Best posts made by Arkandel

@Saulot said in Good TV:

@Arkandel I know, right? I was blown way the fuck away by him. However, Klaus/Number 4 is my favorite. He is just too perfect.

I was so sure Number 5 was just a very, very young-looking adult. Nope.

Which is funny (and impressive) as most shows that feature teenagers use adult actors for them even when the acting requirements are much more relaxed than this plot required.

But yeah, Number 4 was damn good, too. I wasn't too impressed with Elen Page though, I expected her to steal every scene but she was outperformed.

@hamstersonPcP said in Testing the Waters for Battletech Interest:

So it's no secret that the active MU* community is always hungry for new Superhero and World of Darkness games that step past the sins of their fathers, even if keeping that momentum can be a bit of a hat trick

I think a lot of us are waiting for the Next Big Thing; an ambitious, well executed project whose creators won't abandon it to its fate by calling it a sandbox after it opens.

If it's Battletech or anything else I'm not sure it will matter too much. Make it obvious it's something you're invested in, and people will come.

Game of Thrones: Season 8 trailer.

I could not possibly be more hyped than this.

@Ganymede Everything else aside, ego management is an essential skill for all levels of MU*ing. I can see taking pride in your own work (whatever that may be - staffing, RPing, plot-running) but this sounds even more than unhealthy (which of course it is), it's unsustainable.

Something had to give - and of course, it did.

Without any spoilers I enjoyed Captain Marvel but I felt it took a dive in the last 20 minutes or so. This is a complaint I also had in Black Panther as the movie became a bit of a special effects pasta instead of staying strong with the character development arc that had worked really well for the rest of the film.

There's the flipside of it, when staff - usually wanting to wash their hands clean off having to pick a side in whatever's happening - ask for 'evidence' before they'll take action.

Evidence, of course, is next to impossible to gather.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/emilia-clarke-a-battle-for-my-life-brain-aneurysm-surgery-game-of-thrones

@HelloRaptor said:

@Arkandel

One of my many rules of thumb is that if I ever need to 'keep logs of everything' what I really "need" to do is stop playing that game.

The fuck? What kind of arcane programs are you bitches using to MUSH with? It is trivially easy to set up automatic logging. It takes all of a minute, if by a minute I include the rest of setting up a new MUSH world in your client.

You actually thought my problem with that was technical? That I didn't know how to autolog everything? Tsk!

@Sunny I get more shit done when I work from home. My cats can't bug me more than my coworkers even though they try their best.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Even tabletop GM's don't tend to address social situations much, if at all. Its not MU* specific. Look at a handful of premade modules, let me know how often socializing or even social rolls REALLY come into play vs going on a monster hunt (cause we're not afraid!).

I won't go over table-top GMing but on MU* it's a fairly common theme that social situations are allowed to be hijacked by physical types who happen to also have good conversational skills - or at least you wouldn't know they don't from the way they are posed even if their +sheet wouldn't support it.

Part of the fault for that lies with players. My werewolf is no negotiator - there have been multiple situations where he's screwed up considerably simply by opening his mouth. It's not that he's dumb but he's not good at reading or talking to people in stressful non-violent situations. And yet I've seen the opposite happen a fair bit, which undermines other characters' concepts for whom this sort of thing is their bread and butter, where they can excel and shine.

The other half is Storytellers not requesting dice rolls (or, at least not doing so if they spot a mismatch between PC ability and actual poses). When in doubt there should really be more rolling, especially since STs don't always know what the strengths and weaknesses of characters in their scenes are supposed to be.

The real tricky part for me is players whose own skill with posing is misaligned with their characters' abilities. I've ran into more than a few folks who, for example, ought to be excellent at inspiring others or being manipulative but their actual poses are neither that inspiring nor manipulative. In contrast it's harder to screw up posing throwing a punch.

@Auspice That's a feature!

In my experience most staff aren't corrupt, they just don't want any part of this. Whatever this is. They'll just ask people to jump through any number of hoops sufficient to make them give up and go away before they're forced to take sides.

Chinese government burns Call of Cthulhu supplement.

@surreality said:

thing I have to a 'solution' is based on this, to some extent -- that being that some folks, and they're very few in number even after close to 20 years, have earned not a welcome, but an unwelcome. Spider, Jeurg; that class of 'unwelcome presence'.

See, the problem with this is that hindsight is 20/20. Both players you name here have at times being highly regarded by many - I remember when I was first interested in rolling a Mage on HM knowing very little about it I asked @EmmahSue to recommend someone to get points from and she offered Juerg. VAS had been lauded at times as an accomplished ST, was given the reigns to factions voluntarily and people actively tried to get in her coterie/packs.

What I'm saying is that telling the difference between "person who rubs me the wrong way" and "plague who destroys everything they touch" can be a very hard to distinguish at the time. People, even the worst players, have people who really like them and others get pretty bad press without actually doing something horrible just because as a community we can be fairly mean to people if there's a bandwagon pointing their way. "Woo-hoo, I'm in the in-crowd, evidenced by the fact there's a we, and we hate <X>!" is very much a thing.

So sure, after a couple of years patterns emerge and we can have a better idea who's batshit and who's not based on their track record but until then I wouldn't trust any subjective metric other than specific actions to demonstrate it's time to get rid of a player altogether.

In other words, banning a player because he demonstratively sexually harassed someone after being warned to cut it out is perfectly legitimate. Banning them because of general badness... that's another story altogether.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattfleming/doublesix-dice-generation-two

This is so utterly stupid it's awesome

Yeah, I agree with @surreality that 'activity' measured in some way or other ought to be a major factor of XP distribution. Otherwise it's less useful as a carrot, since it promotes nothing but existence.

@Cupcake I think the issue here isn't work-friends or not, it's having established personal relationships so people know where you're coming from.

For example a work-friend started coming to our basketball games recently but I know him, we char regularly, etc. So when we played I'd give him pointers ("you shouldn't let me get positioned inside for a rebound, push back man!") and I didn't feel it was received as anything than what it was meant to.

But if I went to a guy who had never met me, shoved him out of the way and then 'advised' him on what he 'should' have done... that's a whole different thing.

Once again... no one in this thread is wrong (except for Gany of course, just out of principle).

We either have to debate the best way to do a thing or to debate why a thing is the best way to run a game. We can't do both at the same time, it's an exercise in futility.

A discussion has to begin with the goal, not with the method. That's basic engineering.

@Pandora said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Almost any sentence that begins "I'm 'not racist, but'..." is probably fucking RACIST.

Yep. Just like anyone who says "it's not the money, it's the principle"... it's the money.

Let's take a look at a few things:

• You want players who've been contributing to the game, running plot and being active to have something to show for their achievements. Also if players have to earn things they will value them more.

• You want newcomers to feel like they can catch up to the oldbies else the game becomes owned by entrenched dinosaurs. This reduces the potential for fresh blood and causes game-wide stagnation.

• You want people who have busy lives and can't be on for every minute or every hour of every day to not be terribly outpaced by those who can. After all most games' cores are made of casual gamers.

• You want players to like and continue playing by dangling the carrot of advancement, roleplaying games' oldest trope, in front of them. There must also be ways to incentitivize wanted behaviors like PrP running.

I could go on.

See, all of those things are noble and completely reasonable things to want. They are also, to a degree or other, mutually exclusive; compromises may be found between some of them but they can't all be achieved at the same time. The proof for that is that it hasn't happened yet after several decades of people designing XP systems.