Posts made by Arkandel

@Lithium, as you noted - repeatedly - this is indeed your game. As such you can indeed make every choice about it that you see fit.

However you posted about it on a forum for other people to comment upon, and if you don't mind me saying so you sound a bit defensive about anyone having different ideas than your own. That, too, is fine but it begs the question of why you brought it up here in the first place.

If it's for advertisement purposes only there's a sub-forum for that. Otherwise you should expect brainstorming because that's what we do here, and if you can't handle different ideas than what you've already decided on you'll end up frustrated. Well, or more frustrated than you already sound which seems like a non-inconsiderable amount.

@HelloRaptor said:

Mage as a game plays well with most things. Mage players don't always, and non-Mage players frequently don't.

It's sometimes a chicken-and-egg situation. Asshole players cause asshole responses.

For example on HM I ran a plot which kicked off with a dead kid found drained of blood, and my intention was for vampire PCs to go investigate a possible Masquerade breach and find more than they expected. Well, a Mage player paged me and wanted to investigate as well since dead kids make the news. I informed the bloodsuckers' players in passing someone else was involved and they lost their shit. I was told point-blank by several of them if Mages were getting into it, they were out of the plot.

Now, the Mage player in question was Dyaria so there's that but they players didn't know who it was at the time. A 'Mage PC' is all they had been told, and it was enough.

@JDCorley said:

There were many good follow-on effects of this system. If you wanted to see a character played, you posted about it and someone could try it without much in the way of investment. So you saw characters played that had rarely been played before. You could express clearly what you wanted from the character and everyone could see it. You could instantly put a team of 4-5 characters together, have a rollicking adventure, then high five and move on to a different situation.

That sounds pretty fantastic, actually. Making people write a background for Hawkeye when there are a zillion official of them around is plain dumb. And doing soft resets on the character when he switches hands, given how fluid comic-book continuity is to begin with, should be a blessing - then if he had been sleeping with Black Cat all that time because fetish, well it's gone now when the new guy takes over.

No, it's a great concept.

I may be beating a dying horse but there are so many things wrong with this kind of thinking.

• One player screws up, everyone is penalized for it
• Female characters are likely more affected than men (that's speculation on my end)
• It adds to staff workload for a minimal benefit at best
• Just what 'too sexy' is is subjective.
• It's fantasy, where female heroes wearing tight leather outfits is very much a trope.
• The whole thing is stupid unless people were making Shang-like descriptions (which @Lithium's post didn't make it sound like that was the case)

Bah humbug.

I've literally never heard of a game that micromanaged descriptions like that unless they were truly absurd. Wow.

That turned me off a bit to this game again. Maybe it's for the best.

Edit: Were sexy males also banned? ("What do you mean your PC has biceps? You some sort of gigolo?")

In Chrome and using the "Readable" theme the "X" button on the top right of the chat window isn't visible. It's there and clickable but not showing.

I keep thinking about Tenebrae every once in a while. I got a gigantic fantasy itch to scratch - it's closer to a rash by now.

Although this was written with authors in mind, I think we might be able to pick up a few things from it to improve our shitty poses. Or maybe not. Either way here it is, an article recommended by Brandon Sanderson.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/08/26/i-smell-your-rookie-moves-new-writers/

@Sunny said:

@Arkandel @Tempest

There will be ranks in play, both within certain racial factions and with the families. There will not be hard activity lines drawn/enforced. In the cases of racial factions, the leadership will be starting out as NPC; whether we change that or not depends heavily on what the landscape ends up looking like. We're using Mystery Cult Initiation for the families, so that's a 1-5 merit; 5 is family head (or public family head, in some cases). Other positions (like Sheriff) correspond to the various factions' status merits.

Fair enough.

What turns me off is the idea of ranks acting in a musical chairs fashion. <Ranks> open and a bunch of people run-run-run to grab every position available. In fact it's already happened if you already have people snatching some of them weeks or months before the game even opens!

It's your game, obviously, but my suggestion is that since you want PCs to take over ranks, to let it happen as organically as possible. Let players prove themselves first, roleplay on the grid politicking and earning their stripes rather than +jobs asking staff for things before anyone else even has a chance to pose at all. You say you're planning to do that with factions, and that's great, so why not with Families as well?

My assertion is that, otherwise, much like in real-life politics, you end up with exactly the kind of folks who shouldn't hold positions hold positions.

@FiranSurvivor said:

Sorry I meant in the past. I haven't played on CS for... 3-4 years. During my time there was quite a few cheaters.

I don't know the first thing about the issue at hand so take this comment with a huge grain of salt, but in my experience the definition of 'cheating' can vary wildly and it's often the by-product of badly designed systems.

For example in some games XP is derived from votes, and often people have an infinite amount but their impact is diminished (i.e. as you get voted by the same person you gain less and less XP). So it was a common phenomenon on at least one I've been on for people to 'farm' large scenes, since they had opportunities to trade +votes with impunity. They'd go to a huge gathering, type +vote/here or whatever, pose a couple of times and then idle off.

Is that cheating? I'd say no (and others would say yes) but either way it's not black and white. Was the system badly designed? You betcha.

@Tempest said:

Ranks/Positions/Titles/etc need to have play requirements that are enforced.

Sure, if you just wanna play your character, nobody else is entitled to your time. But as soon as you decide you want to be Sheriff/Family Head (assuming it's a staff-made family)/etc, you should be expected to be going out of your way to play outside your circle of friends.

That's taking a problem then trying to apply a solution to it which is worse than the original; it introduces the issue of how it's going to be monitored, how the condition of "playing outside your circle of friends" is to be judged, etc.

In the process it doesn't actually solve the problem it was meant to fix in the first place, which is the generation of OOC drama by people chasing after ranks.

@Sunny said:

I would like to have all of my family heads in place prior to opening. Some of the families are fairly well defined, some of them are still just broad strokes. If you think you might be interested in taking a family and would like to work with me from step one, let me know here or on my site.

What are your views on PCs holding ranks in general for your game, and what is the difference between 'ranks' and positions such as this Family Head idea?

I ask because for ever @EmmahSue leading the Carthians to glory there are three special snowflakes clenching those onto things like their life depends on it.

That's true. Or you could introduce your own universal threat in the metagame while allowing each sphere's own baddies to deal with their own menaces - after all non-staff STs would need plot devices like that.

It's hard to say what Mage plays well with in 2.0. It's just so hard to launch games in fact with unpublished material because a few (?) months from now when the actual books launch it'll be a bitch to put the genie back in the bottle.

Otherwise Beast plays well with just about everything by design, I think, so you might want to consider that as well. Especially since at least one version of its rules, early and prone to changing but out is in the wild. And I didn't even intend for that to be a pun.

GMC pretty much excludes some spheres at the moment unless you're willing to house rule their existence for 2.0 until their own splats pan out. Is that the case or are you specifically interested in spheres which play well together and are out for 2.0 ?

@surreality This is true, and even more so - there are times when it frustrates me to see people complain about things which they are at least partially responsible for if not nearly entirely.

A classic case of this is finding a pack. It's such a cliche to see 4-5 people sitting there on a channel bemoaning the fact 'there are no packs' simultaneously - make one!

Roleplay availability? The same deal. "There are no PrPs!" "I'll run a PrP for you, what do you want to do?" "I dunno". Or "There's no one to play with!" "Hey, wanna play?" <silence>

If I sit in a room on my own and make no effort to meet anyone else then I'm not exactly being a thrilling option for them to go out of their way to meet. I get being shy, I really do. But although cliques can be a plague on entire games depending on how they manifest they're orthogonal to self isolation.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

Basic every mu code like who and jobs not needed on this list.

How about +comm jobs? Something being able to get started, CCed, left and closed by players without staff intervention is invaluable.

You know how if you meet a jerk in the morning you met a jerk, but if everyone you met in the morning was a jerk, you are the jerk?

There are no games without cliques, it's basic human behavior to hang out with people you know or you have something in common with, etc. Chances are significant if you're on a MU* and 'there are no cliques, phew!' all it means is that you're part of them.

I'm on Eldritch, I know folks, in fact some of them have been playing with me in one form or the other for years. Of course the game isn't cliquish - for me. For another it can be a different story.

One question I had about Shadowrun...

Back in the day it was an issue for table-top that while Deckers went on to do their own thing, the rest of the party couldn't be there (and vice versa of course).

Has that been changed in any way in later editions? It used to be an issue since it kinda wrecked pace for the chronicle since the ST had to split his attention to things characters did which were exclusive to them.

@Thenomain said:

@Ganymede said:

I played Magic for about six months before I discovered Jyhad, later V:TES, which is infinitely superior.

My better-than-Magic CCG was Shadowfist. Then again, I find most household injuries to be preferable to MtG.

Heresy, the both of you!

... I've been playing Hearthstone non-stop. It's not a superior card game than Magic, but as a digital game it's so far more polished and better in every way than either version of online Magic it's not even funny. On a tablet it plays like a dream... an addictive, horrible dream.

@Tempest said:

I personally don't like having to worry about "collecting beats". And I do not do it.

I used to do the same thing on Eldritch at first. And even now I don't always remember to set aspirations beforehand so I miss out on XP I could be gaining.

But that's the game. I don't know if it's preferable to just ignore major mechanics, since Beats/Aspirations/etc are simply a major part of the system. What's the point of using it if we won't play under it?