Best posts made by Arkandel

I decided this thread needs more documentation.

https://www.audubon.org/news/when-bird-birb-extremely-important-guide

@flahgenstow said:

I find it strange when couples play on a game and then have IC relationships (and sex) with other players.

My characters do stuff my wife would generally frown upon iRL all the time. They murder people for starters. They steal stuff.

But as to the specific rules of engagement for sexual matters (or TS), that's up to each relationship to figure out. There's no right or wrong let alone a general rule that fits them all.

Stumptown. It's pretty good! And who the hell knew Maria Hill/the chick from How I Met Your Mother could act? As it turns out, she damn well can.

@Lisse24 said:

I used to do that as well, until I was burnt (lost a character) because another player misread my pose. What I thought was clearly trying to hold back emotion while begging for another chance, they read as stony-faced lack of remorse.

To be fair, people misread each other in real life all the time, right? On top of that, they could have asked for an empathy roll if the system allowed it, or asked for a clarification over pages, etc.

But I see where you're coming from - I don't consider some metadata offered in the pose to be anathema as long as it doesn't come with the expectation that characters should be aware of it. After all in literature some exposition is often offered this way and I see no reason to deprive scenes of the same convenient too to offer a few tidbits of background if they'd be awkward to squeeze into it otherwise, even if they're only for flavor and don't actually serve a purpose.

the phrase "be proactive" is my pet peeve. It seems like I've recently seen a spade of people criticizing players who are reactive. Players are told to "make their own fun" and then criticized when a game seems to be overwhelmed with bar rp.

There's a line. Yes, it's often pretty annoying to have to pull your partner(s) kicking and screaming into the scene because they give little to react to and don't take the hooks they're being offered to facilitate a meaningful conversation. On the other hand some players just desire the spotlight so much they disrupt rather than enrich scenes they're invited into - there's such a thing as 'too' proactive.

For example - and I posted this on the bitching thread - a couple of days ago I was in a quiet but nice scene at a bookstore. We thought to bring others into the fold so I advertised it as bookstore roleplay, possibly about magic or something close to it and one of the players who came in posed a riot outside, people chasing his character, fighting in the streets... I mean that's not joining a scene, that's trying to take it over without caring what was happening beforehand or if other players liked how it was going.

@GreenFlashlight said in Depression Meals:

I like how many of the entries in this thread are some variation on Italian food.

We love our breads and bread variants, we depressed people.

What kind of monster doesn't like bread.

@Ganymede said:

It is reasonably inferred from Ingrid's statement about having her background tied intimately into Sam's. You generally don't do that without Sam's knowledge or consent, so I presumed that Sam had knowledge that Ingrid was coming in as Ingrid.

If that's the case I'll retract my statement, but my assumption was the background ties were due to the source material - in the Maltese Falcon the two are tied together - rather than that Sam explicitly asked Ingrid to roll the character then neglected her. Yes, that'd be a very dick move to make.

In many cases staff only make sure FC game-specific backgrounds don't actually conflict though. We don't even know if they make sure players communicate when someone applies to someone they are intimately tied to in canon.

@Auspice Well Picard can't be episodic. It's like expecting Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry to come out of retirement in his 80+, barely able to walk, then work random murder cases. Why would this ever happen?

@Sunny I don't think anyone but @Arkandel suggested staff make people RP together. He just likes his straw men.

Alright, maybe I was wrong. Let's see.

What I said was... If you (in this case, actually you as your persona on KD) accepted a position of authority/power/etc (such as you have) and went two weeks without giving someone something other than "yeah we should totally RP eventually" despite their repeat efforts, AND you failed to go to staff or otherwise find an alternative to RPing with this person, then I would want staff to take action, mostly in the form of removing you from that position.

... Huh. So you are not saying staff should force people to RP together... just that they'd punish those people unless they do so. Gotcha.

Again, since apparently I was unclear, if you stand up and say "I will do this thing" in an RP community and then do not do this thing, I think you should no longer be in charge of this thing. No one is suggesting forcing two people to RP together, because that's absurd. To quote myself: "Don't want to have to RP with anyone? Don't sign up to be a leader. Don't want to RP with a specific person? Talk to staff. Agreeing to do something then not doing it is rude."

How are you sure, without knowing the rules of that game, that that's what the person who plays Sam signed up for? For all we know unless shown otherwise all he stood up and said was "I'll play Sam". I even demonstrated how on many games the only responsibility of FCs towards each other is to not have conflicting backgrounds - so for example if Jean Grey hasn't been through the alternate universe stuff and someone apps Rachel Grey, the latter needs to figure out a way to explain her birth. Somehow. It's all still confusing to me.

Now, @Arkandel has pointed out that we're apparently talking about a Maltese Falcon game, or playing characters from that story, which I honestly know nothing about (which I guess makes me the ignorant slut).

I googled it! Although Sam Spade did ring a bell.

My whole point was based off @Arkandel's statement: "No matter what you are never obligated to play with one specific person."

And I absolutely stand by it. You never are and you should never be. I would be willing to clarify though that by "play with" I didn't mean a random one-time scene but something consistent and ongoing; you should never have to, unless it was part of what you signed up for, and if it was you should have obviously said no.

Staff - sane staff - would never make anyone do so. As @Sunny said, if someone went over and told KD staff that because she has a position she has to play with them and they should totally make her, they'd laugh that person out of the +job.

I don't know that it belongs in this thread but I kinda love it anyhow so...

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/who-killed-the-great-american-cable-tv-bundle

@mietze As far as I'm concerned the only issue is having to make assumptions, not to advance your roleplay or move forward but just because it's inevitable.

Say I'm playing Bob, Jane's boyfriend and Jane's player goes on a hiatus. I can try to avoid referring to Jane in RP and explain this to others but at a certain point someone will ask "hey, is Bob single?" and at that point I'll have to provide an answer. Well, is he? This isn't a Schrodinger's cat situation! And either answer is settling the matter on someone else's behalf.

My take on it is that if you're not active OOC and IC - if Jane is responsive to to @mail or pages she can settle the matter and all's good - then you should be fine with staff making such calls on your behalf when they are contacted to resolve the matter. Yeah, Jane is out of town, her mom is sick.

An open ended answer can even be a hook for future RP, provided of course Jane eventually comes back. We were on a break! And if she's not at least poor Bob can finally move on.

WTF Does That Mean Kobe Bryant

@Apos said:

I think it's more of a natural progression of what happens during downtime. In between plots, on more sandbox-y games players feel a lot more freedom to run meaningful PrPs since there's more of the expectation that it doesn't really effect other people very much. In a lot of L&L games, that's not really the case, so PrPs tend to be de-emphasized and that leaves players doing political RP as one of the more consequential forms of RP they can pursue without GM assistance.

That's pretty accurate. For example I had never been on a game where I actually put a decent amount of time in and never STed until Kushiel's Debut - but I just didn't feel comfortable running plots there. Everything I did could affect people's roleplay even through its ripples and I was paranoid about stepping on toes or not have a great grasp of current politics and relationships.

On a WoD or a comic book MU* on the other hand I give no shits about such things and I can afford to just come up with stuff then put them into play - with staff permission if needed but with no worries about where that leaves players who can't take part in them.

L&L games though on MU* tend to be more cliquish in my experience because of it. You can't just join a random event and bond with others by going out to kill orcs since as PrPs are often dominated by social events whose bonding potential is smaller as for characters without ties they are at best meet-and-greet opportunities. On the other hand it's easier to join a clique simply by signing up for the right House/faction.

@Macha I listened to his most recent interview on All The Smoke a couple of weeks ago where he spoke about coaching Gianna's team (while Tracy McGrady coached his own kid's team) and how much Kobe loved doing that since it was about pure basketball.

Apparently another parent+child was with them on that helicopter, going to a game.

The only real problem with this is that most players would need to know the ins and out of the bureaucratic system itself to do the concept justice. And most wouldn't.

It'd be kinda sorta like having an E.R. MUSH set at a hospital - if most characters need to know at least some basic things about medical practices but most players don't, it'll hit a wall really fast.

Organized, competitive basketball on Sunday nights is amazing. It's fun and exhausting in equal measure.

What's not fun is that the games are late (they start at 7 pm) and then I just can't sleep. I'm not sure if it's the adrenaline rush or the caffeine consumption before - I'll adjust the latter, at least - but two weeks in a row I couldn't get to sleep until past 1 am, which just straight up murders my Monday morning.

@Ganymede Eldritch's were also capped, that doesn't actually fix it. Some players are naturally more inclined/willing/shameless enough to pursue such things as 'the cap' aggressively and others don't, and it adds up fast.

It even has a diluting effect on other kinds of rewards - if I can get a Beat for 30 seconds' worth of typing an one-line justification and you have to run a multi-hour PrP with several players in it it's the same incentive being applied, but one action helps the game a great deal more than the other.

@Auspice Look, I'm no master of etiquette. I don't know of a good way to ask someone "uh, so are you offering me sexual favors in exchange for money or are you just dressed like it?". What if I was wrong?!

Also I still didn't get my damn massage which irks me.

@Bobotron Resilience was the big thing. I hadn't noticed it doesn't simply convert its dots of aggravated damage into lethal for the scene, it's whenever you take damage. And that's just the passive part of it. The active portion skyrockets a vampire's survival.

I value aggravated damage and Conditions/Tilts very highly in 2.0 and no other splat has the means to deal with the former as well as that. Until I see how the latter play out in practice, the bloodsuckers win.

I hope that GIF isn't real, it made me angry.

What I like about social (and mental) stats being part of the game: That otherwise they are greatly underdevalued, for the same investment, compared to their physical counterparts; a punch is a punch and it counts, but anyone can play being manipulative even if their actual attributes suck.

What I dislike about social stats and powers being part of the game: They are disruptive in scenes. Violent scenes are rare but social ones are constant; it's really inconvenient when people start rolling for things every other pose ('I roll for Dominate. Oh, it failed. Okay, I roll again next pose. Oh yeah, let me look up if it works like I think it does or like you think it does. Oh, let's ask staff. Oh, why are you slicing your own wrists?').

A good system would probably be greatly dependent on its interface... and it'd need to be a damn good interface to get around this.