Posts made by Arkandel

@Jaded I...

... No. I'll watch it tonight and I won't cry until I do.

@Lisse24 I think that does belong in this thread anyhow. How much plot do you want before you're overwhelmed by clues/followups, for example? I knew people on Arx as well who just couldn't keep up.

@Taika Yeah, that's the flipside. I'll revise my earlier statement.

The worst monsters are players who don't want to chase down post-PrP leads.

@Roz The worst monsters are STs who don't answer questions and feed players with hooks after the PrP is over.

@Misadventure said in How much plot do people want?:

I like plot, but I like subsequent consequences even more. A plot is fodder for scenes. Results are fodder for thinking and getting in tune with the actual goals of the game.

If I run a plot and the characters don't refer to it outside of the PrP then it's a failure as far as I'm concerned. I don't care what else worked, that's the true benchmark.

The TV show model should still be applicable here. On TV their formula is one-third long meta-arcs, two thirds shorter duration stuff, so that regular viewers have something to look forward to but newcomers get the chance to be hooked into the day to day events.

Just like TV MU* have a lot of flakes around who'll come to a few scenes then drop off, or who'll start super active and then you never see them again. Plot series which last months are dangerous, you might be investing in something that will never have a payoff because by the time you get to do your big reveal there's no one around any more who saw it getting set up.

I advise chaining shorter arcs into bigger ones. Don't force feed plot to your players, let them come to you; give them things to do on a regular basis, arouse their curiosity and offer them chances to buy into your metaplot. Once they care then sure, you can engage them further since they might get proactive which is great and what you actually want, but you can't count on it.

What you ultimately want on a new, unproven game is for your players to never look around and go 'well, shit, there's nothing happening around here'. That's the main goal; you want to keep them around before it becomes a catch-22 situation, so feed them regularly to keep those jerks coming back for more and then you might even be able to do a bait and switch - voila! There was metaplot happening all along and you didn't even know! Mwah-hah-hah.

But yeah, don't start with the big bad world-is-ending stuff. It'll become the stuff of bar RP on week two, and trite old topic by week three.

@Auspice That's good news, I'm watching it tonight. After those movies I can really use some actual good Trek.

It's not that the movies were necessarily bad, but they weren't Star Trek.

@Ganymede Don't forget OKC... that's the other half of the banana boat crew right there (minus CP3 of course).

The issue is 2017 DWade isn't 2009 DWade or even 2013 DWade. His defense has fallen off, and apparently Cleveland is promising him a starter position (which probably means it's where he's going), but although he's a considerable upgrade over Shump, I don't see a worst defensive back court than him and IT facing against Golden State... or hell, Boston.

Kyrie would feast on IT and DWade. And I don't even want to know what Curry would.

This is the greatest off season of ALL TIME no questions asked.

Put all those trades together and add the entire NBA rising up to publicly trash talk Donald Trump after Stephen Curry said he wasn't going to the traditional champions' visit to the White House and Trump, being Trump, said they aren't invited then... including LeBron James calling the POTUS a bum and we have peaked.

There will never be an off season like this one.

I rarely play board games but this is from reddit today...

@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!

Stupid people when it comes to movies. They are out there! And they are hilarious!

I was reading a subreddit thread where people were talking about the worst movie misconceptions they had when it came to watching films.

One of them was "who is Gotham? why is Batman trying to save him?" by a guy's wife... who laughed so hard he was 'asked' to sleep on the couch afterwards.

Another was this guy when he was younger who asked his parents which astronaut "Houston" was, since they kept saying "Houston we have a problem".

Or a girl who after The Force Awakens asked her friends "wait, the bad guy was Han and Leia's son??" when they brought it up. Like... how did she manage to miss that!

I laughed.

@Tempest ADMIN VOICE - it was at the user's request. He's not banned from MSB or under any limitations from my end.

@ThatGuyThere I absolutely believe that KD didn't intend to get caught making disparaging comments about his old team using a second throwaway Twitter account which he then exposed by accidentally posting from his real one about the fake one's comments, yes.

Kevin Durant says he hasn't been able to eat or sleep since posting disparaging tweets about the Thunder.

Dude, can you get more soft?

Is the port listening?

Try netstat -tulpn | grep $port or such. If it is then something else is the issue, but if you can't connect even from localhost I doubt it's a hosting matter.

@ThatGuyThere No one is going to blend well right away, not even Butler on the Wolves who needed a good 3&D guy at his position really badly. Certainly not the Celtics who just basically rebooted the team.

It takes a while to gel... it's just that teams with enough superstar power can hide the growing pains a little better.

@Ganymede said in The Basketball Thread:

Cleveland will somehow come out as the bandits, if Thomas proves he's healthy. Irving wanted out, he got out, and he gave the Cavs a king's ransom to do it.

Ainge fucked up.

The weird thing to me is that he rushed. There was no reason to rush.

They would have had IT for at least another year. In that year they'd know 100% if the hip injury was bad, and treat his upcoming free agency accordingly; he obviously would want to stay for the max, and if he wasn't worth it then point guards are the easiest position to fill in the NBA.

Paul George to OKC

Pointless. Westbrook had an MVP year with no one around him, but that's because there was no one around him. He's the reincarnation of Iverson.

Yeah, I think OKC is heading for another heartbreak. PG wants to go to the Lakers, he's said as much. And Westie is amazing, but no superstar wants to play with him because he's so ball dominant. If someone like KD couldn't quite fit - an excellent shooter, selfless, a creator - I don't think there's another player that will mesh.

Jimmy Butler to the Wolves

Still a team that is young and full of problems.

I think Thibs will need to prove himself this year. Either the Wolves get good or they need to look for a new coach, because he's running out of excuses. KAT is a top 3 young player in the league, the team is stacked... it's time to produde.

The Balls can suck themselves. Lonzo's the second coming of Manziel, mark my words.

I dunno. I like what I saw in the summer league, and to be fair Lonzo hasn't said stupid things yet - it sounds like his dad is a complete moron, but that's not the kid's fault. His court vision is tremendous, but his shooting isn't... that's my issue with him. In this league it's not enough to be a playmaker. Look at Ricky Rubio.

Chris Paul to the Rockets.

It just means there's no one to truly challenge the Warriors in the West.

Uhm, the Rockets?

Do you think anyone's taking out the Warriors this year? Do you think anyone can, barring injuries?

Cleveland still has the best shot because LBJ is LBJ.

I think the Cavs might do better than last year because LeBron will now have something to prove. But the Dubs are so stacked. I've never seen a team this stacked in my life, and it's gotten 'worse' since so many veterans want to go over for little money for the chance to win a ring.

I hate those ice nerds who have their own thread and think hockey's all that. Who else here is hyped about the NBA season that's coming up soon, following the single most exciting offseason in history?

The Kyrie/IT trade, KD twitter drama, Paul George to OKC, Jimmy Butler to the Wolves, trading the #1 draft pick, Lonzo and Lavar, the possibility of a new Lakers resurgence featuring LeBron, the incredible mess that are the New York Knicks, Chris Paul to the Rockets...

Do you think anyone's taking out the Warriors this year? Do you think anyone can, barring injuries?