Best posts made by Arkandel

@Derp said in RL Anger:

Yes, well, forgive me if my first reaction to your statement isn't 'oh, of course, it's so obvious now! How did I not see Kanye's point all along', given your rather pronounced tendency to take anything that's even a bit off and turn it into something extremely inflammatory. At the end of the day, as much as I sympathize with @Mietze's point, it's still only one side of the story, and is skewed by her perception of events as somewhat creepy/off. (NOTE: I am -not- calling Mietze a liar, or saying she is wrong -- just that it is only one side of the story, there, and there exists a -possibility- that the intentions are more innocent than they may appear. I fully understand her hesitation in this matter.)

Although Kanye will be Kanye, it's not really a side-of-the-story matter here.

What the guy did was objectively creepy even if he has only the best intentions in mind, thought it'd be a fun reunion, would never hurt a fly, and would back off the first time he got even a hint she's uncomfortable by this.

@Sunny I don't do that much work with spreadsheets but wow, $13/month is a lot. Aside from Google Docs it's even more expensive than a month-to-month MS Office subscription ($10/month) which bundles the entire platform let alone their annual price ($100).

I guess there are enough spreadsheet nerds out there to make the business model sustainable.

@saosmash You know what I really liked about Strange New Worlds? It wasn't dystopian at all. In fact it was downright hopeful.

I want Star Trek that speaks to the best of humanity. Showing us in a place and at a time we're not raging assholes or living in a grimdark reality where everything is terrible, but - for once - part of the solution than the problem. Giving us a vision of a future in which humans believe in something which isn't just that the one with the biggest guns wins - in fact, where violence itself is a failure, not a solution.

And FFS, a Captain of a Starship worth looking up to.

Especially in the new movies I never felt that way. Kirk was an action hero - all of them were. Which is fine, I guess, but it ain't the Star Trek I'm into.

@tragedyjones Your mom does like cuffs.

Obi-Wan Kenobi might have started slow, and the first few episodes definitely had their flows...

... but what a goddamn finish. Damn.

@Scorn said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

It warms my heart to see how cheaply you can be bought, @surreality.

I'm in for whatever you need, @tragedyjones.

We're all buyable here, it's just a matter of pricing.

Something something someone's mom.

@Macha It's your grief, not theirs. That doesn't mean they don't have your best interests in mind; in fact they quite likely do.

But no one is in your head but you.

Sometimes it's easier to have another dog around. I personally found it a comfort to cuddle the puppy we had adopted a year before Daphne left, after she was gone. Other people simply never get a dog again, but instead volunteer at shelters to walk and play with doggos instead - an invaluable service in itself - without committing their hearts again.

There's no 'right' or 'wrong'. Do what feels appropriate. No one else's opinion matters nearly as much as yours.

@ThatOneDude said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

If you're really looking to create a game for players to enjoy your better off with something a much broader set of players would likely enjoy.

You can't have everything. The more generic your setting is the more players you'll get, that's a given. However you also yield the element of uniqueness and, even if your wiki is otherwise very detailed, your plots very tailored to highlight specific unusual thematic elements etc... there will always be a majority of people who'll treat it as being exactly that, generic. They'll run the exact same highschool girl ninjas and cardboard rich party animals with a heart of gold as always.

I am not saying either of those things is bad on its own, just that they are things. A game set in the 50s or in a post-apocalyptic jungle-covered metropolis or whatever else will cost you in numbers since it won't be everyone's cup of tea but you can tell stories you can't tell elsewhere.

What are the game's goals? Start with that.

@faraday "<Journalist discovers Shangrila>".

@Kanye-Qwest Being a flake is commonly thrust as an accusation around here, it's true. We fling it about like it's the worst sin or only a few people ever are accused of it.

The way I see it flakes have been happening forever. You know how many MU* I've seen abandoned and successful at the same time? HM was on autopilot sporadically and in several spheres, it just happened to have a ton of players every night so it just kept going - in fact one of the best spheres I've seen, Vampire, was basically staffless for months. TR? Its creator vanished a few months in, but the timing was right for other people to take up the reigns and it had already been sapping HM's playerbase by then so it kept going.

In other words, it's games which simply lack such numbers - not surprisingly given how shallow our pool of eligible players is - that fail, and then we notice it and stick the 'flake' label on them, but we don't stick it to the ones who keep going because there's still activity there regardless of whether they're well staffed or not.

Something else we might consider: Look at some of the biggest hate-threads on these forums and we might notice something else; people who stick around on the Haven MU*s of our hobbies, our Elsa's if you will, are the ones who are not flakes. Why? Because that's what they got going for them, they are running the games for themselves and couldn't give a damn if they are good or not - as long as they are in charge. Is that a lighter sin than letting your MUSH run its course then letting it slip away into nothingness?

Finally... let's say TJ is a flake. Is it better if he never makes the effort, and a new MU* never sees the light of day, than if it gets made, some people play on it and have fun for a few months then it dies down?

I know I pay money to buy games I fully realize I won't play for more than a month or two on Steam. Why are MU* held to far higher standards of longevity?

@Roz I've tried different formats in the past, some with more success than others. I like to set up long ambitious multi-chapter plots with their own wikis which I'm still tweaking - so that's the first thing, having a central nexus feeding newcomers with information, letting them see who the current primary participants are and get a brief synopsis on the (relatively spoiler-free) story so far so they can decide if it's something they'd like to dip their toes in.

I took a hey-would-this-work approach back while I was staffing Geist on TR by making a big Mortal Kombat-style tournament with a promised huge payoff happen in the Underworld. The idea was to let characters from all spheres compete with NPCs trying to get to the promised prize... and it did work for a time. Mages and Sin-Eaters (predictably) were more interested in it due to the setting itself, the idea got pretty good traction. If I had to redo it though I'd have done so in isolation from other thematic changes I was making in the sphere at the time since keeping the two distinct was becoming a chore, involving a lot of posts on TR's forum, bboards and actual scene logs.

One of my experiments was on Safe Haven Harbor where I tried to pull a Walking Dead by introducing a rival city to the PC's as well as resources they were meant to scramble over. My plan was to break down the story into independent-looking parts and then bring them together organically. That... didn't work as intended; the MU* was smaller and its characters more closely knit than I expected which resulted in a premature gigantic social scene meeting with a potential hostile rival settlement early on. While it was still fun and at least we got halfway into the second chapter in retrospect a more integrated format breaking meetings down into several smaller group-sized scenes would have served them better.

On Eldritch I had a long chat with Eerie before the MU* even opened since I wanted to run a more large scale epic story based on the emergence of a big bad and the recovery of a mythical judeo-christian relic. My revised plan that time entailed breaking down participants in either coterie/cabal groups or, in case of loners, hook them in through their spheres; I ended up sending a ton of @mail and opening +jobs to feed people separate clues through dreams, Auspex visions, spirit interventions and the such. While that approach worked much better to get the hurdle of enormous scenes off everyone's plates I kept having issues managing the momentum - key characters kept dropping in activity, logging on more infrequently and making the endeavour more about logistics than storytelling.

Actually I STed a pair of scenes lately on BITM where I had a group of mismatched mortals to this building where one floor was in a different world than their own. I got pretty good feedback from the players there - this was one of my very few short arc plots, usually I go for the long term - so maybe I need to run more creepy smaller scale stuff.

@Pyrephox said in Fallen World MUX!:

Investment isn't the only reason for a restrictive alt policy. It's also a matter of roles. Games where all the available "roles" are filled by a small minority of players who have 3-10 alts each are considerably less welcoming to new people, and more stagnant, in my experience, than games with much more restrictive alt policies.

Oh, I agree with you there.

But I think any game that has a political environment where ranks/roles are in somewhat short supply (as they tend to be) needs a system where only active, involved people can maintain them - which is a separate problem to solve.

You don't want that guy's third alt to be a Sheriff, you're absolutely right, since he'll never be on. But you don't want the Sheriff to not ever be on, period, no matter what the reason is; I understand RfK had a good system to handle ascension as well as keeping what you already have - and if that exists then alts won't be an issue any more.

@Pyrephox said in Fallen World MUX!:

Because if you don't have enough characters to fill all the niches in your system, you're going to be actively trying to pull people in, and more accommodating to them. Because you NEED them. Otherwise, it's Applicant #25 of 450, all applying for the same data entry job - you're looking for a reason to REJECT them, not to bring them in.

(I like this topic ).

I dunno. It seems like a very specific way of looking at roleplaying to me - the idea that you're defined by your concept, and if you can't have a unique role the character is redundant.

It just doesn't mesh with me - PCs are more than hackers, warriors, chefs, aspiring writers or car mechanics. These are plot devices that might be invoked in different ways or degrees by char A and B:

• A is always broke since he's trying to become a writer and stubbornly refuses to get a 'real' job. B is obsessively trying to improve, willingly making deals with the devil to buy himself some talent.

• A is a chef so she opens a restaurant which serves as a hangout for the sphere. B is a Crone Acolyte searching for ways to find enlightenment through rarefied food recipes.

• A is a retired US Marine suffering from PTSD and tries to escape a life of violence but it keeps finding him. B is a cocksure arrogant Rahu trying to get that perfect, glorious death to exonerate the shame on his family.

And so on... the same very general concept can be played in a bunch of different ways, some of which will become tired, predictable cliche and some may be brilliant depictions because of they way they are done, not what they are.

And on top of it there is a pretty specific number of useful 'roles' available to begin with... and the prototypes will be taken very quickly in a game of any real size. The week after a MU* launches there will be hackers around, and at least a few people will play the 'hangout' concepts (brewers, bar and restaurant owners, etc); in most systems there are also only so many powers; a few Arcana, a few Disciplines, and someone is getting specialised in them. That doesn't mean the ones coming after that don't have a place.

Oh, before I forget - you know how every time staff is asked "hey, what kind of character should I make? What's needed?" the stock response is "whatever you'll enjoy"? That's absolutely the right answer. The beer brewer who rolled two weeks before you might not even be logging on two weeks from now so your concept is rare again, but if you pick one you won't thoroughly find fun you're stuck with it.

In other words: In a RL company you have every reason to reject Data Entry Guy #11 if you only need 10, you're right, but in RP there's no such thing as a redundant character role.

@Coin said in What themes and subjects do you look for in a game?:

One of the advantqages of CofD 2E is that you can say, "We only use the new edition's books" and have a clear, hard line where the split is.

"But this one book in 1E says this Legacy can--"
"Don't care."

Aren't there going to be more 2E supplementary books coming out though? I.e. isn't it just a matter of time before this one book in 2E says this Legacy can...?

@Three-Eyed-Crow But if someone is doing that, can't you just avoid them (like you'd avoid anyone who's doing something stupid) instead of imposing a game-wide limit on everyone?

@Swaggot said in Making a MU* of your own:

@surreality Just out of curiosity: do you actually believe that if enough people believe something, it becomes true? Or was that just a useful rhetorical device in the moment?

Do you think because a minority (or even one person) believes in something its chances of being true are similarly increased? Not every special, unique opinion is true on the merit of it being special and unique.

Even if he played sports or sang songs or whatever makes you famous these days... it's a consequence of it, not a natural extension. We've the right to buy t-shirts and tickets, not show up at these guys' door.

Werewolf: the Forsaken Second Edition is now available for purchase.

@Taika What I dislike about Mage:

1. It encourages people who know the system better than others (it intimidates the fuck out of many players) to try and do all the things in any given situation. They just take over entire scenes while others watch not knowing how to use their Spirit 3 or if they can really do this thing with Fate, does it work like that?

2. It really really turns characters into power-bots and plots into problems to solve. Very often it devolves from "what would my character do now" to "what power should I use now".

@Insomnia There's a flipside to it though and it's...well, it's just ranting online. It doesn't mean anything if a tiny little (albeit very vocal) subgroup is 'very mad'. Who cares?

If they cross into real life, doxxing, stalking then yes - it's a police matter. But those are, even for the lofty standards of those over-entitled people, way on the extreme side; the vast majority of it is just talk.

I dunno. I get celebrities these days need to have a 'social network presence' {tm} but they could hand it out to a professional to handle on their behalf and separate themselves from the toxicity. Then if that crazy-ass lady is cursing their man-bits to rot and fall off because the last product they put out didn't match her expectations, well, okay!