Posts made by Arkandel

Jensen Ackles is Soldier Boy in season 3 of The Boys.

America's Mayor.

Listen, the strange women lying in ponds distributing swords have spoken. It's not a perfect system of government but it's been proven to work.

Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden.

what have I stumbled on

Do you want Planet of the Crabs? Because that's how you get Planet of the Crabs.

<cries in George R. R. Martin>

I don't know if this is accurate or to what degree. It just popped up on my Facebook feed so I'm pasting it here.

I just watched The Boys' season 2 finale.

It was great! The only thing I begrudge about the show is some weaker acting in the midst of some otherwise really well done scenes. For example
Dominique McElligot (who plays Queen Maeve) really couldn't keep up with Antony Starr. It was pretty telling.

Otherwise great stuff, let's see what season 3 will bring!

@L-B-Heuschkel A classic issue (and in some cases, 'issue') is what players can 'get' from a player-ran PrP.

For example your group infiltrates the vampire terrorist group and slays them! Yay! But their semi-automatic weapons are now among their ashes. Can the PCs claim them?

Many staff teams try to regulate this very clearly, and even with the best intentions, yet it often results in creating wiki pages with a zillion rules trying to predict every possible scenario ahead of time. That often makes it... challenging (and hostile looking) to use.

It can end up looking very much like staff does not want you to run a plot that has any impact at all, rather than just trying to make it fair and clear for everyone.

Collaboration, mainly.

Sometimes staff get... defensive. Almost competitive - they try to put too many regulations, too many checks and balances, too many rules.

It all works out so much better if a ST feels they are wanted and prized on the game, and that the plots they throw can be picked up and enriched by the 'official' metaplot rather than merely tolerated.

Damn but Jimmy Buckets played a hell of a series. But unless he went supernova in each game the Heat didn't really stood a chance to win it.

I don't even think they could have with Dragic fully healthy. That Laker defense was suffocating.

Fucking hell. It sounds like gyms will be closed in Toronto again.

I get it, there are record numbers of new Covid19 cases (wear a mask, people!) but I was so happy when I could finally get that me-time back. And I have no room at my place to build a home gym.

Le sigh.

What the fuck. Huh. TIL.

@Wizz said in Good TV:

Man. The Boys is going really hard on the blatant political commentary this season and I'm enjoying it. I think that was the thing I disliked the most in the first season, that it didn't feel like it had much to say beyond a really nihilistic take on superheroes, so this was nice. I am very excited for the season finale.

I think season 1 had to set the stage and focus more on the superheroes, their history and the secrets behind the curtain.

Season 2 seems to be much more about the world they inhabit and their effect on it. The best part is the acting, I think. not everyone is great but the leads have bought into it, and it shows. Antony Starr is kicking some serious ass.

@Packrat

@GangOfDolls Hey, you might be living in a simulation right now.

They need to fix the customization options though and the grind is brutal. Maybe the next patch will fix it.

Here's a different question I think belongs in the thread.

If the hobby 'progressed' in whatever shape or form that might mean, do you think we oldbies would move with the times or is it likely we're more fixated on the form of what gameplay means to us after all this time (black backgrounds with white letters on telnet client screens, long scrolling texts, the slash-based command driven interface) than the concept itself?

I've already read some debate on whether people prefer web interfaces, some asking for more integration and some differentiating the kind of scenes they have on them compared to the classic ones.

Do you think the hobby might outgrow our community even if it maintains some or most of its core tenets and concepts? Would nostalgia be a blocker?

I don't think the hobby will die. It's got a niche - there's nothing quite out there like it, and that alone gives it some pretty good odds.

What's quite likely is that someone else out there will create a real paradigm shift at some point, or that an existing implementation (such as Ares) progressively becomes something only loosely resembling what we would recognize as a MUSH even if it shares many fundamental characteristics. And that may take off.

Us oldbies may even look at that new form and wrinkle our collective noses at it ("that ain't no MUSH! Get off my lawn!") but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

@Auspice said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

so drunk from the Nth iteration of this discussion

Just because many of us here have seen or been part of it that doesn't mean it's not relatively new to others.

Also circumstances change; this conversation wasn't the same before Ares and Evennia became popular.

@tragedyjones said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

Weirdly, online RPing seems to be at an online high in more traditional OTT style games. I am literally playing or GMing in 5 different campaigns right now.

I don't think though that's part of 'this hobby'. A virtual table-top with all the usual trappings of old-style RPGs (a fixed GM dictating play, a small group made up of regular PCs, sessions scheduled in advance) is a different experience than consistent multiplayer worlds populated by whoever happens to be on at the time.

Otherwise yeah for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if Covid and some TV shows like Stranger Things have propelled D&D and the like to peak popularity online.