Best posts made by Arkandel

@three-eyed-crow A poll is really the only way to find that out.

But I'd bet internet dollars 'most' of us don't have an opinion, and 'many' of us haven't even played on FATE so they wouldn't care.

@kanye-qwest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

You have lost your damn mind.

When I heard you named Auspice mod, I said 'oh, that's going to be TERRIBLE."

If you want me to care about what you said, or what you are saying now, you will do well to be civil about it.

If I came to you on Arx about an issue I disagreed with you about, used all caps to address you and then told you you lost your mind when you asked to tone it down a bit, how long would I have left to be on the game?

I ask for no different courtesy than that.

My only advice is, if you choose a non-modern period or a geographical location other than contemporary north America then please do not even try to make it realistic. Your players won't have the same idea of... anything about it - social conventions, technological levels, everyday lifestyle, dress codes... anything.

Any choice can still succeed wildly, mind you, just as long as you Hollywood-ize the shit out of it.

@bobotron A part (and I can't tell how large it is) of the population can't handle any threat to their IC status, be it bigotry, base politics or just being made fun of.

Because how dare you.

This is totally not me, fuck y'all.

@surreality said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

Let's say I have a scene posted for 'it's a normal day at the diner when two thugs show up and try to rob the joint', and Giles, the sniper, the seamstress, and let's say someone specializing in playing guitar, and another who is a crime scene tech are the ones who sign on to show up.

Are you suggesting that each of these characters should reasonably have a chance to demonstrate their primary concept skill in this scene or someone is a failure as an ST? (Sniping, occult research, tailoring, playing guitar, and investigating a crime that hasn't yet occurred?)

Characters aren't and shouldn't be what they do. They should be who they are. The greatest fallacy in all of roleplaying is that you need to have a niche because that's what people want to see - newsflash, it's not true. If your character is boring or annoying I don't care if you are the only sniper, medic or seamstress on the entire game, we still won't have much to do together; no, not in PrPs either.

So what I would love to see in a PrP situation like the one above is just how these people coming from completely different paths of life respond to a couple of thugs trying to rob the bistro or whatever. I want to see the seamstress freaking out and trying to hold her shit together while the crime lab tech is paying attention to the details trying to figure out if they're armed and prepare for the deposition he'll need to give the next day while events are still occurring, while the sniper is completely unintimidated and unarmed, and is the only one present who will want to do something because soldiers are trained to do things.

How will these three characters interact through this? That's one third of the fun in this situation - not what kind of dice they have to throw at this, because who gives a shit. How will they relate to each other after this? That's two thirds of the fun, and the reason PrPs are so great even when they aren't amazing on their own, because now these PCs who would have normally struggled to have any scenes together and have something to say to each other (wtf does a sniper talk about with a seamstress if it doesn't lead to TS?) now do. Maybe the sniper hurt one of the thugs badly, and the CSR guy is trying to cover up for him in his report because he respects what happened, or perhaps he hates vigilante justice and in fact is bitching about it, then both ignore the tailor whose hands are shaking a bit while she's trying to be funny and uplifting.

That's more interesting. How the thugs are taken down is not. At all.

This is already a weird thread even by MSB standards.

@apos said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Other PCs think that the reason it's not a slap on the wrist is due to homophobia, and want the Sheriff to sweep it under the rug. What should he do?

Opinions on what the Sheriff should do may vary, and for good reason.

What I want to see is the Sheriff's player not being forced into an IC action due to OOC reasons, such as reactions by other players. Especially if staff doesn't give him a direction and leaves the player to face the backlash.

When I was a teenager I was discovering the internet along with a buddy, and for some reason we were fixating on witty/cool quotes written by assorted people to put them randomly in our .sigs.

... This isn't the cringing part just yet.

So we were parsing our way through this gigantic text file cherry-picking the best taglines out of there, when we noticed a great number of the best of those were attributed to "Anon".

For a long time we were both very impressed by the fact that Anon dude was pretty funny!

Yeah.

Play again.

@Ganymede said:

An ENT may be able to help.

Here, then.

You're welcome.

@kanye-qwest said in The trappings of posing:

I hate pose order. For me, nothing kills conversational flow faster. If we're in a scene of 2-4 people? Pose when you dang well want. If it's more than that, 3pr is reasonable.

As a fast typist I don't care. But I've seen people complain because they can't keep up, and the scene is moving faster than they're able to pose - by the time they squeeze out their greeting to someone walking in and taking a seat, that person has been punched in the face, gotten up and broken a bottle over someone's head, and he's currently being carried out the back by the local thugs.

For anyone who, for some unfathomable reason, is not idolizing J.R.R. Tolkien...

http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/j-r-r-tolkien-snubs-a-german-publisher.html

TL;DR: In response of a letter from pre-WW2 germany asking for 'proof of Tolkien's Aryan descent'...

25 July 1938
20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully,

J. R. R. Tolkien"

@kanye-qwest said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

If you want to 'vent', whine, and complain, do it to your friends.

Nothing wrong with venting on a public venue unless you're overdoing it or you're being a jerk. Anyone can go "OMG screw Mondays... amirite?" on the public channel. It's fixating on your issues for half an hour afterwards that's a problem.

Don't whine on channels about other people getting things.

In my experience that's typically a way to apply pressure. They aren't really whining, they're asking for more stuff for themselves but over a venue they believe gives them deniability ("I wasn't really saying Bob didn't deserve that sword! I'm just chatting, hah-hah.")

Don't whine publicly about people not loving your char or not responding to you fast enough. That isn't just a player being human, that's a player being a negative brat.

Yeah, I got nothing here. I'd also add public boasting about how awesome your character is and how much you love them and how great RP is over and over again because... come on.

And if you let that shit fly, your environment becomes INUNDATED with it. Everyone should be free to whine and snark and complain /sometimes/, right? Wrong. Wrong, or the whining and complaining will overwhelm the atmosphere.

IMHO within measure there are no issue letting some air out. The problem is when things get out of hand because because won't STFU about it, either in the short or even the long term. No one wants to deal with a chronic whiner.

@Wretched

I'm very happy to see all these Shout in the Dark threads waking up with people's new characters, especially newer accounts. Not only does that mean we might be seeing more - and new - MUSHers in general, it also signals people are interested in catching up and networking, which I seriously love to see MSB being used for.

That and spreading horrible cat memes, but also the other thing.

What I love about Game of Thrones (and shows like it - Westworld comes to mind) is how much every episode is broken down and analyzed, speculated upon and discussed afterwards.

I've listened to three podcasts this week so far about Episode 1, each dissecting it to its smallest details. The Coffee Klatch Crew one for example spent over twenty minutes going over the opening animation breaking it down pretty much frame by frame.

I dunno. I just like super nerdy things like these.

@apos said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@sockmonkey Deliberate obfuscation of numbers has some strong and weak points, and it is something that's existed for a long time. I've played games that didn't use any numbers at all, hiding them entirely to staff side while there was still automated systems.

This is a dangerous road to tread, though. Let me give you an example using Arx specifically.

When I first played there I knew nothing about the ins and outs of the system - things were rolled and results were given out, but I - by design - had no way of knowing the specifics of what factored into what and how strongly. So far the obfuscation worked, and whatever the purpose of obfuscation was (which can be argued whether it's successful or not), it was achieved.

However then I was talking to people who started revealing more about the ins and outs of those invisible system. Maybe they were reverse engineered the way that you described (through trial and error) or someone knew a guy who knew a guy, but the point is the formulas were better known by some players more than others.

At this point there's a fundamental imbalance - a non-systemic factor not intended by the original design - where part of the playerbase has more access to optimization than the rest. In other words, some people could min-max better than others could. At least in an open, published system everyone has the same opportunity to make that choice for themselves.

It's something to take under consideration.

***=Double post to quite someone from reddit:***

@sg said in Make it fun for Me!:

For sure. I've had people flip out at me because my pose style usually includes snippets of backstory and narrative to explain some of the references I use, but some people are very firmly into the only write physical actions that poeple would see and hear and nothing else.

That's what bugs me. The only legitimate reason to complain to someone is if they are actually doing something bad - meaning they are harassing others or trying to metagame or cheat or whatever. That's it, there's no other good reason to do it.

I have lots of peeves. We all do - I don't think you can MUSH for a long time without being irked at some particular gamestyle, or even all of them except for your own thing, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it.

For example I love flowery purple prose, but I'm well aware that's not for everyone; if I choose to not play with (generic) you very often because you prefer short prose that's completely my choice and we don't need to be mortal enemies! It's just... a thing. On WoW if you like raiding and I'm a PvPer we can still be in the same guild, or maybe do a 5-man together once in a while - no big deal.

If however I make a point of frowning at you for posing like that then I'm just an asshole.