@testament Yep, the dude is getting a statue outside that stadium even if the team never even makes it to the playoffs for the rest of his career.
Also in this age of instant super-teams he stuck it out when he could have gone to any number of much sexier cities to have gotten himself a ton more money then won with Middleton at his side after 8 years of these guys playing - hell, practically becoming adults - together. That alone is legendary.
@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:
I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.
I don't even remember which I used when we played. But see, I first learned how to roleplay on a MUD, right? So we had 'socials' - the same kind MMORPGs use these days. So if I was in a room with @surreality and @Ganymede and I typed "grin ganymede" then Ganymede would see "Arkandel grins at you." but surreality would see "Arkandel grins at Ganymede.".
So the etiquette for us there absolutely permitted the use of second person if the scene was just between two people. You'd pose using 'you' if it was the case otherwise of course it would be their name. In fact until somewhat recently (2-3 years ago?) I hadn't even realized anyone was peeved by it; I simply watched how people posed and used the same convention.
These days I wouldn't simply because it is a peeve and... well, I don't care either way, so why piss people off for no reason?
I'm'a just gonna put this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiYGxlr74mw
@buttercup That's quite a story. I am really sorry you had to go through all that; your family's stories make it clear what sports are really about, and those idiots' actions about what they are not.
If it helps at all, Booker + Ayton are the real deal. I think Ayton can legitimately have a Duncan-kind of career. All the team needs is stability, fleshing out the bench and maaaaybe if you can replace CP3 (who had an amazing run, mind you, but he's not getting any younger) with a ball handler/passer who fits the timeline better you are looking to compete for years to come.
What problem are the solutions in this thread solving?
@misadventure The NBA specifically is as much about resource management (fitting the right roster under one's budget, which is more or less what salary caps are) as it is about the sport itself.
General Managers strategize, trade players and look for hopefuls through the draft more or less like a trading card game with years as their horizon which - depending on how you view it - is either a very high stakes or a zero stakes one.
It can be high stakes for fans since if the GM makes the wrong trades and creates albatross (baaaad!) long-term contracts the team will stay shitty for years since their salary cap space is all taken up and they have no good way to free it before those contracts expire.
And it can be almost zero stakes for team owners especially in large markets because fans are gonna go buy tickets to their games and merchandise anyway. The New York Knicks for instance have been absolute shit for twenty five years and they're making money over fist, so...
@Quibbler said in Roleplaying writing styles:
I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.
On the MUD I was on what we had - and I still think is a good idea - is pemote. It's essentially the exact same thing as @emit, but it put [Arkandel] at the very end so it was always obvious who did what.
It was originally implemented that way to prevent abuse (we thought people might use it to fake other people's poses or insult others anonymously) but it kept large scenes sane. Saner.
Well, Activision Blizzard done fucked up. With a major lawsuit in the works, sponsors fleeing after allegations of widely spread sexual misconduct in the workplace start to rise and their own employees coming out to accuse management of trying to deny it, even long-term YouTube and Twitch streamers are fleeing WoW since they risk damaging their own brand by association.
As someone who remembers it being a shining example of a creative behemoth making very high-quality games as of even only a few years ago, this is such a sad turn of events.
And trying to rely on denial tactics now as if in this day and age they had any way of keeping it under wraps is frankly disappointing. By the time they are done playing damage control they'll burn their credibility.
Several people from my WoW guild have already quit over it. With Final Fantasy XIV already being as popular as it is, it's not like players don't have other options either.
@Misadventure XP no, because that's too flexible a resource. But many shareable merit dots cost XP and that's more or less how they already work. Wouldn't that work for you?
@kanye-qwest said in Good Anime:
I had to bail out because it was just WAY too derivative, and I predicted le big twist immediately based off of the material it was ripping off. Looked up spoilers, and I was right! Meh.
If it helps (and probably doesn't since we're talking about the show and not the source material) the twist itself was a very early one in the course of the overall plot.
In the comic books the entire season 1 is a small part of the story - just the introduction, really - and serves to set things up rather than be finale of a 'season' like the show does.
But speaking of subverting, the show itself did do away with a lot of themes the original comics feel... very dated about. A lot of borderline homophobic humor is missing, a female romantic interest is much stronger and more interesting in the show than she is in the comic book, another's reaction to seeing Mark with her was much healthier in the show, etc. Clearly they were trying to do some things better, and I think they succeeded.
As long as people don't try to trash the current game or actively try to advertise/convince people to leave and go to theirs (through pages, using general public channels, etc) it should be fine.
I watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings today. It was really good! I wouldn't say the best MCU movie (Civil War and The Winter Soldier are too high up for me) but it's certainly very near the top.
It went from strength to strength. Unlike most MCU intro movies there was no boring origin part, no dead time... everything was either setting up the story, offering background or an action scene.
The fight scenes were top notch.
Really good chemistry between the leads.
The benchmark of a good MCU movie: A relatable villain whose motive isn't simply being evil.
Some spoilery thing things:
***=NSFW content***
Actually I did have a question from anyone versed in Asian communities. I read a post on Reddit that claimed Shang-Chi wasn't expected to do very well in actually Asian countries because Simu Liu is too muscular/big, and that doesn't conform to the cultural ideal of lean action heroes.
Is there any truth to it?
Oh, okay, so we're not talking about nWoD but more generally, gotcha.
I think it could work, as long as there's some reasonably plausible way you can justify what the resource will end up buying from an IC point of view, and it might have its uses in say, catch newcomers up to the rest of the faction, be offered as rewards for good service to the group, etc.
I think - or fear - that living during a pandemic might be something we will just all... need to do.
Even assuming high vaccination rates in the western world - which is by no means a given there are millions of people worldwide who don't have access to that level of care. Until that happens Covid-19 is here to stay. Any traveler can transmit it.
I don't see us getting rid of mask mandates and we'll probably need to be vaccinated more in the future to maintain a strong immune response or even to cover potential new strains. We're at least at a good place given our mRNA tech.
If nothing else the issue will be collective fatigue. Everyone is tired of this shit. We need to keep being responsible but it's hard. And it won't get easier.
@Ghost said in Roleplaying writing styles:
- I am not my character
- You are not affecting me
- My character's actions, beliefs, or opinions do not reflect my own
- (and, most importantly) There is a line made of tape that separates myself from you.
All of those things are true. I must however warn against needlessly generalizing about what it means to cross those lines.
You do get to have peeves. If second-person posing is one of them more power to you. I'll happily go out of my way to avoid triggering it.
You don't get to be right about it. I've used 'you' in poses in the past yet I have a better-than-average grasp on the difference between IC and OOC.
...
How does the logic go from "my freedom to not be vaccinated" to "stop others from being vaccinated"?
There are many ways to implement XP systems and 'the best' approach always depends on the beholder's eye, for obvious reasons.
@Ganymede, I'm agreeing with you here, a system which scales the rewards with activity would be tilted toward people who have the luxury of investing a lot of hours into the game, and that's not right. A MU*'s lifeblood is in its casual players who log on a few times a week to have a scene, not those few who practically live there.
What I'm arguing is that a the hybrid system (such as, but IMHO not quite the one described here) does ensure that. Consider the following please?
The amount of XP you earn through activity is capped. A player who logs on for 5 hours a day and one who gets to play for a couple of hours 2-3 times in a week would still hit the same weekly ceiling; what it incentivizes is consistency, not mere time investment.
The advantage of Beats over automated pose counters (which I'm still fond of due to their impartiality and not adding to staff's workload) is that it's not how much but what you do that matters. Go to a bar to chat about the weather and it's going to be hard to justify resolving a Condition or the such. Someone would eventually make a frownie face at you.
If done right, it places the emphasis on story; quite literally stories are where the game's carrots are, they're the best ways for mechanical advancement - which is exactly where they should be. Figure out a way to draw Storytellers and you're gold - which helps players without a ton of time immensely. I work a lot of hours so when I'm home in the evening the very worse thing I need is have to scavenge RP out of the blue, asking on channels and waiting to see who bites, possibly ending up in some pointless scene; compare that to an +event that starts at 20:30 which is guaranteed to come with a plot attached and man, I'm so there.
If I disagree with Eldritch's approach it's in the exact distribution of numbers but there's nothing to say I'm right and those guys are wrong. I think past the six months due to the XP cap versus the reduced automatic gains people with extra time would indeed begin to outpace the rest significantly - but that's not an issue with the system's philosophy overall, it's just figuring out the right figures to attach.
@tinuviel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
The Hog Pit is the newer, more sensible plan.
If that is true we need to be nuked from orbit.
In order of more to less important:
If I'm in a game where I need to log as 'evidence' in case something goes wrong during bouts of drama I'm outta there. No questions asked. I'll never 'log everything just in case'.
I semi-frequently log scenes especially if they're PrPs that need to be posted... or at least guilt someone else into doing it for me. 
("I run the PrP, you guys post it up!")
I almost never reboot my PC so there's usually weeks of backscroll to wade through if I feel like it. While not exactly logging per se, it serves the same purpose.
Now and then I paste weird or interesting things to friends... which thanks to Google/Skype's infinite memory means they are logged in a roundabout way. I've found stuff that happened years ago there.
From the flip side I'd accept logs as evidence but if there's any doubt from a side about their validity then... probably wouldn't count it for much given how easy it is to fake. Having said that I don't even remember the last time someone seriously expressed the view a log was doctored.
Winnie gets really excited when I get home and walk toward the back door to let her, and her sister, out to the yard. After all she hasn't seen me in a while, and she wants to be out! So she jumps on my heels because yay. And that's fine.
However when I take Winnie for a long walk, once we get home I let them both out in the back yard so her sister can get some fresh air too. Then the dumb dog still gets excited and jumps on my heels even though she was just out with me.
Wtf dog.