Best posts made by Autumn

There's been a bit of an Instinct resurgence lately where I am. Probably more than half the gyms I saw today were yellow. It was a nice change.

I have a theory that Blue, as the middle and therefore sort of the default option, picked up a lot of casuals, which helped them dominate in the early going; but numbers're starting to become less of a factor now that more players are deploying Pokemon that are out of reach of casual players' attacks, which makes the relative numbers of serious players more important than just the raw numbers.

In the long run it may even turn out to have helped out yellow to be outnumbered at the start, as that might attract people who are looking for a challenge. But perhaps that's wishful thinking.

@Arkandel I'd say they were very clear about what they wanted in this specific instance, but I can see how a third party might have questions about how to generalize from it.

Which is not to minimize the good in being clear what one wants from a specific person. There's a fairly longish list of games that have lost me completely when the only feedback is "this isn't a good fit" or "this is too high/too low". "Remove or rename this specific element", by contrast, is a breath of fresh air.

I am all for sphere caps, although it's my opinion that they ought to go hand in hand with fairly low alt limits.

I don't mind having to wait for a spot in my chosen sphere to open up if that means more attentive staff (not even attentive to me, necessarily -- just more attentive generally). I would be a little peeved if I have to wait while Alty McAltface has a character in each of the 18 spheres available in Hypothetical Game #10, though.

(I do not know what SF:PotW's alt policy is; I am speaking in general, not offering criticism, or for that matter praise, of this particular game.)

What kills me (but hopefully will not kill them, however deserved it might be) is people who just stroll right across a busy street when there is not merely a crosswalk but an honest to God elevated walkway less than fifty feet away.

@marsmrsmars said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Ex-Nazis are explicitly disallowed in character generation which I assume extends to fascism, which Nazi Germany is the poster boys for.

That's an interesting question. I wonder whether, say, an Italian army veteran who fought in the Ethiopian campaign would be permitted. I would guess it would depend more on the details of the character concept than the bare facts per se (e.g., a character disgusted by what their country did and determined to stop the spread of fascism would get a very different response from an enthusiastic Mussolini-ite) -- but that's just a guess on my part, since I have no more insight on staff's decisionmaking than anyone else.

hopeful thread necromancy

I know a lot of soapbox has moved on to different genres and different game styles; wondering if this game is still in active development or has been a victim of this migration.

My experience has been that Five Guys has lower variance, but In-N-Out has a higher ceiling. When In-N-Out gets your order just right, it's great, but it seems like at least a third of the time, the fries are either done too crispy or too soggy; or the bun is charred or insufficiently toasted; or the burger itself is either over- or under-done.

Five Guys is almost always Perfectly Acceptable, but it never climbs to the level of Burger Nirvana the way In-N-Out is capable of.

Worth mentioning: a character not knowing anything about Amber or the setting is actually totally in theme for an Amber game. The protagonist of the first five -- er, I mean "only good" -- books starts off completely ignorant of the larger world and thinks he's just an ordinary guy on 1960s Earth, and a recurring motif throughout the series is "person who thinks he knows his or her place in the world is shown the larger Amber universe."

Just don't be amnesiac. 'Cause that is so played.

@Jaunt

To echo what @Thenomain said from a slightly different perspective: why are you here?

That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm actually not. Are you here to get people to come to your site and engage with you on topics of mutual interest? Or are you here to demonstrate that you can stand up to "internet bullying?" (Okay, the scare quotes are a little bit sarcastic.)

If you're here for the latter, then go crazy! Be just as much of a jerk to people as they are to you, if not more so. It's fun. I do it sometimes myself. But if you're here for the former, the best way to demonstrate that your site has something to offer on topics of mutual interest is to engage with such points in a sincere and respectful way, and ignore everything else. Some people will keep jeering at you (although I suspect not very many), but whose side of the debate is that actually going to harm? From my perspective as a mostly disinterested observer, not yours.

Ooof. I hope she's recovering OK, and I will try to find some spare cash.

@Rick-Sanchez said in World (Chronicles?) of Darkness Concepts You Would Enjoy RPing with:

What if you wanted to make convincing counterfeits of things, though? Given roughly the same material, you could make a duplicate of it, as I surmise, with just Matter 1. These are for mundane objects only. I mean, if you can copy supernatural stuff with Prime 1, Matter 1, can't you copy mundane stuff with just Matter 1?

Coincidentally enough, the Mysterium book also contains (p. 198) a spell for "duplicate mundane objects", although they list it as a Matter 4 spell. Which you could still totally do with a starting character unless the starting XP is pretty miserly; it just requires a little more focus.

That's pretty much how a fair number of early World of Darkness games did work, right down to the part where slots that open up almost invariably go to staff or friends of staff. Shockingly, games that actually allow players to be vampires or werewolves proved to be a lot more popular.

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. And then the murders began.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. And then the murders began.

A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. And then the murders began.

@Arkandel It's probably due to the effects of having things cost differently depending on whether you buy them in chargen or with XP. That is, if you want to end up with a stat spread of 3/5/3, there is an objectively more XP-efficient way to get there when post-chargen costs are not linear, which disadvantages people who want to start out with a relatively balanced set of stats.

Of course, the other way to do this is to make it more expensive to spike stats in chargen. CoD made tentative baby steps in this direction by having 5s cost extra in chargen, but all that did was adjust the calculations, rather than getting rid of the problem.

@tragedyjones said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

Didn't The Great Game also face a tide of outcry and revamp into a modern game? Or did I make that up?

I'm not sure if it was "a tide of outcry" (the population was never really high enough to generate a tide of anything), but it did indeed go from 1899 to modern. There may have been another game by the same name, but the Spider London Mage game definitely underwent a timeshift. And there was also The Greatest Generation, which probably didn't help with name confusion.

@surreality said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

I love how crystal clear their opinion of themselves is, right there in the name.

While I think it's totally plausible that the name was chosen for self-aggrandizing reasons, I had always just sort of assumed it was called "The Great Game" because they intended to center the game around geopolitical conflicts among the European powers during the end of the Victorian Era. But then, I am notorious for either "preferring to think the best of people" or "failing to notice the totally bloody obvious", depending on how nice you feel like being. More the latter than the former, in this case.

@surreality said in Making a MU* of your own:

If those rules are not posted? Yes, that is a problem, and they need to fix that problem by posting those rules, and doing so clearly.

I don't like unwritten rules, but I will tolerate a rejection on those grounds, especially if it's some weird corner case where staff might not actually have thought of it before. Worse than just having unwritten rules, though, is having unwritten rules and not being willing to say what they are.

If your unwritten rule is that characters can't have more than 3 skills over 50%, that's fine, and I will redo the character sheet to comply with that (and possibly suggest mentioning that in the chargen rules somewhere). But for God's sake don't deny an application for "having too many skills over 50%" without offering some guidance as to how many skills over 50% is an appropriate number.

@tragedyjones said in Mostly Mage, Partially Descent Mux:

Also, to cast a lethal spell in combat takes 1 turn, and a maximum of, +2 Yantra dice? Mages really need to prepare these days. Dangerous and versatile yes, but they did a wonderful job of balancing them.

You can draw upon one Yantra reflexively when casting a spell. If you have the spell as a Rote, you can use the appropriate Skill rating. If you have Potent Shadow Name and the spell fits your paradigm, then you can use the merit rating. As far as I can tell, there is no explicit limit to the number of dice your one Yantra can add, just the practical limit of which ones you have available.

To my mind the fact that ritual spellcasting is no longer handled as an extended action is one of the largest factors in depowering 2nd edition. You can still do some impressive things, but you can no longer bring a ridiculously enormous pile of dice to the table. That's fine with me -- impressive things are fun. Just winning because you have the biggest pile of dice is boring.

@Coin said in Fanbase entitlement:

I suppose. And if that's the case, sure. But then again, they most likely bought the shirt, which means it was the product of a capitalist action, which Che would have probably at least sneered at.

Now I kind of want to put the Che photo on an iPhone case, just to maximize the cognitive dissonance.

@Goldfish I am also going to give a shout-out to the reverse form, where you stumble upon someone IC and make a mutual, spur-of-the-moment decision that your characters are going have backstory. And then it actually works.

My Haunted Memories character once met someone who happened to have the same last name -- I'd picked it specifically because it was one of the most common surnames in Austria, so it wasn't a shock -- and who then paged me to say, basically, "We have the same name, let's be relatives!" So we just rolled with that, inventing relatives and relationship details on the fly in the middle of the scene and working one another into our backstories. And it was fabulous.

@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:

When I hear 'brevity' I just picture those Elysium-sort of poses we're all familiar with. Or people who will just pose "She smiles." or some other 2/3/4 word action in every pose they write. Yes, we all abuse those small gesture, but like...give me some flavor please. "She laughs and flashes a cocky smile at Jane after the woman's comment." Not just "She smiles."

For me, brevity in RP is aggravating if the person isn't posing quickly and frequently. You know the kind -- the person we've all played with where you wait 15 minutes for a one-sentence pose? That will not stand. My best experiences with people posing briefly have been those who respond quickly, and usually more than once every time it's their 'turn' in the scene.

I suppose you could make the argument that if someone's outputting half a dozen one-line poses in two minutes, then it's no longer 'brevity' per se, it's just a stylistic quirk of using multiple lines to convey something that someone else might use a single long paragraph for. And I'm not sure I'd argue otherwise.

@Ganymede said in Roleplaying writing styles:

My style changes distinctly when you're involved. You know what I mean.

You ... you mean you aren't like that with everyone? blushing