Posts made by Arkandel

@RDC said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

Why let Protean claws do lethal damage to vampires? Honestly, because I think it might decrease the usage of Claws of the Unholy.

The most important case for Claws of the Unholy for me is as a counter-balance to Werewolves. Uratha are amazing combat machines but they've very few ways of preventing aggravated damage but will laugh at lethal especially in Gauru. If you pin two combat monsters in a white room against each other and take out the aggravated damage portion the wolf will win - assuming the vampire can't one-shot them, of course.

With aggravated damage on the claws it's a far more fair race.

@VulgarKitten Being on your FB I think I've seen your mom on there. So she's, y'know, on it. That sounds like a mom-guilt trip, the kind they are very well versed at!

@surreality Damn. You better get better.

@Seraphim73 said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:

@Arkandel There's also the issue with any game that's lasted more than a couple of years where people gain positions of power simply by outlasting their contemporaries. This is particularly true in GoD/DoD's case, as there was a wave of departures (in fact, DoD could be seen as one of them) that drained a lot of the upper levels of power away.

That's pretty much the case for any MU* I've ever been in; people drop out and others take their place. While it has effects of its own (say, in Vampire the upper echelons of power are typically supposed to be static as opposed to the PC Prince changing every 3 months because their player burned out) it's probably impossible to avoid unless you use NPCs for those positions.

Look at it as a circle of life. The old give way to the new. It's not necessarily a bad thing, other than that you miss your friends after they move on.

@Ganymede Speaking as a new Star Wars player who's familiar with the movies and has watched Clone Wars (I need to watch Rebels...) along with a couple of books back in the day, but is in no way an expert in the SW universe, what makes or breaks a MU* - as usual, I guess - isn't the mechanics.

I mean sure, it's important that you can roll at least the archtypes and that there's leeway to do each differently but really what it comes down to is what will I be able to do? What kinds of things are there to do after I roll? Sure, I got a blaster/saber/X-Wing but now what? How much help is there by staff, is the player culture a positive experience, how often are events ran, are there things happening?

In DoD's case I've been talking to some of their oldbies and at least one expressed reservations about SAGA in particular just because of its complexity - it intimidates newbies, and she's seen people be overwhelmed and leave because of it. I suppose I can relate to that since even if you get great help to build your PC (and they're excellent about it) it takes a bit from your agency as a player, and it still means you probably don't know how to play it or what you can do with it in regular scenes ("how do I try to tell if someone's lying?").

A macro-effect might also mean that those more adept with a system are the ones to rise in IC power which aren't necessarily the best roleplayers. I am in no way going to imply a correlation/causation link here (many people are excellent at both mechanics and posing) but it's still something to consider. With a simplistic system like WoD that's not as much of an issue since the gap between the filthy casuals and the dice doctors isn't as deep.

@Pondscum That's a cute dog and she knows it. Does she get snarky with other cute dogs?

@ThatGuyThere Don't you fucking encourage @Misadventure.

@Autumn You can't take my righteous indignation from me!

My boss' dog which he's been bringing to the office for years passed away today. She was the nicest one, too, very polite and gentle (she'd only stare at you sadly while you ate), never demanded attention or got in the way... she was a very dignified, good dog. He was really attached to him, too, and always used to stand behind the back door when he'd go outside waiting until he returned.

Here's to you, Molly. I hope you don't mind waiting for a bit longer this time.

@Seraphim73 See, with me it's not so much that I don't like playing in a system with real depth to it even if I bellyache until I learn the ins and outs. It adds to the overall fun, and I like to twink - it gives me an extra incentive to try and get in-game goodies to improve my character.

What I don't like is turning that into a game-wide imperative, to make it necessary to twink else - or so the implication goes - your PC can't go as far. That's a big no-no in my book since some of the best players I've been around barely ever cared about systems and their +sheets were simplistic as hell (in fact a few didn't even spend the XP they did have); although quality roleplaying and twinking are not mutually exclusive by any means, I don't want to play in a game where only powergamers can succeed.

All that is theoretical, mind you. I'm not saying this is the case on DoD, a MU* I'm enjoying.

I edit my posts sometimes but mostly for missing words, misspellings, etc.

I doubt this is a real issue though. It sounds more like a peeve-of-the-day to me.

@Ganymede It rubbed me the wrong way the other day when someone, after he asked and looked at one of our group's +sheets, gasped "What?! You took <talent>?!" over on a public channel.

I've never seen that happen on a WoD MU*. People pick stupid powers and/or don't know how to use them all the time and zero shits are given.

Maybe it's just a different culture - or (equally as possible, to be fair) I might be judging from a very small sample of incidents here.

@Lithium Hey, you just summarized the exact one complaint I have so far of DoD. People are super into +sheet optimization, at least one faction leader was asking to look at +sheets before he'd assign tasks to newcomers, etc. It's rare that I've seen mechanical efficiency take such focus in a game from the beginning.

I don't know if it means anything though. And I mean that literally - I haven't been on the game enough to know what the effects of this are on RP.

@Lithium I loved Magicians. But then again I really enjoyed the book as well, and I was really into Mage at the time.

Although I had enjoyed season 1 of Sense8 sometimes the Christmas Special seemed to drag on. Its heart is certainly in the right place and I love the composition of colors and images - it's inspired and inspiring - but often I felt I was watching the same scene for what felt like 5+ minutes which basically consisted of a song playing while everyone joined in an activity their minds... well, it got boring.

Maybe I'm just heartless.

I'm having fun on Dawn of Defiance. It's using SAGA so it's a bit heavy on the mechanics from that end but it's active.

@Catsmeow Username checks out.

@gasket said in Taking your ball and going home...:

AKA deleting comments and/or entire threads when things aren't going your way.

Why is this allowed / why is this a good thing? We already have to re-re-retell old history whenever 'this is why X is a horrible person and should be avoided' comes up, rather than point to WORA and let them figure it out on their own. It's much easier to avoid he-said she-said when, you know, one doesn't get to stir shit and then delete it all.

Generic gripe is generic.

Can we hear some specifics? For what it's worth I haven't noticed many deleted posts, and no one but admins can delete threads - only our own individual posts.