Posts made by Arkandel

@Ganymede For me it's not so much a complaint as it is an inner voice making me too self-conscious when I play concepts outside of my personal experiences.

For example I've NPCed women before - it never felt right. I've played people of color and again, I was re-examining my own poses too much.

I don't think others would have complained about how I portrayed such characters - none of them were stereotypes or anything like that - but I never quite managed to relax and sink into their skin enough to make the experience fully fun for me.

@tek said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

As one of the newer MUers I've encountered (I'm about three years into the hobby), these are some of the unwritten conventions I had to learn the hard way:

1. Pose order and how people like to handle that
2. It was hard for me to learn that most people aren't into lots of OOC chatting
3. Pose length and what to put in my poses -- I didn't realize it was expected that I should not only write what my character does, but that everyone (or the majority of folks) in the scene with me generally expects to be acknowledged, usually by name.

I don't think these are universal concepts though. Game culture has a lot more to do with what the posing conventions and expectations are than anything else, and as such they can vary a lot between different MU*.

In my opinion this isn't a barrier to entry. For new players though, especially ones who can't casually type 80-90 words per minute, I'd say fast paced games are probably a safer bet.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

@WildBaboons said in Good TV:

I was really hoping for Byron Mann after seeing him in Wu Assassin

Everyone hopes for Byron Mann after seeing him in Wu Assassin.

Unfortunately, you're more likely to get Ken Jeong.

Hrm, interesting choice for Lan. I don't care about the racial casting choices one way or the other but I admit I was thinking of him as older as well.

Speaking of all this though I'm curious now to see how much emphasis is placed on the martial arts parts in the show - sparring, training, fighting, all that stuff. It's probably much more cinematic than teaching about how Saidar is like a flower spreading its leaves or whatever but then again just how the One Power works is critical to what makes WoT tick.

It's not ideas that the hobby is lacking. We have plenty of those.

Some things we do lack:

1. Word of mouth. People can't join what they don't even know exists.
2. An interface that doesn't look like it was created thirty years ago. A black screen on a dedicated telnet client downloaded from some obscure web site riddled with features and terminology that makes no sense to an outsider isn't it.

The specifics can vary as do tastes but the more we try to hold onto the paradigms that just happen to be familiar to us the fewer new players we can get.

There's a sense of denial about this in the hobby ("why, I have met several youngsters myself!") but nothing to explain exactly how when internet usage is far more widespread than ever before we have the smallest number of people playing on MU* than ever before, too.

Old men bicker about their legacies way after the issue has been laid to rest is basically a staple.

History isn't always fair. Sometimes events, contributions and ideas are simplified or attributed on a first-come first-served basis then that's that. Whether this article is true or not I think it's the case here; Gary Gygax will be credited with D&D and that's about that.

The stories and narratives that I often want are hard if not impossible to create on the grid for a multitude of reasons. I like spinning them off in a more (hopefully) cohesive fashion and letting others play them out.

@Warma-Sheen That is one take on the character - perhaps your favorite one, but not by any means the only interpretation. Keep in mind Logan has been around for decades and he's been written by multiple people, all with a bit of their own twist on him.

Logan has been as you describe him. He's also been seen as highly regarded, a team leader, a sought-out romantic partner (the guy has been around), an unstoppable killer, a father figure, etc. They are all him.

@Derp said in Good TV:

ETA: And Rosamund Pike as Moiraine?!? At 5'9, when she's even shorter than Nynaeve in the books! This is an outrage!

I can't tell if this tongue in cheek or what.

Either way the camera can do great things - and a good actor can pull off even more amazing feats in terms of the fit between them and their characters. Kit Harington is uh, not the tallest guy but he pulled off a pretty damn convincing Jon Snow throughout eight seasons of GoT. Emilia Clarke didn't even wear purple contact lenses for Dany's funky eyes, did anyone really miss that?

Seriously, physicality is the least of the concerns anyone should have about casting. There are so many other factors - from acting chops, budget, directing, script pace, dialogue - that will affect how the show is perceived. If that clicks then no one is going to miss an inch of height compared to the books. Who freakin' cares.

So I've started on a D&D campaign after work hours with a few of my coworkers. The DM is... puzzling to me. He's a very nice guy, and I don't know if this is a matter of inexperience or simply the kind of take he has on RPGs in general, so I don't know if I ought to try and communicate better with him or drop out.

For example this is what he posted for session 3 from our chat:

I've tried to explain before (and he seemed to agree) what I was looking for at least was character development and that one of the issues so far has been player agency.

I.e. each session started, within five minutes we are fighting some random enemy while being informed OOC there is a greater context ("there are tensions in the kingdom due to a possible war", even if what we are fighting isn't tied to that, since they are literally rolled random encounters) and then when we are done with the fight it's time to wrap it up.

Advice, dear readers?

FanExpo is so much fun! I've been here for a few hours already and I don't want to go yet (but I'm getting hungry).

Anyone else here today? Message me.

One opinion I wanted to bring up in this thread was that each game really should have a firm design from the ground up. That doesn't mean it ought to be 'complete' on day 1 - or even day 365 - since that isn't feasible (or even fun). But it does mean each game ought to have its principal administrators put in some honest thought in how it's different than every other MU*; why does it even have to exist? What are their goals? What excites them to create this new thing? What would make it exciting for players to come in and participate?

It always drove me a little crazy when the whole process became "let's put this new thing out with as little work as possible, as soon as possible". I've maintained that thought through the years because this is the whole thing about a MUSH - the possibilities are endless. You're basically staging an interactive, multiplayer novel-slash-improv theatrical production whose characters can be any damn thing you choose, you can set it on any stage (today's Earth, a galaxy far far away, Westeros, Gotham City, anywhere)... so why would you choose to just copy/paste what the last three MU* did pretty much verbatim, slap a new name on it and call it a day?

And this kind of hurried let's-just-go-ahead process can infect other important decision making due to the lack of a central focus or guiding set of principles throughout the way an entire MUSH is being ran. Decisions get made in a hurry without real thought behind them; for example it's very common to see fledgling games create a larger issue than what they're trying to solve by creating hoops good players need to (and will, since that's what makes them good) jump through trying to prevent the symptoms of bad players' behavior - only most often they won't, since those folks will ignore or go around the obstacle to get what they want, since that's what makes them bad. The result is alienating the former and barely inconveniencing the latter. The cause varies.

Another example is games which simply copy house rules or policies from other MU*, a tactic that can result in perpetuated systemic issues, mixed signals and conflicting goals if other aspects of those games don't match them. For instance one sphere can be ran very liberally ("spend your XPs, y'all!") while another in a draconian fashion ("to buy Renown 3 you need to cut yourself and show me the wound") or treat PrPs as an afterthought or even a net negative - and all of that results in isolationism, not being able to create any kind of sustainable culture not to mention - quite often - a revolting door of staff who come in and go right back out.

All of this isn't bluffing or base stupidity - it's just negotiating. Disney is using public opinion as leverage, making fans' outrage a factor in Sony's decision making.

If Sony believes enough people will be angry enough to not watch Spider-man if the character is detached from Marvel and they expect the diminished sales to be more than the percentage of shared revenue Disney is asking for, then they'll cut a deal. Else they won't.

Your well-being is not expendable, your presence on a game is.

I didn't always realize this and I hadn't always enforced that on myself, and I should have. But the power to leave when the cons of being on a MU* outweigh the positives is essential.

Nothing excuses it. I firmly believe that now. Not 'but I still have friends there...', certainly not 'but I've already invested so much time in it...', or even 'if this one person finally leaves...'if that person finally understands...' .

If I stop having fun I leave. That's it.

Also leaving shouldn't be a statement aimed to be leverage. Don't expect people to follow you ("If you're my friend why are you still on <X>?" - it's because they might still be having fun, dummy), don't hold your breath for the game to suffer because you're gone (and if you do, please examine your motives).

And for the love of Cthulhu don't make any last-second melodramatic motions, long posts or bridge-burning to signal your exit. Inform any actual friends or regular partners you're going or how to reach you if they want to, then make a graceful exit.

I see your Spider-man and I will raise you an official Matrix 4 announcement just because.

@Rinel I quite loved the paranoia of who is, or might be, a darkfriend - sometimes based on very minor clues, any bit of irregular behavior, that one thing someone said that one time, etc.

It seems a bit more common now that we've seen the same thing a bunch of times in the form of Skrulls, Cylons, etc... but I feel back then it was a brand new, cool concept: Paranoia in fantasy.

One more thing I quite like about the Wheel of Time: It's very translatable to a MUSH.

That is, despite the power levels and meaning to the story certain specific book characters have, there are a ton of playable concepts with cool things available for PCs without stretching disbelief too much. Depending on the timeline and goals you can have male or female channelers, Aiel warriors (and different channelers), Warders, Whitecloaks, Borderlanders, Seanchan (... and different channelers)... then if the game wants to go that way, too, darkfriends.

Not all of those are going to be possible or even advisable to run at the same time, or not for every game. But they are possible. WoT works quite well for a game as a setting even in the absence of book characters - it can even thrive that way.

@Ghost It's also not a consistent ride.

The first five books are (in my opinion, obviously) quite good. Not necessarily on the masterpiece level but great reads with a lot of ideas, fresh concepts and interesting characters.

For instance the way the One Power worked and the sheer level of detail RJ put into it were pretty amazing for the time, paving the way for Sanderson's own magic systems later on. A lot of details were also awesome inventions - how ta'veren worked, for instance, explained in an in-universe fashion why these characters always seemed to be around when interesting stuff... happened to happen or survived out of luck and circumstance. Those weren't just coincidences, it was because they were ta'veren.

But, again in my opinion, some time during/after book six things went wrong. Too many dangling subplots, and RJ kept opening new threads instead of closing older ones. We kept being introduced to new characters (each of whom seemed to be more powerful than the last, when we were already told the last ones were the most powerful seen in hundreds of years) and the bloat built up both in in-setting power but also just things that needed to be resolved and weren't being.

A TV show can fix some of those things, hopefully. If they are lucky enough the casting will work, too.

That's many ifs, but I'm hopeful. Now if we get a great WoT MUSH out of this, I'd be overjoyed.

@WildBaboons said in Good TV:

but maybe it'll inspire someone with the time to make a MUSH

<hope intensifies>

@Jaded The issue is, ask ten fans what would make a script 'real Wheel of Time' and you'll probably get ten different responses.

For example I like Rand. Other people have different favorites. We won't all get the same attention to our specific arcs that we'd like, and it'll come down to the showrunner or any breakout actors.

Why are we pronouncing it?