Best posts made by Arkandel

Dundas and Dragons.

@Ganymede The caveat here is that my memory is painted by nostalgia but I think the difference maker is culture; when you have a critical mass of players whose expectations, understanding and goals for emote fighting is similar then others joining in can learn organically as well.

@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

Apparently, my blade can cut through reality itself.

Found Superboy!

@peasoupling I think there's a joke here about TS and hand pronation.

I'm not going to make that joke.

@Admiral I was unemployed semi-recently for over a year when bureaucracy hit me the wrong way. I know exactly what that is like.

Which is why an offer like this is so risky - I'd need to leave a country where I have status and can work freely to one where I'm essentially bound to one company. So if anything didn't work out I'd be back at square one. You know what's worse than being unemployed? Being unemployable.

@Ganymede I think you can make a game pretty lethal without making it draconic, though. The illusion of hope ("I have a pretty powerful PC now with all that XP!") is more fun than the certainty of mediocrity.

@Auspice Now I'm hungry. THANKS SO MUCH.

@Ghost In my experience the question of "what, exactly, do Players In General know about <X>?" has rarely been sufficiently answered.

However that's not the most important element here, IMHO. The real issue is the expectations gap between what some players want in terms of their IC/OOC separation compared to others. Maybe I'm hardcore about my bard's knowledge of the world and thus I play him as not knowing what a mimic is or even that such monsters exist; however does that stance bind other players? Are you borderline cheating by assuming your character has heard of things that can take the form of a chest and attack when he tries to open it?

I don't believe addressing this issue is a trivial or straight-forward task because it involves communication, which rarely is.

@Auspice What the actual fuck?

@Auspice said in PC vs Player Assumptions:

I've encountered people who rail so hard at 'being wrong' that they get incredibly upset about it. You can approach it as being helpful, wanting to make sure no wires got crossed, and it becomes the end of the world.

Once egos get in the way RP goes out the window. The moment your character's success or failure at anything begins to reflect emotionally to you as a person there's no coming back from it.

This is far, far from a rare condition. In fact all but a handful of players I've ever met in MU* were truly immune to it; most are simply able to handle it. Some fail, often in spectacular ways. But it's really not a given in any way.

@HelloProject Did you read what Deadpool's director said about the sequel right after the first movie became a success? I can't be bothered to track down the link right now, but he spoke of this push in the industry to make follow-up works bigger and flashier, to have the plot baloon up from saving the girl into saving the city, then saving the world, then saving the universe! Or to add characters, more villains, more stuff to use up the expanded budget... which takes away from movies, it doesn't add to them.

The same principle applies to comics, just without the budget. In some ways it's self-serving - writers and editors in chief get more exposure, their names are out there more to advertise these big blockbuster events no one reads any more, they create storylines they hope to make viral and sell a few more issues through controversy ("Captain America is a HYDRA agent!") which is a tactic that used to work before it became first the norm then a tired cliche ("No More Spider-man" or Elektra's death were innovative stories at their time, then it went to "Death of Superman", then... then it became a 'is it Tuesday again?' when the latest superhero died or the universe was at stake, you know?).

I don't really know that it's the repetitive nature of the big two's comics. I'd personally love to read good stories about the superheroes I'm familiar with. But who are they? Take Marvel - Peter Parker isn't a lovable, relatable loser trying to make ends meet, he's a CEO or something? Thor is Jane Foster, Iron-Man is dead (I think?), Captain America is... you know, Fantastic Four isn't even being published, and that's just major characters who're in movies.

I don't know what's going on there or what their strategy is, but if I want to read about completely new characters why wouldn't I go read an independent publisher's stuff instead? They're throwing away the only real advantage they have - recognizable characters with a rich, established history between them.

@Thenomain said in Staff scrutiny during CGen:

I often don't know. I play to find this out. If this creates a flat character that I can't engage with I don't think that this is the problem of the game or game staff. Someone can convince me that these two questions are critical for playing a character, but I will do a complete 180° on the third one:

I don't think it's critical that you have an answer. I think it is critical you are aware of the fact yourself.

For example "Joe is a regular person. He wants to make a decent living, get good dental and perhaps retire in his forties to focus on his real passion which is gardening. He was never exceptional at anything but decent at a lot of things so since the paycheck for this Stargate program came with great benefits he decided to join it".

Then you have this guy who's not trying to save the world and who might become a walking redshirt, an unwitting hero, an incompetent coward or anything in between determined by what happens to him after play begins; you don't know how he'll react or turn out any more than he does.

As staff I'd have no issues with this as long as I knew you knew. For example if you're going to play him as a Man in Black who's unphased and regularly tackles existential threats like it's another Tuesday at the office I'd like to be aware of it since that may or not fit the kind of game I have in mind, but a blank slate is fine.

Detailed flowchart of the entire Stephen King Universe.

I fondly remember @Coin's reaction when I misread his set at one point and thought combat was about to start, leading to me shifting out of the blue into full Garou murderform in the middle of the street at some random time while people were still just getting out of their cars and shit.

By the way, I was curious and bored enough so I went through Civil War 2 and the recent Captain America retconstory arc.

I just caught up all the way to Secret Empire #0. You know, it's not bad.

At least I like it more than the DC stuff which at this point I don't even know what the fuck is happening at all, Rebirth made my head hurt trying to keep up with the Flash stuff alone.

@Ganymede said:

I think Kingsmouth does a decent job of ensuring some parity between PCs. They do this by altering the number of beats that you need for an experience; the more beats you accumulate, the more you need for an experience. Alternately, you could modify the cost of raises as you gather more experiences.

See, I don't like that. It essentially sounds like what they're doing is take 2.0's removal of diminishing returns by making XP costs flat then reverting it by re-introducing a different method of diminishing returns.

Only, instead of doing that per stat (reflecting the fact, say, it takes a whole lot more time and effort to gain the training and experience for Medicine to go from 3->4 than it does from 1->2) they are doing it universally; but why would being very good at something mean you're having a much harder time learning the rudimentary basics of another?

Lady on the commute two days in a row. I know I should feel more sympathetic that your toddler is throwing hissy fits for half an hour straight because it's more annoying to you than it is to us since you have to take it all day long but damn.

Half an hour and it's not even eight in the morning yet. And you are trying to bribe him into stopping? That's called rewarding him for it. Damn.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
I am pretty sure in Kingsmouth's case the diminishing returns were to help prevent the dino problem, without completely leveling the beats for everyone.
I thought it was a good compromise since it game folks an advantage for being early adapters but late comers like me could functionally cut the gap with out it feeling completely hopeless.

I am pretty sure you are right. It's not their intention I'm against, it's the implementation.

There are better ways to do the same thing - Eldritch for instance simply caps weekly gains and progressively reduces automatic XP for people after the first six months. So active players can still bust their ass if they want to progress at the same rate, but newer characters would find it much easier to catch up. It's a more elegant solution which achieves the same thing.

@Ghost My (real and actually-happened-to-me) IT story:

Back in the day I was teaching ECDL classes, and the first lesson was going over the real basics. You know, this is a computer's main unit, this is the keyboard, the monitor, etc.

Now keep in mind this was a class offered to professionals, paid by their companies. In fact the majority in the class were doctors and medical personnel, and although I'm not 100% certain I'm comfortable with assuming the person involved in this incident actually was a MD.

So anyway, I picked the mouse up to show it to them and explain its general use by waving it in the air to demonstrate. Once I was done I set it down and asked students to do it with their mice as well and control the cursor on their screens.

Naturally one of them picked his mouse up and started waving it in the air just like I had.

@Ganymede It depends on what you are doing and, more importantly, why.

Auto-XP is quite friendly to alts, for instance, because otherwise good luck doing 'enough' stuff on multiple characters to get any progress at all and as noted it can be combined with diminishing returns to allow a more natural catch-up for new PCs as well.

But that's not why I consider Eldritch's (or TR's for that matter) to be a superior system.

One of my concerns with any adopted system for a MU* is to let it work more or less as it is in the books. The more you deviate from it with house rules and patches 'to make it better' the least you're taking advantage of the instant rules recognition new players can enjoy. So if you are changing the source of XP (rather than how they may be utilized) you're not touching the mechanics in any way; Beats, Conditions, etc are applied exactly the way it happens in the books, it's just that your character may see more of them come up than expected if there are auto-gains.

That implementation is much neater. Then again I'm usually in favor of liberal policies when it comes to having or rerolling alts.