Best posts made by Autumn

@saosmash When you don't want to give back the money, any reason you can think of will do, whether it makes any sense or not.

If GRRM was scripting 2016, it wouldn't have come out until 2025.

@ganymede said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

I vastly prefer Singer's Cyclops, who gets disintegrated but, before then, is pretty damn consistent.

Singer's Cyclops succeeded in making me think that, if I were Jean Grey and being around too many people with strong emotions made me uncomfortable, okay, sure, fine, this tall drink of bland could be exactly what I need to have in my life.

Whereas comic-book Cyclops' many and varied toxic stews of angst and guilt and anger at the world strike me as a thing I could not possibly get far away enough from even if I weren't a telepath.

@ghost I think Zero Punctuation once referred to the facehugger as "nature's communion wafer", apropos of people in a game taking roughly that same worshipful attitude.

MCU Thor reminds me of the things I loved about Christopher Reeve's Superman. And I'm glad someone does, because the DCCU broody miseryguts Superman doesn't work for me, like, at all.

I found 2E to be simpler than 1E once I learned it. 1E didn't feel too bad when I first started learning it, but the sheer number of special cases and options hidden in individual spells and so forth meant that the actual complexity ramped up fast. 2E much reduced the total complexity in the system, but at the cost of making it feel more intimidating because you had to learn it all up front.

Or that's how it felt to me, anyway. If I had come to 2E without ever having played 1E, I might have felt very differently about it, since I'd've had no 1E reflexes to unlearn.

@arkandel said in X-Men Game:

So if you had nothing else going on, Cyclops could always meet up with Bob the Melter to give them a lecture about leadership or... something.

On an almost completely unrelated topic, I thought the new Melter was a great character.

Wisdom gleaned from moving:

1. Don't move.

2. Definitely don't move if you've spent the past eight years cramming 8 bedrooms worth of possessions into a 4-bedroom house.

3. If you must move, get other people to do the work for you.

4. If you can't get other people to do all the work for you, do not fill a 26' U-Haul with books and then drive it cross-country.

5. Do not move from a location 350 feet above sea level to a location 7500 feet above sea level.

6. If you do, do not make your plans hinge on being able to unload a 26' truck full of books in less than 24 hours.

(Yes, there is a positive version of this post in the works for the other thread, but this was easier! Also kind of more fun.)

@Alzie Well, we haven't seen the light yet, so someone's going to keep coming by with a new Watchtower every month.

@thenomain One other possible contributing reason:

• We started writing longer descs, and people aren't willing to read them.

I still have some descriptions I wrote in 1992 or thereabouts, and when I went back to look at them the first thing I noticed is just how short they are compared to those I've seen (or, hell, written) lately. The first one I checked was eight lines long, or a little less than a third of a vt100 screen, which I think is a pretty reasonable length to ask someone to read -- maybe a little wordy, but I wouldn't feel too put-upon if someone's desc was that long. The fashion since then seems to have turned toward much longer descriptions. And who has time to read that much for every character you meet? I have clung tenaciously to "a single vt100 screen" as my measure of the maximum practical description size, but if I'm being honest, I'm reluctant to read even that much. And plenty of people were writing them a lot longer than that. I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to wade through 5-6 paragraphs of lushly detailed purple prose just to figure out what kind of clothes someone's wearing.

Along those lines, I suspect that having short-descs show up in +glance, and later in default room views, probably contributed, too. If memory serves that practice got started around the time people started going way overboard on their descriptions, and I doubt if that was a coincidence.

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

@TheOnceler said in Good or New Movies Review:

People should go see Knives Out. It's Rian Johnson finally recovering from the stumble of making a critically acclaimed billion dollar movie.

Looper?

Brick?

Oh, wait, no, that only made a billion dollars in my imagination.

(Still wildly underappreciated, though.)

Maybe I'm unduly cynical, but I can't help thinking that any setting close enough to actual history to make a recognizable substitute will not be far enough away to defuse the potential ethno-religio-cultural minefields. It might escape some of the people who'd be offended by the real world, but would probably almost make up the difference from people offended by ways in which they think the alt-world portrays a particular group unfairly.

@packrat said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

Just being a huge jerk to people is unpleasant, being say, a huge jerk to commoners as a noble in a manner that makes it obvious you as the player think your character is a tool? That can work really well.

I feel like this is a really important thing. If other players understand that you think your own character is a jerk, you can get away with a lot. While too much meta makes me itch, I still sometimes put callouts of my characters in pose text when they do something that's particularly egregious jerkery.

On the other hand, it's not a get out of jail free card. I met a guy once who openly acknowledged that his character was a jerk, and, sure enough, when I RP'd with him the character was so jerkish that I had no desire to interact with him again.

As Karl Popper once wrote, "It is impossible to work out in such a way that you cannot be perceived to be judging."

I've had a lot of fun playing at FW so far and am looking forward to spending more time there with some of my favorite Mage characters. If you're thinking of giving it a try, I encourage you to do so!

While you have to mold the game around what you're prepared to have PCs be able to do, I'd be a little bit leery of setting up a situation where the people through whose eyes we came to know and appreciate the setting in the first place are presented as being (or having been) much more awesome than PCs can ever aspire to be.

Or, to put it slightly differently: if I come to game about the siege of Troy, it's probably because I want to play one of the Greek or Trojan heroes. I don't insist that I be able to play an Achilles-equivalent, but at least let me be someone who'll prompt Homer to spend some time on it when Achilles kills me, rather than one of those guys who get named as part of a list of the fifty Trojans he slaughters to get to Hector.

(Unless the game is a high-concept thing where playing the metaphorical spear carriers is the whole point. Like, I'd play an Amber game where the players were all ordinary members of the Watch and the focus is on dealing with the mythic superhuman deeds of the various royal family members with darkly humorous understatement. If that makes sense.)

When I approach a traffic light and see that, on the far side of the intersection, traffic has ground to a halt so that I will be sticking out into traffic if I proceed through, I come to a halt at the traffic light even if it's still green.

Sometimes, once I've stopped, traffic on the far side lurches forward far enough to allow me to proceed through, and, if the light is still green, I will do just that.

And every time, without fail, every single one of the paste-eating morons behind me follows right on through and blocks the intersection anyway.

I have realized two things over the past week:

1. I miss playing Amber (you know, the Roger Zelazny hard-boiled Lords and Ladies setting) more than I had thought I did.

2. I am pretty much done with the canonical Amber royal family as PCs.

I kind of want to see what other characters will do with the setting. Heck, I want to see the setting itself taken in different directions. When I log in to an Amber game after seven years and it's still Corwin and Eric squabbling over the throne ... I know that there are people for whom this is the essence of Amber and therefore there will always be an audience for it. I'm just not that person any more.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

But more than a gun, I kinda want this: https://www.preppergunshop.com/flamethrowers

Why settle for one or the other?

TinyFugue. And yes, as a matter of fact, I do churn my own butter.