Best posts made by Autumn

@saturna said in WoD Games in the Works:

There's also this monster in the works:

https://youtu.be/IwBS6QGsH_4

Here's hoping for a New Year's status update. I need my Mage fix!

While I have never tried it, I always thought it would be a lot of fun to have a Dream Park-esque cyberpunk campaign where the players generate two sets of characters: one for their "actual" characters, using Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 or some similar set of rules. And then another set for the characters their characters play in virtual reality fantasy adventures, using AD&D rules. And then just switch back and forth between rulesets depending on whether we're in the "real" game or in the "virtual" game. That way you can have exotic fantasy adventures while lampshading some of the weirder elements of the way Dungeons and Dragons works, but they still have impact because if you "die" in-game, your "real" character's lifestyle suffers as a consequence ...

Um. Anyway, that was sort of a roundabout answer. But I think it'd be neat.

I don't really have a strong opinion on what system to use, but I think that:

• It should probably be fairly simple to pick up; the Amber player base is not exactly habituated to nWoD levels of system complexity.

• It should be aimed to handle the conflicts that the game will be about, so figuring out in advance what those are should probably be a big part of it (e.g., Amber never came up with a satisfying way of handling military action, RtA tacked on the flagpole system as an afterthought, etc.)

• If it can avoid requiring staff intervention for everyday use, that's probably a good thing.

@Cupcake Dibs on Hudson Leick as a PB!

I have to add to the plaudits for the wiki. And the concept's neat, too! While I am normally a little wary of games that split up the player base between different factions, in this case the factions have enough ideological overlap so they aren't necessarily going to be at each other's throats.

Inevitably, when you run an Amber game, you have two choices. You can make the Princes and Princesses be qualitatively no different from any other character, in which case people will object because an Amber where Benedict can get thrashed by someone no one's ever heard of doesn't feel much like Amber.

Or you can make them qualitatively different from other characters, in which case everybody else will be second-class citizens, and that also doesn't feel like Amber, because that's not really a setting that's about any of the protagonists willingly being second-class citizens. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

That was part of what led me to suggest having the descendents organized by bloodline houses -- so the ideas of Deirdre, Bleys, Llewella, Corwin, etc., were still in the setting, and their mythic archetypes and character stereotypes were things that could be invoked consciously by both players and by characters, without having the actual characters around to present their usual Hobson's choice. But I'm certainly not about to suggest that's the best way to do it.

@arkandel Sure, sure. Why, when you get sendmail set up and running properly* on a 386 running Slackware -- that's as good as it gets! Crack open a Zima and toast a job well done.

[*]: to the extent that sendmail ever runs properly, that is.

@tnp I've only looked at the wiki, but it might be that Jean is using the Phoenix name, without actually being fully powered? Since they have both a Jean and a Rachel, they have to distinguish between them somehow, codename wise.

But I have no idea what's going on with Exodus. He seems like a better deus ex machina device than an actual PC, but I admit I had sort of tuned out of X-lore by the time he came on the scene, so I might be missing something important.

@Arkandel The Hong Kong situation has provided an excellent way to distinguish between "genuinely committed to defending human rights" and "happy to posture for the media and the public as long as it's popular and profitable but would sell their own parents for a nickel if they thought it would bring them more business."

@Arkandel The short answer is "Nothing!", of course, but that's not very helpful.

I'd expect that doing that would give more flavor than even a very carefully crafted offstage setup (assuming that staff are good at playing the Princes). It brings with it the usual issues that accompany having very powerful in-setting characters run as NPCs, and it wouldn't surprise me if Amber players as a group are sensitive to some of those issues due to past history, but just because something has worked out badly in the past doesn't mean it can't work out well in the present.

Removing them from everyday life also runs the risk of suggesting that things that the Princes can't be arsed to deal with aren't particularly important. When they do come out, it's a special occasion, but does that make it less special when they aren't around?

I don't think there's a simple yes or no answer. It's about what you want out of a game. To some people Amber is the Princes and Princesses being awesome and doing the things that make them awesome. To other people it's less about those specific characters and more about the environment they exist in. Do I sound wishy-washy? It's probably 'cause I am, since I feel a little uncomfortable with both ends of the debate.

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

I'm a bit out of the loop, but isn't that one of Cyclops' MOs?

That sounds way too straightforward and angst-free for Cyclops. Maybe throw in about 36 issues' worth of Hamlet-ing ("to Jean, or not to Jean") before he finally has the decision made for him by circumstances.

I spent a day or two last year reading Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword, so I can't say this comes as a complete surprise. From my layperson's perspective it was an interesting read, and I enjoy Holland's prose style.

@Cobaltasaurus: I like Lords and Ladies, and I like that the setting opens up such a huge amount of imaginative possibilities. I also like the extended family feel of the setting, which (and this will sound funny to anyone who knows the books) I think works to soften some of the hostility that can crop up in L&L games about less familial groups of people.

@Ganymede: d'awwwww!

@Sunny: I think it would be extraordinarily hard to do DRPG-style character creation in a persistent environment. But I think you could do something to indicate who is "the best", or at least who's among the best. Here's what I have in mind ...

I'm going to take RtA's mechanics -- which I actually prefer to the DRPG for a large-scale game -- as an example; for those who don't know them, there are four stats (Force, Grace, Wits, Resolve) and then a large number of possible powers that may add to your stats in a particular situation (e.g., being a badass swordsperson). When you get in a conflict, you pick a stat, your opponent picks a stat, and you both total up your stats and add appropriate bonuses (plus a random factor), then see who has a bigger total. If you both pick the same stat, then yes, you add the same number twice.

So if you have a character whose high stat + bonuses in one of a variety of areas is in the top X% of the game, that character gets a little tag in his or her +finger that says "this character is renowned as one of the greatest swordspersons alive." Doesn't matter if it's primarily stat or primarily bonus -- although if you wanted to you could have little secondary tags that say 'this person is renowned for their legendary Resolve' or 'this person is widely known to be a skilled swordfighter', when they have a high-level bonus or a very high stat but the combined total doesn't push them into the stratosphere.

This allows the rankings to evolve organically, keeps the number of people ranked as "one of the best ever" in rough proportion to the game's total population, and allows people to be informed about who's good and who's GREAT ... while still allowing players to keep /some/ secrets. Even if people know you're one of the greatest swordfighters alive, they might not know your preferred style (i.e., what your high stat is); and even if you're renowned for your razor wit, people may not know whether you focus more on being a dangerous duelist or an expert in cutting remarks.

You could even have an additional power that you can buy to lower your "effective" ranking, if you want to be one of those people who trains in secret until they're the best in the world: you can do that, but it costs something to keep your actual skill level a secret. The default is that once you reach a certain point, the general public is aware that you're a badass.

1: See this thread's title, immediately think: "YAY I HOPE SHE BRINGS BACK WINGS AND CLAY"

2: Click on thread, realize it's not THAT Darkwater.

3: Make sad face.

@Arkandel said in Comics Stuff:

Up next: Peter Parker murdered Uncle Ben in an act of insurance fraud to fund his scholarship!

I would totally read an alternate universe series based around this premise, though.

In my experience people will be nice and helpful if you:

• make a sincere effort to understand enough of the system to handle the basics;
• avoid slowing the game down more than necessary;
• are willing to learn on your own.

The only thing that really grinds my gears is people who don't have the core book at all and who then, upon hearing of something they think sounds neat, demand to have it explained to them. (If you ever played in the Mage sphere on the Reach, I guarantee a particular examplar of this habit just sprang to mind.) It's one thing to need some help in getting a handle on the complexities of extended casting. It's something else again to be constantly asking what Matter 1 does or who the Guardians of the Veil are.

@arkandel This is eerily similar to an actual place I used to go to in Palo Alto.

Dear mister loudly-shouting, angrily-gesticulating, horn-honking guy in the car behind me: I am genuinely and sincerely sorry that you want to turn at this cycle of the light and cannot, but I am still not going to pull out into the intersection until I am certain the light won't turn red while I'm blocking it.

My parents did not raise me nerdy; they were conventionally stodgy sorts. Dad liked books about early American history and 1920s automobiles. Mom read fiction about small-town life in England -- Flora Thompson, Laurie Lee, that sort of thing. But they did encourage me to read; one of my earliest memories is of my mother arguing with someone at the public library over their insistence that I had to be able to write my name in order to have a library card, when clearly the only important thing was that I be able to read.

She was, I'm sure, tremendously disappointed when I decided that this Anne McCaffrey woman's books looked interesting. What my five-year-old self thought about all the sex and violence in "Dragonquest" is no longer clear to me, but once I had got through the two Pern trilogies (all that existed at the time -- this was, um, a while back) there were Tolkien paperbacks with the lovely Darrell Sweet covers, and then Stephen Donaldson, and, and, and.

@cobaltasaurus Well, Reality Stalker is the best Legacy. But I might be biased.