Posts made by Arkandel

For anyone who's not sure if racism is largely a thing of the past... perhaps a look at this article first, and then a quick read through the comments section? The latter is as... interesting as the main article.

Someone make this game!

Diseases hidden in ice are waking up, so what can possibly go wrong?

@Packrat said in Fifth Kingdom:

I have to admit that my first thought after looking through the website was along the lines of:

'Ohh god, not vaguely medieval Irish, this is going to be insufferable'. It is going to attract the worst typed accents, weird hagiographic interpretations of inherent Irishness, etc.

It's unfair though to judge a game by the potential behavior of players it doesn't even have yet based on a stereotype, especially as they're specifically not adhering to historic settings.

We've all seen horrors with the nWoD (or even oWoD). Let's see how the game itself goes, since issues like these are cultural, and culture is largely depended on what staff promotes, tolerates or frowns upon especially shaped in the MU*'s early days.

@ArmedCarp said in State of Things:

@kitteh My opinion, racism is kind of a joke these days. Has been for years. Sure it still exists, but wolf has been cried so many times, that there's a certain numbness to it now.

I dare you to read youtube comment sections on any kind of popular link. Holy shit the unfiltered, raw racism there.

Now if we only define racism as actions rather than words written on the internet, I'd say it depends on geography.

Marvel's Inhumans.

@Wizz The flipside of it the same argument is that no matter what you choose to go with needs to excite you first and foremost.

If it doesn't then the project will never work. Period. There's no 'right' and 'wrong' about figuring out theme stuff like this, it's just opinions on different takes, but if you don't love what you end up with then stop and see where you took a wrong turn. No MU* can survive its creator's disinterest at such an early stage.

@SG I don't see why it doesn't contribute, it's a fair point. I could be pedantic and point out I said "most professions" but the truth is I didn't do my research first.

Being a cop seems pretty dangerous but I guess that's comparing it with nerdfests like my own line of work.

Medicate.

Hell, you could integrate parts of the question - what actually happened back then? - into your theme or even metaplot. Oral traditions carried by these fucked up enraged half-men over millenia, stories carried through word of mouth probably intentionally distorted to make for better stories or just to fit contemporary agendas and local fueds; the truth may need to be deduced the hard way.

And even so would all tribes or their established leaders want the truth? Again think of real-life religions; if it could be proven that some precious, time-honored events never took place or happened much differently how well would that go over with them?

What I'm trying to say is you don't need to provide such history as the word-from-above actual-way-it-happened anywhere in your theme. It could have been one way, maybe another, who knows any more? And if someone wants to know (and it might make for a good story) then let them earn it. It's worth more in a ST's hands than sitting in a wiki page from day 1.

@Monogram Then eat my dust on The Defenders, too!

@Lithium said in Computer Science:

Let's put it this way, they've been talking about Evennia for years now, and yet I've never seen a successful Evennia mush. They may be out there, but I've never seen it myself.

Arx is huge. What's your metric for success?

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

A werewolf can /easily/ get upwards of 20+ dice on brawl just to start. Even subtracting defense that's still going to get an exceptional success most of the time, and rote doesn't matter.

I don't understand what you mean. Sure, if you have 15+ dice then you're pretty likely to score an exceptional success on average but the number of successes still matters in combat.

Would you rather score 6 successes or 10?

@Wizz said in Brainstorming: Hybrid/Homebrew Werewolf Game:

It is a very, very different take from the books and I understand it might not really work or make sense, it's just my first idea on how to approach the setting differently.

Okay.

So how do you envision this would translate in-game? Ideally what are the dynamics you would like to see between characters belonging to different tribes and the same one? How do they affect their everyday lives outside the pack? How does it impact packs made from PCs hailing from different tribes?

Let me reverse things a bit if that's okay.

These changes for the Tribes and whatnot - what's the goal here? What are you hoping to accomplish @Wizz ?

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

Does that mean you're going to shut up about "microaggressions" then?

I seriously don't know what that word means anymore.

We call them "posts" on MSB.

I prefer to not try and explain things we do purely for balance's sake in in-game terms. That's just how it is.

In some cases the actual explanation is easy; it overlaps with other stuff. So part of what makes that Rahu able to smack people overlaps with Personal Training for brawl, that's why they don't have it - or, rather, they already do have it under a different name, with slightly different strengths and weaknesses.

But IMHO there's no point in explaining it. It ends up sounding exactly as made-up as it is.

Edit: Erm, professional training. Personal training is something else.

@surreality said in CofD and Professional Training:

@Ganymede I get that, I just think 'this is what you get for choosing this template' is legit enough as an answer.

There are other merits that are 'sphere only' as written that have been the same.

I think once we start mixing buffs and bonuses is where things can break down. Not that all games are meant to be balanced (or against each other) in the first place, of course.

But being able to do these things some 'builds' benefit a lot more than others. Sure, PT for a mortal lets them shoot with rote and 9-again or whatever, but their pools aren't gigantic to begin with; stack it for a Vampire who can burn vitae to improve the pool and suddenly it balloons.

The same thing happened with splats who could buff others. On TR it was common for Mages and Lost PCs to give bonuses to their friends (since it essentially cost them nothing but copy/pasting into a job for their monthlies) and suddenly that changed the game to the have's and have-not's; it's kinda hard to ignore the difference all that extra armor and dice mean if you happen to have friends in the right places.

I do know there were accusations flying back then about fake characters - PCs created for the sole purpose of buffing, who were rarely if ever played otherwise. They just sat in a room, collected freebie auto-XP to buy dice and cast them on their player's OOC friends.

It's easier to compartmentalize at least a bit, assuming of course you care about balance.

@Ganymede Fair enough. I will also accept this counter-argument about cops vs everyone else; what they do is more dangerous than most professions.

To use my own paradigm from before, the worst thing that can happen to me is maybe if I fuck up changing the battery on a UPS it'll fall on my foot, or I'll delete something important and unrecoverable. It's pretty low risk to begin with and much of it can be proactively reduced with the right planning. A cop can die in a second no matter how they do their job.

It's reasonable to accept they get a great deal of leeway for how their job is conducted. Unlawful or not, protected by the constitution or not, grievance or not... if a police officer tells you to do something, you need to do it. Express your reservations and formally complain later, file charges, get the fucker fired if needed but dammit, do it.

How do y'all feel about officers being required to wear cameras while on duty? And being liable if they suddenly stop working at convenient times?