Bye.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@Ghost said in PC antagonism done right:
If you explain that this is your mindset to the players, OOCly, they will appreciate having something to fight against, so long as you're fair and appreciative of them.
Never. Ever. Ever. EVER. EVER forget to OOCly high five them for the attention they give your antagonists.
Unlike table-top though, where the antagonist is either the GM or at least a known face sitting at the same table, on MU* it's a bit more blurry. People expect parity and fairness - even if it can be argued a better story could be told without it - and the unfortunate part is historically we've seen this go really awry where staff blatantly favored their friends or even alts this way.
Darth Vader and his ilk are way more powerful than almost everyone else in the same settings. The resource staff usually lack to pull this off is trust.
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RE: Safe Haven Harbor is seeking a few good players!
What particularly bothered me at the time - and I expressed my dissatisfaction to staff - were two things.
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The blatant way it was happening. There was no subtlety involved, only entitlement; instant campaining to grab the seats, pleads on channels boasting their own worth, pushing hard for 'election' meetings - all while the game was brand new, while many players were still in CG or trying to figure out their characters. The shamelessness of that left a bad taste in my mouth even when I had nothing to do with that race myself (my character was a former Libertine, the last thing he pursued were positions).
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The complete lack of collaboration. When you want to be the Queen of Whatever by specifically trying to race everyone else to it you don't care about playing with others. You just care about 'winning' the game. And my specific problem with it was that staff didn't put a drastic stop stop to it - which essentially meant the worst people who could have gotten those positions ended up with them.
Those were bad signs. I was enjoying myself but once it was made clear this was being tolerated (and thus encouraged) I parted ways with the game.
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RE: What do you play most?
@Lotherio said in What do you play most?:
Some suggest they do, some don't do anything unless staff run something.
Inversely I agree the most active places have no meta or its more open and not world shattering. Yet those highly active places seen to crop up in hog pit for reasons (too many staff alts, too little staff, staff doesn't do what I want ... More grief and gripe). I play on some and don't join in the slinging. Preception versus reality, just when I've pondered similar thoughts, what folks like in a mu*, answers always point to meta, staff keeping it active (including everyone), etc.
I'm saying I prefer less meta and my own stories. And maybe wrong perception on my part.
Many games put their metaplot on a wiki and promptly forget it exists. That's one of the reasons most sandbox games come to a grinding halt a couple of weeks after they open and once the early excitement which comes with that new character smell wears off, and everyone realizes there really isn't much to do around these parts after all. Sure, the opening page claims there's an invasion by the Pure or whatever but nothing's actually happening, so after the 6th time you end up in a bar scene bitching about those damn theoretical Pure taking your jobs and stealing your women ... well, it gets a bit repetitive.
Good metaplot is a roleplay-generating engine. The vast majority of MU* don't have good metaplot, they have a wiki with someone's fanfic scribbled hastily in a couple of its pages.
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RE: NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot
@Jennkryst said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:
Everyone should make werewolves. ESPECIALLY @Rinel and @Ganymede. And they should come to court with my Elodoth. Not like... vampire court. Lawyer-court.
Edit to make @names happen and shit."OBJECTION, YOUR HONOR"
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RE: WW released Dark Pack guidelines
@Ganymede IANAL (you you are ANAL) but my impression has always been that fair use of printed material consisted of these two things.
- Don't make money from their work
- Don't violate copyrights of their work
Sometimes I feel MU* have been really pushing the envelope on the latter with their super detailed wikis, going as far as to copy verbatim the texts, effects and of course rolls of every power or special ability, for instance.
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RE: Seeking Women for Multi-Game Harem
@tragedyjones I'm pretty sure that's not how harems work. Source: I'm irresistible.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@Derp said in PC antagonism done right:
Antagonist PCs should be at least somewhat numerous and/or powerful. Those two work on a sliding scale, really. The point is, there should be enough of them, or they should be powerful enough, that a full-force direct assault on them would be the height of stupidity. And vice-versa. They shouldn't be able to wipe the protagonists off the map either.
In the case of PCs in particular neither needs to be the case. After all players are (usually) free to play dark horse antagonists; say, a handful of Crones trying to make it in a Sanctified-dominated Praxis. There's no mandate for them to be either numerous or strong there.
What concerns me the most is when PC politics don't agree with the way the game is written. For instance thematically - in the wiki, NPCs, etc - suggests ghouls are suppressed but the situation on the actual grid doesn't support that; what then?
It's important that there are opportunities offered to both political sides when friction such as this comes to exist - traditionalists should have options to flex their good ol' boy club muscles, dissenters to try and disrupt existing operations to try and force concessions over time - else there is almost no point to the conflict. It'll just come down to people exchanging empty poses in rooms, and the most numerous camp will absolutely win 100% of the time, no matter any other factors.
That's bad. Several elements are missing in such a situation; staff thinks the political situation is A but in truth is B, players lack viable options to play out strong thematic elements, and resolution is decided by the least IC mechanism of them all - CGen demographics - which marginalizes any minorities regardless of their theoretical impact on the game.
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RE: Seeking Women for Multi-Game Harem
@surreality said:
@tragedyjones If you'd asked for dick pics, I'm sure this would have been a very different story.
Well, duh, these forums are full of dicks.
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RE: Armageddon MUD
You know, I've been thinking about it - not that this incident is unique or this particular guy is anything special among all the other idiots who plague the hobby.
I decided there are two things that bug me.
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How little this kind of person thinks of others. He wasn't offering any tangible benefits, money, anything at all... he really hoped to buy someone's basic dignity - OOC, not IC - for some kind of IC favor on a game they had barely even played and had zero investment in. In other words, for nothing.
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How little he thinks of himself. He wasn't standing to gain anything either; it's just over TS, which is the cheapest commodity in all of MU*'dom and it's literally handed out for nothing in any ol' game. Sure, there's some kind of OOC thrill somewhere in there but damn. His own soul sure got priced super low in that bargain.
Meh.
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
@Pandora said in MSB: The meta-discussion:
A game is 'doing it right' when it doesn't wind up on WORA/MSB. That said, I think games that voluntarily advertise on MSB are very brave and open-minded, though they should keep in mind that they'll be attracting a specific sort of crowd that is heavily biased toward 'The Way We Do Things Just Because It's How We Do It'.
For starters it's quite normal (and for good reason) that games which are or are becoming popular invariably end up on MSB simply because someone plays on them. I think this is confirmation bias on your behalf to claim that, since being on here isn't a bad sign - in fact many threads have had nothing but good things to say about the MU* they were about.
May I present Star Wars: Defiance as a counter-example? A bunch of 'us' tried it, and we gave it pretty high marks; I said they had a good and very helpful staff, Ganymede praised their CGen and helpfiles, etc. Even when I decided to move on that was because I just couldn't get into SAGA (the system they were using) which had nothing to do with the quality of the MU* itself.
MSB isn't universally harsh on MU* by any means. Nor is there a universal 'we' involved when 'we' see something iffy happening; yes, some extrapolate wildly from a tiny sample ("this will never work because six years ago someone tried something vaguely similar and it didn't pan out" but the rule isn't that we get the pitchforks out.
Which is not to say pitchforks don't exist, or that they aren't within easy reach, mind you.
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RE: Dust to Dust (Formerly the nWoD grenade thread)
@Tempest said:
Ranks/Positions/Titles/etc need to have play requirements that are enforced.
Sure, if you just wanna play your character, nobody else is entitled to your time. But as soon as you decide you want to be Sheriff/Family Head (assuming it's a staff-made family)/etc, you should be expected to be going out of your way to play outside your circle of friends.
That's taking a problem then trying to apply a solution to it which is worse than the original; it introduces the issue of how it's going to be monitored, how the condition of "playing outside your circle of friends" is to be judged, etc.
In the process it doesn't actually solve the problem it was meant to fix in the first place, which is the generation of OOC drama by people chasing after ranks.
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Consent-based games
I'm waiting for a VM to finish updating so I've been meaning to write this up for a while. Time to get to it.
So I've been chatting (more recently with @Misadventure) about how to set up a consent-based game, and I believe there is potential in at least discussing it here. Parts of that could apply to a fully consentual environment and other elements, such as collaboration between players, could perhaps be useful to people running games without such clauses.
Before we go further I'd like to ask that this thread remains (roughly ) on point - it's not supposed to be a discussion on whether consent based MU* are worth it and/or superior/inferior to other games but how to implement one.
So here's what I'd like to see in such a game.
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I believe mechanics should be present. Frankly, an environment like Shang where you can roll whatever you like might have its advantages (such as a very minimal CG) but ultimately it deprives players of a common framework for abilities, randomizing the chances of success or failure, and having a standardized character progression curve (i.e. "XP", or something like it) which has its own uses. Characters only possess powers and abilities they have purchased.
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Consent, in the context that I'd like to see, is defined as such: A character may not be removed from play long-termly or physically altered in a permanent manner without the explicit consent of their player. It's good to leave a loophole there (which perhaps doesn't need to be stated) that staff can override this at their discretion; this could entail cases of harassment or even players writing themselves into a corner ("No, I want to jump into the active volcano. Yes, I know there's a pool of hot lava there, I'm doing it!").
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Consent does not shield characters from social or political consequences. I.e. it doesn't matter if you refuse to have the Sheriff title stripped from your PC, no one is asking.
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Once consent has been granted for an IC path it cannot be taken back. If Bob accepts vitae from Jane then it happened, with all of its consequences (addiction, etc). This overrides the first condition above - if Bob's player agrees to drink three times his PC will be blood bonded (which is otherwise a long term change).
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Handling failure should be a fundamental part of a consensual game in order to promote collaboration between players even if (or especially since) their PCs are safe from permanent harm - the two don't need to be exclusive. There are two cases here:
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Player versus environment. A player can simply assume an action their PC takes is successful ("Bob climbs the wall"). They may choose to roll the dice with the appropriate mechanical penalties according to the difficulty of the task. If they fail they have to accept any consequences of the action that doesn't violate the first condition above ("Bob fails to climb the wall and the cops catch up to him"). Either way waiving the roll should award them a small amount of XP, with more given for failure than success.
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Player versus player. This doesn't need to be PvP, it would be any contested action ("Jane uses Awe to intimidate Jill"). If players can agree on the outcome award an intermediate amount of XP to them both (collaboration!). If the players cannot agree on the outcome and the defender wishes to automatically resist against the attacker's wishes then that's what happens, so roll no dice - but this awards no XP. If they cannot agree but agree to use mechanics use the dice to determine the action's outcome, then award a large amount of XP to both characters.
That's what I got so far. Thoughts, troubleshooting, counter-proposals, devil's advocacy and brainstorming are all welcome.
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RE: Shadow War - WoD Mage-Only (Revised)
An initial question is... with so many games focusing on nWoD, and you guys using GMC rules for it, will players need access to both sets of material?
How easy/hard to you expect knowledge of the old theme be for people - since I assume the majority of the potential playerbase won't have played MtA in many, many, many, many years?
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RE: Why do you play? (Or not.)
I play where I know or hope good people already are, they're active, and staff are mostly sane.
It's probably not a great answer but it's true. Unless the theme is very niche to me (dunno, a My Little Pony place) I don't even care that much about anything else. If a player or players I already like invited me tomorrow and I wasn't engaged anywhere else - since I'm really bad at managing multiple characters - I'd just go play wherever.
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RE: Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce
In my opinion (this might be off-topic, in which case please let me know) the main issue with WoD MU* isn't so much that characters are special. They are kind-of sort-of supposed to be.
The issue - for me - is that RP tends to be very segregated around bubbles of activity (typically PrPs, whether staff- or player-ran) and bar RP. That leads to feast or famine; either you're fending off bloodthirsty frogmen or scenes revolve around birthday parties and dating calendars. As overall activity wanes it gets tilted toward the latter.
But in the right group it's a whole lot of fun.
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RE: Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed)
@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):
So here's the first questions:
- Y'all are going to make me make cephalopods of some kind under that umbrella, aren't you. (There are already sirens and mermaids and a few other mer-things, some sparkle-shiny and some shuddersome and creepy.) If you want to be a tentacled creature (of the deep, not hentai), express your wants in that direction here.
I think I've mentioned over this part, but... make sure you're not segmenting your playerbase. If mer-things and humans can't both go to certain places (such as an underwater bar) then it's a problem.
Also, how much realism are you going for here? For example - language. Underwater sentient people wouldn't have developed the same kind of speech landwalkers have for obvious reasons, and possibly their weapons, civilization (do they have writing?), fashion, etc. Are you interested in exploring these things? How much is beyond the game's scope?
Otherwise maybe introduce a cultural state of animosity - fantasy racism and old vendettas can make a game world come to life.
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RE: Welcome to the Euphoria - Alpha
I don't even know what "siding with @Coin" is supposed to mean. That sentence makes no sense to me.