Best posts made by Arkandel

@aria said in The Work Thread:

I'm just angry because I can only imagine, with the timing of when his comments came in, that this guy spent the whole 90 minutes sitting there with his polemic all ready to go, just waiting for the survey to open so that he could shit all over

That sounds like a fairly reasonable assumption.

Have you seen videos of people who walk unmasked - but filming - into malls only to pick a fight with employees there about being unable to sit anywhere, being excluded, attacked, what about their children, etc?

This guy came in prepared to pick that fight. He probably knew how it would play out before you even started. I'd bet it'd have gone exactly the same way if you had catered 90% to Christmas over the remaining 10%. It's all for the spectacle.

Sadly it only serves to validate them at the cost of ruining some other person's day. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

My last infodump scene didn't go so well. Essentially I had two goals going in; there was a plot point to be resolved (a PC had hurt an innocent bystander) and a larger one to be advanced (a larger meeting had to be arranged).

The sheer number of PCs (I think something like 9?) present presented the greatest difficulty; it was simply impractical to deal with the spam, both for my sake - trying to keep the NPCs address everyone's comments made it somewhat commical - and that of onlookers who were starting to lose track of what was happening. Furthermore, PCs with authority were frustrated because they couldn't deal with the matter at hand had to swim through the same amount of raw text.

Now, let's use a sample generic plot just to make things more clear if no one minds? Say, we have emissaries in Vampire coming from a different Praxis to bring news of a dangerous group of vitae-addicts who might have found refuge to their city.

1. There's a balance to consider between only involving the big-name PCs in closed meetings (which seals the majority of players out of the plot, turning it into something they care less about) and making every scene chaotic. If possible, breaking it up between public forums and private addresses seems like a good idea; for instance NPCs could address each Covenant separately.

If interaction is not going to add to the plot at that point, maybe consider doing it via announcements, although that risks detachment (reading about things isn't the same as being part of them).

2. Introducing an internal structure to the larger scenes. This may require IC authority but imposing strict pose order (my usual 1PR failed me) could help. Each Covenant picks their representative and there's a bigger scene with its own drama and revelations, each Covenant sits at a +place together so they can pose at each other, but only their representative gets to pose giving voice to their questions, remarks and proposals.

3. A plot device I really like to use is to turn PCs into mouth-pieces. That scales up very well (since I don't need to be present for every scene) and puts characters in the driver's seat - in our case an old blind monk could ask the Ordo Dracul to do research on his behalf, a fanatical Inquisitor could be - barely - constrained by the Lancea Sanctum while they go around recruiting help to drive the pagan demon-worshippers from the city, etc. I hate micromanagement, so finding a few proactive players, giving them the spiel and unleashing them on the grid is an excellent practice if you want information to spread out.

4. The KISS principle really helps. A complex plot full of jargon will be much harder to catch on than a more straight-forward enough - stories don't need to involve every word in italics from the splatbook to be fun. In case anyone has managed to miss it I'm also pretty wordy (why use one word when ten will do?) but walls of text put people off too, so when I need to dump plot on people I try to keep it as compressed as possible.

5. I try to give the social challenge here room to grow. Did the lowly lay LS member just oppose that Inquisitor's wish to drown the mortals in the homeless shelter (beneath which the invaders are hiding) in their own blood 'just to make sure' ? Make him remember it and make sure the PC knows it is remembered. Choices made have to mean something and have consequences just like in combat - only it's more delicious for STs because the worse you can usually do in a fight is kill a character but using an encounter gone bad you can torment them for months to come, and in the process make the nameless NPCs be memorable.

Just some notes.

@sunny In some sectors the cat is out of the bag. It's too late to demand a return to WFO, since basic rules of supply and demand will create a worker shortage. And those who do will find their employees seeking other options.

TS comes to mind. But basically tiny-everything is pretty unique to the hobby.

+jobs instead of tickets, which most people would identify from the real world?

The grid, referring to a game's built, described, interconnected world.

Dunno, this is a big project. You're probably better off sticking it on a wiki and let people add items then just curate occasionally... individual games have a ton of native terms, too. "Emote fighting" for example is what we used to call purely posed combat in a MUD I played, but I've not seen the term picked up anywhere else since.

@caryatid We only had a couple of scenes years ago when we ran into each other on some random MU* and I still remember those fondly.

You're a lot of fun to be around! Have a splendid time Out There.

@Miss-Demeanor One of the most fun betas I've ever been in was for Magic Online a long time ago. For something like... I dunno, two years? They gave you free boosters every week and you just played and traded. I loved it.

It was also ran by WotC so ... fingers crossed.

Absolutely terribly implemented system in Ontario for Covid-19 booster shot scheduling.

For starters there should be one centralized location you sign up for with your health card. Then it would be up to the system to notify you where to go and when to be vaccinated.

On top of it pharmacy web sites are getting hammered by tens of thousands of users, and almost all use a calendar UI where you need to individually click on dates to 'check' if there are open appointments. Not only does that generate millions of extra clicks - each of them making a separate call - but it's counter-intuitive. Why show dates without available appointments at all? Just let us queue up for the closest appointment, then they can notify us when there is one.

For the start of the pandemic I could excuse the lack of proper infrastructure and tooling, but they had almost two years to design something more usable and scalable.

@Thenomain It's no slight to you. That seems to be about par for the course with this gentleman's dealings with staff.

It kind of reminds me of this newspaper cover.

@derp Dammit. So much anger, misplaced.

@Gilette said in What do you play most?:

No genre preference, even when I look back through my gaming history. But what I've always been looking for in recent memory is a good superhero game.

I'm convinced those don't exist.

Now and then I'm tempted, but then I realize they're a multi-universe abomination where everyone ever is playable at the same time and none of it makes any sense.

Then again looking for sense in comics was always a fool's errand, I suppose.

@ganymede Oh for sure. However:

New York hospitalizations rise 12% in a day.

Omicron cases pass US peak compared to Delta - "So far, 12 states have had at least a 10% increase in COVID hospitalizations this past week, according to U.S. Health and Human Services data. Overall, the country has seen a 2% increase in hospitalizations."

@Ghost said in What do you WANT to play most?:

HOW IN GODS NAME DO WE NOT HAVE A GAME IN THIS UNIVERSE YET?

The perhaps obvious but incorrect reason is the books may be excellent but only a niche part of the playerbase has read them. So you either have to loosen things up thematically to allow non-readers to have a nicer experience, but perhaps alienate the hardcore players, or you adhere closely and lose most of your potential players.

But really the reason is we all have books we love and would really want to see made into a MU* we play, but they are different books for each of us. So it's hard to find a set of staff to begin with whose top preference is the same. It's much easier to pick a genre than a novel series.

@Autumn said in What do you WANT to play most?:

Original themes often aren't well-presented, and that can make it difficult to get and retain players. Say what you like about George R. R. Martin, but he's a much more entertaining writer than the average person who decides they want to start a game and make up their own setting for it.

Yeah, and for me it's also a matter of not wanting to pollute my mindscape of beloved works of literature with the usual MU* idiocy. It's why I haven't and would never play a Lord of the Rings game. I don't need to deal with stupid homicidal sex-starved Elves fucking in Elrond Half-elven's bedroom on a drunken wager.

@greenflashlight I think although both movies leaned heavily into the nostalgia factor, Spider-man was (in my opinion) much more successful at it.

It really had a lot of heart, which given the number of moving pieces and guest stars is an achievement on its own.

@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:

I believe that having any kind of antagonist at all requires active, interested, and creative staff. That is a must. Sure, one can run NPCs in their PrPs, but for a truly game-mattering antagonist staff have to be involved.

Notice that in the context of this thread an 'antagonist' doesn't need to be a bad guy. For example if you're playing a Crone and I'm playing a Sanctified we should be able to have a very adversarial relationship without it devolving into OOC unpleasantness. The objective is to somehow make this happen. Or to at least make it more likely.

That said, the key to any antagonist is that they are capable of winning and losing in a way that doesn't result in things ending AND provides for more RP around that situation. For example: Taking prisoners, escaping at the last moment, considering those he fights beneath him and leaving when he has the upper hand, et cetera.

Alright, so a good first step is to ensure death is a truly final solution and not a first inclination. Other than thematically (a decree from the old-fashioned Prince threatening nasty retaliation to anyone who destroys another) how can this be systematized? How do we make players and characters want to keep their adversaries around instead of just putting a knife into their eye socket?

@greenflashlight Frustration aside, I was never comfortable with https://reddit.com/r/hermancainawards and the idea of laughing at people dying.

Yes, it was their own fault in many, many posts showcased in that subreddit. Yes, they were stupid as fuck and fell to lies fed by political predators. And yes, some of them weren't great human beings in the first place, as evidenced by openly racist posts they had made previously on social media.

But dammit they were still people. They had family, spouses, children and friends who loved and will miss them. Rubbing it in their faces, especially right after that person died and the grief is still fresh, is in pretty bad taste.

@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:

But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots).

Exactly. I've seen the same thing - probably all of us here have. Historically having a healthy OOC relationship with IC antagonists has been an exception and not a rule.

But the reason I made this thread is to ask... could it be because we've been doing it wrong? Can we make it right? Or better?

I mean your IC friends in games give you so much even just counting system benefits. You exchange +votes/+reccs way more often, they can buff you in games like Mage, exchange +task support on Arx, lend you their well-statted Haven and Herd on Vampire, share pack bonuses on Werewolf... that's before we even count scenes.

What have antagonists ever done for you other than stand in your way?

I mean this could be a fool's errand but I think there's a non-zero chance if we revisit this and come up with a system that sets the pieces up differently than how every-game-ever has been handling this kind of relationship, possibly inadvertently, we can get different results as well. Dunno. Maybe?

I am not sold on Book of Fett either. It's not that it's bad.

For starters I agree with what others said; like it or not the actor isn't young any more and it's hard to pull off cool, choreographed fighting scenes. That's something they should have been able to work around though - Fett wears a full armor and helmet, for crying out lout. Surely they could have professional stuntmen doing the flippy flip stuff.

It's also though that the show isn't giving us a cool supporting cast. It's merely hinting at it. Ming-Na Wen is awesome but she barely does anything. There are morally gray characters such as a local club owner played by Jennifer Beals but she also does very little other than appear now and then. The Mayor is cool but what's his story? The henchmen have no lines. The desert tribal people have no lines.

We need some fucking dialogue in this show. Character development. Something.

@Tinuviel On the tin it says where no man has gone before, not what no man has done before.

@greenflashlight Cobra Kai is heeeeavily based on 80s nostalgia. And it's overly dramatic - even cheesy - by design. That's the kind of show it is!

Realism is thrown out of the window the moment cops and concerned parents haven't already gotten pretty much everyone involved in these massive high school karate brawls expelled and pressed charges on their assorted sensei.

***NSFW content***

@Ganymede My favorite cost comes from Dark Sun... for a much larger-scale version of the same thing.