Best posts made by Arkandel

@thebird In my experience watching GoT increases stress, it doesn't alleviate it.

May your favorite character die last though!

@auspice A little hack I'm using to get out of that terrible interface is to use an address like this instead:

https://blahblah.salesforce.com/500

It escapes some of the horror and replaces it with a mild headache instead.

I do think if Beast comes out before Mage 2.0 we'll see @EmmahSue on the evening news.

@lordbelh "S6E9 Battle of the Bastards currently has a perfect 10/10 rating on IMDB with 34,000 votes"

...Holy shit.

@ifrit A couple of questions for you:

1. The theme sounds interesting! Do you have ideas on what your players will be able to do when there isn't staff explicitly running metaplot things for them?

2. Do you have ideas on the systems (mechanics, etc) you want to use for this?

3. Is the game cooperative or antagonistic between PCs? Do you see it focusing more on action, politics or something else?

@tragedyjones said:

The same people aren't working on Mage, Beast and Changeling though, are they?

My opinion of Onyx Path's professionalism, based on their ability to plan things ahead, make deadlines, inform their own customers about their products or keeping their suppliers network remotely happy with them is not a great one. So my answer to that would be, at best, 'who the hell knows'.

@silentsophia I looked for a Yoda Funko so hard. There's none!

What the hell people!

@packrat said in Automated Adventure System:

I can guarantee that if you make a ring (or a nipple ring) that gives +1 Luck but does not announce this then that mostly means that its secret powers will only be unlocked by assholes who are willing to equip items then +roll three hundred times in their bedroom before loading the results into a spreadsheet and comparing to the unassisted statistics.

I agree with the request but not the characterization. If you base a system on numbers someone will crunch them out; it's just another puzzle to be solved. It doesn't make someone an asshole.

@Thisnameistaken said:

I love LFG code. I only wish more people used it. I think a large reason people don't use it is that it /is/ a fairly new code (relatively) and that a lot of folks don't know about it. If a Mu* has this code, they should advertise it now and then, just to remind folks.

That's largely about implementation. For example the seekingRP flag should also show up on things like +where and +who next to characters' names, show up at login ("There are 3 people currently looking for RP") and turn itself off when you log out or after X hours, to help eliminate false positives.

It can even be extended to include ideas of what kinds of scenes you could offer. "+rpseek Maybe my car has broken down at the side of a road" would give an instant-in for a scene.

It's one of those things which, once they become part of your game's culture, they're used constantly.

Game of Thrones does not fuck around.

@sparks said in Automated Adventure System:

On healing, one thought I had was that you could heal more often than the limit (which I might reduce to 30 minutes in Shardhavens), but it would cost you an amount of AP equal to the minutes remaining. I.e., if there was a 30 minute timer and you heal someone and ten minutes later they desperately need healing again, you could wait for the half-hour to tick over or pay 20 AP to skip the 20 minutes remaining.

I don't know Arx-stuff so this might not be applicable to your system at all, but maybe you could borrow a page from WoW's mythic dungeon cooldowns.

So basically the way they did it is that there are some skills on WoW which can be incredibly powerful, enough to turn the tide of combat completely. For example you could resurrect a dead character while combat's still taking place, turning certain defeat into a potential victory. Or you could buff all your group's power by a lot for a limited time.

The two ways WoW limits those, but keeps then important, is by time and by total number of uses. So either you can use your supercharger once every 3 minutes (and since mythic runs are timed the total number of applications is limited too), or you can only use your combat rez X times in the whole run.

Now... you might not be able to count on time being the limited factor here like WoW can simply because people take different times to pose (although I don't know, maybe you do time the runs in your system too). You could however use number of applications instead, which should still work - say, "you can heal your teammates X times in the same run".

@SG "Why would you assume I'm really here just because I'm here? GAWD."

@Thenomain said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

And yeah, accusing your devil's advocacy as mentally unstable is mostly my frustration, because you do it preeeetttty much any time you disagree with something. Now you're trying to get me to come up with the evidence that you can openly dispute. If you want to be fair on this (i.e., not a devil's advocate), then do the same thing.

I'll start with this part if you don't mind.

I don't mind attacks (which, frustration-inspired or not, that was); this is an internet forum after all and we all get flamed eventually, some of us more than others. But it seemed out of the blue to get personal about an issue I was trying to remain patient myself while dealing with someone who was, in this thread, wishing people to get cancer and treat them as respectfully as I could.

It also crossed a line - we've all hanged out enough around here to be peeved by each other now and then but certain escalations seemed rather unnecessary. It's like shooting the shit with the regulars at the hobby store, making fun of each other's fashion sense or taste in movies or whatever then someone goes way off the charts and insults the other's job or choice in partners. ("Yeah but you're in a dead-end job and your husband is probably cheating on you, you ... Trekkie!").

Think about it man, in the whole thread this made you salty enough but not the part someone was wishing people got cancer? What gives?

@Arkandel

Let me turn around what you're doing:

Prove to me that my statement is wrong. Clearly you think it is. While I come up with my evidence, you come up with yours. This is what debate is for, not just one person saying, "That's interesting, but I think you're wrong, so convince me," without the other side doing the same.

And you would have been completely right if I had come out of the blue and asked someone that question. But I didn't, and in fact in this whole thread I didn't challenge anyone else, some of whom have posted about strange experiences of their own, to prove that it actually happened. However I did after this bit:

Talk to me about being open minded after you've spent over a decade researching this stuff in depth.

Part of the scientific method (I'm getting tired of typing that by now) involves communicating one's findings. Someone claimed to have done a lot of research on a topic which they deemed I couldn't understand or be open minded about, so I requested to see their results so we could find out.

I believe at best you could say my demand was out of place - I don't get to demand that, that'd be true - but devil's advocacy it was not.

@misadventure said in MUSHgicians elements:

@coin It sounds like you want something as complex as Ars Magica, with its study rules and ratings for books and research, and a bunch of Verbs and Nouns to study.

However, the details are only going to be talked about IC if you learn in downtime, so who cares how many classes it takes to learn something? If you need more than 50, then make it take more than one class to learn a thing. Also, there is a ton of lore, countermeasures, an alternate forms like alchemy, etc to learn.

I feel dirty for typing the words but Coin has a pretty good idea there.

The reason I like this system is that it forces the player to make organical and meaningful choices. Do they improve their raw understanding of magic and improve on their skillsets (think: Hermione Granger) or do they work on their practical applications and become better field agents, sacrificing something in the process (obviously think: Harry Potter).

They are both very useful aspects if done right, just in different ways, and finding the balance you want for your character adds depth on both the systemic and roleplaying end. So it matters very much.

@faraday said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

Haven't we proven time and time again that the community doesn't regulate itself?

I don't know that we have. I hope not.

Freedom of speech means you can stand on the street corner shouting horrible stuff; it doesn't mean you can do so in my living room. The person in charge (whether that's the home owner, business owner or forum owner/s) has to decide what level of discourse they find acceptable, which in turn decides what kind of environment they're going to foster.

I have no issues enforcing any rules or being yelled at by internet people. What I don't want is to make this forum unwelcoming to anyone who doesn't share my personal views. That's the reason the bar is set pretty damn low ("don't be a racist") and why I want the content here to be a reflection of our community, not its administrators.

I realize this is perhaps counter-intuitive in some ways as, for instance, as a game runner I would absolutely need to enforce my vision for the world, but as @Auspice pointed out earlier... MSB isn't a game.

Oh, while we're at it, Silicon Valley is fantastic. Funny as hell, with spot-on performances and a so-close-to-the-truth look at the IT industry it hurts.

@chibichibi said in Mage 2e game - The Golden Road:

The game I'm planning has each "chapter" set in different archmage chantries, so paradox might be meaningless or it might impose penalties depending on the path of the PC in question or even affect certain arcana differently depending on factors like type of spell, phase of moon or whatever. The initial plan is to make paradox random as fuck so the PCs should be paranoid about magic-ing problems away.

Thoughts on that from everyone?

Just two things from me.

1. The more you 'stray' from CoD Mage canon the least approachable your game would be for newcomers who're familiar with Mage but not your MUSH's rules. In other words I recommend creating as short a list of House Rules as you can get away with - no matter how large their impact - rather than a long set of tweaks and adjustments ("On page 133, the Rote's duration is doubled").

2. Giving Paradox teeth is probably a good idea but tread the line carefully between magic use carrying enough risks to not be used trivially and between your game's Mages not using any. I think you still have a large leeway though since in the books Paradox is a boogeyman that doesn't actually do that much mechanically.

@shincashay I'm inclined to agree. I hoped for something useful to get input from, but any signal is completely lost to the noise.

Locking it, with apologies to those of you who I know tried to contribute in good faith.

One of my favorite reads by Isaac Asimov on the argument of 'well, science has been wrong in the past'.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

@Taika said in City of Shadows:

There's no particular theme, per se, but the game itself will be -very- cross sphere. I expect to see packs, coteries, cabals, and the like with lots of cross-sphere tie-ins. The overall feel I'm aiming for is 'tense cooperation'.

You don't need a particular theme; in fact very WoD MUSHes with a very specific theme have survived their first few weeks as staff struggled to enforce their vision of how things should work versus players trying to run a multitude of things they're interested in.

What you need - IMHO, of course - is stuff for these players to do. To rephrase it - if you just open a sandbox WoD game, no matter the code, and expect players to form alliances and run/get involved in plots on their own initiative you will almost certainly watch a very familiar pattern unfold as the MU* runs through an initial but brief window of high activity ("Yay, I have a new PC!") followed by a mixed bag of enthusiasm and apathy based on whether people find dancing partners ("Yay I found a great person to play with" / "Boo I'm sitting in a room alone and I'm bored") followed by inactivity when even the enthusiastic finally look around, see nothing else happening, and drop off themselves.

You guys sound like you're doing a lot of work, and it's a shame not to protect it by making sure the game retains is players. Find people ahead of time who'll run plot, incentivize the hell out of it. Give reasons for PCs to mingle that aren't just a wiki page somewhere, create IC politics for the PCs to be each other's allies and antagonists. You don't need a theme for that but you do need folks willing to get their hands dirty for a while to create and maintain intrigue until it has its own momentum.

Just some suggestions.