@Miss-Demeanor One of the most fun betas I've ever been in was for Magic Online a long time ago. For something like... I dunno, two years? They gave you free boosters every week and you just played and traded. I loved it.
It was also ran by WotC so ... fingers crossed. 
My regular basketball group broke up a while ago after the school gym we were using became unavailable as of last August, which means it's been almost a year since I played.
I just subscribed to a new meetup at the UoT. I've missed playing a lot, dammit. Hopefully everyone there won't be in their early twenties and 6'5+.
@Miss-Demeanor said in Dungeons and Dragons:
@Arkandel Actually, what they've put up is THE Compendium. Not just monsters. The basic rules for how to play the game. Basic equipment, armor, mounts, lifestyle costs, spells, etc. A breakdown of the stats (both abilities and skills). How to run a basic campaign. Essentially... everything you would need to run a D&D 5E starting campaign.
That sounds more promising then. I just hoped to see the actual interface they have up for running campaigns - the sleeker that is the more likely I am to actually pay for it when it goes live.
I suppose it'll also depend on what the payment model will be... a monthly subscription, buy to own, features like print on demand etc.
Edit:
@Miss-Demeanor said in Dungeons and Dragons:
They've just put everything from at least one, and possibly two books, online, for free.
It's not for free, it's for the free beta.
@Ganymede said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:
@Arkandel said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:
You have the Hand as your bad guys and there's not one fucking ninja in the whole season?
Dude, not every ninja needs to go around looking like a villain from TMNT.
YES THEY DO THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF NINJAING
The first stage of the beta opened today. So far there... really isn't that much to test, really, from what I can see. What they've made available is a help files with a simple index, and categorized searchable spellbook and monsters' compedium. The interface is clean enough, but so far it's nothing that much better than what you can see on a wiki.
Hopefully the next stages will bring in the oomph.
Oh! OH!
My biggest issue with the entire series, its most inexcusable fault!
You have the Hand as your bad guys and there's not one fucking ninja in the whole season? Not one? Danny is fighting people in jeans and windbreakers? Come on!
@Ganymede said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:
True. I suppose my observations are limited to serials, rather than movies.
I'll never give up on Marvel's Agents of SHIELD either. It's seen some slumps but that's a good show.
@Pyrephox I think we are spoiled, that's all. Netflix's in particular have been stellar.
@Coin said in Where's your RP at?:
@Cupcake said in Where's your RP at?:
While watching it the other night, it occurred to me that as a dystopian setting, Into the Badlands might be pretty perfect as a MUSH.
It's as good a basis for a MU as any other show, really. Depending on how the second season goes, it'll become clear whether or not they're going to flesh the world out a little more. As it is it's pretty sparse, which is not a condemnation. It was only a 6 episode season. More of a miniseries, really.
I couldn't tell while I watched it if the ambiguity was because the writers simply didn't bother fleshing out the setting and giving us more detail, or if it was intentionally that way; in fact for the purposes of making a MU* out of it that might be a good thing - "martial arts meets post-apocalyptic western" is a pretty good base to build on.
@Clarity Yes, it was fun. It's just not on par with Jessica Jones, Daredevil or Luke Cage, all of which had a really interesting angle.
JJ dealt with the impact superhuman characters have on ordinary people, and David Tennant was amazing, DD was gritty and nasty, he didn't win fights as much as he outlasted them. LC was a love song (sometimes literally) to Harlem and its culture.
Iron Fist was entertaining but not on that level.
@Insomnia said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:
@Arkandel said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:
Joy's turnaround in the finale was also... peculiar. What the hell? She met a guy she'd never seen before and suddenly she's plotting against Danny because reasons?
Because everything is Danny's fault. Did you have to pee the eleventy billion times it was said?
Every time he said I'm sorry turned me into an alcoholic.
I joke, kinda, because the damn show did have potential. I didn't dislike it, I swear. After all I binge-watched the fuck out of it! But the final act was a really big let down - it's a martial arts series, at least give us a final martial arts fight!
There will be spoilers in this thread. I just want to discuss the show. So there will be spoilers.
Spoilers.
No, really, stop reading if you don't like spoilers.
So I didn't like the second half of the season. The first 6 episodes, I felt, were interesting; I was invested in the character gaining control over Rand, to see why he left K’un-Lun in the first place and even what his actual powers were. Harold was also an intriguing villain since he was devious and calculating, someone who seemed like a good match for a showdown against a physical character - plus there was promise in the writers spending so much time showing him training.
Too bad none of it mattered.
For starters this is the first Netflix Marvel series where the hero doesn't have a good boss fight. Not one. Bakuto being in an one-vs-one against Colleen... fine, okay, plus it was a cool fight. I think I preferred her fight against that Hand chick a few episodes back because of the mixed sword styles.
But after all that, the final fight involved as a guy holding a gun and Danny trying to not get shot by hiding behind stuff. The villain's immortality - the one superpower he had - turned out to be utterly useless to him. In fact the only cool fight Danny had in the whole show was the one against that drunken master guy, and he didn't even have to fight him; he could have just let the guy sleep!
Joy's turnaround in the finale was also... peculiar. What the hell? She met a guy she'd never seen before and suddenly she's plotting against Danny because reasons? Sure, Madam Gao was present but it still felt pretty contrived to me.
Thoughts?
@Roz said in Hobby Glossary:
@Arkandel said in Hobby Glossary:
@Roz said in Hobby Glossary:
Mav is one of the first that comes to mind.
I swear, I never figured out what 'mav' stands for. Mis-...something?
It's short for Maverick, a player from what back when (I think on AmberMUSH?) who was notorious for mis-paging/talking on the wrong channel. So the term got coined as a shortening of his name.
Seriously? Damn, that guy got immortalized!
@Roz said in Hobby Glossary:
Mav is one of the first that comes to mind.
I swear, I never figured out what 'mav' stands for. Mis-...something?
@SG said in Silly-ish Poll:
Is it a regional thing? This is the first I've come across people saying a dump stat is their high one.
Probably a cultural thing. I mean on some games there might not even be useless stats due to the mechanics, in which case the dump stat becomes the one they pour spare points in.
Yeah, I always use 'dump stat/skill' to refer to XP sinks, stuff that does very little mechanics-wise or is really circumstantial.
TS comes to mind. But basically tiny-everything is pretty unique to the hobby.
+jobs instead of tickets, which most people would identify from the real world?
The grid, referring to a game's built, described, interconnected world.
Dunno, this is a big project. You're probably better off sticking it on a wiki and let people add items then just curate occasionally... individual games have a ton of native terms, too. "Emote fighting" for example is what we used to call purely posed combat in a MUD I played, but I've not seen the term picked up anywhere else since.
@Auspice said in Random links:
My fault for taking from Arkandel's tone that people were getting angry over it.
Hey, all I said was people were bitching about it - I didn't even mean commentators, I meant whoever wrote it.
It's a movie. If we start nitpicking those enough for conforming to modern standards of hygiene or beauty then we should have a beef about all the other non-contemporary ones where every peasant has perfect teeth, etc.
What really, really stupid thing will internet-people bitch about next, you ask?
@Tanyuu said in Getting a sense of what sort of MU* ads are okay:
If the MU* was something that I had a hand in, I'd probably just post it in the advertisements section and be fine with it all. However, since I'd be posting ads for MU*s I don't have a personal hand in creating, I'm being a bit more cautious on that front and gauge how people felt about it.
It probably doesn't matter if you're not part of staff if you want to advertise a game you think is cool - you might be doing us a favor. The only exception I can think of is MU* whose staff don't want advertised, if for example they're still in beta or for any other reason.