Best posts made by Arkandel

I set up a whole regime around walking - it's not the best cardio but it's the safest cardio, so it'll need to do.

What works for me (although obviously it might not be everyone's cup of tea) is gamifying the whole experience; yes, it can be fun since it gives a chance to reflect, think of things - I don't even know how many PrPs I've worked on while taking a long walk - but it can also get boring after a while.

So, these are my tricks:

1. Figure out my limits, both physical and otherwise. For example time is a limit; if going from A->B takes 1.5 hour then going back the same way takes another 1.5, which I might not have. So I need to consider my routes in advance, or count on taking public transit back as needed.

2. Give me something at the end of the trip. For example I walk downtown where the largest Indigo bookstore I know is, so I can sift through new arrivals. Or to a restaurant I really like to have lunch at. It's nice to walk toward something than just aimlessly.

3. Have something to do in the mean time. Pokemon: Go works (it used to be Ingress) but... anything, really. Music is certainly great for this (I suggest bluetooth headphones if you have them, cables suck once you're getting sweaty). Stay safe!

4. Finally... Fitbit is also a blast for all this since, by the end, you can have little competitions with your buddies if anyone you know has it. If you do and you don't have buddies I'll be one! Just ping me.

That's all.

I prefer V20's Vampire over Requiem in every conceivable way other than its mechanics. I love everything about Generation and the Gehenna/Time of Thin Blood metaplot is magnificent.

Alright, let's go through my local bestiary.

This is my alpha dog, Daphne (Daffy).

We found her wandering the streets as a puppy, hobbling on one leg trying to follow a random old lady around who was having none of it. She ran over immediately when we stopped the car and called her over, and turned out her feet worked just fine the next day. She's a bit of a bitch with other small dogs (there can only be one cute dog around and we all know who that is) but she's sweet with larger breeds and gets along pretty well with cats. She just... has some anger management issues now and then - fewer as she gets older - where she sees red if another dog gives her lip. And she's terrified of curtains and grates.

Onwards to Ruby.

Ruby is the sweetest, most submissive dog ever. She's a rescued stray as well who basically found us; one evening we were walking home, she saw us and just...followed us there. We didn't know if we wanted another dog yet (Greece has a real stray issue) so we were mulling it over, but she basically sat on our doorstep until we opened the door and let her in anyway. Somehow she got along with Daphne right away - as mentioned earlier that's not a given - which we think is because Ruby's born to be a minion. She constantly thinks she's about to die and her face is stuck in poor-me mode, but she's very pushy for petting most of the time anyway.

And finally the bitch of the family - Rusty.

Rusty's a moluccan cockatoo and she can be the cutest, sweetest thing in the universe when she's showed with attention and a complete raging screaming monster when she's not. Cursed with the intelligence of a 3-year human she will snarl "PRETTY BIRD" at you if she thinks she's slighted, but although her beak can and does frequently crush all sorts of inanimate objects that find their way into it she's never as much as nicked anyone enough to cause even slight pain. She's all talk, but that's a lot of talk. She will also quite happily nestle under my chin for two hours while I watch a movie and barely even stir, only alternating which wing she wants to be petted under now and then.

And that's it, since I've posted pictures of Izzie (aka Cancer Cat) in the past somewhere else in these forums. She's still tickin', by the way, so who knows.

@Lotherio Reasons why I like wikis:

1. Why not? I don't get this 'it's not part of the game' concern (although I've nothing against people thinking it, it's their right); lots of non-MU* games have wikis and forums - in fact nearly all of them. I've never heard of anyone claim WoW has an out-of-game forum and that's a bad thing.

2. You can hang things such as maps images, format long lists into tables so they're easier to read, include hyperlinks to reference material - all things you can't due due to telnet limitations.

3. Information is easier to navigate going back and forth without menus spamming the living crap out of your screen every time you view an index.

4. Searchable information. Good luck finding that one keyword you remember seeing somewhere on a help file (or was it in a post? then you're really screwed) in-game.

5. Since you can't edit bbposts custom pages are far more suitable for many tasks. For instance I've used a 'plot index' before, pointing to all the logs in a particular story I'm running along with some basic information regarding what it's about OOC, hooks into it, what people might already assume they know IC regarding it, etc. If I had to do it on a board I'd need to delete the old one and repost every time I want it updated.

Wikis aren't just a place to hang hawt PBs on otherwise useless, static character pages. That's a very unfair oversimplification.

@Pondscum That's a cute dog and she knows it. Does she get snarky with other cute dogs?

@Bobotron I otherwise really like oWoD Werewolf. The one thing I don't is the same as its 2.0 equivalent; it's very dependent on having plots available. The whole game is dependent on PvE conflict for everything, from character advancement to its basic theme, but someone needs to run the bad guys.

And that's a premium resource on MU*.

@ThugHeaven Sorry to hear about your wrist! I hope you feel better.

Although I curse IKEA every second I'm putting stuff together (at least at first, I've found if I'm doing several pieces in a row the last few become much simpler), my biggest issue with them is if I have to move and the furniture won't fit through the door.

Putting them together is a smaller issue. Taking them apart might be a much bigger one if I plan to use them again after that.

@Pyrephox said in Social Conflict via Stats:

And that is where, IMO, a lot of games really fall down. Social stats/skills don't need to work on PCs, IF they work on NPCs and work in meaningful, predictable, usable ways.

Then they need to be cheaper, because physical skills work on both NPCs and PCs juuuust fine.

And in my experience, a lot of staff balk at even letting PCs use social skills/stats against NPCs in any meaningful way. You're far more likely to get a "no, you can't do that" regarding social maneuvering against NPCs than you are if you say, "I'm going to beat him up." Which renders social skills doubly useless.

That's a staff failure, not a systemic one.

@Ghost So your dad has turned into @ThatGuyThere?

<runs>

@Livia said:

@Arkandel I think there's something positive in disposable antagonist PCs if they're played well. Jutte started as an example of this, though she ended up becoming a lot more than I expected.

Well, yes, but just about anything can turn out positive if played well. My objection isn't to antagonistic PCs, or even to disposable ones, it's for playing those things badly.

One of the things I'm still trying to figure out if they are cultural differences or perception biases on my behalf is how more relaxed people are in NA about changing careers than they were in Greece.

At least where I spent half my life there is (or seems to be?) some stigma about starting on a career path then switching to something quite difference, it's perceived as having wasting your time or failed to pan out your resume properly. So for example if you begin in IT, go to school, get a job until your late 20s then realize it's not for you and start training to become a paramedic or something? Fail! Because, or so the assumption goes, how are you gonna compare at the same age with someone who's been already doing the job for 8 more years?

It's the whole argument I think... looking at making a living as competition, trying to out-asset the other guys.

No wonder jobs are stressful, right? Not for just this reason, but you're basically a 17 year old trying to decide which school to attend and you're told it's going to make or break your whole life. What the hell do you know at 17?

In Canada at least it seems somewhat more relaxed. Maybe it's all the safety nets if something goes wrong.

@Lisse24 Exactly, and that's what I meant earlier about having to quantify social 'damage' (and we probably want to shy away from that term if we want to avoid people treating it as a negative thing).

To put it in perspective let's use real life for a second - although obviously there are huge differences between that and depictions on games, I think I can still make my point.

Any given fight can change your life - every single time you get punched someone can poke your eye out, pull a shoulder out of its socket, cause internal bleeding... and that's without counting weapons. With weapons all bet are off, at that point chances are your life is about to change especially if you lose.

But how often have you sat with someone and had a chat after which any dramatic (hell, even significant) changes in perspective took place? You have conversations every day, arguments, debates... when's the last time any of us sat with someone whose political views are different and caused a tangible, somewhat permanent shift? Not that often, right? But maybe if you continue to sit down and have these chats until a different perspective is hammered into you there could be a more noticeable shift - that's how people get indoctrinated into cults or educated at school after all. Not in bursts but in degrees, normalising their behaviour based on their environment and the stimuli they receive from it.

That's what I'd like to see in RP.

I'm an Carthian atheist and you're playing a Sanctified. I sit down with your character and he/she 'wins' the religious argument? The IC result could be some more respect for you people. You win another of those? I understand better the role you play and maybe am a bit more sympathetic toward the overall cause. Another? I could be convinced to take minor action - nothing that could do my causes damage but giving you a freebie piece of information maybe - to help you guys out. And so on - each of those arguments being an entire scene.

If I started out as a devout Catholic already interested in the Sanctified though it'd go significantly faster. You could entice me to help out in the first scene, for instance.

That's how I imagine social stats should be used. There's inertia in people's views, different levels of 'defence' against gaps in opinions - and somehow in all that posing quality should matter. For example we should be trusted to assign modifiers to our own resistances; if you just made a great IC argument I'll give you a +2 bonus against my own character's convictions. If you just threatened I'll burn in hell if I don't help you, here's a -3 for your trouble. That sort of thing.

There must be cooperation from both sides for this to work out. There's no way it'll function if someone is OOC negatively predisposed toward it or is using the system as a sledgehammer ("here's my roll, now you want me!").

Social attributes must facilitate RP if they are to be used in RP. They need to enrich it.

Cracked.com is touch and go, but some of their work such as Superman being a complete dick has been really funny.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Social Conflict via Stats:

And people don't like it when they don't have full autonomy over their character. So you will never get that relatively easy ruleset until the players stop bitching about not being in complete control of their character's choices/actions/etc.

Absolutely. That's why I keep repeating the same thing (so forgive me one more try ) - in order for a social stats system to have a chance of being culturally accepted and actually used, as opposed to being merely forced on people, it must offer something we don't currently have.

In other words it can't just be an addon to the way we already play in scenes. That's a disadvantage then. It's interrupting scenes which already flow a certain way with extra delays for OOC conversations, dice rolls, looking up tables, debating mechanics, etc.

What it must do is make things better than what we are doing now. And not just better because 'whelp, we are using social stats now' - that's the goal, not the means. We must answer the question 'how is this making things more fun than before? convincingly.

I haven't GMed iRL for some time but when I did my problem wasn't cancellations, it was either enough people just not showing up without saying anything, or coming an hour late.

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

I played Arx for a month. Felt there was way too much OOC collusion from the player-base and not alot of plot to pursue. I decided I'd wait until the game went live since it'd be easier to inject my character into stuff.

That was...about verbatim, word for word, my experience.

Arx has a lot of potential. It has good staff - by which I mean it has staff who care about and understand roleplay, and they're willing to do the day-to-day work to keep their standards high. That's something few MU* do these days - most just put a wiki and a grid up, wrap it all up in some theme and let it fly on its own with little extra diligence after that. This game is different, you could tell it was a project its people actually cared for.

But there was nothing happening. You could be in one of the few cliques that had things between themselves but even those were islands; if you weren't in one of those groups you might as well not exist at all though. And at least while I was playing there wasn't really a system for players to run plot themselves so I couldn't even do my usual thing and get things going on a smaller scale.

Either way the e-mail account requirement simply never factored into my decision to leave at all.

All-Star Superman. You need to know next to nothing if you've already watched any Superman movie. It's a complete story, fully contained, told from beginning to end.

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

@Arkandel Presently I am judging it both on what it is, and what it can be. The can be part is going to find itself less and less important as we go forward, though. There's only so long that can be an effective lure.

Agreed.

I will say that while there is always going to be a level of OOC in political games, I'm not sure exactly how much of it there is.

For political games OOC relationships can absolutely be a good, even a great thing! As I mentioned above for example, being specifically called out to play something by a faction ("hey dude, I need a spymaster who can pull it off, are you available?") is the exact opposite of what a clique can sometimes be; if factions can treat good players who're not currently playing as untapped resources and pull them into their orbit it's the best kind of win/win - folks feel wanted, the game gains players they don't have and no one is sitting there twiddling their thumbs because there's work for them to do!

But you know what that requires? Work for them to do.

For factions to operate like this the game must give them an absolute imperative to do so; to win today's struggle we need more troops, more money, more information - generating a roleplaying 'arms race' is imperative to me. And to do that, to turn newcomers into fuel to win races thus keeping them involved you need to constantly generate carrots for the Houses to go after.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

What's worse? I think FB still considers photos of women breastfeeding to be "sexual nudity."

So, yeah, their standards are kinda fucked.

What offends me a lot is the double standards.

Nudity or harsh language being 'inappropriate' for whatever reason because kids shouldn't see it... I could stomach that. But in the same work (movies and TV shows are usual culprits) they show people getting violently killed, so what gives man? Are tits so much more offensive than killing someone?

@Apos Well, shit.