Posts made by Auspice

Magicians works best set in modern day.

Part because of its theme in general and part because there's specific plot devices that would easily allow your PCs to visit other time periods.

@Ganymede said in Good TV:

@Auspice said in Good TV:

Mermista is me.

Mermista is me.

@Ominous said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I am driving towards the burning coast this week, and today I drove through the Texas and New Mexico and it was 35 degrees F from 1 to 5 pm. I am not from this area, but I suspect those temperatures at that time of day is very odd.

They are.
We've had some big storms the past couple weeks that have dropped the temps a lot.

Seems since S3 will be in Japan, a lot of the other characters won't be in it.

@Lotherio said in Good TV:

@Auspice said in Good TV:

He's a guy who was bullied for how he looked, so instead of some hackneyed LET'S GIVE YOU A MAKEOVER STORY TEEHEE (female chars get subjected to this far, far too often), they had him own the shit out of it.

Aisha is here, not doing a makeover, torn between being who she was and sporting some new change where she own's it. Tory and Sam's indifferent struggles might give her more independence we saw from her throughout, but Tory to follow after Sam left had her puppy-dogging a friend. She's ready to be way more independent strong.

I just need more from Aisha. I figure they'll likely give her more of her own story in season 3 (they're doing a good job of not overloading on who gets what story so you don't get lost in the weeds). But she does need to ditch Sam because Sam is the worst.

@Ghost said in Good TV:

@Auspice said in Good TV:

Hawk is the best. #changemymind

Hawk IS a great character for all kinds of reasons, up to and including being a perfect example as to how a sweet, bullied kid can become the worst of the worst, which I've seen happen so much.
They'll need to introduce more antagonists before they consider a "redemption arc" for Hawk, but I'd be down to see more Eli/Demetri bromance.

So this is part of why Hawk is the best.

I don't need or even necessarily want my characters to be perfect bastions of human behavior.

But so often our story for a 'omg so shy and passive' nerd is that he becomes confident and attractive and-

Hawk's story so far has been realistic. He's a guy who was bullied for how he looked, so instead of some hackneyed LET'S GIVE YOU A MAKEOVER STORY TEEHEE (female chars get subjected to this far, far too often), they had him own the shit out of it.

He's a TEENAGER. He's not going to transform into being the best human being overnight.

The reason Hawk is the best is because his story has depth to it. Because it's engaging. Because it's fun. I love Hawk.

Hawk is the best. #changemymind

@krmbm said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@silverfox said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I've yet to play on an Ares game where when I threw up a general scene set and waited, people didn't show up. Yes, I did make sure there were people "active" on the game within it.

This has totally happened to me. Like three times.

Out of the hundreds of scenes I've played on Ares games.

And as you know, if you fail even once, the whole thing is bad. >.>

[Chat] Nicoli (@Coin) says, "I'm just saying we got lucky and losing the Euphoria would have been preferable to an entire solar system where did you learn ethics from, Stargate SG-1? jeez"
[Chat] Nicoli (@Coin) says, "y'know what don't answer that"

ilu @Coin

I've been mulling the past couple days over what it is that I really like about Euphoria. I mean, I enjoy the theme, but there's been something else. Some reason that's caused me to nudge at friends that they should check it out when they have the time/energy.

It's the buy-in.

So often these days it feels like RP exists in a vacuum. Your pose is only acknowledged so long as it pertains to / aids / assists someone else and if a Staff NPC / metaplot event is present, you may as well forget about 'existing.' I know I've absolutely (on Arx this happens in almost every big scene I go to) spent entire scenes where 90% of my poses are to... myself. I had a scene on another game recently where I went to a public event, roughly 8 people. I posed in, someone acknowledged me! Gasp! And then a friend of theirs showed up and they never responded back to anything else (leaving a thread of conversation dangling, even).

But on Euphoria, there's buy-in. People will engage with you. People will pick up threads you didn't even expect and run with them. In an event scene, while trying to explain a concept, my character made a comment about 'You know how everyone sucks their stomach in...' and it was just sort of a flippant, silly way of explaining the idea. Another PC in the scene posed sucking their stomach in, considering it, deciding they were OK with their body, but experiencing that moment of self-doubt and oh gosh, that tickled me. It was a cute, funny pose and I felt flattered that my pose had been read.

So yeah, the engagement. I really, really dig the engagement and buy-in from the active players.

@Tinuviel said in Selling people on MU*'s strikes me as impossible:

ETA: They've also done the old "why isn't anyone making games" thing. So either this person is simply very ignorant, or they're trolling. Or both.

it's the usual troll. I mean c'mon he's done this cycle before.

Step 1: post 'woe why isn't anyone making games / RPing' in Gripes.
Step 2: reply to someone in an RL-related thread to commiserate and try to engage them
Step 3: Start making mostly pointless threads in Mildly Constructive

it's bait. don't bother. he'll go full racism within 36 hours.

@Lotherio said in Good TV:

I'll admit it, I'm nearly done on my binge of Cobra Kai. Its better than I thought, there's a lot of homage to the original while still giving that teen drama feel that goes along with the stuff my kids like so we can watch it together (it even has a girl from one of their Nick shows). Despite teen drama and the over the top karate, there is some good character development in there between all the fan service. I like it.

I honestly love Cobra Kai. The character development is great. I watched it on YouTube Red because I was so into it (they did the first three episodes free originally and I went I NEED THIS lol)

re: rank options in cg that you can't choose...that is an FS3 thing. If the rank is being used, it needs to be in the system.

Now if it was selectable, it may just be they didnt/forgot to flag it as not an option in cg. Remember that Cobalt and NGC are still learning Ares and FS3 both.

I am having existential crisis.

I had an evaluation appt today for a medical study (because study = $$ which I need) and part of it was weight/height and when tf did I gain an inch

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I think my biggest struggle with engaging in those/remembering I'm in them is, if I'm not online to get the @inform when there's a new pose in them, I frequently totally miss that there's been activity in them. Like, I'm someone who does pretty well with the Ares scene system but mostly can't manage flashbacks so idk exactly what the difference is. It might just be a matter of how much they're deemphasized on the Arx website (you have to click through your character page to get to your flashbacks and then into the flashback itself). Also might be a cultural thing, idk.

I hate the flashback system. And I say this as someone who likely uses it more than most. The @informs aren't the issue for me. I check my informs religiously because hey! might be something fun! But if I'm posing regularly in one while online? I might not check my informs that day and then the next day be like 'oh that's all from the same day.' I COULD fix that by checkin the @inform every time but.... lolno.

It's the 'reload the page every time' interface for one.
It's the 'have to do some commands on game, some on the web' for two.
I've heard some people complain that since they can't change the look of it (the bright white), they dislike it (I know there's Chrome extensions that let you change these things yourself).

But yeah, the hassle of accessing flashbacks makes them harder to engage in, too.

@krmbm said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Honestly? Now that there's a one-click "restart" button on scenes? I'd probably knock it down to 12 hours on any future games.

I wonder if maybe having a way to flag a scene as variable might help. Because some of us (I know I and @L-B-Heuschkel do, for example) purposefully run asynchronous plot scenes for the non-standard-US time crowd. So setting a timer to 12 hours would be frustrating because I doubt the players would be on the ball enough to hit restart, so the ST would have to and hope that players would do their thing in time and... it'd slow things down even more, IMO.

BUT. If you could, when creating the scene, set a flag like 'This will be a slow scene' and it'd have a longer time-out window...... that'd be handy.

So a couple thoughts as I've seen the thread:

You are doing a lot at once. I know @Paradox commented this to me when I mentioned the Xayians showing up. He felt you'd gone too soon (he and I talk game theory a LOT) and was surprised. The scene was fun and well-done! But I do agree it could've been held off longer. Am I excited to see the Xayians and learn about them? Hell yeah. But it IS yet-another-new-thing for incoming people to learn and I think that may be hurting things a bit also, potentially. You wanna ramp stuff up.

I get the want to DO THINGS. You're excited! There's plot! You want to share it with people! I 100% get it. But roll it out slowly.

I'd say do just 1-2 BIG events a month and if you and NGC are up to running moar stuff, do more domestic stuff mid-week. The mystery in the farm is a good example.

Also: nix the PC Department Heads altogether. IMO. People DO idle out in those roles, it's true. And putting requirements on them ('run scenes' or 'hit these activity requirements') doesn't help. Either no one apps or they do and they don't meet the requirements, hoping they'll be Special and Cool Enough you won't care. PC Department Heads aren't necessary. @faraday ran BSU with a relatively 'flat' structure for PCs so that everyone could have turns running missions, but no one was TEH MAN IN CHARGE and y'know what? It worked. Nothing ever got bottlenecked because Bob the CAG wasn't on. No one ever felt stymied because they didn't get along with Sue the marine Captain.

The game is small enough right now, you can NPC the Department Heads and have PCs be their assistants, then have 1-3 assistants per so that there's variety, no issue if people idle/idle out, etc., and they can still have a sense of responsibility.

Do remember that for some people, asynchronous play is all they can do. It's OK if it's not your cup of tea, but remember that if you scrub if from visibility on your game, you're saying 'we don't want your kind here.'

I know the'Limited' option is usually used now to flag what scenes are and aren't slow and if that's not good enough for people, we could ask @faraday for a feature to separate live and asynchronous scenes in the listing, but it sounds like people are unhappy seeing them at all and that bothers me a lot. A lot of my favorite people to rp with can only rp because of these scenes and I don't jive with the idea of essentially excluding them because some people don't like that rp. Your preference shouldn't mean excluding others unless you're designing a game around having only live scenes period.