Posts made by Arkandel

The God-Machine is the Storyteller.

@Coin Yeah, I'm not happy with my commute at all. At least in the spring+summer I can make better use of it by cycling when it's not rainy but once it's cold enough it's dead time stuck in the subway and buses for two hours a day - that's a huge waste of time, even if it at least means I can read books to make some use of it. On the other hand the neighborhood where I live is pretty nice and quite safe, otherwise it wouldn't have been an issue at all to move somewhere closer to my job.

@SG Thanks for the input, that really helps. I'll be using it mostly for my commute (~15km each way) on city roads - some of them are bumpy and some are uphill but nothing extreme. The insight on the disc brakes is useful! I was thinking of a road bike or a hybrid, there's no point in anything else. As for gears... I barely shift on my existent bike - I go between 3-7 based on the road and that's about it.

@Tempest The similarities between the Demon Cycle and the Wheel of Time are pretty astounding, aren't they?

The hell?

A good rule of thumb in all management is to praise in public, chastise privately.

So if a player screws up and you need to intervene, do it quietly, handle and document it only for the few sets of eyes that has to know, then let it go. A game never benefits from unnecessarily airing grievances and opening the floor for drama, responses and mud-flinging.

Plus the worst kinds of players thrive in the dirt, and you want to keep your players' respect more than you need to come off as the 'winner' of any argument.

@tragedyjones Is The 100 any good?

@tragedyjones said:

and the finale was almost as satisfying as Age of Ultron.

The finale was really well written. Excellent dialogue, and Kyle MacLachlan killed it.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

Staff actually need to get some fun out of their games. It's very different than player-fun. It often comes with bullshit and work that offsets the fun.

Yeah, that's correct. Basically it's the rough equivalent of running your own table-top game at your house; a player only needs to show up, but you need to have the place relatively clean beforehand, there has to be a table with enough chairs for everyone, you need to make sure the new guy doesn't clog your toilet, and on top of the mundane logistics you need to actually prepare a story for the RPG itself.

It can be fun, it's a different kind of fun though, and it's not for everyone. Cultivate a thick skin and be patient.

Don't over-regulate. Don't try to predict and write down every conceivable douchy thing someone might do, because you'll keep running into some very inventive assholes - you can't keep up - and they'll absolutely try to use your wording against you ("well, technically I wasn't violating that rule because...").

This is a game, people go there to have fun. If someone's not behaving correctly talk to them and if they aren't correcting that behavior show them the door. And remember that ultimately it's what you do that shapes your MU*'s culture and adjusts attitudes to your liking, not what you post or put on a wiki.

Cool bike! See, I have the advantage that I don't actually need a lock that much (they let us park our bikes in an empty cubicle at work, and I rarely leave it anywhere else) but otherwise I really want something more than a baseline model. However there are so many bike stores and it's fairly clear they often have an agenda - for example in one place they were talking me down about disc brakes, possibly because they only had one model at roughly my price range that had them, but in another it was mentioned as a must. Or front fork suspension was talked down in one place ('it wastes some of your energy since city streets are mostly smooth') while talked way up in another ('since you're doing moderate mileage you need it').

And of course good luck comparing even upgrades within the same model line from the same company let alone different ones. If the crankset is better in one but the fork better in the other what does that mean? And what the hell is a derailleur? Do pedal brands matter? Are these tires better or worse?

Can you send your bike guy over?

Doing the footwork to buy a new bicycle. Argh. You have to have a PhD in bicyclology before you can tell anything for sure as you wade through obscure part numbers and terminology. Questions such as "so uhm, why is this cool looking bike $200 more expensive than that cool looking bike?" are answered with "well, better parts". No shit, really? So what kind of better are we talking about? Is it actually $200 worth of better? Is it "$500 HDMI cables are better than $20 ones" better?

"Well, they are lighter" they say. Notice they never ever tell you how much each bike weighs even though it's the whole freakin' point of everything! But okay, so it's lighter - by how much? 50 grams? So I'll pay $200 for 50-100 fewer grams of weight then put on a jacket or grab an extra fork for my lunch to waste the difference?

I mean there has to be a breakpoint in the quality curve after which adding better parts is subject to steeper diminishing returns but when I put the question to Google? There are two answers, each more precious than the other. "It depends since that's different for each person" is one - thanks, man! That makes everything clear. But the second one is even better - "ask your bike store what better fits you". So you mean ask the people who want me to spend more money how to spend money efficiently, because that works so well for every other aspect of life.

Meh.

@Luna Where else would they save money AND live better? Duuh.

@HelloRaptor said:

Though the Architect sequence in Matrix was fine with me too, so. >_>

You are literally Satan.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I think it's partially because of the properties they're directly tied to. Marvel is eyeing that Avengers franchise like the cash cow that it is, but Arrow and Flash barely have any ties to DC's movie universe (and its $$$) at all.

Agreed though. Either trust your writers to run a good series or don't.

@Chime said:

@Melpomene But I liiiiike perl and regexes and things!

Sometimes you have a problem. You figure you'll use a regex to fix it. Now you have two problems.

(says someone who uses regexes every day. )

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I think its nothing short of a stroke of genius to have DC 'overtaking' tv while Marvel is dominating at the theater. DC's comics are better set to a tv show, anyhow.

Not if you count Daredevil in the mix. IMHO it stands head and shoulders over any other comic-book based TV series - and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at its peak is better than either Flash or Arrow (although Flash is probably better in terms of consistency).

True, but the fundamentals of storytelling don't change, it's all still about what story you want to tell. So you start with that ("I want high-adventure") and then create the plot in whatever way you use to make shit up.

What I like about GMC is that it's flexible. Hell, you don't even have to figure out 'what' it is yourself; if it's encompassing enough it can simply exist on a separate layer from the story and affect the characters as a connecting thread rather than a specific, well-defined entity. So the role of Angels can remain static as per the book and you can use them to seed your chronicle with bad guys, quest-givers, mysterious benefactors, whatever it is you need them to be but the G-M itself can simply... be.

In fact this is probably a more manageable approach since allowing PCs to alter a framework that keeps everything together creates meta-questions that might be outside the scope of most campaigns.

Furthermore it allows a Storyteller to personalize the opposition; for example I don't like it when the PCs are pinned against something faceless since it denies a level of intimacy in their struggle.For me it's better when the party is recruited and is set against someone instead so they can invest emotionally in the outcome. Fighting against a system isn't as satisfactory.

The hell is John Doe?

But I wouldn't be surprised to find out Whedon is difficult to deal with if you're a producer or some such (as opposed to being an actor working with him, for example). The guy is brilliant, and aside from his movies and TV shows he wrote the definitive X-Men comic-book run as far as I'm concerned, but there's a non-zero chance managerial staff might find it hard to communicate with him properly.

On the other hand he's a huge name now, and has made metric tons of money, so he can shoot whatever films he likes for the foreseeable future.

Unless the campaign is meant to resolve the matter of the God-Machine, its sheer size would probably still have it beyond the realm of understanding for PCs.

Such a behemothian structure would simply be unfathomable so that characters only ever perceive a small subset of the whole (the part which somehow affects them) but have no way of really knowing what the results of their actions are even if there are actions to be taken. It's just too complex, they're sort of like bugs in the dirt trying to figure out a lawnmower - it rearranges their entire reality when it works but what can they possibly figure out about the reason it exists or what lays past their sphere of awareness? Even if they somehow sabotage it so that it doesn't function any more it's just a tiny part of an incredibly larger whole.

Breaking down the 'machine' into manageable parts allows both for the mystery to be maintained and for the PCs to actually have some milestones to look forward to. It's not really the whole thing they're interacting with, it's one of who-knows-how-many subsystems within layers of subsystems.