I don't particularly like science fiction (other than Isaac Asimov) but these were excellent:
Basically they are Ender's Game meets Hunger Games set in the a dystopian caste-based segregated society where lower classes are oppressed by the ruling one. They are amazing page-turners, I burned my way through those books and can't wait for the third.
I believe most of the phenomena and paradigms above can be broken down to the fact we're losing more players than we're getting. Roleplay in MU* unlike what we find on table-top is largely dependent on - usually a small minority of - players who are able to create, as opposed to carrying on and expanding, plot threads which can then be picked up by others.
For each such person who burns out, has been caught up by real life or simply moved on it's increasingly difficult to replace them simply because one of the main factors in being able to do what such flagship players do is experience; so as the number of folks who've been playing for years and have the ability to do so diminishes newer ones with the potential and talent to replace them never find the same circumstances and opportunities which existed, say, in the late nineties or early 2000's.
There's a chance we're on a slow downward spiral. Another way to see it though is that we're going through a slum until the paradigm changes to allow for our hobby's resurgence.
@Three-Eyed-Crow I think downvotes would have worked better if their source was visible.
As it was it turned into passive-aggressive snarking for some users, anonymously expressing their discontent over someone else' continued existence.
@Ominous That's just depending on the nature of the campaign being ran - I've seen similar/identical groups playing Vampire on table-top for instance.
I don't think D&D is inherently less about storytelling than say, Werewolf is. You can definitely run the latter in an episodic mission-based manner as packs do one hunt after the other.
@Cupcake said in What series are you reading?:
Red Rising trilogy
Red Rising was great! Ender's Game meets Hunger Games. In space! And Roman themes! Exclamation mark!
@Sessurea said:
I don't really get it because, why not go play on Shang? I guess that it could be having an established theme, or you've probably got a lot of people who ARE on Shang but are eager enough to spread it anywhere they can get a login, I dunno.
That's a question I often ask and there's no real answer. My best guess is people don't want to think of themselves as the kind who're mainly in it for the TS and/or they want to find partners they can 'seduce' to their hawt kinks (without always checking if they're okay with the other person) who don't usually do that sort of thing.
Or something.
@Bobotron Hahah. It's a great, very underrated show. It should be more well known.
@Tempest I miss WoT after all this time. No idea if I'd still feel the same way if I actually started playing again though or if it's just nostalgia, but I'd play the hell out of an Aiel or Warder again at least for a while.
Rise from the grave, thread!
Some good books I've read lately:
Iron Prince, by Bryce O'Connor. Sci-fi, progression fantasy, fun dialogue, light romance. If you like 'military school' settings this works pretty nicely.
The Hedge Wizard by Alex Maher. Just about as close to D&D a book can be without being published by WotC, with some mature dialogue (F-bombs, nothing extreme) and just a touch of grimdark fantasy. A lowly wizard in search for money to pay the bills enters a party to enter a dungeon. Fun, diverse and interesting characters made it a good read for me. I enjoyed the magic system, and its 'dungeons' setup could make for an intriguing MUSH setting!
@VulgarKitten said:
Bond. James Bond. I would kill for (pun intended) a 007-themed MU*.
I'll be double-oh fifty six.
@Blood_Magic Well, not quite. I mean it is energy too, absolutely... conditioning matters in everything, but in this case it's got more to do with how one activity translates into another.
There are long studies about how to best preprae for sports, or how much getting stronger in one motion affects another; as it turns out there seems to be a correlation but it's by no means an absolute as long as you're comparing apples to apples. In other words the guy who's very active and works out will be far better than a second guy who's a couch potato, but if the second guy is also involved in their activity of choice then generally speaking it won't be that close.
The body is a very specific machine to train; it becomes more efficient and better at exactly the things you make it do. It's a common advice in weightlifting that if you want to improve your bench you need to bench more; basketball professional athletes mostly train by playing more basketball. Swimmers swim a lot... and so on. You can get benefits from cross-training but your focus always defines what you're the best at. In fact even range of motion matters; do a partial squat (oh-so common) and your quads and glutes will get stronger for that range; your muscles don't have a crap to give that you want them to get stronger overall, they only improve to match the very specific challenge you're forcing them to compensate for.
So pilates just works different angles and tests muscles for things compound barbell movements don't. That's basically where I'm getting at. 
Sure, energy is a bit thing too, but that's not why you're sore as fuck the day after - you're not tired, that's all DOMS.
@Runescryer said in High Fantasy:
@Ominous The big advantage to WoT is the same advantage of LotR: a wonderfully detailed and awesome world to play in.
The big downside to WoT is the same downside to LotR: All that detailed world-building was done to cater to a small group of characters who pretty much do every awesome thing possible, so there's nothing really for the players to do that could recapture that epic tale feeling you had when reading the series.
The only real option is to create an alt-universe, IMO
There are ways - and there have been games which took advantage of them - to get around the issue. The easy way is to set it in a different era; go back fifty years and go at it. Unless you want Tarmon Gaidon to happen within the MU*'s timeline you don't even have to worry about the prophecies, since they will eventually come true anyway, or you can have them be about something else.
On A Moment in Tyme we did something similar at some point - we thought plot was getting a bit stale so we created a What If? alternate timeline where Lews Therin Telamon wrestled control and took over Rand's mind at an early point, which basically meant we tossed the events in the books out and just did our own thing. @Seraphim73 might be better able to tell if that was successful or not since my perspective was from driving this, but I recall people having fun.
IMHO any game based on original material needs to unshackle itself from the exact events and characters as soon as possible. The focus needs to be on the PCs, not what the canonical protagonists are going to do; they can still be used for the cool factor now and then ("OMG I'M IN A ROOM WITH LUKE SKYWALKER OMG") but if it's overdone then that, too, becomes trite and loses its coolness factor.
As for WoT, it has a great magic system where both male and female characters have super amazing yet different things they can do, a complex and detailed magic system, built-in politics and a bunch of interesting NPC enemies you can have to spice things up with some paranoia as well as brute force.
@reimesu Hey, the party had been dead for like 7 years in this thread.
Do you care to give a quick synopsis of what the book is about or why you liked it?
@Entropy said:
Right. Either way, this entire thing is taking away from the topic at hand, which is talking about my desire to help create/run a freeform game with a more democratic/fair staffing policy, so that people can enjoy the things that make MU*s fun, and not have to deal with as much of the stuff that makes them not so much fun... because even looking over this site... most of the complaints I see about games are about crappy, self-interested and thoroughly corrupt and/or malicious staff.
The most corrupt, drama-laden staffing experience I've ever had was on a democratic MU*. And I mean by far.
Every decision had to go through voting, which led to multi-hour meetings where everything was being broken down and bickered about endlessly. People would try to arrange for their friends to be present just to cast votes by placing staff meetings at the most inconvenient times according to who they wanted present, and staff politics were basically a game-within-a-game in themselves.
Cliques formed almost immediately so communication between 'spheres' had completely broken down and in some cases was passive aggressively withheld between opposing staff factions, an effect which spilled over to players as well. In some cases important issues couldn't be decided on either way because the 66% consensus wasn't present so we were all bottlenecked, and I don't even want to go into what recruiting new staff was like ('do I want @Entropy to be hired? Are they a friend or foe?').
Man that was a mess. Yay for democracy.
An anonymous, encrypted auto-expiring file-sending service ran by Mozilla to send all your disgusting TS logs to each other.
@Nein In my head you were replying to @WildBaboons' sex dungeons, which makes the response so much better.
@sg said in Infinity War [SPOILERS]:
@arkandel I guess my issue is that the comics already had a solid motivation, Thanos was nuts and in love with an abstract concept. They really didn't need to change that for the movie.
If they had gone with Hela I'd have been fine with that. Or if they had mentioned a different avatar of Death before in the MCU, same deal.
But this was already a long-ass movie with a crap-ton of characters in it. They didn't need an extra major one, especially coming out of nowhere and whom they'd need to explain.
@Entropy said:
No one person should really be the end all say all. Maybe not like... the full on "everything needs to be voted" thing like mentioned above. That does seem like it's taking things too far, and looks as if it led to the logical result. But simply put, stuff like denying a player something that's within reason... or giving a clique of lackeys priority over everyone else... that kind of stuff should be checked.
By whom? Who'll be checking it? If a clique becomes powerful enough (and usually one does, very quickly) then they are in control... sort of. In a democratic environment no one has the authority to do anything about it.
Your fallacy here is assuming you have a group of mature, intelligent people able to work with each other. Compare the likelihood of that with assuming one person - or a tiny group - is sane and you might see the point. It's easier (not easy, mind you) to find Head Staff who fit certain characteristics than basically a majority of your entire staffing team.
As a community we resort to high school tactics way too often as it is. I can't claim democracy can't work on a MU* because that's a ridiculous assumption to make and I can't prove it, but I've never seen it happen, and I think the reasons why it didn't are common enough to make it an inefficient way to run a game. If you can prove me wrong I'd happily eat my words, though.
@Tempest said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
What MUs have you been playing?
My experience tells me the "regular PCs" will eventually (because omg what about CHARACTER GROWTH? If my character isn't getting stronger, why am I even RPing!? /s) be powerful enough to wipe out every single Forsaken at once without batting an eye.
But if we start with the assumption staff is bad, or at least that they aren't good at system design (which is what the symptoms you are referring to are caused by) then of course things will go south.
That's why threads like this exist, to help steer design around issues like power inflation to the point the game's theme is no longer challenging for its own PCs.