Posts made by Arkandel

@Ganymede said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@RDC said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Unpopular opinion: Generic CofD 2e game where the defining feature is that staff just kind of stay out of your way and let you play the game without metaplot or too much staff-lead politics and stuff. >.>

It's a fair opinion to have, but I have not seen this work in practice for longer than a few months.

Then again most nWoD MU* don't last for longer than a few months, no matter how they are constructed. If I was counting activity in any other way than "the port is still up and staff+friends still log on" then the list would shrink even further.

I have specific reasons in mind causing it, mind you, but this thread isn't the place to go over it.

This is an e-mail I just sent to Uber Eats. The meal was from a new 'recommended' restaurant, badly packaged and rather bad, but the complaint I sent was about the actual hair found in it as well.

Hello folks,

I don't care about adjustments to that one meal at this point, but could you please explain what I was expected to do here?

There was a hair in my food. I tried to take a picture of it - but it's a hair - so I did the best I could yesterday, when I had it.

This morning you are asking me to send a better picture, I suppose, clearly showing that hair. How would I do that? How do you even suggest I keep the hair overnight, so that I take a better shot of it today? How would you know it's the same hair as yesterday?

Regards,
<Me>

My best guess is they try hard to make people drop their complaints.

I have a problem.

My problem is a certain kind of book is crack cocaine to me; once I find one I just feast on it, quite often starting then finishing it in the same day. So now I need my fix and hopefully you people will point me to an author/dealer to keep it going.

Don't judge me, but the material at hand involves (in semi-random order) a combination of military or arcane training, underdogs and badass moments. I'm talking about books such as the following:

• Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter; a low-class nobody in a caste-based militant Empire gets into a military program and kicks all kinds of ass.

• The Red Rising saga by Brown Pierce; a low-class nobody in an solan system-wide oppressive regime fakes his way into a military program and kicks all kinds of ass.

• The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks; a bastard of the world's most powerful man makes his way into an magical military school and kicks all kinds of ass.

• Red Sister by Mark Lawrence; a piss-poor orphan girl gets in the world's most badass nunnery and kicks all kinds of ass.

• The Raven's Shadow series by Anthony Ryan; a young nobleman is forced into a military school and kicks all kinds of ass.

• Okay, okay, Ender's Game. You know this one, the author turned out to be fucked up... but Ender kicked all kinds of ass. In a military school.

Anyway you can stop judging me now FINE I get it, I said I had a problem. Find me more books to feed my habit, will you?

@peasoupling I think there's a joke here about TS and hand pronation.

I'm not going to make that joke.

@Ganymede The caveat here is that my memory is painted by nostalgia but I think the difference maker is culture; when you have a critical mass of players whose expectations, understanding and goals for emote fighting is similar then others joining in can learn organically as well.

@Kestrel said in Spars and fights:

I know this is kind of bad and communication is important and all that, but having to do this takes a lot of the magic out of it for me.

Communication doesn't need to be explicit. I agree that sitting down to work a bunch of things in advance can spoil the moment versus simply... playing.

However having played with someone already gives you a pretty good idea of what they're like, for example. Either way you (generic you) can also read your partner's poses, see what they seem to be aiming for and adjust on the fly - in fact this is the default, in my experience.

All that said I don't know if it's just nostalgia but I haven't seen the spirit of 'emote fighting' recreated in another MUSH since. The actual implementation was pretty flawed (and that's partly on me, as I had a big say in it) but the status the practice itself carried as a mini game of sorts was quite fun.

To me one of the basic parts of building up chemistry while roleplaying fights is to be on the same wave length with the other person(s?) about the style. I don't mean posing style or the verbiage involved, just... the general spirit of it.

For example a fight can be cinematic, full of backflips, walk-walking, heroic poses and such. It can also be more of a conversational piece full of banter, multi-sentence dialogue, taunting and generally stuff that ignores the physical vigor using it as a backdrop for other things. It can be also be hardcore super realistic (or at least what passes for that on MU*) with energy conservation being a primary concern, participants keeping track of how fatigue or minor injuries affect the spar going forward, etc.

Aside from the outcome, using dice or not... aside from all that, I think it's important everyone agrees beforehand how it's going to be, because mixing those things usually won't work well.

Let me ask a different question for the thread.

Is 'knowing how to fight iRL' - having some kind of background in martial arts, or even just watching MMA stuff on TV - an advantage to roleplaying such scenes?

I didn't want to derail the thread where "emote fighting" came up, but basically it was discussing the way we were handling sparring and fights between PCs back in the day in one MU*.

Here's the thing - how do you like to handle this kind of thing? That is, two characters meet and decide to have a friendly (?) bout; for the purposes of this let's assume they're both played by reasonable people who won't lose their shit if their PC loses, who are willing to communicate with each other and generally this is done for fun.

But how do you handle the fight? For example do you predetermine the whole outcome ahead of time? Do you do individual rolls per action until a certain number of hit points (or whatever) is reached? Do you allow mechanics to decide the result or do you wing it based on just the poses?

What's your preference in this kind of setup?

I use Google Music. It comes with YouTube premium (so basically no ads) which is extra value, and their song libraries are pretty comparable to the big three streaming services' so... why not.

@Rinel said in Games? Do they exist? Where?:

An irresistible urge to engage in the contumacious denial of the brevity so highly esteemed in these literary latter days and to revel in sesquipedalian verbiage akin to what a perspicacious member of the literati might find while perusing catalogues of authors past frequently engenders a sense of frustration and, dare I say, ire in the modern reader.

<your Weaponmastery score has increased>

@mietze Actually now that I thought about it, some issue are typically trivial to address in smaller group but increasingly tricky to tackle as we add people to them:

• Sharing a vision of what the game is about and what PC concepts look like; with four players you can chat and come to an agreement this is a low magic setting playing a rugtag group of peasants in situations way over their heads. As you add more folks you'll also start getting pitched more edge cases - noblewomen in disguise, excommunicated paladins, former assassins, etc.

• Not having enough TLC to go around by the GM. With a party of four more or less everyone gets to shine. As the ratio of GMs to players worsens so does the chance someone is left sitting on their thumbs.

• Administrative issues and logistics increase with the playerbase's size. There's a higher risk someone won't get along, you need to track down more stuff than just +sheets, juggling timezones and availabilities gets tricky, and as you add more GMs (well, staff) they need to be managed to like everything else.

• Continuity in general is something MU* don't handle very well because staff are so transient. A typical table-top campaign rarely survives its GM's departure but staff gets replaced on games all the time, leaving storylines dangling and character arcs unresolved. Even the style of play can be quite different based on who's running a plot which isn't something more intimate campaigns (often ran and involving well-knit groups who know each other well) have to struggle with.

@mietze said in Has anyone ever set up a server just for a small group of friends?:

It is tough to gauge what the number of people or PC is that will sustain a mush feel/activity (which for me means enough people around for a mix of pick up RP and building their own relationships with each other, vs a more tabletop group meetup that is scheduled) while still remaining small enough for intimate staff/outside the group storytelling.

Obviously 'a group small enough for intimate storytelling' means different things to different people but to me it's this: The group size allows a single GM to be familiar with all of the PCs (since nearly everything that happens to or around them that GM is present for and controls), and they are the protagonists of their own campaign. The story revolves completely around them.

@surreality We did have a WM staffer whose main job (if I remember correctly, it's been like... twenty years) was taking in the submitted logs, anonymize them, then randomnly distribute them around the grader team making sure no one ended up grading their own logs.

And yes, it was subjective as hell of course. In retrospect the greatest issue with this was that a very certain 'style' of emote fighting - as we called it - was the right way of doing it. While I have no recollection of the pronation factor (I don't think I've ever used the word in... anything but maybe I championed it back then - who knows any more) there were specific things you could do wrong, both documented and undocumented.

For instance you could never close an emote meaning something like "Bob slashes at Jim and hits him in the leg". Jim could accept the hit in his own emote, but not the other way around.

The funniest incident I recall was one Lan player (who lost the character after being caught and shamed for this incident) had gone over past logs of high Weaponmastery scored players, took their poses pretty much verbatim, changed the names and used them for his fight.

@dvoraen I don't recall wrist pronation-related bitching. Is my mind blocking it for a reason?

@Derp said in Games? Do they exist? Where?:

It's because you can't win in WoD. You always piss someone off, or become the target of the latest social outrage. It's exhausting.

Since when was winning the goal of roleplaying?

I couldn't care less what other people's tastes in music are, as long as I don't have to listen to said music.

bRitIsH aRrOWs CaN't peNeTRaTe sTeEL aRmOR. Agincourt was staged!

This thread turned very quickly from 'mildly constructive' to a bandwagon of accusations and personal attacks. I know we can do better than that.

But it won't be here, because it's locked.