Best posts made by Arkandel

If that was the case MSB would be the source of all happiness, all the time.

@Misadventure I am sorry you are incredibly boring.

Oh, wrong thread?

MSB is the new pornhub?

@Miss-Demeanor I think that's a byproduct of our collective policy of copying what others have done before.

So the Hunter sphere is subject to TR's rules on hunting, and the possibly misguided notion it'd all become a cesspool of PvP in an instant otherwise.

I am not saying it wouldn't go down like that. Just that I'm not convinced staff in each game with Hunter in it had a conversation from scratch considering the angles from scratch, proposing alternatives and possibly allowing the sphere to exist without the tether; my suspicion is each generation just goes with the safe option.

@Lotherio said in Good or New Movies Review:

@Arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

Basically it'd have been set in an Earth-in-the-1930s-like gangster setting, presumably while trying to not break the Prime Directive. I dunno, that's certainly different!

Its called The City on the Edge of Forever, where McCoy travels to 1930s NYC and saves someone who was supposed to die, they start a movement that delays the US entry into WWII, and the Nazi's develop nukes 1st and win. Like that 1930s try not to break the Prime Directive, or different?

Given Tarantino's penchant in his last couple of movies for changing the past I suppose the time travel angle was more likely.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Shadows Over Reno:

(which doesn't work very well since I work nights Sun-Wed, which means I don't sleep much during the week, and then sleep A LOT Thursday - Saturday). So I schedule events for mid-evening PST / night EST, and then it's time for the event and my brain is mush and I'm like "i can't be bothered with rules and rolling right now, no event tonight, sorry".

Been there. Yeah, the early evening zzz's are hard to reconcile with "oh, time to juggle 4-5 players paging me through paragraphs of poses and assorted game spam".

Having said that, yours was the only plot I got to join lately so... thanks for that.

@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:

You either start early enough for the EST folks and no PST can make it (since they're all still at work), or you start late enough for PST and the EST peeps have to leave early. I work from home and I've tried a broad spectrum. 5:30p PST / 8:30p EST seems to be the sweet spot, but you've gotta be able to jump right into the action in 1 or 2 rounds.

My take on that is very simple - I leave work at 5:30, get home at 6:30 and need to eat something. So I run them at 8 - all EST, all based on my availability. It's the best I can do.

I skip the 'You all gather here,' the 'figure out who is riding in what vehicle,' etc. We spend a few minutes OOC (or in advance of the scene time if possible) figuring out who has what and is doing which in advance... and then I start with the 'As you roll up to the abandoned Radio Shack, you see...'

Because I swear, for every person that's awesome in the 'setup' by including everything in one pose, there's a couple people who take 2-3 rounds of posing and that alone can add an hour or so.

I wanted to take a bit more time here because that one's important... the setup.

In the past I had at least one person complain to me because I launched a multi-part story in a formulaic way - there was basically a quest-giver who handed the PCs some initial task, and that was apparently not good enough. To such people I kindly say fuck you too; beginnings are hard, k? When no character knows each other so I can't even draw on existing alliances to hook things into, players need to give the ST a chance and suspend their disbelief just a little to leave room for the plot to roll. Else we'll spend the first hour (maybe the first session) just trying to figure out how everyone got involved and isn't that a lovely way to spend a Tuesday night?

Obviously if I railroad the whole plot and characters are just bit parts in a story without choices and agency then yes, that'd be a good reason to protest.

Anyway, these days I @mail interested participants in a new plot a day or two before it starts with some suggestions about how they might get onboard; ideally they get in touch with me and we work something more elaborate out as needed. Almost no one has ever actually done the latter but hey, I try.

What's much harder is hooking new people after the plot is ongoing, especially if it's not a Hollywood production with cars exploding and giant monsters coming out of the deep; if there's an overall veil of secrecy or discretion about the affair but I only have three players for my scene on Thursday and I need four, or someone asks "hey, I heard about the ninja thing, I want in on the ninjas" then it needs to be done. And I hate asking the plot's participants to suspend their disbelief again so Bob can show up out of nowhere for that thing they're trying hard to keep under wraps.

I haven't found a reliable, universal way to get that one done so far. It's just all case by case - but it's obviously much easier if the players themselves do the work for me ("Hey Bob, I need a favor man... we need extra muscle for a job"), but that's relying on them to do some of the legwork which... I admit, isn't always something I'm keen on counting on. The vast majority of players just sit on a plot until the next scheduled +event unless I'm specifically targeting an already well-knit OOC/IC group with the plot-fu.

@GreenFlashlight He impressed the fuck out of me in the Witcher. And he was really good in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as well.

In fact come to think of it his roles as Clark were easily the worst ones I've seen him in.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

HM. Regular mandatory Mass scenes. 25+ characters in a room.

I still have nightmares.

I don't want to say this but democracies deserve the leadership they elect, so unless Trump stays in the White House through force of arms then there comes a point it's not really on him any more.

Y'all had four years of that presidency so it's not like he's an unknown. Vote him out, or live with the idea that - for better or for worse - that's the will of the people. No one promised it'd be perfect.

@Apos said in Social Conflict via Stats:

@Arkandel I generally agree but I think everyone judges the relative merits versus what's possible from abuse cases. I don't think anyone would argue that giving everyone full admin privs on every game would be a great idea, even though it would definitely cut down on overhead. I think most players are honest, non-dicks. I also think most people get extremely involved in their stories, and the time they are least likely to be reasonable is when they get emotionally invested in a conflict against another player or feel slighted by something, and it's not that paranoid to try to avoid cases that get people worked up.

There is however a balance in which cases it's worth trying to avoid getting people worked up about without inconveniencing everyone else. Common sense and basic player etiquette can go a long way into mitigating risks from roleplaying systems.

Let me offer an example. When I made the switch from MUDs to MUSHes years ago I was scratching my head about how staffs everywhere were permitting @emit - it's such a broken command! You can literally do anything you want with it... only of course you can't because if you try others will squint in your general direction so hard your skin will melt.

In fact to give you an idea, I had coded something similar on the game I had been playing called pemote; it was functionally identical to @emit only it put "[$characterName]" at the end to avoid cases of abuse where people could badmouth other players anonymously or fake others' poses if it didn't have their name attached. Yes, those were concerns that had been brought to me about it at the time, that's why the pemotes were name-tagged.

These are all possibilities even now, right? I mean I could go to one of @Ganymede's scenes and "@emit Ganymede eats a bag of dicks" couldn't I? It's the perfect crime, no one can find out it was me! Mwahahah!

... Yeah - but when was the last time this was actually done? No one is trying to fix this broken command because who the fuck cares? It'd be way worse to prevent a tiny margin of abuse by one immature idiot (me, as usual) than to enable everyone else to pose anything they legitimately want.

I think the same applies to what we're discussing here. Yes, someone might abuse it. Maybe. In fact they have even without the need for fancy systems - panther semen and all. But the vast majority of players don't carry panther semen around, they just play the game as it's supposed to be. Those are IMHO the ones we should be aiming to accommodate primarily and then, as much as we can, do our due diligence for the assholes among us.

@Wizz said in Good TV:

Man. The Boys is going really hard on the blatant political commentary this season and I'm enjoying it. I think that was the thing I disliked the most in the first season, that it didn't feel like it had much to say beyond a really nihilistic take on superheroes, so this was nice. I am very excited for the season finale.

I think season 1 had to set the stage and focus more on the superheroes, their history and the secrets behind the curtain.

Season 2 seems to be much more about the world they inhabit and their effect on it. The best part is the acting, I think. not everyone is great but the leads have bought into it, and it shows. Antony Starr is kicking some serious ass.

I guess when I asked "should people be banned on games for past behavior elsewhere?" I was really merely showing off my prophetic powers.

what have I stumbled on

@surreality I dunno. I mean I've literally no horse in this race as I'm neither playing on Arx nor have I ever met Custodius in any form.

But if enough players view another as the devil and he is a douche... it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of chaos and mayhem. Especially for a game like Arx which by all accounts so far was mostly drama-free.

America's Mayor.

@Ominous Still, it's an improvement over every other system where research is free. You can literally claim to spend more hours a week working on things than there are hours in a week because who can check?

Jensen Ackles is Soldier Boy in season 3 of The Boys.

I'm starting a new storyline this week, Food For Worms.

It begins with the Werewolves; if you want in, a good way to start is +bbread 14/5 which gives some early information to the appropriate characters, otherwise +event 21 is open to all comers for Thursday (as long as said comers can get to the Shadow).

Please let me know in-game (Richter) or PM me here if you need any special accommodations or need an IC reason to get involved.

@AeriaNyx I am really sorry. He looks like a perfectly happy kitty who's lived a good life.

@Auspice Yeah, I'm willing to cut a lot of slack for RL things.

I don't think there's a game out even in the planning stages that could get me back on a staff roster. I'm happily running plot for Reno but that's it.