Jupiter's Legacy was very good! I binge watched the crap out of it.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: Good TV
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RE: Balancing wizards and warriors
@insomniac7809 said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.
That's a good point. And although I agree with it, I am often reminded that on comic book and Star Wars games people do play other stuff. So they must be doing something right!
What is the secret recipe? Why do folks play a Robin-type (let's assume original characters here just to remove the 'well I like Tim Drake' copout) when you can play a Superboy-type? Or if you can have a Force-user why pick an engineer, or a smuggler with a blaster?
(These are not rhetorical questions - my experience with these kinds of MU* is very minimal)
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RE: Orange Shirt Day for Native Children
One of the things I like about Canada is that shit like this gets confronted. Basically every nation did despicable things even in their near past, but we're at least trying to do something about it now.
And this isn't over, by the way. For example indigenous women and girls are preyed on at much higher rates than other ethnic groups in the country.
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RE: The Desired Experience
@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:
@devrex said in The Desired Experience:
In my experience what is wanted is to feel wanted
This.
Yeah. Some of this comes from a place of insecurity (which let's face it, the hobby has enough of).
The hard truth is there are very few character concepts that can truly guarantee someone interactions. Sure, staff can drive it through plot or setting design.
But for the most part we get out of it what we put into it. If you are fun to play with, people will play with you.
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RE: Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff
It makes me very sad during my 1:1s to be told they are not used to receiving positive feedback. That there are adults out there in their thirties who haven't been told yet they are doing a good job - at something they spend a third of their lives doing - is unsettling.
When you do something wrong you hear about it in no uncertain terms. When you're doing well you... get paid since that's what's expected?
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RE: The Desired Experience
@tinuviel The way I see it any number of external factors can contribute to helping someone find play. The character concept is one, staff (or PrP runners') willingness and ability to get someone looped into plots, the game itself might offer mechanics to either make search for scenes easier or to even incentivize it.
But the largest of those factors by far is how fun it is to play with us. And that's something no one can just hand out. All we get is an increased opportunity to showcase that when we do play with others.
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RE: Critters!
I'm a terrible person who shouldn't have dogs.
When I call the girls in from the yard they get a liver treat each (so they come in when called ). That's all great, but today there were no more treats in there! Ohnoes.
So I reached into their regular dry food container, took a few nuggets of their regular dry food, and excitedly put them in their regular dry food dish, on top of the regular dry food already in there.
The young one went for it anyway because she's got like 100 grams worth of brains at the best of times. The oldest just gave me this look.
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RE: The Desired Experience
@pyrephox said in The Desired Experience:
I tend to think the ideal MU* structure player-side tends to be a large number of smallish Sandwich Clubs with some overlap.
I feel this is a manufactured model that we, as players, have been gradually taught to follow. Many tabletop RPGs are party-based and that has introduced the 'Sandwich Club' as an integral part of how we play. World of Darkness games are notorious for this since in some spheres literally the first thing most players do is search for a pack/cabal/etc. Lords and Ladies similarly follow a similar paradigm as they integrate into factions (Houses, etc) to play politics.
I think Sandwich Clubs tend to get toxic when they start trying to police who people play with outside the group. Either by outright 'I won't play with you if you play with X' or the more subtle (not MUCH more subtle, but...) attempts to monopolize playgroup members, or egging them on to criticize people outside the group (so that they can later go back and tell those people oooooh look what X said about you and isolate the club member further).
Frankly I think this is a symptom of toxic people rather than the model itself. It's a perfectly human trait to want to be included, play mostly with your friends or like-minded individuals, etc. But leveraging that to exert pressure on other players to get your way or exclude specific others is a whole different ball game.
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RE: Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition
@greenflashlight said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:
John McAfee dead in prison. Apparent suicide.
This dude was never going to die to natural causes.
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RE: Experience Gain in nWoD 2.0 - An analysis and shit
@Thenomain said:
Did you miss that Arkandel was saying he didn't want to play up the practice/training side of being a boxer?
If this was the point, then I missed it like a skull-shaped meteorite misses the Earth, and Arc and I are in agreement.
You can play a boxer and never land a punch in actual RP. You can play him the next day after a fight he won, all beaten up with a swollen face, bruised joints, limping around like he's a man thirty years past his actual age. You can have him deal with bookies trying to get him to throw a fight in due of his debts and the consequences of what that entails. You can play him being recruited by local petty mob bosses to go harrass store owners for protection cash.
I can keep going - my point is when it comes to playing a character staff often is of a mind to butt in where they're not needed and not do so when it's less ... flashy. Is the guy who sits in a room collecting charity XP and only shows up for violent PrPs to throw some dice only to vanish again afterwards better for the game than the afforementioned boxer who doesn't like to roleplay combat itself? (and mind you, I'm not that guy since I love training scenes, this is an example). And yet the former will thrive in a justifications-heavy system a lot more than the latter.
I find that to be the wrong approach. In trying to stop the theoretical example of the twink who only grabs punching-stats but doesn't roleplay them - which it doesn't accomplish anyway, as I just pointed out an obvious way among many this can be easily circumvented - we penalize players who for a variety of reasons won't play concepts that could be fun for many people to interact with. Maybe they don't like writing justifications, or staff doesn't know them when it's time to approve that Renown/whatever spend. Maybe it's a particular aspect of a profession's life they have in mind - an interesting, original part - and for some inexplicable reason they are told they are playing wrong. But the guy who sits in a room is playing right! Nuts.
Staff should stay out of these things unless they are needed - unless there's an existing, proven issue where someone's really being a jerk. Otherwise let folks spend their XP and play their characters! Don't get in the way, enable them to play what you think is missing. Do you think the boxer needs to throw more punches? Don't try to shame the guy into doing it, run a plot where his punches come into play. Make an event the pinnacle of a small storyline where he's actually in a fight with an NPC antagonist and get him an audience of other PCs.Pull him in with honey, not by pointing at some "THOU SHALL NOT DO THAT" rule.
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RE: MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't)
@betternow said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
Or, GMs could not be the only source of plot and let players run their own stuff, make up their own cases to run for others, come up with their own NPC patients with X or Y illness for PCs to solve, etc. Then GMS only have to focus on big, world-changing stuff
In most MU* I used to play this was pretty much the default. In some of the sandbox ones it was really the only option other than when staff ran very occasional scenes.
Unless something has changed, the truth of the matter is the majority of players want to participate but not run plot. It's not really a matter of whether they are permitted to; in fact unless there are generous reward systems encouraging them to do so, it tends to not happen outside small groups of players running scenes for each other.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
@wizz The problem for people after a certain age is that it gets hard to meet new friends in the first place. Once we're out of school, most everyone has started a family or has kids... it's very difficult any more to get that "old friend" status out of anyone. Much more so if you have had to relocate at some point since you also lost your existing buddies in the process.
So what we are left with are... well, whatever comes our way. Online friendships, activity-based matches, etc. It might be imperfect but it beats... you know, nothing.
I don't know how it works with women but with men it's also that we don't talk about our personal lives nearly as much; girls seem sometimes weirded out by the fact guys can hang out for hours a week but know next to nothing about each other. It's comfortable, but it does leave us without outlets if we do need to let something important off our chests.
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RE: A Post-Mortem for Kingsmouth
@DnvnQuinn said:
That doesn't leave me with a huge feeling of security regarding this new project. I love what they do, but I don't want to invest the time in it if one day it's just going to be randomly shut down, at least from the players point of view.
How long was the game running for? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know).
If staff has been running a game you liked for say, more than a year, and they've been active in that time that's a pretty impressive span of time. Would you begrudge your friend running a great long campaign in their living room for ending it because the circumstances of their lives changed?
Enjoy it while it lasts, and make sure to say thanks. Security doesn't play into it unless the game summarily shuts down a month in. We're not owed anything.
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RE: Nepotism versus restricted concepts
@bored said:
It's not agitation, its lack of equivocation
Let me try to be more specific if you don't mind.
There's a lot of 'oh well good staffing can make anything work' in this thread, and on this forum in general, but I think that's BS. The sort of thing @Ganymede is suggesting is a) not actually different from how MU* have always worked and b) fundamentally terrible, as the history of this stuff tells us.
Aside from personal experience, if reading these forums can demonstrate anything it's that there's absolutely no 'how MU* have always worked'. We've seen so many different approaches by games - some of which failed spectacularly - there's no way to realistically stick any label on them all and call it a day.
In this case I'd argue you would have a hard time showing either that every MU* has tried to engage in favoritism (for instance, RfK seems to have gone to extremes to avoid exactly that, and was actually criticized for it at times) or that history tells us they've always failed - since even say Firan lasted for many years and engaged hundreds of players. If only every game failed like that!
I think the debate of whether games should be run for fairness or for fun is a far more interesting one than whether Gany is a tyrannical despot, you know? ... I mean obviously she is, but she's our tyrannical despot.
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RE: Nepotism versus restricted concepts
@bored said:
But that gets into the whole 'don't hire shitty staff' (and perhaps more important, 'actually fire your friends when they turn out to be shitty staff') thing.
Sure, but what is the point of having good ('not shitty') staff if you can't trust them to make decisions like that without accusing them of favoritism?
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RE: Good TV
A Wheel of Time production that's apparently already renewed for season 2 but has stopped twice due to Covid-19.
I am desperately hoping that this doesn't suck. I don't want to get excited (we've all been burned before I'm sure with the disconnect between expectation and result) but... I kinda am anyway.
My fingers, toes and other noodly appendages are crossed.
I think it will come down to how well they can translate the elements that made the books a fun read to the screen.
There was hundreds of pages' worth of content about how the One Power worked for example can't be quite transferred over as-is without it being boring, but they could spread it out across multiple seasons in a simplified form.
Then the sheer number of characters will need to be seriously fucking trimmed. We all have our favorites of course but there's no way in hell they can possibly bring them all in.
Also... well, Robert Jordan himself should have also trimmed so much of the plotlines because there were a ton in the books but we'll see what they can do with that.
I read the first season will have Moiraine as the protagonist which kind of makes sense both thematically and because Rosamund Pike is the one big name they have. The three ta'veren won't have a lot to do early on other than follow along, and even Egwene and Nynaeve would barely know how to weave yet. I'm hoping later on they'll all get the chance to shine.
In my opinion it will all come down to how good the casting is - that's after one of the things Game of Thrones was extremely successful at. For example Rand al'Thor's actor will need to carry a ton of weight on him after the first season as there's no way to hide the freakin' Dragon Reborn.
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RE: Spying on players
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
Pretty sure Shang staffers do make the invisible rounds, to see if their ageplay policies are being followed. How else would you catch people at it?
It'd be a very inefficient way to do it. Unless they're right on it from the start it'd be very difficult to determine the exact age.
But man... staffing and trying to enforce policies on Shang, that must be a nightmare. The things they must have seen.