Posts made by Arkandel

@Pyrephox Agreed. And how players (and thus characters) respond to such desperate choices is equally as important.

My ideal Hunter game would offer characters the chance to lay their hands on equalizers - a weapon, a flask with a mysterious potion, something that evens out the odds and temporarily lets them go toe to toe with the monsters... only to find themselves changed in the process, becoming closer to the things they hunt than who they were before.

But to do that takes work and creativity otherwise they'll just be... perks. Rather than "woohoo, I got a magical glowing sword, bitches!" it should be "holySHIT did this damn knife just tell me I need to kill someone every day or it'll take my soul?". And other PCs' reactions should be mistrust, antipathy and GET RID OF THAT FUCKING THING DUDE instead of 'hey, let's bring Bob with his magical glowing sword to our next adventure!'.

You know?

One of the things I'd like to see for BITN (and any Hunter game out there) is to have the monsters be on the winning side. It should never be that Hunters are actually pushing them out, where they are a factor to be reckoned with - the city should never be clean other than for the occasional, quickly dispatched horror who manages to get in only to become slaughtered.

My vision of such a game would be one where they're trying to make a dent - that's it. Now and then they score a victory and stake a bloodsucker but more often than not their car is mysteriously blown up and they get fired from their day-job because they keep going to work bruised and sporting black eyes.

Mind you, it'd be the lazy way to do this strictly or mostly through killing a few PCs - which should happen, I'm just saying it shouldn't be the go-to way as you can't roleplay the consequences of your own PC dying and if people around you die all the time you'll simply grow jaded; there are other, more fun ways to incorporate loss. The more theme itself has characters swimming against the tide, doing all they can just to stay afloat, the more successful it'll be.

@tragedyjones Deja vu!

@tragedyjones said:

In case you are wondering, it is you, the reader.

I knew it.

@Coin said:

I think high character death/turnover would help a lot with the last bit.

Do we have an example of a high death/turnover MU* which worked? And I define 'work' as in 'retained an active playerbase of more than a handful of people'.

It's not a rhetorical question, I don't know if we do. The successful games I can think of in this context were all ones the same characters were often played for more than a RL year each and involuntary PC death was infrequent.

@Ganymede Aw, we don't hate your ideas. Don't be silly.

We hate you.

Gym wildlife, an important documentary.

@Vorpal I'm sorry, Vorpal. That really sucks.

@Ganymede I'm partial to Love and Basketball but even so... if you compare the top non-basketball movies to those you'll see the difference. Hell, the Mighty Ducks probably did better than any basketball movie ever made.

@ArmedCarp Their batteries holding a charge is an issue, that's about it. To give you an idea, I had a replacement tracker sent which itself had battery issues so now they're sending me a second replacement for the first placement.

There's a suspicion it could be because I was charging from a wall socket instead of a computer's USB port (!) which is silly since I've been using the same one to charge a bunch of different devices, but...

@tragedyjones Your core muscles must be iron hard, hauling that thing around your neck all day long.

@ArmedCarp If you want to track your paths the Surge is great since it comes with GPS. If you don't but you still want your tracker and smartphone to talk (for music control, text notifications, etc) the Blaze will do. If you just want caller ID, the Charge. If you just want steps and maybe a heartbeat monitor almost any model will do - and you get to save a ton of money in the process.

You can use https://www.fitbit.com/ca/compare to see for yourself which model has what.

The Witcher 3 was probably the best game that's come out the last 2-3 years, as far as I'm concerned. It's so good, and it's enormous, you can play forever. It's a true successor to Skyrim in that way.

@tragedyjones We don't need an excuse but it's always good to have extra ammunition.

@Arkandel said:

The new Mistborn novel is out! Brandon Sanderson's Shadows of Self came out today.
... The new Mistborn novel is out! The Bands of Mourning came out today.

... I think he's just messing with us.

The new Reckoners novel by Brandon Sanderson is comes out tomorrow! Calamity - a post-apocalyptic superhero series of novels - is the third installment in the series.

That guy can't be human.

Updated with my first ever superhero. Let's see how this one goes.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I've heard of Strava. Since my Fitbit model has GPS I haven't used it but I think it's one of the good ones. Have a ton of fun with your new bike!

@tragedyjones Fuck you! I'm a dragon!

The answer is always Rick.

Always.

@faraday said:

If you dump all your points in basketweaving you're not going to be as combat-effective as someone who dumped them into firearms.

I put my trust in the internet and as usual it didn't disappoint me.