Best posts made by Arkandel

***Minor spoiler***

@nyctophiliac said:

@Arkandel I believe I did, I could bump it since there's been some renewed interest

Interest will always wane but you might get the project going long enough to attract more people, perhaps. Counting on a few specific STs though will never be a good investment no matter what they promise before the game launches.

I'm lucky enough to live in Toronto where... well, there are some racial tensions in some parts of town I guess, but for the most part no one gives a shit where you're coming from (or look/sound like you are). The city is packed with Asian people, no shits are given. I went to the annual Greek festival on the Danforth and expected to see mostly greek people there - nawp! People from a bunch of ethnicities were all over the place, just having fun slapping tzatziki over their souvlaki sticks like nobody's business.

That's exactly what I like, the fact folks in general aren't homogenized or forced to conform to a general identity - they're happy identifying as whatever, but they're (also in general) happy participating in their neighbor's funtimes while there're at it.

If it wasn't for all the fucking cold, this city would be so great.

@paris said in Make MSB great again!:

You allow known stalkers, with known pasts of stalking behaviors, to harass and slag other players.

I'm unaware of any stalking. I wasn't an administrator at the time it sounds like this happened, but if you give me some details - in private or otherwise - I'll treat it no differently than if it had happened today.

@wizz said in Make MSB great again!:

@arkandel
What do you mean by help? What are you asking for and what are your expectations?

From your (generic-you) end I need more adults in the room. I need people who will show by example how we expect players to act, and that MSB isn't where you go when you just need to rant and vent your frustrations at your perceived enemies.

Or to put it a different way, if you (again, generic-you but also you) just stop participating because of badly behaved posters, the scale is tipped just a little further the wrong way each time.

As for the rest, steps are being taken. Give me a minute here, guys.

The season finale was garbage.

What a steaming pile of shit. It boggles my mind. What the actual hell.

@Ganymede said:

That said: any suggestions?

Only this: Either adopt an existing system with no or relatively few house rules which does what you want adequately or make a new system which does exactly what you want.

Going with a hybrid will cause more issues than it will solve as it will confuse players familiar with the default mechanics and those who're not familiar with that would be learning a new system anyway so you might as well have started that way.

@TwoGunBob It also explains - and to a point, justifies - why studios are treating audiences like they are dumb fucks sometimes, and they crap painful amounts of exposition down our throats.

They have to.

For some reason it doesn't piss me off, I love it. I mean some of my friends are like that, and they are by no means dumb.

For example my boss took us to watch Spiderman: Homecoming (second viewing for me) a few weeks ago, and I was talking to a coworker who watches next to no movies at all about it. He said he just couldn't get past one thing he found really unbelievable in the movie and kinda ruined it for him; when "a guy" (... Happy Hogan) was driving his whatever car model, he was shifting gears by moving the shifter up, but in that model the lever should be going down.

No, Mike, never mind the wall crawling teenager with the AI living in his pyjamas or his enemy with the suit made of alien technology spare parts flying around! Hell no, the shifter is the real issue!

@auspice The mental mental images for me were... wildly different.

(Moved it to the right thread!)

Now that Christmas is behind us I feel I can rant a bit.

But first a couple of disclaimers: I honestly hope other people enjoyed the show more than I did - as I really wanted to. And also, although not adhering to the books' plot is one of the reasons I disliked it, it was far from the biggest one.

So to get into it:

***=Spoiler-filled grumblings***

Star Trek: Discovery is seriously winning me over.

The first double episode made it look like too much of an action-based series for me, and it doesn't always feel like Trek, but just judging it by its own merit it's actually pretty damn good. The serious $$ they're pouring into it doesn't hurt production values either, the SFX look good.

It's ... different than the Trek shows we know though, so far there's either no formula or when it starts to follow one ("Captain, we've received a distress call...") it takes us into a whole new direction than we have in the past. Even the Captain himself is nothing like the kindly, peace-loving Starfleet officers we've known from past series.

Thankfully The Orville is there to satisfy those cravings in the mean time while Discovery does its own thing.

(Oh, and if you're not watching this @surreality... you should. There's a character in it whose anti-hero's journey will remind you of a certain pirate captain.)

@HelloRaptor said:

@Admiral said:

The God Machine is the Weaver. He won and banished the rest of the Triat and rebuilt the World of Darkness without all of the excitement of the old universe.

It's why nWoD is so stale.

A++, would upvote again.

You didn't even upvote once, you lying liar!

@derp said in The Wheel of Time:

@arkandel

I mean, I get that you have STRONG OPINIONS for reasons, but I think I am going to to with Hard Disagree that any work transferred between mediums has to be absolutely chained to the original, especially when the original had both aged poorly and been met with so much criticism of the content in it.

But I never said the work needs to be chained to the original. I do think any changes need to be tied to the change of mediums, however.

For example it's perfectly legitimate to greatly simplify the 'mechanics' of channeling since you can't fit that much exposition into a TV series without making it boring. It's also reasonable to amalgamate characters, trim some plotlines that don't advance the plot, etc. All of that is expected, even celebrated in other successful adaptations; Lord of the Rings (once again!) did a great job of it.

On the other hand I do think if content creators think they can tell a better story than someone else's then that's what they should do. If they have the talent to do it then it will stand on its own merit.

@auspice Chiiiills.

@faraday No, these are good questions. I don't know! I think it'll depend, it's hard to make concrete rules and try to match what anyone post against them.

The best way is to probably play it by ear. If a post sounds aggressive we can move it over.

@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

Just giving my opinion because, y'know, this is MSB, we like to debate things endlessly

That's fine! Just reading through this thread alone I'd like to cherry pick good ideas, because half the posts are like "let's change stuff, this is unbearable!" and the other half are like "change is stupid, leave it the way it is!" - with the same posters sometimes in both camps.

I realize too well that just because something has to change it doesn't mean we just need to do random things for the sake of changing them, but giving stuff a try to see what sticks isn't the worst idea ever.

This is from Reddit, not my own words.

"When you get into armed martial arts (especially something developed for agility and speed) like WuShu or the various Shao Lin Kung Fu forms, one of your major strategies is to go blade to blade, because your opponent will be using their similar speed and agility (swinging from cables non withstanding) to block In a way that enables them to instantly counter attack agressively. You go blade to blade in a very practiced routine to try to work your opponent's blade into a position to attack, without the counter attack. Also to work your opponents center of gravity over their heels.

If you do that you throw off their center of balance, and this takes away some of your opponent's agility and strength, because they have to use those resources to keep their feet. Especially if two opponents know each other and each others combat styles strengths and weaknesses, even in a competitive environment it can look choreographed.
So those kinds of scenes actually fit the prequels quite well.

In the originals we have a different situation. Yoda and Obi-Wan are teaching Luke to be a weapon, not a martial artist. Kind of like the difference between Bruce Lee (absolutely a lethal guy) and a samurai warrior. In fact the sword master hired for the originals based lightsaber combat on single katana combat. It's more direct and designed for single hit kill. Extremely fast but very aggressive and linear moving.

Both kinds of fighting, martial arts and combat, are just as lethal but they're very different.

This kind of combat fits Obi-Wan, Vader and Luke very well. Vader is wearing heavy (Saber resistant) armor. Obi-Wan is not only older and less agile (the force could make up for that though) but Vader is a very different opponent now, and his strategy is to survive long enough for Luke to witness his sacrifice. Now he needs to stop each potentially lethal attack as they happen. Luke is almost on a suicide mission against a titan, and needs to get the upper hand fast. He needs to win at Street Fighter, not chess. Two hand Katana fits these movies with these characters perfectly.
It also makes sense because it keeps the blade in a very tight controlled area, with most of the moves keeping your own blade (made out of magnetically contained plasma) as far from you as possible for most of the fight.

So now we have TFA. Kylo Ren is using what essentially boils down to a German or Scottish bastard sword. I used to do SCA tournament combat, and what Ren is doing looks very similar to 11th or 12th century German. He has a lot of flourish though. It's for camera so there's going to be telegraphing. European medieval combat was both for duels and for on field warfare, and this is where we find Ren. Vader comes to a battle, leads and single targets. Ren leads and is in the middle of the battle.

Fin is opportunistically striking, he's not a highly trained martial combatant, and Rey is an efficient street brawler. She only gains an upper hand by calming herself into the force and using its potential.

All of these styles were chosen for their era in the Star Wars timeline and fit very well."

@bobotron Well, we know she has to die somehow in this series

@kanye-qwest But there's no reason the time period can't be defined either for the entire game or the character in question.

"This is Rebirth Superman".

(In fact, to me, there's no other way that makes sense but there are so many hybrid MU* out there I guess I must be a minority)