Best posts made by Arkandel

@Pandora said in TS - Danger zone:

@farfalla said in TS - Danger zone:

@Pandora What is your point? I can't even tell what I'm supposed to be displeased by. Is your argument that... we shouldn't ban certain types of behavior on games, because some people want the facade of non-con RP but won't say so, so we'd better make sure they can get their heart racing unexpressed desires over the expressed desires of other people to not be explicitly pressured and creeped on? Or is it that because you can't entirely eliminate pressure or coercion or non-con behavior, we shouldn't try to disallow any of it? Or that we don't have the "right" (whatever that means) to establish content rules and guidelines on games?

I know you're just arguing for the sake of arguing, tbh, but it really seems like you're just arguing for the sake of arguing.

You're boring.

Guys, both of you, cut this out or get out of this thread.

This might contain some spoilers. I think the entire thread might be spoiler-y in general so my only request here is to keep them out of it for at least a day after the latest episode airs to give people a chance to watch it.

... But damn the series, which at times has had its faults, is starting to spend the capital it's been building for years, and it's a glorious thing. Game of Thrones always succeeded on the strengths of its secondary characters; sure, there was some undead army in the north constantly ready to kill everyone and there were some badass Big Names clearly meant to be the protagonists (or villains) but the rest of the cast was where most people seem to be picking favorites from.

And the series has done an incredible job developing them. Jaime Lannister - a guy who in the show's first thirty minutes was caught fucking his married sister by an underage kid and threw said kid out of a window, crippling him. A guy who even later on threatened a baby's father to catapult the baby over a besieged fort if it meant he could get back to that same sister. On every other show he'd have been just a mustache-twirling villain and somehow eight years later he's a tragic, heroic figure, the kind who in this cynical, dark setting that laughs at noble deeds (and he had himself, often) picks up a lance from the ground and charges at a full grown dragon mounted on a steed.

Then that scene from last week's episode. Everyone pretty much acknowledges openly they are about to die, it's generally understood it's the last time all these supporting characters will ever have a drink together... yet the most cliche trope of bestowing honor brings them all to their feet. It's the kind of thing a few seasons ago would have been done to subvert it and now it lent emotional weight to the entire episode which ended up revolving around it.

This is pretty special. I'll miss this damn show when it's over.

Good thing George Martin is putting all those books out soon!

@ominous said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Go read the last 22 pages <snip>

I will concede any point I've ever made or considered debating before I subject myself to that.

The problem with paying for anything is that... well, players are entitled enough as it is.

How long before someone throws that around? Don't think "you can't ban me, I paid!". That's easy to deal with. Think "you didn't ban him because he paid!" Staff is on the spot for looking like they favored someone without dollar signs in the mix.

And let's not even go into expectations from coders ("your code is buggier than the other game that's actually free"), admins ("I've been in CGen for three days, imagine if I hadn't paid!") etc.

The question isn't really if it's worth paying for a MU*. The real question is whether it's worth the hassle getting paid to run one.

Most table-top games with social mechanics assume - naturally - the majority of characters' interactions will involve NPCs. That's not the case on MU* where the vast majority of your roleplay will be with other PCs.

This often makes such mechanics elusive, redundant or plain wrong in actual practice, yet they are often too ingrained within the system to discard as well.

So you end up with people who can't roleplay the charm or social grace their character supposedly radiates or who, on the merit of just plain being good roleplayers, are charismatic enough for their unlikable character to be irresistible anyway even when they are played correctly.

It's what it is.

@ThugHeaven said in Good TV:

@Kanye-Qwest I love her resting bitch face. Since they went so far off the books now, they just need to have her in the show...like all the time.

@Roz said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I am pretty sure that neither of the two recent bans (or any others that I've heard about, really) were really only because of one single conversation with no prior history of conflict. There's usually a final straw in instances like this, but it's rarely the first straw.

My objection about this is not all straws are the same. Just from reading this thread there's an atmosphere of... well, I won't call it fear but there seem to be people who don't like to rock the boat too much in case they get slapped down. This is not being debated; it has been a common sentiment. It's not right.

In that kind of atmosphere what constitutes conflict? Disagreeing is not conflict. I believe @lordbelh looked as objectively as he could at his actions and that when he says he sounded more passive aggressive than he perhaps should (I'm paraphrasing) it was just that; I am also willing to bet it wasn't an explosion of profanity, an abusive remark or some kind of personal insult that in most books would constitute a bannable offense. I don't know if you'd agree, but that's my feeling of the situation.

What I'm saying is that this wasn't a case of a chronically disgruntled player who went out of his way to be snide and hurl petty challenges at staff. It was someone who spoke his mind constructively - as we are accustomed to doing here - and got made an example. I am also saying that in this environment, unless something changes, why would anyone make their thoughts public unless they were in complete agreement with the administration?

And how conductive to the MU* is it that the only players who have staff's ear are those willing to whisper 'yes!' to them?

I'm not saying that because I dislike the game but because I like it, I am playing there, and it's a shame.

The last couple of troll accounts (Распутин, etc) have been banned.

Guys, I know they're trolls. You know it too - but I won't ban them until they go too far. In the mean time you don't have to feed them.

I've had talks in the past trying to guess what possesses people to go to a certain kind of game looking for content that doesn't quite match what its theme is about.

The obvious case (which I don't want the thread to be consumed by) is sex. Some players don't go to Shang but instead to newVampireMUSH, and I'm not talking about stalkers or jerks here but just regular players who want a very large portion of their RP to be about TS, yet they don't choose to play on TS-based MU*.

Or... people who claim they despise certain genres or types of games yet they play them anyway. That doesn't make any sense! If you hate L&L why play on Arx? And if you do what's the point of trying to invent a steam engine or gunpowder or whatever otherwise proclaim the game to be a railroading failure because it doesn't match that very one-sided vision?

The only expectations players should have is for things to be fairly documented and implemented - in other words that procedures are written down ahead of time and staff not screwing them over. Now granted, this has been... known to not be the case.

Otherwise though in many cases expectations weren't fair to begin with. Even when I was participate in a PrP I didn't enjoy too much - perhaps I wasn't given agency, maybe it's too slow, could be that it's too combat based with little story to sink my teeth into, whatever - it's always up to me to leave. I didn't get promised anything, the ST (be it staff or player) doesn't owe me anything.

I feel sometimes we take things for granted in our community, including the time and energy put forth by others for our entertainment. The world outside of MUSHdom isn't our oyster to harvest for our fun as we see fit, so why should a MU* be?

One of the common pitfalls in many of the games I've played is that risk is up to the GM running a PrP, but rewards are heavily restricted or simply not systematized in any way whatsoever.

So for example, I want to run a PrP where the characters are going after some gnolls. I arbitrarily decide to make this pretty hard (or don't know how to scale the challenge) so I max the NPC stats, add a higher level chieftain, etc... so the PCs barely make it out alive. Perhaps some don't. However since there's no staff oversight not much can come of it. I don't have the authority to throw some actually tangible rewards at the end - perhaps not even more XP than if this was a birthday party PrP. Certainly nothing like a title, recognition by important NPC leadership (who're only played by staff who may never even hear about the PrP), some kind of magic item, etc.

So essentially PCs were risked for, well, nothing more than what the exact same adventure would have been at a fraction of its difficulty.

This happened regularly in WoD games where combat was pretty bursty. It was possible even a solid character could get one- or two-shot by a solid roll. But on the other hand PrPs' rewards were often flat regardless of the challenge rating, or simply scaled terribly; if going to your IC cousin's engagement party is worth half the XP of a potentially deadly combat, the latter objectively isn't worth the risk. Sooner or later the dice would go the other way and you would be rerolling.

@Kanye-Qwest said in How to move beyond a concept?:

A world is not the most important part of the game imo. Start bigger. What do you want the theme of the game to be? What will the stories be exploring? How do you want your players to spend their time and focus? Then adjust your world and rules/systems (If you have them) to those goals.

To add my thoughts to that, what players will spend their time doing is the most important question for a new game.

A lot of very lengthy, detailed writeups I've seen over the years failed to answer it; the ideas in such cases looked fine as something to base a book on, but that's a completely different project than an interactive multiplayer world.

@Fantom A piece of advice: Enjoy your life, don't burn out working on this project.. After all most of your players are also out and about doing summer type things - do the same if you're so inclined. We'll be here.

But more seriously, happy Mother's day to all you mommies out there!

@sunny said in Open Sheets?:

@cobaltasaurus

How much PVP do you intend for there to be?

I literally have no answer for 'games in general' beyond 'it depends'. Specifically for Sacred Seed, if you're planning on discouraging PVP completely, then I think Open Sheets are the best. If you're going to allow any PVP at all (including allowing for political action against one another for rank/reputation) then semi-open.

I think full transparency is a great thing for PvP games as well - as it removes any appearance of wrongdoing, favoritism ("staff like X so they gave him more stuff"), etc.

To put it a different way, a bad player will figure out a way to deduce information using OOC means one way or the other. They'll analyze someone's dice in PrPs, ask innocent sounding questions and file the answers away, etc.

Open sheets ought to flatten the field and remove a vector I always thought was ineffective - the OOC masquerade - from the equation completely.

@Misadventure said in Fear and Loathing:

What is the point of RP?

Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their MSB posts.

@Coin said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

If you can't buy in to the system you're playing, then why are you playing that game? Because there's nothing else around? Lame.

Yes.

Conversely that's also why people join a game then try to turn it into a different game. They want the audience so they go where players already are, but they want those to play what they think is right.