Best posts made by Autumn

@tinuviel Over time I've gotten into the habit of starting poses with /: (or /;, or /@emit, or whatever) so that if I want to respond to something else while I'm writing, all I have to do is:

<return>
(Answer page, channel talk, whatever)
<ctrl-p back to pose in progress>
<finish writing pose>
<up-arrow right-arrow backspace return>

This also has the handy side effect of preventing me from sending out an incomplete pose if I accidentally hit return while typing it out. It does add a few extra keystrokes to every pose I write, but considering how many there are already this is a pretty minor downside.

@goldfish CoD stopped allowing extended rolls for ritual spellcasting. I think this was one of the best changes made between editions, as it cut out a lot of nonsense.

I'm strongly in favor of a Gnosis cap for Mage games in either edition, and if I thought enough players would tolerate it I'd push for that cap to be below 5.

No account will ever be fair to everyone, but: a player apping Cole Cash asked on-channel why he was being asked to genericize references to Halo Corporation in his background, when, e.g., Batman's background does not genericize Wayne Enterprises. Staff replied that this was because he was not the founder and owner of said corporation. The player in turn replied that Bruce Wayne was not the founder of Wayne Enterprises either, and that it seemed like unfair favorites-playing (their words) to allow one and not the other. Staff noted their objection.

I have two thoughts about this specific case and one related thought about ESH generally.

S1) This is a no-win situation for staff. If they let Cole's player establish stuff about the Halo Corporation and then someone decides to apply for the actual founder (unlikely as this may seem), that player is going to be upset. (And still other players will take it as license to argue for narrative control of things that are part of, but not necessarily a key element of, their background.) If they don't, the person wanting to play Cole will be upset.

S2) Staff was a little short with the player. I don't know whether this may or may not have been justified by behavior not visible to me, but I thought the policy explanation could have been handled better.

G1) ESH feels to me like a game where staff has a really strong idea of what they want and don't want on it, and if what you the player want isn't what they want then you can pound sand. There is nothing wrong with this attitude, and in all honesty I wish more games would adopt it, but it's an attitude that benefits from a very, very clear explication of what staff wants and doesn't want.

I loved Crimson Skies. So, two thumbs up!

I interpret "what are you going to do over the next 30 days?" more as an invitation for the applicant to demonstrate that they have some actual ideas about what to do with the character than as a request to accurately predict what kind of roleplaying you're doing. I'd be very surprised if staff checks to see whether your actual RP matches up with your predictions, and still more surprised to find that they even care.

I don't expect anyone to know what's going to happen with their character in 30 days, I just want to know they have something better in mind than "um, sit in the OOC room and hit on members of the appropriate sex."

@faraday said in The Savage Skies:

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't get how an ex-navy pilot with a specific RP hook of being benevolent toward non-Japanese people is racist? Should the game ban all Japanese characters?

I think the argument to be made there is that Imperial Japan is every bit as offensive to Asian people as Nazi Germany is to westerners, and that therefore permitting one but not the other indicates a cultural bias. To be clear, I'm not making this argument, but that's how I read the objection.

I'm less clear on the objection to monarchist characters; the game's background is explicit that populations are divided between communists, democrats, monarchists, and fascists, and none are specifically called out as forbidden (even fascists, although that might be a tough pitch in a game that's explicitly about punching fascists). Perhaps it's more about a character who supports this specific monarch, and an openly pro-Communist character who supports Stalin would garner a similar response?

@Arkandel said in Mostly Mage, Partially Descent Mux:

Given the fact no one in the tread contests the fact Paradox isn't being used by the clear majority of players then you are suggesting almost everyone is a shitty player, which I can't accept.

Wait, what? Paradox has been a thing in virtually every Mage sphere I've ever been a part of. Where exactly is this clear majority of players who "aren't using it"?

That Paradox isn't enough of a hindrance -- sure, okay, it sort of depends on what you think mage characters should be able to accomplish, but I could at least in theory agree with that. There's a lot of stuff you can do in Mage that doesn't require Paradox checks at all, and even things that do require Paradox checks often don't amount to much unless you do a lot of them in quick succession. The mechanics of nWoD Mage Paradox are such that it isn't really a big deal unless you go absolutely crazy, and that's a perfectly reasonable complaint to make about the game. But that it's just flat-out being ignored? Not in my experience.

@Coin said in Fanbase entitlement:

At least get mad at actual idiots, like people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts but can't even revolt against their parents. "Viva la revolución, mom, now can you send me my allowance, my Twinky supply is low". Fuck.

I am reminded of the guy I once saw wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Che and the caption, "I have no idea who this guy is."

@Misadventure said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

Would what you are talking about not work if for every scene (or big scene, or whatever qualifier) you pulled a card, and on some cards some unexpected direction was given as a prompt.

Not only would that work, it actually did work. You're pretty much describing Everway, a game Jonathan Tweet wrote before working on D&D 3rd edition; rather than dice, it used cards with tarot-esque imagery.

If the GM wasn't sure whether an action would succeed, or what might happen to the players next, or whatever -- she or he comes up with something on the basis of the card drawn. This does, however, require that the players really trust the GM, because, as anyone who's ever tried to read tarot cards can tell you, it's extremely easy to divine whatever result you want from an esoteric and allusive image.

@surreality said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Juerg was quite nice to me, for instance.

You do not have a vagina. This is relevant.

Juerg was never other than pleasant to me -- at least, he wasn't when interacting out of character. (In character is another story.) Despite playing a good-looking female character in the Order his character ran, I was actually taken by surprise when he got thrown off the game, because he had always been reasonable, courteous, and respectful in his OOC dealings with me.

To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying he's just a misunderstood but decent guy. I recognize that this is very much the exception rather than the rule. I don't know why he behaved this way; I'm sure I'm not the only person who made clear early and often that she wasn't interested in either sexytimes or OOC discussion of IC matters. But apparently, for whatever reason, this one time it stuck.

I like large grids. I enjoy the ability for players to spread out across the map, I enjoy reading well-done descriptions of places that builders thought would be interesting to make public, and having a lot of established options for where to go sometimes helps me think of things that would be fun to RP. (Yes, with temprooms I have infinite options for where I can go, but that obliges me to pick one out of that infinite number, and I'm vulnerable to option paralysis.)

However. Large grids really, really, really need to have good navigation tools. If I need to go somewhere, then the game needs to be able to tell me how to get there from where I am in as few steps as possible. Ideally through something like RtA's +go that just takes me there, rather than telling me the fifty exits I need to take to get there.

I am of the opinion that the problem with large grids is not grid size per se, but rather, that large grids require more tools to take best advantage of them, and often don't get those tools.

Original themes often aren't well-presented, and that can make it difficult to get and retain players. Say what you like about George R. R. Martin, but he's a much more entertaining writer than the average person who decides they want to start a game and make up their own setting for it.

When they are well-presented, by someone who's a good writer, has thought carefully about what will make an entertaining setting for a MU*, has written up the setting documentation in a way that's both fun to read, and provides enough information to get the game moving without having so much that it's a chore to wade through -- then they're great! My experience is that those things all coming together is very much the exception rather than the rule, though.

The problem I've observed with online fora where vitriolic, jerkish self-presentation is accepted (or actively encouraged) is that eventually, that's all it's about.

The people who start that sort of forum often do so because they think that a lack of restrictions on debate foster a more honest and open discussion, or because they think calling people out as harshly as possible will make people consider their arguments more carefully, or because it's funny if you do it in as absurd and overblown a manner as possible among friends who know it's all just a gag.

And that works fine as long as it's a small group of friends who all operate on the same wavelength, but when you get more people involved, you get people who aren't on the same wavelength; or who don't realize that the point of being allowed to be a vitriolic asshole is supposed to be to make the discussion better, rather than just venting spleen; or who just aren't capable of engaging on the same intellectual level as the people who started the whole thing, but are really good at being vitriolic assholes and want to be like the cool popular kids.

Smart and funny people interspersing their discussions with entertainingly written and articulate insults can be fun to read and participate in. Until they get drowned out by people who aren't smart, or funny, or entertaining, or articulate.

I'll settle for a game that has the Legion of Super-Heroes.

@Ataru Oh, absolutely! The more the merrier, I think. Even if we somehow got more people than could realistically crew a spaceship, we could work something out where we kick it old-school Dungeons and Dragons campaign style and various sub-groups go on missions depending on who showed up that day.

@Auspice I am irrationally enraged by how many organizations that've been happy to rake in the "socially conscious" cred as long as it represented an opportunity for free positive publicity are now not only refusing to support people who badly need that support -- but are actively undercutting and sabotaging them.

@ghost "Every facehugger is sacred, every facehugger is great; if a facehugger is wasted, the Queen gets quite irate ..."

@derp said in Class/Society Systems, WoD:

Another idea: you could make Resources beyond 1 or 2 chargen only. Same with Status. If you want to be a big mover in a group or super rich, that kind of thing often takes years of work (not weeks or months), and people should have to make some real choices about what their toon's actual focus areas are.

I feel like this would need to be accompanied by a Haunted Memories style timer/justification system for spending XP in general, or it would lead to a lot of awkward questions about why it takes years of in-game time to get a good enough job to buy a late-model car (Resources 3) or a house (4), but over there in a different part of the game people are becoming multiple-degree black belts or reaching Gnosis 5 in a month a two.

I'm not necessarily opposed to going in that direction, mind you; I think that approach has some benefits. It might be challenging to come up with a sufficiently sophisticated approach to handle it well, though.

@Seraphim73 said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:

Any level-based game is going to have problems with that. One thing that -could- be implemented to limit it would be to scale the starting level, but as you pointed out, with d20, once you get to a certain level, even specialists of a lower level can't keep up.

Although this is certainly not unique to level-based games. I enjoyed playing in the Mage sphere on Haunted Memories very much, for instance. But it was no easy task for a new player to find a specialty for their character that someone wasn't already better at -- often not even on purpose, but just as a side effect of being good at the things they actually wanted to be good at. The differentiation isn't as reliable as it is with level-based systems; a 250 XP character can be as effective as, or more so than, a 500 XP character, in a way that's rare for level 6 versus level 12. But it can still be awkward.

Not just for players, but for staff; the more subdivided the player base gets into groups who can't usefully operate together, the more separate opportunities staff has to provide to keep them happy. Running a single event for six characters is more work than running an event for three characters ... but not as much more as having to run two events for two groups of three characters because any threat that would challenge group A would be laughable for group B, or vice versa. Staff burnout is enough of a problem without further cranking up the storytelling workload.

My first thought in situations like this is: why is the character homeless in the first place? If the only thing she needs to get a desk job and a 401k and a Mercedes E-class in the driveway is a place to stay for a couple of nights and free meals, then yes, someone who offers you those things gratis is going to make for some adjustments in characterization.

If a character is based around being X, then the reasons for that character being X, and why she might continue to be X even in the face of determined attempts to make her otherwise, should probably be things the player gives some thought to before starting play.

It's not that I don't believe in characters changing radically in play -- a thrillseeking Acanthus who believes in never spending two consecutive nights in the same bed or passing out with an unspent dollar in her pocket could certainly evolve into someone who keeps a household and is a sort of passable foster mom. But the impact of that evolution is lost if the only reason she was a lazy trickster in the first place is "because her player thought it'd be a laugh."