Posts made by Arkandel

@Ganymede said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

I hope you don't think I'm being personally critical of you; I'm not. I'm just lamenting what I see as very lazy game design.

I won't argue the point that it's lazy, only that it's necessary.

White Wolf's niche and intended audience is pretty specific; placing a crucial part of the metaplot in the Middle East covers their 'overseas warzone' demographic in a way most people buying their books would understand even if they know very little about what's actually happening in those parts of the world or, for that matter, whether they could point them out on a map or not. Most wouldn't know anything about what's happening in China though, and that's without even getting into the potential controversy of saying (or even implying) something negative about the country's government even cloaked in the most supernatural lore versus making similar allegations about say, Syria.

They're trying to be respectful (which is why they didn't develop KotE in-house after all) which might mean many things. I wouldn't be shocked if the financial impact of doing so crossed their mind as well.

@Bobotron, @Misadventure is to blame for everything but maybe not for @Ganymede.

What I'd love to see is a conscious effort to make all the major splats integrate into a greater whole. They don't need to be quite balanced in terms of their overall power (although it'd be nice if the gap between them isn't huge) and I'd definitely not want all books to be required to play the game fully, but just being able to treat them as reasonable thematic additions instead of completely separate islands you need to figure out htf to bridge would be nice.

(Then maybe we'll stop seeing the foolishness on multisphere MU* where people are going out of their way to keep their specific sphere from interacting with the rest of the entire game because reasons)

@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

@Arkandel
Yeah. If nothing else, I can steal what mechanical changes I like (Hunger being one of them) and go from there, since I never really use the default setting anyway.

Since it's highly unlikely I'll ever play Vampire again on table-top it's still a big change for MU*; tracking down a resource like the vitae pool never quite meshed very well - it was usually just a command you used to replenish it with nearly no chance of failure or consequences - and Hunger could make it way more relevant.

I am curious to see how they plan for it to affect theme though in terms of ghouls, domain, etc.

@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

We'll see. I like the concept of moving back to street level but I fucking hate the Anarchs as a baseline. A fractured Camarilla with neonates and ancillae in over their heads is more appealing to me.

If anything I'm just happy they are doing something with the IP other than recompile what they wrote 20+ years ago. I hope they can preserve whatever magic I loved back when I first encountered V:tM.

If I'm off topic please tell me to STFU but has anyone used an external keyboard to MU* on a device? Typing a lot of text even on a tablet's touch screen feels icky for me.

@Bobotron Is Generation still a thing in any way that you know of, mechanically or thematically?

@Tinuviel said in FS3:

Naturally, as with every system, there's no guarantee of succeeding no matter how good you are. Sometimes you're just unlucky, and sometimes you're just unlucky a whole lot. That's kind of the point of dice rolling.

Well, yeah, but for example in the nWoD the bias is definitely in favor of the attacker; there are just many more ways of stacking up punch-dice than block-dice, which was definitely part of the design. Plus in latter editions they give you extra chances of resolving things even more handily if you're just facing mooks by having Werewolves auto-kill humans etc.

The combat system was meant to be fast paced.

I hate to laugh at someone else's worst moments but it's hard to feel sympathetic for this guy given how it all ended.

@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

• Over 13K responses to the WW survey. 56% say they play a physical game — board, RPG, card — at least once a week.

I'm frankly surprised physical players even outnumbered the (admittedly small) bunch playing online. It's been years since you could even find WW products in hobby stores at all, they were only available as print-on-demand, which must have taken its toll.

Judge Dredd: Mega-City One.

https://us.yahoo.com/beauty/teen-sexually-harassed-school-asked-take-vow-silence-155533609.html

@Lithium What Ia friend had done for a while was set up an ssh server on my home machine.

Then I'd just ssh to it, and use tf or any other CLI client to play. Encrypted, virtually un-investigateable as long as they don't mind you accessing the outside world at all.

@SunnyJ What is dead may never die but rises again from its ashes.

@Thenomain You've mentioned in the past feeling bad when you didn't have enough evidence to kick people you knew were bad out of the game. Do you regret that decision now? Would you have done the same thing today?

I think that's a discussion worth having in the context of this thread because that word - 'evidence' - divides us somewhat. There is the camp who basically says "it's my game, and if I feel someone is detrimental to it I'm going to remove them" and folks who prefer a more rule of law no one is above, so there needs to be a concrete reason before action is taken against against a player, in some cases even especially if in the name of fairness they don't like them to begin with.

So in the context of our debate (everyone, not just Theno) let's say you believe a player is purposefully trying to emotionally provoke players to get something from them - validation, sexual gratification, it doesn't really matter - how much of a benefit of the doubt are you willing to extent before you do something about it other than have a talk? What's the best way to handle these cases?

It depends on the target audience, at least for me.

Publicly offered story arcs - stuff that basically begins with a new +event accepting all comers - are the easiest, I think, because usually I want them accessible to all comers and I don't have to motivate them too much. All I do is offer a general sense of what it's about ("social", "exploration", etc), the expected risk level, and maybe some very basic IC requirements for joining ("you need to be a Vampire or ghoul in good standing with the Praxis").

Stuff I run for my friends also don't need to include spoilers because I get to talk to these guys ahead of time; I tend to have a decent idea of where they're at, what their characters are about and what they want to do on an OOC level. The tricky part here is to not mold the story too much after those things or in a way they are then spoiling themselves; if they're talking a lot about wanting to go to the Hedge and acquire a magical sword, I need to be careful to either not do quite that, or to twist their expectations in some way.

Either way what's a larger risk - for MU* - is to make people feel like they're in control, nor the story. It's extremely common for STs to place PrPs on rails which is, after all, the ultimate spoiler if you can see where everything's going and you can't even have an effect on it other than to go through the motions. I feel that's the greater risk.

But as for the content... it's a tricky one. My publicly offered scenes tend to be relatively PG13, or at least with no more than one finds in a Hollywood film (that's my standard at least). Little of it applies to stuff I throw to more specific audiences though since they theoretically trust me, and I know them at least somewhat, so I can avoid pitfalls (or communication is open and they know they can tell me if something's heading into hot waters).

@SunnyJ But we might get a Jean Grey/Wolfsbane crossover! THE NORTH REMEMBERS what it's like to be hated and feared.

@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

Hell, I played on Haunted Memories for six years being a person either disliked by staff or in a group specifically targeted by staff via rumors, if not action. Hell, I had the headstaffer and his wife put a "do not contact" order on me partially because I wouldn't let a shitty situation lie but, and here's the fun part, neither could they. I don't know about today, but at the time I wouldn't have trusted them any more than I could throw them, and since I didn't even know where they lived I couldn't throw them an inch.

You touched on something here I hadn't thought of, but which might count for the purposes of this thread... well, maybe.

I used to but I can no longer abide - emotionally, if you will - with knowing people are being screwed over by staff in a game I play, even if that doesn't impact me directly in any way. It just bugs me a lot, and even though a couple of times I made some nominal effort to stick around since I had RP going I didn't want to just abandon it's invariably led to me leaving the MU* not long after. That even included games had a long tenure as a staff and player; after the regime changed on TR and I was made aware of Troy's mishandling of that MGMT person it didn't take longer than a month to walk away, for example.

It's not the content per se that triggers me but it does, and when it happens it's over. To mis-quote Wonder Woman (and @Cupcake) injustice is a turn-off for me.

New Mutants.