I envy you folks with dumbass neighbors.
We have a moluccan cockatoo. She's lovely. She's also loud as holy fuck when she's angry, happy or just she's being a bird, and the songs of her people sound like someone's strangling a baby over hot coals.
I have a sound isolation headset. Hahah. She laughs at it. Or I think she does because I can hear her.
@Ghost said in Superhero Games: Quest For Villain PCs:
Edit: I didn't mention straight male RPers because the amount of rp I get with other male players/characters that didnt involve passes for TS is pretty remarkable. I assumed straight males were like HOLY FUCK GAY COOTIES or DOESNT HAVE VAGINA/DONT CARE.
Frankly I have a pet theory that some games are somehow aimed for a certain demographic and no one tells you these things when you sign up.
I've been in MU* where the male/female ratio is tremendously skewed for some reason and it's open season on whichever gender is in short supply, and I've felt either like a piece of digital meat or completely invisible for no obvious reason accordingly.
@wizz Oh I feel that.
Shit flows downhill. We have considerable technical debt to pay back at my job and there are never opportunities to dedicate resources to do so since offering new features is what gets more customers, not fixing stuff that isn't broken enough.
But here's the thing, the more technical debt you accumulate the harder it is for their services to scale up. That means as you add customers it gets harder to maintain them. It also means stuff needs to be done manually - which directly translates to people getting phone calls at 2am to fix stuff which, if they had time from the daily grind, would either be automatically resolved or wouldn't be broken in the first place.
@Roz said in Superhero Games: Quest For Villain PCs:
OH HILARIOUS I almost forgot who you were. I need to make a mental note somewhere.
I would love it if MSB let us keep notes on people's profiles. Or if we could list our alt history somehow so others can mouseover our avatar and figure out who we are.
Sure, there are the 'playlist' threads but those aren't easy to just use as a reference on the fly.
@derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
It makes me unreasonably content to have the means to exercise again in my garage.
It's not about being strong; I don't play sports during the pandemic. It's not about looking good; I barely go out during the pandemic. It's not even about being healthy, or not entirely.
I've realized I need the incentive to look after myself properly though and without goals and structure I cannot do this. Or, rather, I haven't; in the last year and a half I've taken terrible care of myself. I ate badly, dressed the bare minimum needed to sit in front of a web camera for meetings every morning, and I didn't have a reason to care.
For whatever reason having some iron to lift up and put down again works for me. It gives me a reason to look after the rest of my life. And it makes me feel good about it in ways I didn't realize I was missing until they came back.
I have most of a home gym, really, and I used the hell out of it during the pandemic. To the point where I am soon going to need new weight plates.
Which now cost an absolutely insane amount of money, wtf. I remember when I could get a set of 2 25lb olympic plates for like 39.99, and now it's like, 99.99 for one.
What the hell.
Part of that is that a bunch of people all started to build home gyms during the pandemic so that's supply versus demand. But more than that it's the price of iron/steel. It's going up globally, and it'll continue to be.
I already ordered some more plates (mostly 10s and 5s as well as fractionals) since it's reasonable to expect them to go even higher.
Edit: added a source.
@faraday said in Superhero Games: Quest For Villain PCs:
@Arkandel That template works great for NPCs, but PCs? "Ok, your char can't really hang out and participate in most of the social scenes because you're a wanted criminal mastermind. People are likely to take your IC actions personally and think you're a jerk. We just need you to pop in every now and again with a brilliant plan for the heroes to foil, then disappear again. Sound cool?"
It's not really surprising to me that almost nobody goes for it.
I'm not either. Villains probably won't work as fully playable every day PCs; they would as alts used sporadically to serve a plot purpose or as NPCs.
If you already have plates and a barbell, I'd also look at a landmine accessory. You can also use a corner to anchor the bar against, but it might scratch it. There are so many exercises you can do using different grips.
What worked really well for me was this, although there are like 10 different products almost identical to it on Amazon. They all work just as well, and they're relatively cheap. Basically as long as you have a sturdy object to attach the handle on (a 2x4 beam, a firmly screwed bolt, etc) you can use it for pulldowns, curls, facepulls, rows, etc. It's graded for 200+lbs which is good enough for most people since you can alter the angle, and thus the resistance.
@Packrat said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
One thing that I do feel hurts the game is that athletics and survival are both combat skills, meaning they are expensive and also generic amoungst people who are going to go off on Adventure Stuff. Essentially it means anyone who is liable to head off on a quest is going to have the same skillset, just some will be outright better or worse than others. Not ideal.
That's true. But there's truly no way around it; roughly the same things combat and war naturally require are key for adventuring in general. If I run, say, a dungeon-crawl type of affair then the skills required will overlap with the stuff soldiers buy.
But it goes beyond that. For instance I was trying to do some experimental stuff and see how much interest exists in it; there's no template (or at least none I'm aware of) for it, so I was making shit up as I went along, and one of those things was to have an improvised weapons duel. The idea was to not have everyone show up in their favorite super expensive weapons and do their standard super optimized rolls but they had to enter a yard and fight each other with anything they could conceal on their persons - what I imagined was getting folks creative with hair pins, their own clothes used offensively, steel balls carried in a pocket and used as projectiles, hand to hand combat... that sort of thing.
But that didn't happen. Perhaps the onus was on me to talk about it with participants before the fact and get them riled up, I'm not sure. On top of it someone complained after they lost because their opponent used a practice sword instead of a real sword which was a headache either way; one because it was supposed to be an opportunity to pose something somewhat new, and the other because 'who won' didn't mean anything. Just the fact people were disappointed afterwards was a let down, you know?
@Pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
That is a thing to consider. There's a careful balance to be pondered between OOC equality-of-agency and IC inequality-of-theme. Someone who apps in a hardscrabble peddler of common birth /should not/ have the same access to, say, alaricite as a Great Lord on a systemic level. But, just as true, there should be things that the commoner /can/ do that the Great Lord can't, because being a Great Lord (or any noble) should come with some real consequences for acting in a manner befitting of the nobility.
I would say at this point in the game there is great urgency based on rank (High Lords have a huge advantage) and soldier ability. The more you stray out of these two niches the least involved you can be in cool things.
But the other thing is, there's a lot of redundancy in agency as well. For instance my character got a cool secret and then was shared a neat also top-secret @clue; I thought I'd be able to milk both for some roleplay... until I went out there and tried to discuss them both. Four out of four PCs he went to confide in and involve in them already knew everything about them, plus some. So what I thought was important going to prove to be great leverage to get roleplay out of forming alliances were proven to be duds.
There are many characters around who literally know all the things - it's not just XP and skills, it's information, political positioning, resources, you name it.
There's a certain sort of player - and I see this a lot in video game discussions, too - who feel absolutely compelled to optimize their character and acquisition of resources whenever possible, even if doing so makes the game actively unfun for them. I don't know where it comes from, but I've seen it plenty of times.
But I am one of those players. I absolutely want to optimize my character, I enjoy it. But - again, for example - when he went on a drive to try and recruit help for his pet projects (and make resources to improve his gear, retainers, etc) that meant running IC events showcasing the benefits of being offered this support. This is hard work that I enjoyed putting in, but it's also... hard work, right? Yet I wouldn't change that, even when I know others are just sending out messengers to do the same thing in a couple of paragraphs; yes, it would save me the trouble but it would also deprive me of the roleplay.
Then what the fuck would I do with the gear and the stuff if I'm not playing the game in the mean time? Woohoo, my sword glows red now, yay.
It's really weird how little we know or see even in the people we think we know the most.
I have a friend. We no longer talk as much as we used to, but I met him when I was 15 and he was 13, and used to hang out at his and his brother's house on a very regular basis over the years. We played Magic and D&D together, moved on to Vampire: the Masquerade, we went to (different) schools and hanged out during the summer. We ended up even being coworkers later on for a year and a half, literally in the same office. I've known the guy for 30 fucking years.
Neither of us had any idea we were both big time into basketball. All that time. He went and played with his group, I with mine. We watched games separately. It just never came up in any of our conversations over all that time.
I found out this week because I happened to see a reply of his on a post about the Portland Trailblazers' playoffs exit and when I sent him a WTF?! post thinking he might have at least gotten into it just recently... nope.
What the fuck. How much more have I missed about everyone I know? How much have they? How is this possible!
@Roz said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Oh yeah, when players do it of their own accord it's even better! But if people are playing the whole cool cucumber game, it's totally fair to call for a check.
(Then again, Unflappable Cool Cucumbers are like one of my least favorite things ever on games. You know the ones I'm talking about: players who never want to lose face at all in any way by being less than Perfectly Cool.)
But see, in the context of plot participation it's not just about composure; what I am after isn't so much freaking out, it's engagement, for which there are very few metrics. I'd know things are on the right track if I get a raised brow and a "fascinating" for instance, but if there's a relative OOC radio silence after a scene is over other than for thank-yous (which is the norm) then it's really hard to know how much things worked or to what degree. Am I engaging these characters? Are they getting enough leads to chase after once the PrP is done? Is it interesting for them?
I do make a point of asking, but you should know... actionable feedback is rare.
Anyway, my personal benchmark for success is introducing story seeds that generate RP after I'm done with a scene.
I don't know if this belongs here or in the RL peeves thread!
On my birthday my college roommate made a post in FB tagging me about 'mentoring him in Magic: the Gathering' back in the day and reminding me MtG Arena is a thing.
Fuck you Nick! I love Arena now. 
It had been well over a decade since I had played my last duel, and now I've found myself doing dailies, trying to resist the urge to spend money on the damn thing. It's so much fun! Argh.
Social recognition is the prime motivator for the hobby, I'd say.
But that's a goal, not a method.
I wonder if this trend of very high budget, carefully cast and directed Marvel shows and movies aren't going to cement the company's superiority compared to the far cheaper DC shows that churn out seasons.
I mean compare Loki to Superman & Lois, even though it's easy to argue Superman is a far more important property for DC than Loki is for Marvel.
@runescryer Continuity in older shows (and I mean that as in... anything before probably the late 90s or early 2000s?) was always sketchy. Sometimes intentionally, other times because the writers just didn't care and everything was so episodic.
In my opinion the real catalyst was Buffy. A lot of shows that followed it were influenced by its "2 stand-alone, 1 meta" episode format.
@Coin said in Roleplaying writing styles:
I do this all the time. I don't really mind if other players know my character's motivations (USUALLY) and most of the people I play with aren't assholes who will assume telepathy based on it.
Although I've used this before, I know people (excellent roleplayers, in fact) who advocate everything should be visible in your poses, and that you should only emote things others can observe and interpret.
The idea being that anything less is lazy and bad storytelling, the rough equivalent of having an actor on screen display a reaction through his facial expression and body language, and having a narrator's voiceover explain what just happened to the audience.
What day is it today?
It's shut the fuck up Friday!
@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:
For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".
Because the alternative is...what, exactly? "Bob sits down, grows silent, grabs a beer, and adds fuck all to the scene because edgy loner."
Although I pose like that myself - more often these days than I used to - I think the point is that neither of those things gives you, Bob's partner, something to play about. Sure you know the guy isn't just an antisocial loner but your character doesn't, and you weren't really given something to hook into.
It doesn't need to be much. A soldier dog-tag to go with the grumpiness will do just fine to give you something to ask him about.
What I've found more useful is offering some context to a situation. For example my paranoid mercenary walks in and doesn't put a hand on his weapon, sits with his back facing the door, throws his head back when he laughs... and I explain in the pose these are signs of being at ease - he doesn't feel threatened here. Sure, I can pose just the physical actions and maybe it'll sink in, but some narration doesn't hurt especially with unknown partners.
I've also grown way more verbose in my poses over the years. Lots of fluff. I can cut it down to a paragraph or two in big group scenes, but if that's all I'm writing, I'm probably bored quickly.
Same. As for verbosity (or its absence) I want to stress that neither really means someone is a good roleplayer. I'm more biased toward longer poses with additional detail but the truth is portraying a fun character can't be measured in words and paragraphs.
"Tempest smiles and waves back at Jane. "Hey, how are you?" She keeps smiling. When Bob talks she looks at Bob and laughs. "That's so funny!" She sits in a chair nearby."
I can't tolerate poses like that any longer. I used to be able to 'make do' with that sort of stuff, but now it just makes me want to pull my hair out.
Oh, peeves. Okay, here is mine - please show some goddamn subtlety, don't just parse my pose for keywords. I don't mean being politically or even socially savvy but where it falls just short of metaposing. For instance: "Bob walks into the busy room. He sighs for some reason then he goes to take a seat." "Jane looks at Bob. 'Hey man, why did you sigh?'".
... This bugs me more than it probably should. 
@l-b-heuschkel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
Somehow, 'enjoying life' does does not extend to sitting in the bathroom all day the day after eating that pizza in real life.
More time to play mobile games on the porcelain throne!