Posts made by Arkandel

@VulgarKitten said:

Laugh, have fun.

At 8 o'clock on a Monday the world can burn for all I care. Why should there be joy when I can feel none?

@Ganymede said:

I'm mentioning that there are other options -- neither better nor worse.

No, I agree. I guess if you take alts out of the equation entirely then the benefit is smaller. I do still prefer the rules to remain as unchanged as possible, but it's not as important as when compounded by other gains.

@Misadventure Well, I spent a few moments trying to come up with a system where you essentially walk into a room and 'ask permission' to see its pose history. This could be automated (say, it's on by default on public rooms) which helps, but every other implementation makes it tricky both in from an interface point of view but also in actual usability.

For instance I walk in your room. I type something like "+poselog 10" or whatever to see what's been going on and you and @Coin both get a message asking if that's okay. You say yes. @Coin says no. What happens then? Is one person vetoing it enough for the log to remain undisclosed? What if a third person's in the room but idlying? If I can't get the poses right at first they're probably nearly useless to me later on.

And who can clear a scene? Imagine a five-person scene where one of them clears it because they need to go, but others want it there so they can log it, or for newcomers to see. What happens then?

There are all sorts of questions - the technical part of logging would need to come in last, after they are somehow resolved.

@Ganymede It depends on what you are doing and, more importantly, why.

Auto-XP is quite friendly to alts, for instance, because otherwise good luck doing 'enough' stuff on multiple characters to get any progress at all and as noted it can be combined with diminishing returns to allow a more natural catch-up for new PCs as well.

But that's not why I consider Eldritch's (or TR's for that matter) to be a superior system.

One of my concerns with any adopted system for a MU* is to let it work more or less as it is in the books. The more you deviate from it with house rules and patches 'to make it better' the least you're taking advantage of the instant rules recognition new players can enjoy. So if you are changing the source of XP (rather than how they may be utilized) you're not touching the mechanics in any way; Beats, Conditions, etc are applied exactly the way it happens in the books, it's just that your character may see more of them come up than expected if there are auto-gains.

That implementation is much neater. Then again I'm usually in favor of liberal policies when it comes to having or rerolling alts.

@Misadventure said:

Make it account to you when you enter a room where it is enabled, or when it is enabled, and make sure it can be turned off.

It would probably need a clear command, so you could clear your scene before logging out, and it wouldn't be a terrible idea to have it routinely locked to players who are in the log. Only a big public scene would start with /public going.

To avoid TS-related mishaps I'd say definitely clear the log as soon as a room is vacant, time it out if an hour has passed since the last pose, etc etc.

This has to be automated as well as manual or it would absolutely end up in hilarious threads right here on MSB.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
I am pretty sure in Kingsmouth's case the diminishing returns were to help prevent the dino problem, without completely leveling the beats for everyone.
I thought it was a good compromise since it game folks an advantage for being early adapters but late comers like me could functionally cut the gap with out it feeling completely hopeless.

I am pretty sure you are right. It's not their intention I'm against, it's the implementation.

There are better ways to do the same thing - Eldritch for instance simply caps weekly gains and progressively reduces automatic XP for people after the first six months. So active players can still bust their ass if they want to progress at the same rate, but newer characters would find it much easier to catch up. It's a more elegant solution which achieves the same thing.

I was looking into this today and it might be helpful to someone else. Basically the idea was to save my activation key for Windows 10 in case I wanted to do a clean install without upgrading from Windows 7/8 first.

Well, the Windows 10 activation key we get for upgrading is generic. There is a discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3f1r4y/psa_to_find_your_windows_10_key_follow_this_guide/ .

So basically they don't care about the activation key at all any more, what MS is doing is saving your hardware's signature somewhere after you upgrade, then validate it against whether it's found or not in that database or not.

It'd be interesting at some point to reinstall a machine which has been upgraded in the past. That thread claims you can get away with not even putting in the activation key - you'd just hit skip enough times to go through then it'll activate itself later when it connects to the internet.

For more funtimes, if in a year+ from now you decide to upgrade your motherboard, your hardware's signature will be different. At that point you won't be able to either do a clean install of Windows 10 or upgrade from Windows 7/8 for free any more. Oops.

As long as the concept fits the dots I see nothing wrong with your PC not being well rounded.

For example my character is pretty broke - Resources 0. So I often have him trying to bum lunches out of people. I'll never buy Investigation even with XP to spare, even though it's a damn useful PrP skill, since just he's not the investigative type; that's gotten him in trouble with the law when he failed spectacularly at it.

What the problem is is when people only play up, not down. So for instance they can't fake physical dots (sooner or later they'd need to roll brawl+strength) but they'll avoid portraying low social dots.

From a meta-point of view, it's challenging to roleplay someone being bad at some things without making a caricature out of them.

@Coin said:

@Arkandel

Gotham is little screen. I said big screen.

I know! But that wasn't a limitation I made when I mentioned it, the 'big screen' part was yours.

@Coin said:

Then again how many times have we seen the Waynes die? Those pearls!

On the big screen? Twice. The same amount of times we've seen Uncle Ben die.

Except the Waynes took like thirty years to die again, whereas Uncle Ben died twice in the span of like, 10?

Three, because I counted Gotham.

Same as the destruction of Krypton, especially after you factor in Smallville, Lois and Clark, etc.

@Ganymede said:

Maybe not. I've been a proponent of diminishing returns, and did not like GMC's elimination of it.
Admittedly, this may be a bias.

Oh, I agree with you there. I didn't like that part of GMC; not only does it not make sense (you should find it harder to continue improving at something) but it also doesn't follow the theme's own paradigms (Renown requirements are IC increasingly higher, so why not the cost?).

I just don't agree with this particular implementation, I find it worse than both 1.0 and GMC's.

@Roz Exactly! Good link.

@Roz said:

They've at least explicitly stated that they are NOT telling the origin story again. Probably because too many fans would flip out about this exact thing.

Then again how many times have we seen the Waynes die? Those pearls!

That's to say, I don't think it matters about impact of story being lessened, because it's a different story. (Thank God, IMO. Not a big fan of the Civil War comics arc.)

What I mainly disliked about Civil War is that, although they started out claiming it'd be an evenly told story, it very quickly went to the pro-registration heroes clearly being the bad guys.

(Just in case assume there'll be spoilers here, although they're about the comic book version of Civil War which might have little to do with the actual movie discussed in the thread)

...

I wonder then from which point in Spider-man's film or comics continuity they're planning to take things.

For starters after five damn movies in the last thirteen years we don't need the damn origin story told again! How many times does Uncle Ben need to die before they're satisfied the audience knows what happened?

Also in the original story the point of Spidey's initial inclusion under Tony's banner was to boost the Registration Act. There he was, an infamous and very well known masked super-hero revealing his identity to the public in order to obey the law and do the right thing. If they have him be just a kid who barely even owns a proper costume yet (as possibly implied by the fact he's using the home-made version?) the impact of that seems pretty lessened. Why would Stark even care about what some upstart kid does?

@Coin Yeah, probably the Iron Spider suit and his normal one.

@Ganymede Well, you might not have been a fantastic top ladder player since you're lawyering and that doesn't give you sufficient time to devote to perfecting your gaming, but you'd not have a demonstrably harder time in learning the basic controls, moving around, etc (which is what going from 0->1 would reflect).

However these diminishing returns don't differentiate in what dots you're increasing - which is something the previous system got right. They're across the board, and thus, a regression compared to 1.0 while not taking advantage of the simplicity 2.0 offers instead.

Ain't nature grand?

@Ganymede said:

I think Kingsmouth does a decent job of ensuring some parity between PCs. They do this by altering the number of beats that you need for an experience; the more beats you accumulate, the more you need for an experience. Alternately, you could modify the cost of raises as you gather more experiences.

See, I don't like that. It essentially sounds like what they're doing is take 2.0's removal of diminishing returns by making XP costs flat then reverting it by re-introducing a different method of diminishing returns.

Only, instead of doing that per stat (reflecting the fact, say, it takes a whole lot more time and effort to gain the training and experience for Medicine to go from 3->4 than it does from 1->2) they are doing it universally; but why would being very good at something mean you're having a much harder time learning the rudimentary basics of another?

@Olsson said:

@Arkandel said:

And occasional even successful games have tried non-US settings - HM comes to mind as it was set in Vienna, Germany.

Vienna is in Austria.

Carry on.

What are you, some kinda factist?

I agree with both of these fools.

@HelloRaptor is right (gah, it makes me feel dirty typing that) not because people lamenting about the evils of higher-powered characters are so few, but because they quote it as the reason something else's downfall. "TR's declining popularity is because XP was so readily available" is hilarious, for example, since giving players a liberal amount of it and allowing others to catch up is one the main reasons it's still standing.

And @Coin is correct in that if something floats people's boats... whatever, run it. You want an ultra-accurate depiction of Sisily in the wake of the Athenian invasion in 415 BC as seen through the eyes of its local Kindred? Nothing wrong with that. And occasional even successful games have tried non-US settings - HM comes to mind as it was set in Vienna, Germany.