Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: FCs on Comic MUs
@saosmash said in FCs on Comic MUs:
I mean ... why not just make a rule against squatting and then enforce it? No need to turn character retention into something to politic over. Yes, you do need competent player management staff but I think games need that anyways.
To some degree that's the same issue as firing bad staff.
It's far easier to hire someone (or to not hire them in the first place) than it is to fire them after the fact.
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RE: Random links
Not a link per se but something I ran across Reddit while looking for humanity's redeeming values.
"and then we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello."
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RE: Make MSB great again!
If anyone does want the undertaking of keeping such a thread active I'll be happy to offer any amount of administrative support they need for that purpose.
There is one more thing I wanted to bring up and this thread is as good a place to go over it as any.
The 'MSB effect' in regards to damaging/killing games has come up before, and I hate it. The very idea that this forum is important 'because it can bring down a MUSH', whether right or wrong, is abominable. It's not what the place is about, or for. If our ability to damage games was the measure of its success I'd be looking to pass it on to someone else today since that's not something I want to invest any time into.
Now and then dirty laundry is aired here. That's one of our functions, we give an uncensored floor from which to voice complaints without the possibility someone might silence them. As such MSB (and WORA before it) has created some embarrassment for bad players and staff in many MU* who perhaps wouldn't have been forced to face the consequences of their actions to the degree that they did, and who say their reputations being tarnished as a result. They might overstate the opposite but they care - recent events, laced with repeated condemnations of the fake news people post here on a MU*'s channels only confirm it.
But I really don't want that to be the forum's legacy. We're hobbyists in a tiny community, and our reputation should - maybe not now, but in the future - reflect the fact we genuinely like games, and that when we criticize them it's due to the fact we care. "Bringing games down is the polar opposite of that - which conversely we can't, that's an effect that's exaggerated at best - and definitely nothing to be proud of if we could.
Pardon the rant.
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RE: Make MSB great again!
@wizz Right! We don't want a WHAT IS GRIMDARK REALLY LET'S TALK ABOUT IT smack in the middle of your precious game's ad thread which you were hoping to bait people into giving your MU* a try with.
It's not just negativity we want to avoid there, it's just... random shit. Maybe. I say this after having derailed every thread ever since 1996 with random tangents.
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RE: Good TV
It's probably beating a dead horse but I truly don't understand the people behind Iron Fist.
I'm watching Daredevil S3 now. It's built on the same network, with what I imagine is a similar budget and know-how - yet six episodes into the season it's had several scenes in which the Murdock is far cooler than any in Rand's two full seasons.
For starters just his first fight with his seasonal nemesis alone was far superior; in all of Iron Fist it always seemed he never got to fight the Big Bad - it was always someone from his supporting cast. No one cared that much to do it either; none of his own villains (to the extent he had any!) were actually taking him seriously - in his own show! He was just, kind of, in the way.
But Daredevil's supporting cast actually compliments his story instead of competing with it. Foggy has a life, Karen is a strong character, Maggie is intruiging - yet it never felt disjointed. Even the stuff that doesn't work as much for me were choices I could understand.
Dammit, if they had only given one convincing scene like a prison escape or Rand fighting against several SWAT team members at the same time in close quarters. One. Not even a boss fight.
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RE: FCs on Comic MUs
@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:
To tie, "plays iconic character" to "able to run good plot" together is something I don't feel comfortable with.
It's... a different kind of plot-running. I've done it and it was very satisfactory sometimes but I also had to be very careful the rest of the time since if you are playing certain characters - be that because of their individual power levels or just their significance to the narrative - it's easy to bulldoze over others or to render them a bit... unnecessary if you're not conscious of what you're doing.
But it does put you in a position where you can generate stories for others. It even allows you to enhance other plots, which is something traditional storytelling finds hard to do - two STs running things in parallel tend to ignore each other just because the number of moving pieces makes it hard to coordinate, and communication becomes an extra complexity.
Just for starters, with a thematically important character you can enact that most precious of all storytelling commodities - you can hand out motivation like it's Halloween and you have a bag full of candy. You can talk characters into going on these wild goose chases who are normally sceptical or reserved (but whose players would like to go), act as a quest giver, be inspirational or plain order them to do so.
That's a plot device so handy to have around I've often had to invent to kick PrPs off or lure newcomers in. If someone else was just able to provide this service I'd take it in a heartbeat.
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RE: RL Anger
The guy on my gym's Facebook group posting regularly about his newest lifting achievements. I don't mind people bragging about their PRs but goddamn he's tagging everything he does with #veganpowerlifting #vegangains #veganstrength, every damn time.
He's like a walking, breathing incarnation of that old joke: How do you tell if someone's a vegan? Wait five minutes, they'll tell you.
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RE: FCs on Comic MUs
Yeah, if I play on a comic book MU* it will need to be absolutely based on a specific time period or, even better, a book run. Say, place it in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men period, allow only mutants as playable characters, give information as needed to clarify what the rest of the setting was like (the Avengers roster, major world events) and go to town.
I don't know if it's really restricting that I can't play Captain Atom in such a game. It's like saying a fantasy game has to allow every humanoid race, or every WoD game has to include every supernatural type of PC.
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RE: X-Men Utopia MUX
@scourge said in X-Men Utopia MUX:
@bored Well for Jean I'd say the first thing that comes to mind for most people is "she keeps dying and coming back" which I'm told is a source of frustration for a lot of Jean players. But that aside, I think its not that hard to address the issue.
What's frustrating about it?
Hell, that's a very common superpower. Nearly all superheroes possess it.
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RE: Random links
@thenomain It's pretty funny, but I doubt AI wrote this. It reads very much like a human writing AI writing it.
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RE: Meanest (But Funniest) Thing You've Done in a Game
@faceless You should sue George R.R. Martin, you guys invented the original Red Wedding.
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RE: The Dog Thread
I came back from work to find the recycling and
somemost of the garbage all over the kitchen floor.The problem is I try to be fair, but there is just no way to know which of my two dogs is responsible for this...
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RE: Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?
@sunny Well, they wouldn't be on MSB any more, just for starters.