Posts made by Arkandel

@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:

What I really wanna know is: Have Grey and a staff-alt Grounder hooked up yet for the inevitable "romance across political line" thing?

Inevitable? I'd expect it to be the default.

@Roz What wut? Pietro and Wanda aren't Magneto's children any more?

Uhm, what about House of M? Age of Apocalypse? What the hell, why are they shitting on 50 years of history plus big fairly recent big events based explicitly on the premise he was their father?

Is making headlines at all costs that important? Do these gimmicks actually work?

Up next: Peter Parker murdered Uncle Ben in an act of insurance fraud to fund his scholarship!

@Coin said in The 100: The Mush:

What this thread has taught me is that no matter what, "good game" and "bad game" are subjective and people will always find something to praise and something to damn about anything, and that someone will always rise up in defense and someone will always double-down on criticism when that happens.

So, really, I guess it didn't teach me a damn thing I didn't already know.

Agreed. I think it's one of the reasons being staff is a tricky act since you have to find a way to tell which of the players' concerns are legitimate concerns about things which can and should be improved, which of them are simply a matter of them wanting something different than what you're trying to run and which ones are just entitled bellyaching.

People have screwed up misidentifying all of the above, sometimes with hilarious results. It is pretty difficult, especially since at the time of actual staffing a MU* your perspective is different.

New gym. This one isn't a commercial chain, there's no marketing stuff, corporate inspirational banners or daycare rooms for soccer moms, it consists only of a bunch of benches, iron plates, racks and barbells in a big square space. No Justine Bieber or Taylor Swift blasting on the speakers either, this one is all about Aerosmith, Guns and Roses, Springsteen and their kin.

So I ride my bike over all pumped up for my first session! Personal record on the first set of flat bench press, woohoo! Another set! I'm rolling! Third set, I'm rolling! Forth set... ugh, fail on the last rep, roll of shame.

... It turns out being at a new gym isn't the same as being bitten by a radioactive gainz spider.

@vanderlylle said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

Didn't Spider try to set up this game already? Victorian London Mage?

The people involved and the way it's implemented count a great deal more toward the success or failure of a game than its setting, IMHO.

Staff a MU* well, put thought and creativity into it, time it right and it'll probably be great whether you set it in the most generic modern US metropolis, medieval Chinese village or on the Orient Express traveling through the world.

The major difference is being inspired by the theme and providing more ready-to-use hooks for plot-runners to use. Not that these aren't more important factors, mind you.

@saosmash said in Comics Stuff:

The last big dumb anti-Semitic thing that happened in comics was Remender on Brevoort's watch and he was just as dismissive then as he is now.

I've not read anything about that. What happened?

@Thenomain Speaking of trust, there are comic writers who are fairly celebrated but I don't get it. Jeph Loeb is my go-to guy; just about anything he puts his hands on turns to shit. He took one of my favorite series of all time - Mark Millar's Ultimates - and the drop in quality was immense and immediate.

And yet he kept being given new titles and opportunities.

@Thenomain said in Comics Stuff:

@Arkandel

Three people have written Spider-Man for the movies, so I'm not sure how you can say one person writes for the movies. They're getting reset once every few years. Movies put you in the situation where you are potentially resetting expectations with each one.

TV shows, now....

Yeah, basically I'm saying the same thing Allan Moore has in the past albeit less gracefully; that if two people write the same character it's not really the same character any more.

Or as an example... one person can run Punisher as a gritty realistic comic focusing on his unending war on crime, but another can have him mix it up with supervillains, give him gadgets and whacky weapons turning in a more campy story. Neither approach is 'wrong' per se (both have been done extensively in the past) even though they're both writing Frank Castle but they're fundamentally different.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Comics Stuff:

And while I'm sure this Cap storyline will end up impermanent, or retconned, or banished to an alternate timeline...for now, that's not how they are presenting it. They are saying the real, no-bullshit Captain America has been a Hydra (Nazi) agent all along.

I think it will be swept under the rug - not retconned per se, just not referenced again.

Same as Tony Stark having basically committed war crimes to incite Civil War over his own interests. I don't remember anyone having said a thing about that stuff in the comics for a very long time now, it's like it never happened, but it's not removed from continuity either.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Comics Stuff:

It's because Captain America was created by Jewish writers as a way to show the American way defeating what amounts to Nazis.

I get what you're saying but Superman was also created by Jerry Siegel who was Jewish IIRC and there was at least one (fairly well regarded) elseworlds comic placing him as both a Nazi and USSR superhero with zero backlash.

@Thenomain I can't decide if what MGMT was doing was worse than staff protecting him. But he was pretty damn bad.

I liked X-Men: Apocalypse. It wasn't great by any means but it worked in many ways and actually cared about fan service as well as telling its own story. The new (new new) X-Men roster is fun and there's chemistry between the actors; I'd actually like to watch a team made of the new Jean, Scott, Nightcrawler, Quicksilver, etc.

My one peeve which isn't spoiler-y if you've watched any trailer at all - there's a lot of emphasis on Mystique being a leader/revered hero type. On its own I don't mind that but it's because she's being played by Jennifer Lawrence whose star value skyrocketed since the contract was signed, and it turned a perfectly good spy/infiltrator/mysterious character into a front-line person which wasn't ideal.

@Thenomain said in Comics Stuff:

Character is an incredibly important aspect of fiction. Writing a character wrong is still bad writing, so I think we're on the same page here.

The fundamental difference between novels and comics is the same person always tends to write the former but the latter is taken care of by a paid employee; so on top of style (Bendis likes big dialogue boxes, Miller likes exposition and prose, etc) eras themselves change, fashions (in terms of what's popular) do as well, and in the end the editors in chief strategize differently -- when your boss says you have to downplay the X-Men because the company doesn't have the movie rights to them, you do it.

What I am personally peeved by is when gimmicks take over or a book reads more like someone's pet project than what it says on the label. This Cap thing is meant to get attention - that's it; everyone knows it'll be reversed in a bit so what's the point? Similarly if I pick up Spider-man, Thor or whatever it's because I want to read those iconic characters; if it's Doc Ock or a female Thor it's... not. The title feels misleading, it's a bait and switch.

@Creepy said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

@ mietze and @Arkandel I like multiple sphere selections so players can have greater freedom in telling their personal stories. That might be a direct result of having only staffed at HM and TR. I'm not afraid of it being a niche server but I'd like to build with the hope that it wouldn't be a small player base.

Yes, that's one of the advantages of having many spheres. The drawback is that you need these spheres staffed - and good people who can stay consistently active, can work with each other, require a relative small overhead of administration on your end and know their stuff aren't exactly easy to find.

You worked on HM and TR so you probably know what that's like.

@Arkandel Yeah alternative Victorian London or whatever city would be the plan. I'd avoid steampunk and focus a bit more on grit with some tweaked historical backgrounds. The problem is I want the history/flavor of London without the massive sprawl/size.

All I was thinking about is not having to worry too much about historical accuracy for that time frame; players are unlikely to know many details about everyday life (is there indoor plumbing? are women allowed to do <X>? how does parliament work? how does inheriting money/land work?) which are bound to come out in real life - but if you're doing an alternate setting you can just make it all up, put it on a wiki page and no one will bat an eyelash.

@Creepy I think the setting is great and ripe for a MU*. A couple of suggestions since you're asking:

1. Set it in a slightly alternate universe Victorian London - you probably want to avoid historical purity.

2. Maybe start with a small number of spheres, see how your staff is holding up, what your playerbase wants etc and if you want to add more you always can.

@Vorpal said in Comics Stuff:

No. I've got nothing, really. I don't see how they can pull this off without staining Cap.

The problem isn't (only) staining Cap. It's explaining how come he stopped Hydra from taking over the world the last 3487 times. Oh, and being around telepaths and mind readers for years who didn't pick this nugget up.

@Pyrephox I always thought chemistry existed between players primarily. Which isn't to say I haven't had rapport with someone but we just couldn't make it work for our particular characters because it has happened, but it's very rare - I can't think of a case at least - to have solid chemistry with another PC but not their player overall.

@Apu said in Overwatch, anyone?:

XBox for Windows controller

That's, like, my nightmare.

@ThatGuyThere said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

Is it just combat that MUSHes go turn-by-turn for? Burning Wheel comes to mind as a system that treats duels-of-wit with the same narrative gravitas as duels-of-sword.

That's one of the reasons I don't like generalising on what the cultural differences 'MUDs' and 'MUSHes' are, since the lines aren't that fixed at all. We necessarily discuss ranges rather than fixed implementations.

For example I coded/played for a RP MUD. It had coded combat - where you went around and killed mobs, got XP/items/gold... all that stuff. However we very quickly discovered it wasn't applicable to roleplay; you couldn't pose the actual fights since coded combat lasted for under 30 seconds or so, it was affected by factors we didn't consider appropriate (lag for example - this was the 90s, too) and the first attacker tended to win since if you're in the middle of posing or go to the bathroom mid-scene you could come back dead. It made no sense.

So we decided combat should either need to take place before the roleplay which led to practical issues (what if your character begged for mercy, decided to run away, offer a bribe etc in poses?) or it'd have to be turn-based. We were in the middle of coding a proper system for that which would allow you to target specific body areas with different effects - the torso for more sheer damage, legs to reduce mobility, etc - but by that time the playerbase was dwindling so it never got finished.

The point is, if the MUD is supposed to facilitate RP and unless I see a coded MUD system that's superior to turn-by-turn I don't know of a better system for either MUDs or MUSHes.