Posts made by Arkandel

@tnp said in The Desired Experience:

I'd say that what a player should expect from staff after asking what's needed depends on staff's response.

If staff answers 'Well, there are no Gangrel bikers.' then staff is just acting as a talking +census command. However, if staff answers 'We need Gangrel bikers.' then they're speaking ex cathedra and implying there is an actual NEED for that role from staff's POV and that it comes with specific plot points and involvement.

It might also be that staff are trying to correct a trend and, inadvertently perhaps, steer their new players to play archetypes without there being a plan to actually give them story hooks.

For example maybe there have been a few too many prominent Gangrel plutocrats and academic PCs and staff feels there should be some bikers to balance that trend out. If they don't think about it too much they may easily misguide (without any malevolence on their part) someone to play one without considering what RP or plot points they can make available for these new players so they are relevant and get started.

@ominous said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

There is definitely an expectation, whether voiced or implied, from players who want to play 'movers and shakers'.

The issue here is, not everyone should and not everyone can be that. Especially in smaller games.

I think you meant to say the opposite, or, if you didn't, that's incorrect. It's easier for everyone to be a mover and shaker in a smaller game than a larger game. If a game has 15 noble houses vying for influence and there are 15 players, it sounds like everyone that wants to be the head of a noble house gets their wish.

To clarify:

If you have a game like say, Arx, then you have a large playerbase split between X factions such as factions and organizations. These need to be both populated and led; that means you have someone (hopefully at least a few someones!) to play guardsmen types and someone to play their Lord Captain Commander. But at least there are X factions which are not empty. The LCC position could be classified as a 'mover and shaker' in this context.

On a much smaller game this isn't quite the same. You may have, say, Lancea Sanctum with 1 character, Crones who are empty, Carthians with 3 characters, etc. You can easily end up with too many chiefs and too few Indians, so to speak (and apologies for the outdated figure of speech ). If almost everyone is a 'mover and shaker' then no one is.

I don't know if you'd still disagree but I hope that further elaborates on my initial statement a bit.

@betternow Yeah, that is true. It may be that like other things about Amazon, it depends on which team is responsible for a project. Or it could be that WoT is just a scale of budget higher than those other productions so they're more strategically careful about it. It could also be other projects were ran by people who stood their ground better.

It could also all be bullshit. Ultimately all of these things are judged by their results. I feel so far, being just in episode 3, it's hard to tell if it'll end up closer to The Shannara Chronicles or Game of Thrones.

***NSFW content***

@faraday said in The Desired Experience:

It's also a matter of perspective. There have certainly been people complaining about not being able to be a "mover and shaker" in various games.

Thanks for reminding me.

There is definitely an expectation, whether voiced or implied, from players who want to play 'movers and shakers'.

The issue here is, not everyone should and not everyone can be that. Especially in smaller games.

A concern I heard is that Amazon isn't yet used to running creative projects like that, and it interferedoffered opinions a lot during production. This is one of Amazon Prime's intended carrots, after all, so they want to make it as appealing to everyone as it can possibly be.

I was listening to a Ringer podcast this morning and one of the folks on it who actually got to watch some scenes being shot and was asked for his opinion in screeners mentioned a number - 12,000 notes were passed on to screenwriters to ensure audiences in Sweden found it as compelling as ones in Utah.

Oh I'm just curious to see how they will handle some of the more controversial but integral parts of the series. Damane, Rand's romantic partners, etc.

@tmr I feel like that's not (entirely) on staff.

What is the expectation here? You can offer someone a role for their character and provide them with some hooks into that role.

Being a shopkeeper is one additional reason for other PCs to interact with theirs that someone coming in 'blind' wouldn't otherwise get. If they rolled a dancer, for example, the onus would be on them to find a club or studio looking to hire - it's a proactive search. But as a business owner others have a reason to go to them.

Is that reason compelling enough? Powerful enough? I'd argue it shouldn't be. But it's something.

Ultimately finding scenes and establishing oneself requires some degree of effort. To put it a bit differently, I've seen creative people before (who I didn't know before then) join a game where they know no one, assume a role without any hooks at all, and before long they are movers and shakers.

I watched the first three episodes of the Wheel of Time series. Some comments about it in spoiler

tags:***=WoT Spoilers***

Roo, my youngest cat, the one who ran from everything and spent most of his days in one closet or other, died today.

He was just four years old. Quite healthy overall. Two days ago he seemed just a bit distressed, yesterday he was just sitting there staring up at me so I got concerned and took him to the vet.

Despite treatment and being on fluids his liver was doing quite badly and his vitals were still spiking the wrong way. The vet found blood in his urine and believed it was an aggressive cancer. He recommended euthanasia since Roo was in distress, which is what we did.

And just like that my four-year old cat is gone. When my oldest dog, Daphne, had to be put to sleep earlier in the year it was at least expected - she was quite up there in years. But Roo was so young.

Sigh.

@wizz I haven't watched it yet but as a more general question.

Did it feel like they are trying (possibly too hard) to create 'the next Game of Thrones'? That's kind of my main concern about the series, that its producers would try to make it into something it's not to recapture the magic of a different blockbuster series.

@tinuviel Oh I agree. At a certain point it's hard to tell the difference between what people want and what we're being told we want.

All questions about 'why is <X> showing on TV/YouTube/social media' tend to have the same answer; doing so generates revenue. Folks are watching. They are buying.

It's not about attraction, gender, self-image or sexuality; it's about money.

@greenflashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

It's not that the material there isn't sexy to me. I never expected it to be. It's that it's so unsexy to me I sincerely can't tell whom it's meant to be sexy for. Do straight women really like videos of shirtless men flexing their abs while pretending to receive a beejer, or is this what straight men think straight women find sexy?

A lot of this isn't really about what's sexy regardless of one's sexual preferences.

For example many straight guys like the idea of getting really jacked. That is, the Arnold-style muscles, having big biceps, ripped shoulders, all that stuff.

But that's not necessarily what women want. It's what guys want for themselves. Or think they do, until they realize it takes a lot of very hard work to get there, they won't be able to scratch their own backs again, and they won't find regular clothes that fit them - or even fit in most car seats.

@faraday said in New WoD digital toolset coming in 2022:

Paying $60/year to rent game books that ideally I would be referencing for decades? Not at all appealing.

The dollar amount was pulled out of my ass, obviously. It could be $5 after the cost analysis is done.

But also think the model I had in mind would be per group, not per person; if you and your 4-5 friends played it'd be cheaper, too.

Finally the real benefit in this scenario wouldn't be the books themselves. It'd be the game, where that means both the rules and the platform to fully and 100% run your campaign through. You'd need nothing else, as long as you had an internet connection and a microphone.

It seems it'd have no fewer chances of succeeding than trying to survive on razor-sharp profit margins and distribution channels over Amazon and local hobby stores also needing a cut.

@jennkryst said in New WoD digital toolset coming in 2022:

@arkandel A subscription model would make me want to pirate books MORE, not less.

That's the trick though.

A really good platform where you can play for free only if you are subscribing could make it actually undesirable to pirate.

Sure, you'd have the source rulebooks not the fancy cool online tools to collaborate, create and run handle combat encounters on the fly, manage and store character sheets, talk in real time with your group, etc.

Let me put it this way. Ten years ago if you asked most people whether they'd rather own music or subscribe to a service they'd pick the former.

@derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

The entire premise of insurance is a thing that, I strongly feel, our generation is going to eventually just nope out of.

Among other things, evidently. Cardboard boxes for everyone!

@coin Hell, one of the relatively large companies in the hobby should at try out a more modern approach to RPGs, instead of merely adopting table-top ones to sorta-kinda make it playable online.

For example why not try a subscription model? The GM pays $XX/month for access and their party (up to say, 5 people) get access to the rulebooks. So $5 gets you Mage: the Awakening or $20 gets you the full gamut of nWoD.

This would also lock people into a platform since they don't own the books, they just rent them out. In the long run it ought to be more profitable - and the fact they're digital means no need for distribution channels, printers, storage, etc.

The way the real estate crisis is hitting different households is astounding.

We have good jobs. Even so buying a house in the GTA is a fool's errand; to even start the conversation the down-payment is hefty and the interest rates pretty absurd. Any half decent place - and my standards are not high, it just can't be a condo due to the pets situation - would go near or over seven digits. That's not doable.

So instead we rent. Renting a place used to be easy, straight-forward even; that's no longer the case. Our previous landlord sold the house to someone who planned to move in so we had no choice but to move out - in the middle of the pandemic - yet even with a liberal budget for the new lease we got into bidding wars. For a rental! This was nuts. It is just stupid.

So now that we have a place leased we are well aware of how little leverage there is. All a landlord needs is an excuse to sell; there's just so much cash being floated around, and we'd be going through the same song and dance of finding another house again.

For instance we're being very cautious with repair requests. The front door wedges into the frame since it doesn't fit quite well and creaks like the gates of hell when it's opened. The real estate agent's repairman outright told me it's because the door needs to be replaced, when one of its two locks had to be removed since it didn't align well with the frame.

But asking for expensive maintenance is tricky. They could decide it's too much and just pull the trigger on selling. So instead those creeeeaaaaks! as it turns out are totally fine.

I can't even imagine what people in actual financial dire straits need to compromise with in similar situations.

I honestly don't know why more companies don't embrace the digital playfield more fully.

Even Wizards of the Coast with all their cash flows should have put out a platform out there encompassing all aspects of bringing a party together and playing a campaign online by now. D&D Beyond may be the closest thing to that and it still isn't a full solution since it lacks voicechat with integrated dice rollers, etc.

It just seems like a good idea. Pay to buy books and then they give you the tools to play with your friends no matter where they are.

I hope this toolset pans out for WoD. Not sure how deep their pockets are or how fully fleshed out their approach will be though.

George Clooney had some pointed remarks about gun safety on sets.

@seraphim73 How does (or does) playing style factor into it?

For instance let's revisit playing in a Lord of the Rings setting. Maybe my 'writing style' is more... modern and not quite what a purist might expect not so much from the content of my poses or the goals my PC has, but rather their vibe.

So if my character is asking those knife-eared freaks in Lothlórien to help curb-stomp some Orc skulls... assuming some kind of combat is warranted by the plot - does that impact the desired experience?

And if so, how would that be reflected in the Mission Statement?

@pyrephox said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel I think another thing that games can do is be more explicit about the experience they want to provide. Like, so often I've seen characters be approved in a game where the character is clearly built for a specific experience - only for the game runners to turn around and be either indifferent or actively hostile to that experience.

Agreed! And not just that - but staff need to enforce the experience not simply as what they provide but what they want.

For example if you run a game aiming for it to be a gritty Vampire game based on paranoid neonates working together to uncover an Elder conspiracy, but I come and play my character as a happy go-lucky nerd who's looking to improve his dating woes then I should have to compromise - as a player - more than you should as a GM.

Those two experiences aren't necessarily mutually exclusive but there's a chance I will derail what you're trying to do. And if it happens you need to be willing to set things straight or I can affect the way others play, too.