Best posts made by Arkandel

@surreality said in Game of Thrones:

Yeah, not gonna lie, the real popcornfest is going to be watching the reactions to whatever happens at this point.

In 25 hours or so this thread is going to be on fucking fire.

I've not looked at Evannia's code but I don't see anything wrong with writing something that's meant to do something else.

If they wanted to create a game server they would have, but they shouldn't be judged because they had a different goal than expected. It's like criticizing a company for making an RPG because it's not an FPS.

@Sparks said in Game of Thrones:

@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:

@surreality said in Game of Thrones:

Yeah, not gonna lie, the real popcornfest is going to be watching the reactions to whatever happens at this point.

In 25 hours or so this thread is going to be on fucking fire.

Dragon fire?

This is MSB. Dumpster fire.

Can we please go back to pointing out unrealistic consequences of gaming mechanics trying to describe how the real world would work if magic and possibly inhuman races existed in alternate realities, then quantifying all of a person's skills and abilities with a flat number on a character sheet?

It ends tonight. HYPE.

@ominous And that the underlying game is still easy to understand, teach, and you know - play.

Well, it's over.

That's what I'm equipped to say right now.

Hello folks,

I was thinking about the troubles we had a long time ago running a Wheel of Time MU* so I wanted to open the topic for debate here. It could be fun.

So here's the thing: Assume players can play both 'magic' users and warriors (anyone without magic!) in the same setting. It could be that you're basing your game on books or a TV show, like we did, maybe it's an original work, but ultimately you have a girl who can throw fireballs from her fingertips and a guy who wields sharp pieces of metal in his hand.

How do you balance these different characters? Do you balance them out?

What are the consequences either way? For example if (which is not necessarily a true assumption) most players gravitate towards 'wizards' because of their relative power levels you may end up with skewed demographics, assuming they're supposed to be rare for your setting. On the other hand hand-picking players eligible to play those rare types might lead to allegations of favoritism.

Thoughts?

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

Uhm, about that.

@greenflashlight Those are valid questions.

While obviously it's a case by case basis, the original issue all those years ago which prompted me to start a thread now was that in the Wheel of Time the power gap between channelers (the 'wizards' of the setting) and the 'warriors' was very significant. And that included some augmented types of 'warriors' who had special tricks up their sleeves, not just regular well-trained combatants.

When it comes to its magic, in the WoT setting the canonical checks and balances are either very much on a macro-scale (a relatively small group of women wouldn't last long against entire nations launching constant attacks against them) so that they had to self-restrain or too long term; male channelers became mad and rotted or burned out, but that wouldn't easily happen within the scope of playing a PC.

So the issue we had was that entire factions who were supposed to have the upper hand and be feared by channelers were not, so if you played a character among those you'd get a different experience than what would be expected from the setting.

Demographics were similarly skewed; at some point a friend of my PC had joked IC that he was starting to assume every woman he met could channel since it was happening to him so often, even though they were supposed to be very rare indeed.

However outside of that example I'd urge us to consider more common scenarios in current MU*. For example in comic book games are people not choosing to play Robin/Hawkeye as opposed to Superboy/Thor? In Star Wars games are other types of characters than Jedi or Sith popular and successful as archetypes?

***=First of all I completely agree with the sentiment about Jon's parentage***

Metaplot is a tool, like many. Its success or failure hinges both on being used properly, and it won't work at all if it's simply left there on some wiki pages abandoned but 'available'. Alas, it doesn't work like that.

My thoughts:

• Games without metaplot are too sandbox-y for my tastes. There's no direction or theme, people just do things which are forgotten because they're forgettable.

• Metaplot yields are based on investment. You can't just write stuff and expect that to be enough, you need to get your players to buy in. Its whole point is that the world you built has a point and a payoff, so they need to see and feel their actions deliver results.

• Like any other game element, metaplot needs to be easy to access, hard to master. If it is dependent on reading and memorizing a small novel's worth of text people won't do it (good luck even getting them to remember your NPCs' names). If it's too shallow or predictable they'll mock it just to make themselves seem smart.

• It can't be too restrictive. Players need to feel this is there for them, not that they are there for it. It's supposed to give them something to play with and draw story hooks from, then enrich. It may be your baby but if you want it to be theirs as well you need to let it evolve as they do.

• Don't bite more than you can chew. This is really important, IMHO. If you start a massive story you're soooo excited about but you have two storytellers total including yourself and they also need to handle jobs, policies, etc then it won't go anywhere. Scale to your ability to keep things going.

• Make it fun. You need to be entertained as much as your players. Burning out is a lose/lose proposition.

@Sparks All I wanted was Dunc and Egg. In fact it'd be so great because the time period isn't tremendously different and the budget could be held to reasonable levels - no dragons, no grand armies crushing into each other, just the brutal realities of Westeros seen through some young eyes.

@Derp said:

If it cannot do everything that the current environment does and then some then it is not an improvement over the current methods of working.

While that is a valid concern, evolution in the IT field requires starting from scratch. The developers of every game engine ever look at the old version and see so many things which are built on it they'd need to replicate all over again - and they know they won't right at the beginning. All those custom maps and mods won't work right away until the same creative people who created them look at the new system, realize its advantages, and (hopefully) buy in.

Now, there is an argument to be made that only difference between MU* and other kinds of game development is that there's just so many of us, we have very limited resources and we have trouble getting enough people as it is, so why not focus on enriching what we have, as archaic as it may be?

The counter-argument to that is that we have trouble getting enough people as it is because what we are using is so archaic, and as long as there's no change of paradigm things will not get better.

Do I think Evennia is it? Possibly not (it doesn't add enough to the current way of things for my tastes) but whining at people who are modernizing the underlying MU* server implementations but - the horror! - haven't implemented everything we already have after 20 years of development is an excellent way of ensuring they roll their eyes and go do something else with their time.

Which is surely a big win, right?

So I'm part of this very technical team of people at work most of whom are complete introverts; nice people and easy to get along with but they don't often talk about themselves at all, don't enjoy going out for lunch, socializing, having small talk... as a result I don't know much about many of my immediate coworkers at all outside of a professional environment. It's fine, as I associate liberally with folks from other teams so it's not a big deal.

But the other day one of my team members told me he would start coming to our weekly basketball runs since they had finally made daycare arrangements for him, and asked if I could give him a ride to the court, which I was happy to do. On the way there, just to chat about something and fill the silence I asked if he was watching Game of Thrones.

He goes "yeah, but I'm not sure what they are planning to do about the prophecies from the House of the Undying. At least I hope the valonqar part will prove to be important."

Okay, what the fuck? It turns out the guy has read almost every book I like, plays D&D (wtf?) and watches the same shows. We've been working together for two years and I had no clue - and he did know, so argh, why not say something so we can bond over nerdy shit? Come oooon man! He didn't even avoid the issue, it just didn't occur to him to say anything unless directly approached about it.

@tinuviel said in Paying for a MU*?:

Yes, you can ban them, refund them, whatever...

I really think the issue here is that you can ban them. There's no half-sane staff who will look at a toxic player and worry about the $5 they threw into the tip jar two months earlier.

The risk is when you, as a staff member, decide that someone is not toxic but then someone else throws the money accusation in your face.

Did you sell out for $5, you terrible person?

Any thoughts on this interview? I think it can spark a debate on a nerdy forum like ours.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/05/game-of-thrones-finale-backlash-battlestar-galactica-showrunner-interview.html

One of the fundamental issues with MU*ing has to do with getting everyone on the same page. In short - it's impossible.

People want different experiences. They have different levels of familiarity with the source material and are after different things. Their expectations, thus, are also different.

Take a Lord of the Rings setting. I might go in as a big Tolkien nerd and expect something beautiful and lyrical. Others might see it as a D&D adventure; they want to slice and dice some Orcs. For some it might be that they want it to be more L&L, play some politics, see if Gondor will finally atone for Westfold.

This isn't made any easier for the fact there isn't just one Storyteller/GM/DM around but several and they will also offer different points of view based on their own preferences.

In my opinion the true answer is this: For small sub-groups of people there is potential for such a thing as a shared desired experience. For larger groups expectations need to be managed and compromises made.

In other words - I'd advise folks to find and surround themselves with people who want about the same stuff they do as much as possible. When they venture outside of that circle though their results may vary - sometimes pleasantly.

@Auspice said in Fandom and entitlement:

When I asked one friend about it, his reasoning was: 'Well when I was in school, the jocks bullied me so now it's my turn'

I mean obviously your friend was being an asshole. But also some people are very weird about stuff others like; I have folks on Facebook who take a weird kind of pride in the fact they don't watch Game of Thrones, or don't care about basketball.

Like... if I made a list of all the things I don't like but others do it'd be as long as it is irrelevant. And, hell, shouldn't I want to like more things in life?

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past? Yes.
What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop? AD&D, D&D, Shadowrun 2/3rd Ed, Vampire: the Masquerade, Hunter: the Reckoning, Vampire: the Requiem.
Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop? 95% of the time.
Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity? Yes.
Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop? Not quite. The groups in my area seem to be too young for my tastes and none of my friends play RPGs.
*Misc: Table-top is where it's at. Pizza. Dice. Bad jokes. Rules lawyering.