Topics created by Arkandel

@thatguythere said in Spotlight.:

Of someone show up to a scene and for whatever reason has all the impact on it as third extra on the left, I would not begrudge them complaining or just saying fuck it. Why should anyone spend 3 to 5 hours doing essentially nothing?

If that's your POV then hey - that's cool. I'm not saying you (or they) are wrong to spend your time elsewhere.

But for me? I don't give a crap if my character has a Big Hero Moment or not. I mean, sure, it's kinda neat when it happens but it doesn't drive my RP. I had immense fun being the lone Grounder PC in the 20-person scene in 100, making wisecracks to a NPC I was emitting. It's roleplay. It's a story. I didn't feel like the "third extra on the left" even though my character didn't really accomplish anything, ended up on the losing side, and got shot in the head and mostly incapacitated by some random NPC extra.

Different people like different things. All I'm saying is when you have a significant number of people feeling like "I've got a 66% chance of wasting my time if I don't get to do something awesome", you've got a serious logistical problem that I don't think is solvable.

Short-answer: Yes.

Long-Answer: By the time we ever reached any zone with other life not in our own system, within the Ort Cloud, the life forms and their system, would likely be gone. Evidence of them too, potentially.

@arkandel said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Your real world identity - meaning anything past your first name, including your general geographical location (city, State, etc). Please remember if you e-mail or share documents using your e-mail accounts those often include that name!

Most people don't know my name. I have a Gmail address I use for stuff like this, and use the hangouts feature for chat with other players.
I have no problem with people knowing I'm from Winnipeg.

This is a subset of the above but I wanted to isolate it... what about your gender, family status, religion, etc? That is, stuff about your social status.

I don't disguise my gender, nor my marital status, nor that I have kids. I might have told people the general field in which I work.

Your 'physical' digintal footprint; for example sharing pictures of yourself, but also even being on a voicechat with others; do you only do it with trusted few or go on general channels?

I don't do voicechat because I don't have the hardware and don't care to get it.
Ain't nobody wanting pictures of my gargoylesque appearance either. So, I don't share it.

Your e-mail address or other online traces of your identity outside of gaming.

My throwaway email generally. Maybe 3 people in my entire mu* history have had my real one.

Your identity on games - are you at all concerned about people figuring out your alts, or who you play on other games, including non-MU*? What about the room you are in, or who you are RPing with?

Not really. I did a playlist, after all.

You can't change it, but maybe this helps.

All commands can be separated with a ';'. Example: n;l green;s;say Dan Dare is back! -- do these 4 commands There are several ways ';'s can be overruled. Example: \say Hello ;) -- Lines starting with a '\' aren't parsed by tintin. Example: say Hello \;) -- The escape character can esape 1 letter.

@faraday said in General MSB announcements:

Having a discord for a message forum seems oddly redundant.

Well, given that the idea was 'we have no way to communicate with the Gods of MSB outside of MSB itself if something goes wrong with MSB', the redunancy part was intentional. 🙂 The idea is to have some other line of communication.

Ares forums might be a good call.

@roz said in Forum upgrade:

There's actually an option in your user settings to switch these on mobile.

I tried it right after I posted and nothing happened. Will wait a bit and try again.

Granny Favors: Protagonists happen upon a nice old lady while she was “gardening”. She was actually doing something nefarious and needs to get rid of the protagonists in a way that doesn’t lead back to her. So she sends them on a series of increasingly tasks, hoping they’ll die by misadventure.

Originally mage-y these could be edited for other splats:

Jennassa's Worm: This strange parasite is named for the first victim. An Arrow mage by the name of Jennassa. She was an Obrimos and a sentinel of the Consilium of Zurich. She was sent on assignment to investigate an anomaly in Bern. There were reports of people acting strangely and seeing strange creatures when they went into the Aare. There she found a strange create that had floated down the Aare. She found in the crate a bunch of robin's egg sized green rocks. She took them back to the Arrow's headquarters in Bern to try and run some tests on them. While she was experimenting one of them hatched into a medium-sized snake like creature. The creature then bite her and crawled inside of her body. From there it drove her paranoid and insane. She eventually killed herself, but not before killing a sleepwalker that was assisting her. The entire compound was sanitized by the Guardians after an outbreak of the worms caused three more deaths. You can't find anymore recorded incidents of Jennassa's Worms.

Black Motes: You also find a report of an incident where some spirits called the "black motes" were encountered. These motes had the ability to attach themselves to the Amygdala of a person, and force them into a constant state of panic and fear. Once attached to the victims the only way to cure it was said to be death. However, a Master of Mind found that she could alleviate the fear response. The motes were eventually killed via subjecting them to bright lights, and the affects faded with their death.

Azkhahics: Abyssal creatures that live in the dark places. These creatures are said to have dominion over fear. With one touch they can cause someone to die of fear alone. Their powers range from causing hallucinations, mass paranoia, and lifelong mental scaring. They can be banished by facing them with by exemplifying everything they are not. Courage, healthy mind, light, etc.

The Lurking Terrors: Lastly. There is a creature referred to as 'The Lurking Terror'. You can't find if it is Abyssal or Spiritual, but it seems likely to be Abyssal. The creature seems bound to the laws of terror (whatever those are). It has the ability to spread fear like a disease and cause people to hallucinate.

The Laws of Terror: As previously mentioned. The laws of terror are a modern-day notion- according to the Libertines. And a primordial things according to the Mystagoguges. However, you come across a bit of research that is tangentially connected to them. About how the Abyss is spawning new monsters off of what Humanity is bringing into the world. And that the Laws of Terror are connected to several new creatures.

Fear As A Disease: As I mentioned previously. You come across notes and studies. A libertine has published a small essay on fear as a disease. Detailing his experience with a group of sleepers. How one of them gets afraid of something, tells about that fear, and then the fear spreads among them. Becoming stronger and harder to combat. something that could cure Durandal's child in Deus Solum.

Anguish's Tear: This is a legendary artifact said to be able to breathe life into even dust, so long as the dust once held the spark of a soul. It dates back to bcc. It was said to have been kept in an area of the world that is now somewhere part of Africa. It was said to have been formed from the anguished cries of a Life Archmaster whose child was killed by an abyssal intruder. Unfortunately this legend has never been confirmed, and the only images you can find of Anguish's Tears are sketches that are at least a hundred years old. The last mysterium expedition that went looking for it never returned. The one before that about two hundred years ago only one party member came back- a Mastigos master of space, who teleported back to his home base -and he came back wrong. He had signs of abyssal taint and was raving about living shadows.

Dunvegan's Jewel: This legend appears starting about six hundred years ago. Rumors are that deep in the bowels of Castle Dunvegan in Scotland there is a necklace made of perfected gold and perfected diamonds, that while it is worn the wearer cannot die and is afflicted by no disease. You do manage to find what is supposedly a photograph of it, but it is blurry and the glare obnoxious. The quality is so poor you're not certain you would even be able to properly describe it for sympathetic connections.

Janessa's Herb: The last lead you find is an herb created by life/matter Archmage that is said to cure any disease, even those that cannot normally be cured by life magic. The herb only grows in the ruins of her workshop, deep underground in the antarctic. There is a map of the antarctic listed and a couple of places where the mysterium /thinks/ her lab is... but they are not certain. No one has ever gone and come back from Janessa's lab. People tend to disappear when they go to the suspected areas in the antarctic.

Note, the linode I use to host games got taken down an hour early, FYI.

Spelling and grammar. Typos are fine and easily overlooked, but I grew up in the days when diagramming sentences was actually required, and language has a science all its own. I don't care so much about proper breaking of paragraphs, or if you used a colon instead of a semicolon - but punctuation, capitalization and making the tense and voice of your statements agree with themselves isn't too much to ask in my book.

Detail, detail, detail. I have been accused of posing in George R.R. Martin levels of detail as far back as the opening days of Haunted Memories (In fact, it was Sullivan's comment to me to that effect that got me interested in GRRM to begin with. Yes, I do care about how well done the carrots were and if the capon was killed too old or roasted too long, thank you very much). We're playing in an environment where the only canvas we have is words, and as such the words need to paint a picture. This can be done with sufficient application of adjectives or adverbs, or it could be done as simply as a short meta-statement adjoining a pose. Vis a vis:
Sam looks at Max with the same sort of expression that he might have were she currently in the process of growing a second head.
It doesn't require much excess verbage, but still gets the point across that someone is looking at someone else strangely. A lot of context gets conveyed in expression and body language, and lacking that there needs to be something to indicate if the person's reaction/demeanor is positive, negative, perplexed or what have you. Something needs to indicate if an object in question is new, old, well used or well cared for. At the same time, a pose should be long enough to say what it needs to say; but it need not be longer. If all someone is doing is lurking in the background, wrapped in a burlap sack and making occasional sniffing noises that can easily and fairly be conveyed in a sentence or two.

@surreality said in Table-top gadgets:

This is more writing-focused, but it is entertaining and may be similarly useful: http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/backstory-idea.htm

I think I linked it elsewhere recently, as it's what I use to come up with random filler for test templates for wiki and whatnot as well because once the wiki code brain is on, the 'I need random examples of what might be on a character sheet as filler that doesn't need to be a huge chunk of lorem ipsum text' part is so, so very turned off.

http://www.ashami.com/rpg/

@saosmash said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

People can get very invested in their wrong ideas, which makes sense since they came up with them themselves.

We call them "textualists."

@arkandel said in Do you buy your RPG books?:

Digital files, when downloaded, don't take away anything from someone's inventory.

But it reduces the potential market pool by one: You. Each 'one' reduces the market pool, which reduces the selling power of that item. If they were following elementary market rules, they would respond to a decrease in demand (people paying for it) with a decrease in price. This has worked for the music industry and briefly for the TV industry, though I think as the streaming platforms fracture the number of people willing to pirate will rise again.

Atoms are easy to count, but those things that can be converted to bits are being converted to bits and the atomic-based economics can't be applied wholesale anymore. The movie industry is trying to hold on with both hands and their teeth to their control, and that content providers are also access providers (or strong-arming them, vis a vis Youtube) will certainly help the businesses charge what they believe is right rather than let market forces dictate.

Apple and Spotify are making money hand over fist (tho one is only now crawling into the black) because that's what the market wants. If video wasn't so expensive to make then maybe the same could happen there, though I should reiterate just how much I'm enjoying The Good Place and that can't be expensive at all.

Anyway, most writers don't get paid much. Most of us don't get paid much, but still, buy things from writers you especially like.

@derp said in System dealbreakers:

@thenomain said in System dealbreakers:

Gangrel was my second choice, but overlaps a bit too hard with Werewolf. Well. Depending on which Werewolf Princess archetype we'd be going for.

Think of the TS possibilities though.

Yawn.

@ixokai

I think that it's interesting and indeed very important that the other person involved, really the person who was the victim of her passion play, said they didn't want it retconned. While I go on about how "The Game" is more important than a single player, players do make up The Game, and it must have been a hellish situation to find yourself administrating.

Finding the importance in balancing respect toward multiple people is when you can't just say "Don't Be a Dick" and when you can't go with strict policy. A mix of both can inform without demanding, and I appreciate it when people try.

@auspice said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I played a heroin addict on a game once. I made sure to be careful of who I played it around (since I know it can be triggering), but what surprised me more than people who it bothered (which I get)...

... was how lightly other people took it? Like to some it was this cutesy 'oh your character has the addict flaw? Mine does, too! To caffeine!'

If you're going to play an addict, I'm going to take it lightly not because I would make light of it, but because I happen to live near the county with the highest per capita death-from-overdose rate in the country. (We made the news.)

Addiction isn't funny, but I handle the grim reality with absurd laughter. To do otherwise would make me either severely depressed or violently enraged. (I've had a couple of friends long ago who died of overdoses to other drugs.)

@rook said in How do you construct your characters?:

@thenomain
I am coming to you, sir, to critique and make recommendations if/when I get ready to open.

You called this down on yourself.

I don’t mind helping, but this is the kind of thing that should be done by multiple people trying to make a character without help from you or anyone else. They do have to treat the testing honestly at first; you can test against people deliberately trying to break or misinterpret the systems some other time, like from game open to game close.

Every published board game goes through this; the developer gets people who have never seen the game before in a room, gives them the rules and components, and sits back to watch and take notes. We don’t normally have the time or ability to cold test like this, especially after the game has opened, but if we’re fortunate we will get enough players so we can read the temperature in the room.

But yes, I can criticize. Boy howdy can I criticize. The hard part is using my power for good, not whining.

In contrast, I care where what behavior goes. It's a utility thing.