Best posts made by Arkandel

@Catsmeow There's a special place in hell for people who won't remove their weights after they're done.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

If it's anything like a Garth Ennis comic I'll shank anyone who tries to make me play it.

Explain. Explain while knowing Garth Ennis is my hero.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Good or New Movies Review:

La La Land is next on my list (I've heard nothing but good things), even if I was underwhelmed by the soundtrack when I jammed to it on Spotify.

I really enjoyed the soundtrack; its flavor of bittersweet nostalgia just worked for me.

But it's the kind of movie I suspect you'll love or be indifferent about. I was in the mood to love it.

I don't play to fit other people's ideas of what I should be playing. So for example I'm crap at playing females thus I don't outside of NPCs in my plots, and I feel self conscious playing different ethnicities since I don't want them falling into stereotypes therefore I end up avoiding those as well.

All of my characters are straight white guys. Like me. If anyone doesn't approve for whatever reason, well, I'll just have to live with that.

You jerks are making me hungry.

@Derp said:

@Glitch

How would you change the front-end experience? I mean, there are only so many options for text-based gaming. It puts letters on a screen, and you utilize a specific set of commands to do specific things, many of which are flexible enough that a simple button press isn't gonna cut it. So how would you replace the versatility of the command line experience and the flexible things it offers into a format that offers the same, but different?

Oh, the potential is enormous.

For starters its rich text versus plain text. Or being able to have common functions straight out of the UI we now use clients for (such as pasting a log into a wiki page). Or spell-checking while you type. Or a Hangouts-like tabbed interface for OOC chats instead of spammy channels and pages. Or having a point-and-click interface for sheet setting instead of the arcane commands we use today. Or being able to display an image with the room description as an option.

I could go on.

Not all of these are universally desired, of course. But they would be options, at least, whereas with telnet they are simply not.

Westworld, featuring Billy Crystal.

@Auspice said in Cyberrun:

(Also, @Arkandel this thread should prob be moved to constructive at the least...)

Sure thing.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Need a Job/Place to Live?:

This is not a horror story. He was not a murderer and was a nice enough person, which is why she never had the heart to kick him out.

Was he trying to find a job and make some money? I can at least understand it if someone just can't get any money to contribute and they're essentially dependent on others with no concrete options. But if they can get a job - even if it's not the best one - and help out with the bills that person they're dependent on is paying... then they're not nice enough, you know?

Many of us have been down on their luck before due to circumstances. There was an entire year in which I could legally not work, and I hated it. But you still need to contribute in whatever ways you can.

@Sunny said:

Does anybody have any thoughts as to how we might be able to manage the overhead on this without insanity? Totally just brainstorming here. I want this to work, but I suspect my game might not stay tiny for forever. -.-

Thoughts are easy! Actually doing it is hard though. It does scale badly no matter what you do though, as it's not so much the initial burst of activity that kills you (although it will) but the maintenance over time, keeping track of everything, not being terribly repetitive with plot hooks, not telegraphing your whole metaplot right away to players who're really good at reading it anyway, etc.

Just for starters... break your metaplot into units. Then hand characters pieces of those units.

For example:

The orphanage (slots: 10 PCs). These people all grew up together at the same place but during different ages. What did they see/dream/experience during those years?

Goonies (slots: 5 PCs): These people all had an adventure together. Where did it take them? Why don't they talk about it any more?

Catholic highschool (slots: 10 PCs): These characters went to an ultra-conservative school together. Who was really in charge of it? What kind of trauma do they share?

And so on. Obviously with more detail, but this way you can quantify your seeds and, at the same time, create links between characters. It works for some spheres easier than others (with vampires you'll need to get creative, for example) but it gives you a launching point and it allows you the flexibility of ripping off countless of coming-of-age movies. You can put anything in there from Buffy to freakin' Ocean's Eleven and it'll still work.

... If someone busts their ass and pours a ton of work into it. Creativity is the easy part, maintenance is the bitch that gets you.

@Thenomain said in RL Anger:

Root canal.

Let me elaborate: Not the root canal, but the cost. Oh dear effing lord! The skill and the charge seem to be in line, but having to pay that much for anything I'm not planning on always makes me rar grr.

A few years ago I had just arrived in Canada and I was waiting for my permanent residency application to be processed, so in the mean time I didn't have insurance. I chose to pay something like $400 to get a few months of health insurance from a private company, and I bemoaned the cost thinking it was too fucking much.

Hah.

Two days later I chipped a tooth. It was a Thursday night when it happened, and on Friday all the local dentists were out on a seminar so if I wanted to get treated I'd have to pay a hefty premium, and so I decided to wait for Monday.

The weekend in between... I don't recall ever being in so much pain for that long, before or since. Holy shit.

Anyway on Monday I got to a dentist and... let's just say the health insurance costs weren't even 20% of the actual money I ended up saving once I saw the bill. Dentistry is insane, man.

The stories and narratives that I often want are hard if not impossible to create on the grid for a multitude of reasons. I like spinning them off in a more (hopefully) cohesive fashion and letting others play them out.

I haven't made a post on TripAdvisor in 3+ years, and I never was a regular contributor. I keep getting "congratulations, you're in our 10%!" e-mails every few weeks letting me now how many thousands of people have taken my advice and to keep up the good work.

Yo, if thousands of people go to a restaurant based on a review I wrote four years ago, they're dumb. Also if someone this idle is in your 10%, your service is in trouble.

I'm often the first to pose just so the ball gets rolling. At this point I can write somewhat generic poses without putting much thought into it as long as I'm setting-savvy.

There are typically three exceptions.

1. Someone else offers or simply poses first. Awesome!

2. I'm visiting someone in their own domain (home, space station, haven, whatever). They typically get offered to pose first so I know what the place and their character's current situation are like.

3. If I'm at a new MU* set in some fantasy society and I'm playing a concept whose social status or relations to others I'm not quite sure about I'll happily defer to others until such things are picked out organically. For example if I'm RPing a bodyguard going to a high-end music hall I may be unsure if within the setting I should go over and directly address his betters, if he would be allowed to wear a sword, or even if he's expected to talk at all without the act itself being noteworthy. That doesn't mean I wouldn't have him talk regardless in that theoretical case, but I want to OOC know that it's against the norms to do so since the character himself would.

In such cases I'll let others take the lead.

@surreality March 19! In fact that's what caught my attention, I didn't know it existed until I saw the season 2 thing and looked into it.

As long as two things are true I generally don't mind any XP system:

1. Everyone has roughly the same access to XP. No tiered superpowers, no dinosaurs others will simply never catch up to, etc.

2. The system is implemented in a way to protect people from themselves.

Classic nWoD often failed at (2) because of CG. Spending freebie points to raise your power stat, for example, saved you a bunch of XP compared to buying it with XP later on; likewise spreading your starting dots around rather than mix/maxing them in CG was a pretty bad idea. And let's not go into the practice of playing any sort of combat character without a multi-attack fighting style.

Of course simply because a system protects you from making mistakes when buying things doesn't mean you don't get an enormous benefit from knowing how to use the +sheet you end up with.

@Apu It's sometimes weird 2016 got such a reputation. Lots of people die every year, celebrities included. I guess we might be running out of legends in general - I find it easier to care about Jack Nicholson or Kirk Douglas than Sly Stallone or something even though I grew up with the latter.

I'm a fan of the show for sure. But as with other similar interesting settings the question when it comes to making a game out of them is what players would be doing. What would a game be about? What are PCs going to be involved in?

@Auspice said in Good TV:

I just finished the pilot for Legion and I think I'm already in love.

It's like Marvel meets Twin Peaks and it has Aubrey Plaza. I'm a happy camper.

It was excellent, I really liked it. I hope they can keep it up though - one of the issues non-Netflix shows have is they need to offer something every week, they can't afford to build and wait for a big payoff since current ratings matter so much. So I hope it doesn't go back to one of the tried-and-crappy monster of the week formulas.

If they pull it off it will be fantastic.

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I think the last few posts are just evidence enough I need to completely retire from trying to run a Mu. No matter how clear I try to be in the type of Mu I'm after, something is lost in translation. I'm the sticky wicket. Just for benefit of runners and players alike, communication requires two parties, whole blame cannot reside on the runner; most of the communication problem is the static in the middle between type of game trying to be run and expectations of players.

The last few posts are evidence that MSB is sometimes overly argumentative, and not always (heh) in a constructive fashion.