Best posts made by Arkandel

@ominous

@Ghost said in Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?:

@Arkandel I agree with your view in spirit. I'm all for everyone owning their stuff. Their stuff, not the stuff people diagnose via confirmation bias as being their intent regardless of the person claiming "they didn't mean that".

Reputation is what it is. It's a very human kind of behavior to match expectations to behaviors which may or not have been in play but that's... expected. Perception matters. It's one of the downsides of having the persistent identities we debated in your other thread - as long as I'm not actively trying to 'hide' who I am, people who know me will see "Arkandel" and that will weigh in on how my actions are interpreted, for better or worse.

@AeriaNyx said in Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?:

Now, there are the rare occurrences in which I find people I just do not gel with. I can think of one such person, who I genuinely like as a person, but if I try to RP with them, my emotional state just flips into entirely irrational. So I avoid them. Not because I don't like them, not because I don't like their character. I just know that I cannot trust my behavior around them.

That's a mature way to handle it. I would add this though: You don't have to justify it. If you don't want to play with someone, anyone, you don't need to have 'a good reason' to do it - or rather you already have a pretty damn good one.

My one caveat in all this is people who project their prejudices on others. It's one thing to not like or want to play with someone else or even to have concrete arguments against them you are willing to share with others, and another to make vague negative comments on their behalf to dissuade people they've never met from playing with them either. That's really shitty. And it's actually happened to me, albeit only once, so I speak from experience there.

It's fine to not like me. It's also okay, if I screwed you over in some specific way ("that guy stalked me for three weeks until staff banned him") to say something. But disparaging others when they can't defend themselves about nothing in particular is rather juvenile.

Cards Against Humanity over lunch at work.

Coworker shows a card to another coworker and asks, "what does this word mean"?

The word was 'clitoris'.

... The second coworker found himself on the floor unable to stop laughing.

@Ghost said in X-Cards:

It fixes nothing.

I do not believe that to be correct. It fixes the problem of players playing on games with content that they do not enjoy and players being forced to play games they do not wish.

I think either you missed the point or I did a poor job of making it. Probably the latter.

In games historically the onus has always been on the person who's inconvenienced to suck it up or go away. And it's been placed there more by an established culture in each game rather than its policy.

In other words if you're uncomfortable then you are also expected to speak up about it; that's already a hard step to take, especially if it shows vulnerability on your part, sets you apart from others who are (seem to be) having fun and you'll ruin it, etc. What's even worse is you're often not actually told to leave if you don't like it or if you are then it's not by some game admin but a person in that scene who, because they are not inconvenienced by the cause of your discomfort, simple choose to dismiss it.

There are clearly boundaries and compromises when many different players are present in a single game. If I go to a horror game I can't complain that it scares me; if I'm on Shang I can't be scandalized by the focus on TS. But it's still important for us to look at someone who's genuinely disturbed by a theme not integral to a MU* (or a scene) and try to accommodate them even if it comes at a slight cost to our own enjoyment.

That's just a common courtesy.

I prefer remote work. I didn't use to, but I do now.

The main reason is that despite it all, I have better control of my life.

I'm at home - that means I eat at home because I've access to my own kitchen. It means sparing 1.5-2+ hours of travel time per day simply commuting, which is huge. It means less wear and tear on my car plus a smaller chance for an accident; lots of tired, stressed, distracted drivers around at rush hour. Especially in the Canadian winter when the roads are icy and not everyone has proper tires on.

I'm also working from my own office, no one's staring over my shoulder (except my cat), no one bugs me while I work (except my dogs) and I can wear comfortable pants, fluffy slippers and no socks while I do it. I don't need to worry about walking into a terrible public bathroom situation, and if I need a shower after I'm done there's one waiting for me 5 minutes later. Hell, even brushing my teeth at lunch feels nice - having a toothbrush around at the office always felt... dirty to me.

Is it less social? Yeah, by far. Do I have a worst work/life balance sometimes since it sometimes feel I'm never quite off the clock? Yes.

@Auspice said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Many of his characters are non-white and the protagonist is black. Another main character is Muslim. The author himself is a white man, but he reaches out to his readers often to ask questions, make sure he's getting things right, etc.

Something to perhaps consider here is weaponized complaints.

In other words you might play a black woman who's also an addict perfectly well, having done your research, spoken to people... all of that.

Then one day that gets thrown in your face on MSB because you're a racist.

It was snowing today. Winnie felt very sad about being forced to dive face-first into everything, and wanted back in after she run across the yard like an absolute idiot first.

I would personally much prefer a game with 30 non-alt accounts online out of whom 22 are currently idle than one with 8 people online.

At least there is potential in 22 pairs of eyes who may eventually return to this window, who could respond to requests for RP, who already invested the time to complete CGen thus they have proven interest, and ultimately who know this MU* exists.

If you had told me five years ago I'd be the guy who sets his alarm clock at 5:30 am so I can ride my bicycle across the city to lift weights at the gym before going to work I'd laugh at you.

And yet here I am. I guess people do change.

@The_Supremes said in Finding roleplay:

New Puppy Syndrome, however, is a big drain on staff time and resources. An ST may have a finite interest in their own PrP. They want to run the scenes, they want the things to happen, and then they're done. But their players, and folks who hear about these events second and third hand may want to poke at these goings-on or the aftermaths. The PrP ST, however, is done with it and no longer has interest. This is fine, but that means the aftermath RP (usually investigation type stuff) lands in staff's laps. I need to keep tabs on what PrPs are running, have been run, etc, so that when I get weird +requests from players that make absolutely no sense to me otherwise, I know who's new puppy this is that they got bored with and sent back to the shelter. Unlike with the real puppy, there's no ethical failing here, but taking a first look at a PrP before it goes live lets me be ready for the secondary and tertiary effects it might have.

For starters it's your game, so please treat the following as an counter-argument rather than criticism. If what you're doing works for you and your players that's great, keep it up.

... But it seems like a counter intuitive way to look at PrPs. Look at how I read it: "Storytellers might run things to their conclusion so that several players involved enjoy the story but others who come too late to join the fun will ask staff to keep it going after some fashion. I'd rather make it harder for the first part to happen than have to deal with the second one."

When good plots are ran everyone wins. Dealing with the aftermath of plots is indeed a hassle but not having them in the first place is orders of magnitude worse. It'd be easier - for example - to ask STs if they don't mind answering a few late threads about their stories even if only to inform people any further trail has gone too cold (the mysterious muggers have gone to ground, the orcs have retreated to their mountain lairs, the cultists appear to all be dead) than to pre-empty the fun with red tapes and hoop jumping.

What I've found is that many people who want to run plot but don't are discouraged before they start. For the most part that's just jitters ("do I know the mechanics enough? What if someone uses powers/mechanics I'm not familiar with? Is my story fun enough?") which may or not be something others can help with - confidence is gained through practice - but anything added to the heap just makes it even more likely.

See, what you view as perfectly reasonable and benevolent approval process ("just talk to me, we'll figure it out") is very often seen as an obstacle, a reason for staff to look down at a creative task that's often fuzzy in the early stages. Having someone trying to poke holes into a plot before it even gets off the ground isn't fun, after all, and few people can take rejection or even constructive criticism well.

In my experience it's always better to go back and fix things that don't work than to not have things which do never get off the ground in the first place. I'll never get tired of saying this: Storytellers and coders are by far your scarcest resource as a game-runner, so the more staff can do to stay out of their way until something goes wrong or if they ask for help - as opposed to putting obstacles up - the better it is.

But as in all things your mileage may vary.

@Ganymede said in The Cat Thread:

(3) doesn't need a fucking sitter every time my partner and I go out because OMFG WHAT IF HE WAKES UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT?!?!?!?.

<squints>

What kinda super-cat do you have that doesn't wake up at 4 am, find that the food dish is only 1/3rd full then starts wailing like the world is on fire?

An overlooked part of this conversation so far is the cultural adoptation of any given mechanic. This is far more important to MU* than the actual system.

I've been on MU* before where no one rolled outside PrPs. And I've played games where people did roll somewhat often but almost always for powers ("Auspex! What are your feelings?") rather than mundane purposes (you'd rarely see perception rolls like Wits+Composure for instance). I've even been on spheres where it was considered rude, a douche move, if you rolled at people - the rules never made it consent-only but the community had, at least for that particular span of time.

If a system can't win players over it's no good no matter how good it is, if that makes sense. On table-top you can get away with a lot because as long as the ST wants it done a certain way it's what will happen but on the grid of a multiplayer game it's different.

@Auspice That sounds like classic one-upping. Some people just can't help themselves, they need to assert their own condition over others'. "I'm tired today" "Oh, don't talk to me about tired, do you know how tired I am?".

Because two people can't be tired at the same time, or like different things without one of them being wrong.

@Pyrephox said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

but when my character gets scared he becomes really aggressive so I'm warning you, if you do it, you'll be sorry because I've got 18 dice in brawl and 20 Defense (because I didn't have to spend any XP on social resistance)...."

Yes, I meant to address that issue above but it skipped my mind, thanks for bringing this up.

The problem we MU*ers have when we adopt systems which include social mechanics but those mechanics are infrequently used (or simply are, in practice, less important than ones associated to physical traits) is that the return on players' investment becomes severely skewed. If I get the full benefits of my strength+brawl every single time I feel like punching but you don't get the benefit of your wits+manipulation every time you feel like lying - because simply my character doesn't believe what you say, you filthy LIAR - then why did we pay the same XP to raise those skills?

It's also been brought up before but whether due to systems paying more attention to physical combat or the playerbase in general being more familiar/fond of its mechanics compared to social ones it the return-on-investment curve becomes even more compromised. If I punch you in the face (maybe for lying to me) and roll 3 successes that's 3 bashing damage - it's cut and dried, you know exactly how many health boxes you got and what happens when you run out of them. With me trying to change your mind about who to vote for... that's a gray area full of clouds.

... Which is not even addressing the OOC repercussions of using such rules. Mind control, trying to 'force' a character into sexual/romantic relations through their dice pools, those are all actions which carry hefty social stigma in many communities.

"But", someone might say, "for example the GMC mechanics have Doors and shit, what about that, huh?" Well... again, playerbase adoption is the key. The number of times I've seen a Door used in scenes is hilariously low compared to the punches I've seen backed with dice. Obviously YMMV but I'd be surprised if most people playing nWoD even knew the rules for Doors let alone have used them regularly in scenes; for every person well versed enough to have done so I feel confident - but feel free to prove me wrong - there are many more who kinda sorta know how it works but...

The underlying problem here is fairly inescapable; most MU* use systems which have been built with social mechanics in mind so you can't simply not have them in your game without gutting the system completely, which is a task that requires massive houseruling. And they're in, they'll be used less than their physical counterparts although they cost the same and in theory are just as important; in practice not so much.

@Monogram said in RL Anger:

I don't know anymore. The angry person in me would hope for a quick impeachment or retelling of Dallas 1963 but...

I know where you're coming from, and I'm certainly no Trump supporter, but that's wrong.

Democracy is meaningless if we only believe in it when someone we approve of is elected to office. The will of the people either means something or it doesn't.

Success is having a goal and achieving it.

Not everyone wants the same thing - this took me a while to understand and longer to accept; why didn't everyone want to run/play the kind of game I did? Maybe if I only explained it clearly enough they'd agree? So I took a long time repeating myself in slightly different words until it dawned on me (I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer) that different folks legitimately like different things.

So for example it's entirely fine to want a tiny very niche game that caters to your exact itch; maybe it's a book series you just read that's sorta kinda popular but not really, so you'll never get many players. How do you define success in that? Probably in getting the mechanics to work for its theme and getting the (probably few) players you get to buy in.

Other folks, like me, like big games - those are meant to attract the largest number of players, and a core idea behind it is to build RP momentum - if you have a large enough playlist, the idea is, you maximize the chances someone will want to play at the same time you do, and there'll always be things happening somewhere on the grid. What's success? Maybe getting all those people to not hate each other and keeping theme somewhat consistent since many of them will (surprise!) have a different idea of what the MU* is about.

Some people just like an extra polished game with a tight theme ran on a very specific vision - Eldritch is a good example of that. @Coin (<something about his mother>) ran it and it either worked for people or it didn't; it wasn't supposed to be everything for everyone. Others just want a sandbox and we've seen several of those - the game runs, it's there, +jobs eventually get done... and you can go do whatever you like. What's success there? Probably that it continues to run while there are players left with stories to tell. And some MU* are meant to be vanity projects ('I run this because I can'), often devolving into dictatorships or deserted glorified chat channels. How would you define success there? I wouldn't know.

My point is... each game that opens has different goals. It's very difficult sometimes to reconcile what the players and what the runners want because the former want something the latter never put on the table.

When picking a game actually figure out what it's offering as soon as you can then ask yourself if it's what you're after. Don't try to change it to be what you want unless invited to do exactly that or it will become an exercise in frustration for everyone involved pretty quickly.

Someone make this game!

I think I need to credit MSB at least for helping me understand better how different an experience women get compared to men online. It's not always obvious (or it wasn't to me) how things work; I mean in the hobby, being what it is, flirting is commonplace but I've seen things that made me scratch my head. There's an aggression, an urgency involved on behalf of people. I don't know if I never perceived it on Shang in the past when I was playing there or if it's actually worse on non-adult MU* for whatever reason but some of the pages I was shown were pretty openly manipulative and very single-minded.

Posts today that read "I'VE NEVER WATCHED A SINGLE EPISODE OF GAME OF THRONES".

... Okay? They're the same people around superbowl who post "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO'S PLAYING".

Damn, that's not something to be proud of. You're not special because you don't follow the herd, guys. Plus it's one thing to say you don't like something and another to not be into it because it's popular.

Into The Badlands. Characters belong to different Baronies, maybe also to some neutral factions like the monks or mine owners, and let them go to town - heavy emphasis on martial arts (of course), betrayals and post-apocalyptic intrigue.