Posts made by Arkandel

How CAN SHE SLAP?

I can't even

@Ganymede said in The basketball thread:

@ThatGuyThere said in The basketball thread:

For the Heat they lose they face of their franchise but they also made a sound if completely cold hearted business decision.

Appearing cold and heartless is not the way to attract good free agents. I expect that Miami will once again not be relevant until they draft someone who has the same star potential as a young D.Wade.

Yeah, that screams of a team that will dump you like an old sweater once you're past your peak.

I can blame the Lakers for so many things over the years but they honored Kobe, their flagship player, right until his superb last game. They did a big tour of him to say farewell to the league and yes, in the process they probably lost more games than they would have if they had renewed the team - but got draft picks and showed they intend to repay loyalty in kind in the process.

I think Riley fucked this up really badly. DWade is their best, more iconic player ever and they let him go over $7, which is barely enough to get a bench player. They waited on KD, prioritised Whiteside - who's very talented but his work ethic and personality are both suspect - over him despite the guy having barely been there for a season and a half... that's the wrong way to go about it.

The young players on Kobe's last game saw how he was treated by the fans. They will remember, they will want the same for themselves at the end of their careers; free agents take notice of how certain teams elevate their favorites from contracts to legends... and how others rush to shoot horses when they get old.

So yeah, the Heat might enter the playoffs with a little more depth next season...maybe. Maybe they'll rebuild slightly faster... perhaps. But they lost a lot of respect in my eyes.

@Thenomain said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

Staff are going to get headaches with Changeling's Clarity trait, which will go up and down so much as to make Harmony seem stable.

What changed in GMC's Changeling about Clarity?

@Pyrephox said in Outside the Box GMing:

@Arkandel I dunno! The world of KD has some pretty weird stuff in it - none of which is probably used in a MU*, because it IS weird, but, I mean, the world of Kushiel is pretty weird.

Oh I'm not saying it's not weird - it's weird in a specific way. You can't as easily introduce your own shit to it without someone going 'NAH-AH that doesn't happen in the book!'.

With comic books... well, so much happens in comic books as it is.

@Daeladras Yes! We should have one like that eh?

@Roz That's one of the advantages of being a comics MU* or somewhere you can pull weird shit like that off without running into plausibility issues. For example you can't do it on KD.

@Ganymede Actually btw, yes, OKC's ownership group is terrible. They are very expense-adverse in the way of certain owners (Toronto is among them as well); if their stadium is sold out and the ratings are high they stop giving a shit, and won't spend anything more than they have to.

The franchise has a lot of nerve talking about loyalty after they left Seattle in order to seek greener pastures - they literally dumped a major city! And yes, the Harden mess was really bad, instead of paying more luxury tax leaving one of their biggest players walk away; sure, the Beard isn't exactly a defensive jaggernaut but it's absurd that they were cheap enough to let him go.

If you are a superstar with aspirations of success you want an owner who's as determined to win chips as you are.

@tragedyjones said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

I once shot a man on Reno just to watch him die. How's that for fucking street cred?

Did you abandon him to die of neglect, you flake?

This may be controversial but it's what I think.

In 'big' multisphere games and assuming everyone is reasonably sane and well mannered the effect of the initial staffing team, perhaps even the staffing team at any given time is important but not crucial. What's more critical is how well the overall project is accepted by and embraced by the community at large (which to be fair the names do play a very important role).

What I mean is, the scale of a large MU* like this is considerable - it needs players manning the political scene, populating coteries and packs, running plot, doing things. So a primary consideration is... do the people involved have the street cred (ahem) to generate enough interest and word of mouth to get people to go over and give it an extended try?

Momentum is critical in these endeavors, far more so than in smaller niche games, and the risk is inherently increased compared to a smaller scope since the playerbase is spread out thinner among all the spheres; if you roll a Vampire and look around to find a deserted wasteland of a sphere you are likely to move on, and so will the person rolling the next day since you won't be around to play with them. On top of that MUSHers tend to be very conservative, they'll sit on their current dying game they're actively bitching about rather than give another prospect a chance... unless it gets a good reputation right around then it's the Next Big Thing in which case players do turn to show up in droves - and then the challenge is keeping them.

For this having well known folks around headlining the project is quite important. It's far harder to pull this off as an untried newcomer no one has heard of even assuming they have the skill - obviously the game itself has to still be high quality, the grid and the metaplot must be well done, but to take advantage of it you do want players to show up in the first place.

That's without counting whether or not you'll get those rare players who'll lead in-game factions and attract others around them to generate roleplay. That's even harder.

@ThatGuyThere said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

@Arkandel
I fully support him making new games but his flakiness is why I choose not to play any of them.

I realise that, but I'm trying to tell you two things here.

1. Some very successful MU* have outlived their original creators.

2. Some very bad game creators have stuck around their games, preventing them from moving on and becoming better, only so then can be in charge.

Also dude, if I were on a game and I'm not having fun months after it launches you wouldn't find me there.

@Roz I've tried different formats in the past, some with more success than others. I like to set up long ambitious multi-chapter plots with their own wikis which I'm still tweaking - so that's the first thing, having a central nexus feeding newcomers with information, letting them see who the current primary participants are and get a brief synopsis on the (relatively spoiler-free) story so far so they can decide if it's something they'd like to dip their toes in.

I took a hey-would-this-work approach back while I was staffing Geist on TR by making a big Mortal Kombat-style tournament with a promised huge payoff happen in the Underworld. The idea was to let characters from all spheres compete with NPCs trying to get to the promised prize... and it did work for a time. Mages and Sin-Eaters (predictably) were more interested in it due to the setting itself, the idea got pretty good traction. If I had to redo it though I'd have done so in isolation from other thematic changes I was making in the sphere at the time since keeping the two distinct was becoming a chore, involving a lot of posts on TR's forum, bboards and actual scene logs.

One of my experiments was on Safe Haven Harbor where I tried to pull a Walking Dead by introducing a rival city to the PC's as well as resources they were meant to scramble over. My plan was to break down the story into independent-looking parts and then bring them together organically. That... didn't work as intended; the MU* was smaller and its characters more closely knit than I expected which resulted in a premature gigantic social scene meeting with a potential hostile rival settlement early on. While it was still fun and at least we got halfway into the second chapter in retrospect a more integrated format breaking meetings down into several smaller group-sized scenes would have served them better.

On Eldritch I had a long chat with Eerie before the MU* even opened since I wanted to run a more large scale epic story based on the emergence of a big bad and the recovery of a mythical judeo-christian relic. My revised plan that time entailed breaking down participants in either coterie/cabal groups or, in case of loners, hook them in through their spheres; I ended up sending a ton of @mail and opening +jobs to feed people separate clues through dreams, Auspex visions, spirit interventions and the such. While that approach worked much better to get the hurdle of enormous scenes off everyone's plates I kept having issues managing the momentum - key characters kept dropping in activity, logging on more infrequently and making the endeavour more about logistics than storytelling.

Actually I STed a pair of scenes lately on BITM where I had a group of mismatched mortals to this building where one floor was in a different world than their own. I got pretty good feedback from the players there - this was one of my very few short arc plots, usually I go for the long term - so maybe I need to run more creepy smaller scale stuff.

@Kanye-Qwest Being a flake is commonly thrust as an accusation around here, it's true. We fling it about like it's the worst sin or only a few people ever are accused of it.

The way I see it flakes have been happening forever. You know how many MU* I've seen abandoned and successful at the same time? HM was on autopilot sporadically and in several spheres, it just happened to have a ton of players every night so it just kept going - in fact one of the best spheres I've seen, Vampire, was basically staffless for months. TR? Its creator vanished a few months in, but the timing was right for other people to take up the reigns and it had already been sapping HM's playerbase by then so it kept going.

In other words, it's games which simply lack such numbers - not surprisingly given how shallow our pool of eligible players is - that fail, and then we notice it and stick the 'flake' label on them, but we don't stick it to the ones who keep going because there's still activity there regardless of whether they're well staffed or not.

Something else we might consider: Look at some of the biggest hate-threads on these forums and we might notice something else; people who stick around on the Haven MU*s of our hobbies, our Elsa's if you will, are the ones who are not flakes. Why? Because that's what they got going for them, they are running the games for themselves and couldn't give a damn if they are good or not - as long as they are in charge. Is that a lighter sin than letting your MUSH run its course then letting it slip away into nothingness?

Finally... let's say TJ is a flake. Is it better if he never makes the effort, and a new MU* never sees the light of day, than if it gets made, some people play on it and have fun for a few months then it dies down?

I know I pay money to buy games I fully realize I won't play for more than a month or two on Steam. Why are MU* held to far higher standards of longevity?

@ThatOneDude said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

If you're really looking to create a game for players to enjoy your better off with something a much broader set of players would likely enjoy.

You can't have everything. The more generic your setting is the more players you'll get, that's a given. However you also yield the element of uniqueness and, even if your wiki is otherwise very detailed, your plots very tailored to highlight specific unusual thematic elements etc... there will always be a majority of people who'll treat it as being exactly that, generic. They'll run the exact same highschool girl ninjas and cardboard rich party animals with a heart of gold as always.

I am not saying either of those things is bad on its own, just that they are things. A game set in the 50s or in a post-apocalyptic jungle-covered metropolis or whatever else will cost you in numbers since it won't be everyone's cup of tea but you can tell stories you can't tell elsewhere.

What are the game's goals? Start with that.

@Ganymede My point is though he's being criticised primarily for being a bitch (and signing with a proven winner) and not disloyalty. So it's not at all that he's leaving OKC, only that he's joining GSW.

I think the distinction is the crux of the matter here.

@Ganymede Let's turn this around a little bit.

How would this conversation have played out if KD had signed with Boston or the Knicks?

@ThatGuyThere said in The basketball thread:

I do not feel a cashier need only work for one store ever why would i feel that way about a power forward?

On that point I'm torn.

For one yes, you are of course right. They are both employees of a company hired to do a job so why would it be any different?

For another... they are different. The cashier performs a service that's useful in itself - so does a doctor, a bus driver or a programmer. But an athlete... no one's life is gonna be saved because LeBron blocked the fuck out of Curry, you know? It's all about inspiration, entertainment, projecting hopes and dreams into something which on its own is meaningless.

What does it mean to be a fan realistically? Nothing. You are supporting a company? A color? An idea - what idea is that? And what does 'supporting a team' mean in practical terms? What does it matter if one team wins a title other than what fans emotionally invest in it?

Nothing.

But fans do invest emotionally in it. So that investment is something to be protected because that is where the money is - unless you inspire all those guys to watch, buy tickets and jerseys and talk about it there's nothing in it than some tall guys bouncing a leather ball.

@tragedyjones said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

Setting poll:

Easy: Los Angeles
Medium: Baltimore
Hard: London
Extreme: Tokyo

London. Slightly different, not so much that people pull hilarious/semi-racist approximations of what life in Japan is like according to them.

The cat's vet visit did not go well.

The questions now is how much and how long, and the only answer I'm going to get is to the first one.

@Scorn said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:

It warms my heart to see how cheaply you can be bought, @surreality.

I'm in for whatever you need, @tragedyjones.

We're all buyable here, it's just a matter of pricing.

Something something someone's mom.