Posts made by Arkandel

@gamerngeek said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

The answer to this is something no one wants to admit: Applications are useless. They prove nothing about your ability to RP.

I readily admit that, and have thought it for a long time. They are a relic inherited from the last game and the one before that - it's part of the way things are done, rather than something useful.

Everything about CGen should be automated so the numbers check out and that's it. The rare outlier cases crossing some kind of line can be caught and dealt with later on without causing everyone else having to wait for days to be approved, or having someone nitpick on little details that will never get used in RP anyway.

@ominous Too many years ago when I faced the same dilemma I was like "yeah, I'll pick a cool Tolkien name no one will ever recognize is from the books since it's so obscure", so I picked Narsil. I used that as my internet alias for a while.

So it turns out so did many, many, many, many people. Arkandel it is!

@puppybreath said in Why did you pick your username?:

Puppies have nice breath.

LIES.

@lotherio Also, to bring it back into the context of 'how long should scenes last for', violence is very time efficient. I can stab anyone in the face very believably within seconds no matter who they are, but it could look completely implausible to change the Duke's mind about something huge within the time it takes for a PrP to run.

Hell, introducing NPCs can take a long time. I can produce an Elder y'all can stab to death very easily when all you have to know about her is that she means to drink your blood otherwise, but it would take considerably more for a party to expose her weaknesses and fears then to figure out a way to exploit them in any way that doesn't seem completely unrealistic or over-simplified.

@admiral said in The Basketball Thread:

I'd take any Laker in exchange for Leonard at this point. Well. Aside from Ball.

There's really nothing wrong with Lonzo other than his shot, and even that is fixable. He's quite young, and at times he's shot well. You're thinking of his dad, but what is he supposed to do about that? We don't choose our relatives.

Nobody wants that dumpster fire.

The thing about this situation is that the longer it takes to move him anywhere the lower his value becomes since there's a free agency looming in a year. A non-Lakers team could hope to sway him by then, Paul George style, but in that case they'd need to start working on him early - encourage him to make friends, get used to life in Philly or wherever, show him the public's love, etc. If they move him in February there isn't any time. And by then the Lakers would have the Spurs over a barrel since they could just wait 3 months and get him for free.

IMHO at this rate a Kuzma+Hart+picks offer is as good as it will get, with two caveats:

1. The Lakers get into a multiple team deal to dump Deng's contract too,

2. A team gets desperate enough to take a huge risk, offer a lot of assets, and hope he re-signs in a year. But that's a risk.

@bad-at-lurking said in Why did you pick your username?:

I tried lurking.

I'm bad at it.

Wait, you LIAR.

You named the account before you lurked badly!

We haven't had this in a long time, so...

Why did you choose your user name?

For example Arkandel was the name of one of my first AD&D characters, so I started reusing the name after that... and it kind of stuck.

How about yours?

@sunny said in MU Things I Love:

I think that it's just that most people are not the awful beasts we make them out to be a lot of the time, and if you have high expectations, people tend to meet them.

It's also observational bias. The people who get pointed at are the bad ones, but they are not typical cases.

Also most people fly under the radar anyway. I don't just mean on forums like this (although there are way more active lurkers than posters) but in general.

When I was playing A Moment in Tyme at some point I ran into this player and discovered she had been there longer than I had... and I had been there for years, I was staff, part of some of the same guilds as her characters... it's just that our paths simply never crossed until then.

So not only do we not hear about good people but in some cases we only hear about the bad ones, which can form unfair - and incorrect - expectations.

@faraday said in Plot session duration:

That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody() does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody() can be bothered to engage.

I think sometimes games unfairly categorize player issues given the rest of their setup.

As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.

But why is no one interested in politics!

This isn't a dig at any current games, by the way, it's more of a sideeffect of using and adopting mechanics meant for table-top in which social situations are really meant to be handled swiftly by an ever-present GM, and if you flip through their rulebooks 80% of the mechanics are about combat.

@thatguythere said in The Basketball Thread:

Double post but on a different topic and because I love the to rub salt into wounds.
According to Marc Stein of the New York Times, The Lakers had the chance to sign Cousins to the same deal the Warriors did but passed on it.

It's so hard to know right now how much of what we hear is people covering their asses and how much is legitimate. For example I've read both that no one (including NO) made Boogie a better offer, and that NO offered him considerably more before the end of the season which he turned down.

The latest ass covering is that he's locker room cancer (which sound somewhat true, since it's been a thing for years with him) which coupled with a major injury prevented him from being picked up by contenders. I mean... maybe. I guess for the Lakers in particular when you already have the Lavar Ball shitshow going on, you add Rondo and Lance Stephenson to the mix and you have an arguable top-3 all time super competitive guy on top of tiat, you don't want to compound the team drama.

But who knows.

@sg said in Plot session duration:

1. This is tough. I think it's more about pose wait time than the length of the plot. Like, if one player consistently takes 10 minute to type one line on their turn in combat, that's too long, especially when they had 4 other players each taking 5-10 minutes to do their turn.

I consider short pose rules (1 or 2 poses before someone can repose) to be absolutely essential when dealing with unknown participants. It's also one of the reasons I dislike running small scale PrPs with players I don't know - because if I have three players in my scene and two of them are super slow, I'm screwed. Unlike normal on-grid scenes it's more awkward for a ST to just go "uhm, sorry, this isn't working for me" then walk out.

So either I'd play with people I know and trust to be considerate or I impose limitations and adjust as needed.

Anyways, in most systems, if things keep going at a happy clip, I'm pleased to put in about 4 hours before my back starts aching.

Hello, fellow back sufferer! <sad high five>

2. I think if you're doing a combat in a non automated game, you can count on one hour per player. If you're throwing a plot twist at them, double it. FS3 throws these estimates out the window, because things go so smoothly, and you don't really have to wait on Slowey McBrokenfingers typing 1 wpm to keep things going.

That's a factor I hadn't considered. People in automated combat games with experience playing in non-automated games as well, how big a factor has this been for you?

In a perfect world, a plot would be designed in a way that people could exit without it breaking the scenario, like don't have people in an escape room or something like that, have them driving/running/riding to the next scene in the plot, someone could get stuck in traffic or something.

One of the biggest issues I've had designing PrPs is portability - being able to tag in newcomers for Scene #2 - because up to a certain point I don't want to rely on my existing players to be proactive, both because it's uncommon for that to happen but also because such new players come to me, not them. I've given it a shot with delegation before but I think it's felt like I was passing the buck, or I wasn't interested in helping fresh faces get in ("yeeeah, just talk to Bob, maybe he can figure out a way to bring you in or somethin'"), so I typically try to hook them in myself.

Or, you know, they step on a waterslide pit trap and are gone all of a sudden. One time in a star wars mush, someone said they left their iron on or something and left a scene where we were shooting stormtroopers, I thought that was pretty funny.

I think the key here is to never place characters in IC disadvantage because their players' RL made it so they had to go due to RL. No other factors are as important; I don't care if the group is facing dire odds, half of them are unconscious bleeding out with the fate of the universe rests in their hands, if one of them needs to go to sleep because they have work the next day, they get to vanish gracefully into the aether.

Now if that happens in a deceptive way and I see that person hanging out on OOC channels or a different scene for another hour after getting out of danger then I'd have a chat with the as well as staff. But that's yet to happen.

@admiral said in The Basketball Thread:

I am a Spurs fan. Kawhi Leonard. As a Spurs fan it feels to me like he just pussyfooted around and tried to avoid coming back even when he was ready because he doesn't give a shit about the Spurs and wanted to maximize his potential payday with minimal work.

All this crap about the Lakers, for instance, feels like a stab against the Spurs. Minimizing their ability to trade him off doesn't come off as very professional.

Am I wrong about him? Is he not a Dwight-Howard-Type? Someone explain him to me if so, because... I don't see it.

I'm a Lakers fan. I'd love to see Kawhi play for us.

Having said that, this was completely unprofessional behavior and a major bitch move on his part. You don't do that to the team who drafted you; the right thing to do would be to quietly tell the front office you won't re-sign next year so the Spurs are aware and can plan things out, give them the destinations you'd like, then play out the fucking last year of your contract for whoever it is with. It's one goddamn year in which you're paid tens of millions of dollars to play ball. What the hell.

He's trying to force his team's hand but that sets a terrible precedent. Contracts mean things. No one forced him to sign his, and threatening to not play at all is unacceptable. Worse, perhaps, is that we've heard nearly nothing from his mouth so no one knows exactly why any of this is happening; we're all just speculating based on rumors by his uncle (??) who's also his agent (a brilliant move, btw).

@coin said in Geist 2.0 Kickstarter:

We could just do it all ourselves. Changeling. Geist. Add some Kuei-Jin in there. I mean at this point I think we could write-up some badass fan-supplements faster than they could produce actual content.

Yes, but then it'd be our home-grown content and not universal. Much of the appeal of using an established, public system is that you can get fans to play the game more or less as it was written.

Rewriting an existing system seems more restrictive than making your own completely from scratch. For example why use the Vampire: the Requiem branding instead of going with your own vampire mechanics as a brand new game?

@valkyrie said in Plot session duration:

For example, a simple 3 or 2 pose rule if there is no action can help keep things moving.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I use 1PR in my own plots; if someone else has posed since your last one, you're good to go. There should be no bottlenecks if it can be helped.

I tend to like to run around 3 hours or so at the most. So I will plan the scene, and the action around this accordingly.

That's around where my limit is, both as a runner and a participant. I could do more but... well, I don't want to. However I'm not sure yet that's a personal preference or something somewhat universal.

P.S. One bit of advice that most people will overlook, and not apply is the fact that a PrP/Scene/Event/Plot does not need to begin in the setup phases. You can start players right in the action and skip 1-3 hours of 'setup' RP where everyone is getting to the scene, or preparing etc.

I think though if you do that, it needs to be announced since it's not everyone's cup of tea. For example even with my combat monsters I wouldn't join a scene that starts with an +init roll and ends when then last orc is killed. It sounds really boring - to me.

After watching a PrP a few days ago take a bit over six hours to complete I wanted to see what you all thought about plot duration, and specifically cover the following issues:

1. What duration - as measured in hours - is ideal, acceptable, tolerable and (if there's such a thing) 'too much'?

2. How easy is it for a PrP runner to predict how long a scene is likely to run in the first place? What are some good ways to make rough estimates?

3. Should a projected duration be advertised as part of plots?

4. What's the proper way to break longer scenes down? For example if IC it's a single uninterrupted adventure that gets broken down into two parts for OOC convenience how do you best handle concurrent on-grid RP taking place between those PrP sessions?

5. How do you handle players having to go in mid-scene due to RL; are they fading to black? Do you force them to use an IC excuse ("Arkandel has left the fight to uh, guard the party's flanks!")? Assume the person is there all along doing generic things? Should there be IC consequences for having to drop out of a PrP? ("Arkandel left the session with the Prince early, which offended the monarch!")

Thoughts?

@admiral There is no way - none, zero - Boogie was unable to get 5 million dollars a year. That's Lance Stevenson amounts of money for an All-Star. Even at 60% due to his injury he'd be very easily worth twice as much.

@thatguythere Yeah, fuck him. He took the minimum just to win a ring.

When former champions hold it over their peers who haven't have won this isn't what they had in mind. I could join the Warriors and they'd still win the NBA finals, so what?

I have no respect for guys who get paid well below market value (undercutting lesser players, which hurts them a lot, btw) just to boast they've got one.

@ganymede Can you imagine Toronto finally making it to the Finals... only to meet LeBron there?

@ganymede What I love about the NBA is how active it is in the off season. All these moves!

Now the Lakers - depending on what happens with the big name free agents left in the market like Kawhi (of course) and Boogie - could get even scarier. I personally hope they don't give up Ingram, that kid has it in him to be great, and he's only 20 years old with two years league experience in his pocket already.

If they can stretch Deng and get Cousins for example, but keep the rest of the team in place... something like Ball, LeBron, Ingram, Kuzma, Boogie with a bench of IT, Stevenson, Hart, KCP... that's a stacked team. For starters it has no defensive liabilities; everyone is at least competent, some are great defenders. Lots of length.

Their experience is an issue, and LeBron will eventually start to wear down from age, but no team is perfect. They can make a real run for it. I love their coach, too.

LeBron is a Laker. Yay