Posts made by Arkandel

@Bug-In-A-Jar Oh, unless it's hilarious (and few are) I never bother watching video reviews of anything. Words or bust.

I expect three things from any game. If I can't find any of those I walk away.

1. Overall sanity from staff. If they give me bad vibes I'm gone.

2. The trains to run on time. If I spend too long in CGen, if +jobs (especially time sensitive ones) take weeks to get an answer, I'm gone.

3. Relative freedom in plot-running. I'm happy to report and document but if there are too many hoops in my way, I walk.

Those are the deal-breakers, the bare minimums... but what matters is the execution, not the theory.

The implementation is where most MU* which fail do - they have good ideas but they don't execute them. They say they want to run one thing but in practice it's another. So for instance they'll claim they are all about plots but they become so overwhelmed just keeping up with +jobs they can't run anything. Then they realize people who promised they'd run plot don't, or only do very few, and since a few sporadic PrPs can't support the playerbase (or some fade out) it all falls apart at the seams.

Games aren't magic, 90% of it is work. You can't just come up with a good idea, make a nice looking wiki and be off to the races - unfortunately.

The new wave of film/TV critics blogging 'journalists'.

Clickbait, 100% of them. Commonly attacking the most successful movies and shows based on wild speculation and sensationalist articles without any substance - "will Rogue One be a massive failure for Disney? It seems to be wasting its cast!". What? It's not even close to being out, all we have is a freakin' trailer! "It might be trying too hard to stay in the timeline of existing movies so it can't have its own identity".

Or while Game of Thrones is drawing near-record ratings I've seen no less than three Yahoo! first page articles attacking it ("has it become really predictable? Is this the beginning of the end? They are running out of villains.") The real villains of the show have barely been seen and its big-time players are still ascending, what the...

'Clickbait' should be a swear word.

@Admiral said in Good TV:

The character I hate the most is 'random chick with light hair and dark eyebrows'.

She's boring. Her eyebrows don't match her hair. It creeps me out.

Out of morbid curiosity, can you name a few things you love?

My heartbreak was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Never before have I been so wrong about expecting a series to be bad, and then they went and cancelled it.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-rejected-fable-devs-idea-to-put-black-wo/1100-6439777/

@Sunny Agreed.

Most of the time I'm willing to give people the benefit of a doubt when it comes to their motivations, too. If a cool faction with potential is mostly inactive it's no big deal to bemoan their absence with your friends until someone goes 'hey, why don't we roll and fix it?' without considering those already there. That doesn't sound bad, right?

The phenomenon later on expressed itself in a more malicious - but still not necessarily malevolent - way when the same folks, developing groupthink, had a vision for what the faction or even sphere ought to be like no matter what the game was about. This gave us nearly identically xenophobic/isolationist Changeling spheres in several games, for example, where sometimes outsiders could swear only the names changed.

But anyway, I will never begrudge people playing with their friends. Hell I don't even care if they almost exclusively play together - to each their own, in this case literally.

My one objection is, if there are supposed to be IC politics involved, that they allow enough flexibility to make it worth it; so for instance if a group just took over the Carthians and I'm trying to create some internal tension, split votes, spread some paranoia or just try to win individuals' support that there is a reasonable chance it might be considered. If the group is OOC rock solid and every character is 100% dedicated to each other until death and beyond from CGen to the freezer it makes certain kinds of roleplay redundant.

@Lithium said in The 100: The Mush:

Cliques themselves aren't a problem. Cliques are only a problem when they are exclusive rather than inclusive. Where they promote RP only for the people inside the clique and possibly try to stop it for anyone else.

Cliques aren't even a problem when they are exclusive - as long as they are passive about it. It's when the exclusiveness is active that this becomes an issue.

A very early warning sign is people circle-jerking on sphere channels. "Lithium you're SO AWESOME, your journalist is sooo hilarious!" "OhmyGAWD Arkandel you're the best cop EVER, we're having so much fun!" And it goes on and on. It could be done entirely over pages but the intention, conscious or not, is to boast; our group is better than everyone else's. It kind of rubs it in people's faces too if they're having a hard time getting into RP.

But it's not until cliques try to take over, silently or otherwise, that this becomes systemic. They roll into groups with the intention of leading them - they all roll into Carthians if they outnumber the other current members and marginalize them immediately, for example. Or they vote for each other, IC or OOC, until they call the shots - in some cases they can even control who can get into 'their' group entirely, which I saw with certain Families on TR.

Compared to these things having 3-4 people sit in a room running plot and TSing each other isn't a big deal. I mean their scenes probably have a relatively smaller spillover on the rest of the game than they could but there will inevitably be some so it's not a bad thing on its own - it could be much worse.

@Coin What puzzles me is people who've blamed cliques in the past about their lack of activity but, at the same time, acknowledge no one knows they exist.

I.e. they rolled a character, got out of CGen, found themselves a room to idle in, made few if any attempts to meet others, signed up for no +events but no one is inviting them to things.

It's actually a thing that happens. Very peculiar.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Good TV:

So I don't know if anyone here cares for AMC comic drama a la the Walking Dead, but...I am kind of pumped for Preacher.

There are like 20 posts already around here from people pacing around impatiently waiting for Preacher to start.

Garth Ennis, bitches!

@Autumn said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

@Arkandel It's probably due to the effects of having things cost differently depending on whether you buy them in chargen or with XP. That is, if you want to end up with a stat spread of 3/5/3, there is an objectively more XP-efficient way to get there when post-chargen costs are not linear, which disadvantages people who want to start out with a relatively balanced set of stats.

Of course, the other way to do this is to make it more expensive to spike stats in chargen. CoD made tentative baby steps in this direction by having 5s cost extra in chargen, but all that did was adjust the calculations, rather than getting rid of the problem.

Yeah you're right, but it'd have been easier - and more logical - to adjust CGen and match its scaling to the rest of the game than what they ended up doing. It's why I agree with @Ganymede on the matter of the game being worse off in that particular way now than in nWoD 1.0 since diminishing returns has been taken away as a tool to control dice pool inflation.

@Admiral Man, I disagree with @Coin all the time, it's the only sane response.

But you've been pretty grumpy. Lighten up, dude. It's a Friday!

Hey @Admiral, what are your thoughts on the thermodynamic death of the universe?

@Ganymede What I never understood is what the objective of having linear spends was. What was they hoping to get by it? Simplicity? Because it's not that hard to explain you spend '<x> XP per dot' to raise a stat to <x>, surely.

It just... makes no sense. Learning first aid is easy, reading a few books on biology is harder, going to medical school is harder still... all the way to becoming a world-class surgeon which is pretty damn hard. Why make each step cost the same? It's counter-intuitive.

@Lithium What puzzles me is that on a forum where people get personally flamed to hell and back in no uncertain terms anyone would care about a little number going up or down. It's not even in your face, you need to look pretty hard to see the totals.

It's weird.

@Ganymede said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

@Arkandel said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

One of the main problems with the nWoD is how similarly built most physical characters of a certain type are.

Is this due to any sort of XP capping? If not, your example is distinguishable.

To clarify: I have no knowledge of any game on which there were caps and a lot of players with near identical builds. I concede that there are ways to build a PC in CoD to maximize certain benefits, but I think that's true with all systems.

I'll go over nWoD 1.0 because I had better knowledge of what was going on (being staff on games like TR/HM, as opposed to resorting to anecdotal information through chats with friends).

Pre-GMC if fighting styles were in place that was basically what your combat build had to revolve around. If you failed to do so your character would be ridiculously underpowered compared to having it; so for instance if you were going to use guns then CM5 was basically a given. Then once you had that a lot of the build went toward buffing the fighting style's effectiveness - if you had a way to buff dexterity for instance you did, if you could give rote to the action you did, etc. For non-Mage splats there was always a rather finite number of ways that was possible so that's what most people bought, often overnight (in the case of TR).

Mages...were more flexible. But that's just how it played out.

Note that when I say 'identical builds' I'm referring specifically to combat, and only to the part of the +sheet that deal with physical combat. Obviously a brawl-y Gangrel could have any other number of skills and merits as their concept warranted and XP could afford.

@Sandor So be the change you want in the world. Start a campaign.

@Sandor Is there a reason (maybe the admins wouldn't like it?) we can't run PBP games on MSB? Maybe a forum just for that kind of thing would work.

@Ganymede said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

I cannot think of a single instance where this has ever happened.

You've never been more wrong!

One of the main problems with the nWoD is how similarly built most physical characters of a certain type are. The only difference is the weapon of choice (brawl vs melee vs firearms), if applicable the fighting style used and then the powers which boost that weapon (if you're going with Brawl and you're Gangrel you have the merit for aggravated damage and Potence, for instance). There're definite builds which are either followed or you're gimping your PC's potential. For example in the nWoD 1.0 if you had a character with a multi-attack fighting style and one without it the difference in firepower was enormous.

@Vorpal And yet that lady is so easy on the eyes.