Best posts made by Arkandel

@thebird Feel free to add me. The username is Arkandel as you might have imagined.

@Derp said in Finding roleplay:

@Thenomain said in Finding roleplay:

@faraday

Coin got it. Where I play, a PrP has become systemized. There is an expectation that it have a point, an ending, or at the very least a risk/reward setup. Some people are good at winging it, but the last five years in the realms of WoD that's been discouraged.

I think we're seeing a reversal of that, but I still see the letters "PrP" and cringe.

I kind of hate it too, really. I'd much rather just do something organically in the moment than have to plan every little detail of something out, make it open to everyone who wants to come, try and work on scheduling and crap. It's terrible.

The flipside of it is people whose schedules, socialization skills or plain newbie status prevents them from being organically part of interesting scenes which grow to be more. Organized +events give them an in, and from then on they can cultivate IC relationships, show off their RP chops to people and gain hooks into the game's theme. Sometimes a STed PrP let me grow my still generic 'grumpy cop' into a legitimate more three dimensional character.

If I feel nostalgic about something was player-ran spheres. The need to go out and recruit others to your political cause or bend them toward your agenda is such a potent roleplaying-creation tool. When the more established characters have to get out of their rooms to influence hearts and minds and every new character is an unharvested vote for the next meeting what you end up with is a perpetual scene making machine.

Unfortunately such environments certainly have their issues. Rank-chasing turns mostly reasonable people into frothing idiots, over-active players can dominate things simply on the merit of being online 24/7, it encourages the creation of insular cliques and it often devolves into OOC drama if left unmanaged.

But damn, when it works it works really well.

@Saulot said:

Easy. Three eyes are better than two. I may switch to Garnet at some point as well. Same reasoning too.

You can form a group with @Three-Eyed-Crow and fight crime.

@Pyrephox said in Finding roleplay:

@Arkandel Just the phrase "Babylonian nazi gold" hints at epic. Were these time-traveling Nazis who had taken over Babylon?

Oh, I'll type this out. It might as well be somewhere on MSB.

So on HM several years ago the VampSphere was very busy, the MU* was at its most popular and sphere staff were constantly rotating and essentially non-existent. We had to take care of our own st

I started a plot involving a mysterious torpid Elder, the Babylonian, whose tomb was discovered when PCs tracked some Brood down to an underground complex of caverns where they were conducting some unholy ritual on him for their own purposes.

Now, before I started I did speak with staff and got the go-ahead on it. I started a +job to which they were CCed, and for the first couple of sessions they were responsive. Keep this in mind since it'll become important later.

Things got rolling - there was a lot of creative talent in the VampSphere active at the time, in fact several of those people went ahead and ran or staffed games of their own later on - and since we were starved for story the plot got pretty busy. The arc lasted for something like 10-12 scenes over a period of a couple of months, involving most of the Covenants, then it reached its conclusion (of what I was planning to be the first chapter) in a huge scene with something like 18 PCs in it. I had a blast, and other players seemed to as well.

Through those two-some months I was posting updates on that thread constantly. I documented every scene,complete with posted logs on the wiki, but I was also including my intentions, thoughts for future instalments etc... yet no one was answering any more evne though the +job was getting huge. I also paged staff several times during this period to get their attention to it but they seemed idle and never got back to me. It might be useful to also note several staff alts were present for the entire arc with their PCs; this was hardly a covert operation, OOC or IC.

Anyway, at the end of all this the victorious Kindred laid siege on the caverns and destroyed the Brood there, disrupting the ritual. They recovered the slumbering Elder's coffin (still without any real idea about what they were actually dealing with) and in the chamber they also discovered assorted WW2-era German artifacts, uniforms, and a small chest full of gold bars marked with swastikas. All of this had been in the +job weeks ahead of the encounter, still without any comments of any kind. As far as I know no one bothered reading it until well after the fact.

Well, after the fact I was bitched out by some members of staff about those Nazi gold bars. It's not authorized! Who told me I had permission to introduce them to the game?

At first I actually thought it was an actual joke - no one blinked an eye at an army of PCs waging war on the Brood (which I had actually been permitted to use, which on HM was very rare) conducting dark rituals on the carcass of an ancient vampire but that's where they drew the line? But as I paged and finally got responses from sphere I realized they were quite serious; they were pissed off about it.

I was very disappointed given my prior investment juggling people's schedules, running PrPs, answering +comm jobs there so I made a short response apologizing if I overstepped, informed the involved players the PrPs were over effective immediately, took my ball and went home. The whole thing exploded on WORA when those players got upset about it but by then it was too late anyway, I had lost my appetite for plot-running on HM.

And that's the Nazi gold story.

I suspect @Cirno will get a kick out of this and/or never let me live it down.

So we were in an informal tech meeting at work talking shop and the topic was which operating systems developers were using. Someone pointed out Windows was in the minority since most of our workstations are running Linux along with two Macs.

Since having to support different operating systems, warn about critical vulnerability patches being out etc is a pain in the ass I responded by saying out loud, "it's so annoying how annoying having even a minority using Windows is! In fact it's annoying we have any minorities in the office at all."

Then we all stop talking for a couple of seconds before everyone (well, everyone else, those assholes) starts yelling "HR!".

Yeah.

@ThatGuyThere said in PVP games/elements?:

The trick to pulling it off would be maintaining faith in staff impartiality.

I don't know how anyone can play on a game whose staff they don't feel they can trust. I mean, aside from PrPs.

94% of bike riders wait at red lights, study finds

I cycle whenever the weather permits it, I logged four digits in km over the summer. But no, cyclists are nightmares; for starters many don't have a driving license at all, and they obviously consider themselves some sort of pedestrian/vehicle hybrid.

I've seen people do truly crazy stunts like take sharp diagonal left turns in front of coming traffic in the middle of a busy road just because, I guess, they figure they'll make it. Or not. Whichever. Or my favorite, keep riding through the red light to the zebra crossing where they go right through the crowd of pedestrians, get on the other side, then get on the road again. No shits given.

I love cyclists but I do feel there should be at least a driving test involved. Even just a written one. Something.

@Coin I don't know if I'm a right or wrong person for anything at all but I usually find being staff detracts from my ability to help a game I care for rather than help me. Anything I can do well - give input, run plot, etc - is perfectly possible from a mortal bit, but once you are staff players treat you differently so you get a different perspective of issues, perhaps even a skewed one.

I prefer the view from the ground.

@dontpanda said:

Oh! Get a U-lock. No, a thick cable is not the same. Get a U-lock. I can't stress that enough.

Yeah, there are some good locks on Amazon (I recommend the Kryptonite Evolution Series which I own, the OnGuard Pitbull STD is pretty good too) for $50ish which are more than good enough for most people. You don't want your brand new $$$ bike gone because some guy took it off with a single lever (that's what most of them do, just use a piece of metal they find around the area, twist the chain around it and hope it yields).

Also get some apps. There are some sweet ride-finding ones out there, and with GPS you can keep track of where you're going, how far you're riding etc. If you're into that sort of thing it's a blast - gadgets!

@ThatOneDude said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

One thing I've noticed about "people" who don't understand or know mage is they seem to focus on the high end / high XP side of things. They cry about game breaking powers and such while ignoring the other splats and their ability to "break games" at high xp as well. But low level mage is a blast to play. You can playing that unexperienced mage that is no longer a novice and out doing his thing, itching to call his mentor for an assist but knowing the answer will be something along the lines of, "I know you'll be able to figure it out".

I think if more people gave it a chance, and if more STs were a little more creative people would come to love the sphere.

I always loved Mage. Two of my all-time favorite characters were willworkers.

My problem with the sphere has always the type of players it attracts, by which I mean people who don't roleplay. Be it folks who sit on channels and theorycraft their way out of theme - trying to 'solve' the setting instead of participating in it - or those who come to PrPs armed with spells instead of poses, I've never seen it happen in other spheres to anywhere near the same extent.

Otherwise I have a great fondness for Mage, both as a player and a ST. There's much stuff you can do.

So you fools were right, The 100 is great.

Those kids. Those kids are hardcore. The only people they treat worse than each other are their enemies, holy shit.

@Sandor Is there a reason (maybe the admins wouldn't like it?) we can't run PBP games on MSB? Maybe a forum just for that kind of thing would work.

People who won't hang up the phone in general! "Okay, alright. Well... Alright. Yes, well, okay we'll talk.... Heh, alright. So. I'll talk to you..."

These are signs that suggest I would very much like this conversation to be over!

I expect three things from any game. If I can't find any of those I walk away.

1. Overall sanity from staff. If they give me bad vibes I'm gone.

2. The trains to run on time. If I spend too long in CGen, if +jobs (especially time sensitive ones) take weeks to get an answer, I'm gone.

3. Relative freedom in plot-running. I'm happy to report and document but if there are too many hoops in my way, I walk.

Those are the deal-breakers, the bare minimums... but what matters is the execution, not the theory.

The implementation is where most MU* which fail do - they have good ideas but they don't execute them. They say they want to run one thing but in practice it's another. So for instance they'll claim they are all about plots but they become so overwhelmed just keeping up with +jobs they can't run anything. Then they realize people who promised they'd run plot don't, or only do very few, and since a few sporadic PrPs can't support the playerbase (or some fade out) it all falls apart at the seams.

Games aren't magic, 90% of it is work. You can't just come up with a good idea, make a nice looking wiki and be off to the races - unfortunately.

@ArmedCarp If you want to track your paths the Surge is great since it comes with GPS. If you don't but you still want your tracker and smartphone to talk (for music control, text notifications, etc) the Blaze will do. If you just want caller ID, the Charge. If you just want steps and maybe a heartbeat monitor almost any model will do - and you get to save a ton of money in the process.

You can use https://www.fitbit.com/ca/compare to see for yourself which model has what.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Meta vs PrP vs Planning vs Impromptu:

I don't feel like all game-wide plots staff run have to be saving the world, either. They can sometimes, but I like larger-scale stuff that isn't Mega Destruction, but still reinforces major aspects of the setting, or introduces smaller changes to the status quo.

Two issues I've had with world-saving plots:

1. They cheapen risk. You can't escalate up, and after the tenth time the damn planet is saved it's not really a global emergency this time, it's just Tuesday.

2. It's hard to keep it straight when a ST drops off the side of the planet (i.e. it's Wednesday) and the plot is orphaned; no one saved us, so why are we still here?

As for the status quo, changing it through plot is by far - and I mean by very far the hardest thing for a game to implement. Not saying it's not doable or worth it, but although it sounds doable or even obvious the logistics involved make it really hard unless you design the MU* around it.

@tragedyjones said:

In case you are wondering, it is you, the reader.

I knew it.

@Lotherio One more thing... it's important to know what your resources are in comparison to your goals. Players - and staff - are fickle and more games have shot for the stars before falling short fast in the past; whatever you are scaling towards you need to plan with an eye on the logistics.

It's basically a management challenge, not that unlike any other project. If you over-extend with your staff for instance you risk lacking cohesion and spending more time managing that staff instead of doing other things; if you are undermanned then between handling +jobs and making sure theme is on point you risk burning people out. And Storytellers come and go.

Essentially you want to shoot for something that can inspire people to pour their time into but keep the moving parts under control, ready to step in and try to fix or replace what's not working - that kind of maintenance work isn't what many aspiring game runners have in mind going into it but it's what it comes down to soon enough.