I agree with @Aria on how dark the episode was (as in, I can't see what's happening) but wow, that we can have something like this on TV is still unreal. This is A-list movie level production values.
What a weekend for the Starks!
I agree with @Aria on how dark the episode was (as in, I can't see what's happening) but wow, that we can have something like this on TV is still unreal. This is A-list movie level production values.
What a weekend for the Starks!
@HelloProject You don't need a full combat system (or even stats for that matter) to have a game. You barely even need a grid, unless of course you want to have one.
What you need is the inspiration to run said game, a bit of money and technical know-how (or assistance) to actually run it, and the willingness to sink time into it. That's it, in exponential order of importance.
***=So after watching last night's episode but also reading a ***
There should absolutely be more options in disciplining people. Sometimes you need to go through the entire range.
Years ago when I staffed on Tyme there was this one Asha'man player (who were basically male sorcerers) who was getting quite out of line. He'd use invisibility to stalk people, especially the ladies, threaten them OOC if they ventured anywhere outside of their cities and 'he caught them' and using "IC consequences" as a very thin layer on top of what amounted to bullying.
It was actually harmful to the game on a macro scale, not just from a creeping point of view, and I tried to step in. I tried to reason with the guy, I adjusted the power of some of their spells (I still remember the cries) to balance them a little better, I jumped on their guild channel to ask them to tone it down... nothing worked. I still remember his ultimatum at the end of all that, too, all those years later. "I'll burn down this place if I want to". He seemed to think the numbers on the sheet and the time he played there were enough.
Well, I banned him instead.
Some people simply see gaming as a pissing contest or means to a much different end than what the game itself is about. I find that those need to be removed - but they are a very small minority. Most folks just want to have fun and just happen to step out of line a bit here or there.
***=My prediction for how the show will actually end. We should turn this into a game to compare at the end and see who got closer. ***
@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:
There are certainly players who are behaving so egregiously that they need to be removed.
But I would say MOST of the incidents I've dealt with as staff are otherwise-decent players who lose their temper, say something inappropriate, make a poor decision, cross a boundary, etc.
I agree. It's easy to lose a bit of perspective while gaming in general, especially with the potential for miscommunications, the 'fog of war' in contentious IC circumstances, etc. Many people (I definitely count myself among them) screw up, get rubbed the wrong way, etc.
Another factor to be considered is how easily MUSHes allow bandwagons to form, leading to one person getting presented as the fucking devil if they don't get along with a group of popular, loud players. Then suddenly every word they type can be misinterpreted or presented in a contest they didn't intend - which influences staff. If you (General You) get a bunch of complaints by different people with comments captured out of context about the same one guy it's easy to think they're right without looking deeper into it. It happened before; it will again.
Generally speaking the number of folks who need to be banned is pretty small.
Spoiler-free but can we all agree the music score not just this season (although that, too) but for the last several years has been knocking it right out of the park?
What an incredible soundtrack GoT has. I can't say enough about it. These people are so good.
The best staff, in my opinion, is someone who doesn't want the job but is able to to do it.
People who want to become staff for the wrong reasons - prestige, authority - are very rarely any good at it in the long run.
The best players do not necessarily make the best staff members. There is a skillset required - managerial ability, communication, decision-making, time management - that's not necessarily present in an excellent roleplayer's bag of tricks, but it's essential for administrating games.
On the other hand staff does absolutely need to understand their own game and to be respected by its potential community. They have to be well aware of how certain things work - the balance between plot and 'unscripted' play, the challenges of being new to the MU*, spotting up when RP becomes hard to find... all or all of which require experience at actually having been players first, and probably decent ones at that.
@KQ I consider Thanos' motivation to be on the same level as the machines' in the Matrix movie. It doesn't make sense when you break it down but it's cool enough as a premise that I don't mind not squinting too hard at it.
What I like about Thanos as a character isn't that he's sympathetic but that he's charismatic. For a movie that works more than well enough.
@Pandora said in Punishments in MU*:
@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:
And the second sounds like public shaming, which I am generally against.
Banning someone is a form of public shaming; just because they're off your game now and you don't have to look them in the metaphorical eye afterwards doesn't mean they haven't been shamed and that they aren't going to suffer negatively within the wider community as a result.
Also shaming is in some cases the ultimate deterrent. Some people you really can't discipline due to different reasons; they may be staff, they can reroll or even go from game to game once they get what they want from yours.
In many cases people otherwise unassailable are very much prone to criticism. They'll claim otherwise, most vigorously, and provide long paragraphs' worth of explanations of exactly why they don't care at all but they do.
Sometimes not just the best but the only deterrent is publicly pointing a finger at someone and telling them they are assholes.
I would be very, very surprised if the books aren't going (?) to end up in a pretty damn near identical situation in terms of the character in question.
The only difference in that theoretical scenario is Martin would have hundreds more pages with inner dialogue and narrative to fill out so that we can feel its inevitability as something more organic.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I feel the issue with creeps is very rarely that they get away with things during public scenes focused on aggressive flirting.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's likely much more common that people don't get help when they ask staff for it ("can you produce logs and evidence this happened?", "can you point out the exact thing said that grossed you out and why?", etc which results in the onus being on them) or when they get the OOC page equivalent of dick-pics than someone hitting on a character in plain sight, no matter how awkward it might be.
@Cupcake Just for the sake of spoilers in the preview text but...
***=Given what the writing team is doing so far in the season***
@L-B-Heuschkel said in Engaging the Whole Scene:
A player who refuses to share the stage if they cannot be at the centre of it is honestly a player you'll be better off without. Good players understand that sometimes, you're on centre stage, and sometimes you're support cast. Inside scheduled events, and outside of them. While it's true that we are all the star of our own life, that's not how collaborative story telling works.
One of the disconnects here is that many players don't think of online roleplaying as a form of collaborative storytelling but, rather, as an interactive novel. And in novels there is often a protagonist the readers empathize with, so that's the shoes they try to fill with their character.
But the real issue is not even that. It's simpler - ego is very much a thing. Many players are not trying to participate in a story, they're trying to win the game. To me that's what it boils down to.
@Roz said in Fandom and entitlement:
But I don't care for the sense of "it was silly of you to invest so much into the answers of these mysteries that we built as the centerpiece of the series." If you want to leave your plot pieces open for flexibility, which I understand, it is probably better to not do that in a show that is built on mystery and mystique. Like, if that is your style of writing, it is just...probably a bad fit for those particular pieces.
I agree. Imagine if Agatha Christie wrote a mystery novel at the end of which the murderer isn't revealed, and her explanation was "it's not really about the whodunnit but the friends Hercule Poirot made along the way". Would that have played well even in a pre-internet era? Because I doubt it.
Artists need to occasionally break the rules and bail themselves out of their own genre's rotes, that's absolutely part of the game... but the rules are there for a reason and breaking them shouldn't be its own justification. There still needs to be a payoff, which a "let's look back X years and see how many cool moments we had" outlook really is not. Dangling plotlines, subplots are a weakness, not a strength.
Which isn't to say everything should be explained because that, too, is stupid. Some of the complaints I read about Game of Thrones' ending (for example) were utterly idiotic; some people wanted an explanation of why seasons are so long. What? Or how Valyrian steel is made. Why would that be required for the show - or books - to be complete?
@Derp said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
And yet that still fuels the biggest complaint of the last several years, in that omg every game is just a cookie cutter, no originality, etc.
My big peeve, on the other hand, is that even if you give people a ton of original lore and details on the world, they just ignore most of it because of that same idea of "I don't have time to learn something new," and just do generic whatever system in whatever city, fantasy or otherwise that they usually do, which leads to a lack of cohesion.
Yeah, I think it's been shown very clearly that it's the execution and not the concept that matters.
Arx is a completely new property and incredibly convoluted (in fact it's a genuine complaint people often seem to have that there's so much going on and they're so lost). Yet it's undeniably very popular and successful.
As for the World of Darkness it's perhaps the most well known IP in our circles but some games are completely forgettable or literal clones of each other, so they die a quick and quiet death soon after launching since players log on, create characters, get bored and leave.
It's all in the execution. There's no recipe of some system you pick and your game succeeds or fails. If only.
angry white people
These days, do a thing and someone somewhere will scream about it.
Who cares. As long as characters are tugging on their braids or smoothing their skirts it should be about right.
There's another factor here - an imbalanced demographic.
If the power range of characters in a game is wide enough then optimization can feel - or even become - mandatory.
For example The Reach had crazy XP inflation near its tail end. There were many people around whose dice pools were rather massive and who had mix-maxed their characters very carefully. If you were a ST running a plot including them then you had a dilemma; do you challenge them (but one-shot anyone who's not their near equal) or do you let them blast their way through?
In an unofficial arms race you keep up or you fall behind.
The way I see it, social scenes are a force multiplier. They enhance everything else; metaplot, factions, character progression, PrPs... as a game-runner you ideally want all of those things to branch off like crazy onto your grid, spawning a wider net of interactions than you can yourself arrange.
Without that your PrP is an one-off; it lives in a ST/GM's presence and effectively ceases to exist when they are done.
The key to make these scenes fun and enjoyable though is to provide the kindling. Without that they are sterile; you can only meet so many times with Bob to feed him pieces off your background story. But what if you tell Bob about the thing that happened at the hospital the other night? Or you ask him if he can help your quirky packmate with getting his cat back from his evil ex?
In other words, as long as your MUSH is semi-active and not a sandbox social scenes will be fun and enjoyable. They just need fuel. And if they don't, you have a bigger problem to fix anyway.