@rook Armchair criticism is what you've missed. 
SometimesOften we reject any new-sounding notion out of hand here, thinking only of the worst case scenarios and not waiting to see how it plays out, or taking into account staff will keep an eye on it and can step in if things go south to fix problems.
Jumping the gun to condemn novelty or innovation without giving it a chance is one of MSB's less awesome traits.
@Sunny Agreed.
Most of the time I'm willing to give people the benefit of a doubt when it comes to their motivations, too. If a cool faction with potential is mostly inactive it's no big deal to bemoan their absence with your friends until someone goes 'hey, why don't we roll and fix it?' without considering those already there. That doesn't sound bad, right?
The phenomenon later on expressed itself in a more malicious - but still not necessarily malevolent - way when the same folks, developing groupthink, had a vision for what the faction or even sphere ought to be like no matter what the game was about. This gave us nearly identically xenophobic/isolationist Changeling spheres in several games, for example, where sometimes outsiders could swear only the names changed.
But anyway, I will never begrudge people playing with their friends. Hell I don't even care if they almost exclusively play together - to each their own, in this case literally.
My one objection is, if there are supposed to be IC politics involved, that they allow enough flexibility to make it worth it; so for instance if a group just took over the Carthians and I'm trying to create some internal tension, split votes, spread some paranoia or just try to win individuals' support that there is a reasonable chance it might be considered. If the group is OOC rock solid and every character is 100% dedicated to each other until death and beyond from CGen to the freezer it makes certain kinds of roleplay redundant.
One episode left on Ozark... it's really good. There are obvious parallels to Breaking Bad but it gives me a much different vibe, since the characters' moral dance is taking them to a completely different place.
Really solid performances, too.
@Coin said:
See, I see the mechanics as a help towards making the story less predictable and adding a level of chance to it. When people typically complain about mechanics I find that it's because they want to do something their stats don't allow if they have to roll for it, to which I say: maybe build the character you want to play, instead of playing without consideration of the mechanics.
Obviously this is veering off-topic (a true novelty for these forums, I realize) but I think what people enjoy about a system is the chance to pick their powers and veer their general build toward a specific direction. Powers are quite popular, I've never met anyone who doesn't like'em.
So the WoD allows people to pick 'invisibility' in Obfuscate (I know it's not real invisibility), scary-fu in Nightmare, extra-sensory perception in Auspex, etc. That's appreciated because it makes things uniform; your second dot of Protean and mine are the same, so there's consistency across the board and we all know what it can/can't do. So what do I need to use that second dot of Protean? Oh, it's that roll; gotcha. How much does it cost? Oooh, that much, so now my hard-earned XP go towards stuff I already like, and thus I have incentive to get more.
That's what I assert the system provides most people. It's not the randomness or chance of failure, but then again it's not because they don't like to lose (they do, but that's not the reason); it's just the unifying framework for their abilities.
Few people - and I count myself among them - will change the way they roleplay to accommodate the mechanics. The mechanics are there to serve roleplay, not the other way around. Whenever the implementation of a system significantly alters gameplay bad things happen; what comes to memory is HM's olden days when +vote was the primary/only way people have XP so gigantic scenes became prevalent. No one liked that shit and it was horrible, characters were coming in and idling to farm +vote/all eligibility.
So how do you know if a system is good? People use it on their own because it improves their gameplay. How do you know if a system is not? People don't use it unless they are forced to, and stop using it when they aren't.
That's the only benchmark that matters. A great super-fun mechanic that's unused is neither, no matter how it looks on paper.
@thenomain I don't see a reason it would be exclusive to either. The only reason some information can't be available 'live' (which I assume you mean in-game?) is telnet limitations, but otherwise I'd say they should be both derived from the same data, and display as much of it as possible.
@Ghost Yeah, I think between "we focus on FCs and everyone else is their support cast" and "Jedi/Sith are special so YOU can't play one" the Star Wars genre has been unable to get where it could be for years.
It could still be bad if staff-played NPC FCs are the focus of every story but it doesn't seem like that's what staff intends in this case, which is good.
@auspice "And you two gentlemen in the red shirts, come with me!"
@Roz Most spell-checkers let you add new words, though.
Pet theory: Most players who aren't @HelloRaptor (and thus know ALL THE SYSTEMS) find themselves learning the mechanics and inner workings of spheres slowly over time. So once they've mastered Vampire or whatever that's what they find themselves playing the most.
I know it's hard to believe but some people don't enjoy learning mechanics. It's true!
@lithium said in A new platform?:
I know several who are brand new to MU*'s. I myself have brought new people into the game.
Emphasis mine.
@arkandel said in A new platform?:
Until we can get rid of a user's need to learn arcane incantations to do very simple every day things we won't be getting many new players.
Obviously we'll still get some people. But look around - does this look like it did in the nineties? It doesn't, because back then it was still the norm to use command line interfaces to use your computer so people were familiar with the practice.
And yet today we have more tools than we did back then to open and run games; it's easier to find hosting, more publicly available platforms to run like Theno's, Ares and so on, waaay more households have internet access than back then (remember when going home from school might have meant not being online at all?), etc.
But now, anecdotal evidence aside, as a whole can you argue we are gaining more players than we are losing? The community once had multiple games with hundreds of individual connections every night, and now other than a couple of Arx, maybe FC and a couple of TS MU* I can't even name any more that have broken 3-digit numbers.
I don't have any other way of explaining this. Does anyone else? We can sit here and make excuses or we can accept what - to me - is pretty obvious.
@tempest I don't think I've written a new description in at least a couple of years. I recycle a lot of material.
The reason for it is that, typically, no one looks at you any more. They just check the wiki. It's nearly wasted effort, especially if you plan to change the description based on the circumstances - plus I pose my characters' attires every time anyhow.
@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:
What I really wanna know is: Have Grey and a staff-alt Grounder hooked up yet for the inevitable "romance across political line" thing?
Inevitable? I'd expect it to be the default.
@Coin Yeah, I'm not happy with my commute at all. At least in the spring+summer I can make better use of it by cycling when it's not rainy but once it's cold enough it's dead time stuck in the subway and buses for two hours a day - that's a huge waste of time, even if it at least means I can read books to make some use of it. On the other hand the neighborhood where I live is pretty nice and quite safe, otherwise it wouldn't have been an issue at all to move somewhere closer to my job.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
Most of the torturous slow posers I've played with aren't the florid sort who are crafting little pieces of screen-length art. They're serial-editors.
Most of the slow posers I've played with are simply doing other things at the same time. They have more than one scene or chatting on another window or playing a game or... whatever. So the 20 minutes I'm sitting there waiting for a pose aren't spent making said pose great - which might not excuse the delay entirely but greatly redeems them in my mind. It's like playing Magic with someone iRL but they're messing around on their phone instead of taking their turn, making you wait for them. It's disrespectful.
I won't play with that kind of people for long. Focus on the scene and I'll do the same, don't... and for what it's worth, there won't be another.
@thenomain Frankly my initial thoughts when I first saw the issue were, and I quote, "this is gonna be a shitstorm". People were getting personal right from the start.
It's definitely a Hog Pit issue. I haven't had time yet to read that forked thread but I'll say this - if the posters surprise me and it's a nice civil discussion we'll move it to the Mildly Constructive section. I'm not holding my breath on that one though.
@tragedyjones Awesome is purely in the eye of the beholder.
@Tempest I highly recommend The Broken Empire series. It's a bit grimdark and very cynical but so well written, and self-contained. A follow-up series is midway now in the same setting but reading the first isn't needed.
Alternatively The Lightbringer series is more traditional fantasy, with a pretty original magic system. It reminded me of Sanderson a lot in that the author clearly spent a great deal of time developing it as a building block to base his plot on.
I sometimes do public scenes outside PrPs but not always. The reason is simple - I don't always like how they escalate; you start with two or three people and within twenty minutes there are six or seven.
At that point I'm not having as much fun. It can still be when there's structure - such as in a plot - but otherwise it's just not for me.