Best posts made by Arkandel

@Groth said in Good TV:

Star Trek Lower Decks is the best Star Trek show of the decade.

You misspelled Orville.

It's as if the same source material can inspire characters in more than one ways.

@Ganymede For sure.

But you know what I 'like' ? It probably doesn't belong on a basketball thread but fuck it.

I like what big hypocrites people are when it comes to literally innocent people being murdered by police without any consequences.

You shouldn't make a gesture by kneeling during the anthem, find another way to protest!

You shouldn't march, find another way to protest!

You shouldn't use social media to talk about it, shut up and dribble, find another way to protest!

You shouldn't boycott games, find another way to protest!

Like... at what point are these folks basically saying they're okay with the murders but not with reacting to them?

Is there truly nothing we can't bicker over? Because this time we're bickering over a flow chart.

I started Cobra Kai's S2 without any real degree of enthusiasm. I liked the first season but it wasn't exactly in my must-watch list so I watched the first couple of couple of episodes very casually during suppers and stuff.

Then about halfway in I just kinda went 'wow' and watched the second half in a row, in one sitting. It got really good, really fast, at least for me. The season finale kicked some serious ass.

Also: The Boys! Episode 3 was quite a twist. I did not see that coming.

@lisse24 said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

is just not fun to me, and I don't understand people who want to play the gazillion XP vampirewerewolfmage and win with no cost. I agree with the other person who says they don't really see many dark WoD games out there, because if you're going to explore dark themes, then there has to be cost and consequences and in most cases, that just doesn't exist.

But that's the thing. It's not the XP. You can make some pretty damn powerful characters with relatively little - practically right out of CGen - so you can get good academic rolls, some melee, some firearms, etc.

The problem is people playing to win, not systems that can't be beaten. It's on us.

Do you want Planet of the Crabs? Because that's how you get Planet of the Crabs.

@puppybreath said in Why did you pick your username?:

Puppies have nice breath.

LIES.

@Vixanic

@auspice I feel objectified.

I watched the last four episodes of Supernatural so to see how it ends.

It was emotional but now I also remember why I stopped watching it before now; it's just... not good. The script, especially the dialogue, is often predictable and drags on, while the plot is bogged down by its own massive history.

But even aside from the nostalgia factor that sometimes had to carry the show, when it works... it still works. These guys earned their 15 seasons.

@deadculture said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

In fact, they can subpoena MSB to break my anonymity, get my email

Just for the record I'll delete the VM, all backups and shut the forum down before we are forced to hand out personal information. Although I'm not sure how well that'd fly in Canada anyway.

@tributary Thank you for that, I greatly appreciate it.

@deadculture said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

How proactive should MSB's moderation style be?

I think that's not the issue here. It's more of an open floor debate on what the limits should be than how they will be enforced.

Having said that common courtesy feels like it's pretty uncommon sometimes. For example I use "bitch" as a verb in my daily life but I don't see how it's a big deal to stop using it in the context of a single conversation if someone goes out of their way to ask; sure, I'd be free to roll my eyes or whatever if the context wasn't misogynistic at all, but why not just do it?

On the other hand if that same someone made a point of demanding or ordering me to use whatever terms they wanted to substitute overall I might take it the wrong way. If I was a poster on a forum and the admin went and said "hey, we don't condone the terms 'BC' and 'AD' in reference to time periods here" I would just stop logging on there because fuck that.

The Sound of Music was my first favorite movie. When I watched it as a kid I didn't know what it was, or for that matter what a musical was, and I had to look at the newspaper afterwards to even figure out its name.

But damn, I loved it so much. This man was a legend. RIP.

This thread disappoints

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is very, very good.

Right now the bar for Marvel's shows is very high. WandaVision ended on a great note and although their second premier TV show is a completely different beast than the first, it's excellent.

I love the chemistry between the two protagonists. It's convincing and often quite funny. The political undertones are also quite well done; in all these shades of gray even the villains have believable motives and it's easy to see how from their perspective they are the good guys.

So far it's going from strength to strength. Great job.

An aspect of this debate that's commonly overlooked, I think, is that characters can succeed or fail regardless of their overall stats - that's why randomness is introduced in the system, after all.

Who here hasn't had a combat character with plenty of dice who hilariously (or catastrophically) failed a roll chances were heavy they should have succeeded in? Or who hasn't faced "ST dice" where the ST rolls 4 and gets 5 successes or whatever?

The same thing can apply to social situations... but only if the dice are rolled. Maybe your social ignosaurus just happens to get the tone right this time, and their bubbling speech moves people, or your village idiot has a stroke of brilliance and actually comes up with a bright if improbably solution to that one problem.

None of this works if there is no roll. We can't simply assume a masterful politician always says the right things any more than we should take it for granted a suberb archer hits their mark a hundred percent of the time. If that was the case we'd only have attributes, not elements of randomness.

I haven't read Astro City in years and I am still haunted by that one issue where a guy's wife was ret-conned out of existence by a crossover event, so he spent his life longing for her although he didn't even know what it was that was missing from it.

@mietze said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

If you want to retain agency and be able to put things in a direction that makes things comfortable for you, then I think by necessity you are going to also have to do some work other than batting down someone else's perfectly reasonable roll and success with a "nah, that just doesn't work for me."

I am starting to develop an intense dislike for that word - agency.

Agency in this context means you have a say in the direction a story is developing and your character's role in it; it doesn't mean you control their every aspect. It doesn't mean there can be no setbacks, losses or embarrassments in the way. Such control is in the domain of writing novels (or fan fiction), not roleplaying.

It's being overused to mean "I never lose". That's not what it's supposed to stand for.

That stands in both physical and social encounters. Sure, no one should feel forced to play out anything they find disturbing but there are plenty of scenarios (especially in the World of Darkness) where success is a zero sum game; for someone to prevail someone else needs to take a hit.

The only real way to retain 'agency' in this manner is to avoid being part of those scenarios, and yet many players who should know better - who ought to understand they can't handle setbacks gracefully - engage themselves in situations they're all but guaranteed to be challenged somehow.

For example one could play an artisan and probably not need to worry about losing face too much because that's not an inherently contested position, therefore if I want to avoid things that trigger my irritation that would be a suitable role to play. However if I go and make myself a High Lord wannabe in a hotly contested hotbed of political maneuvering then something has to give; even removing social rolls there's no way I can retain that precious 'agency' of controlling my character's development. I can have a say in it, for sure, but social rolls don't take that away to begin with.