Posts made by Autumn

Bookmarked! We'll see where my time goes over the next week or so.

I've always been really charmed (pun halfway intended) by the Dragon-Blooded and I think a game centered on them has great potential to be a fun mix of action-adventure and lords & ladies hijinks ... sort of like a less uptight anime-flavored Amber game!

So I would recommend being super cautious about copying one of the long-time pain points of Amber games: having a higher up tier of PC that's, well, better than the sort the average person gets to play. The other flavors of Exalted might be better kept as NPCs and/or villains; otherwise you have to walk a very narrow line between allowing too many in play (which risks the game becoming entirely different and no longer meaningfully about the Terrestrials at all) and allowing too few (which runs the risk of DB players getting cranky about being reduced to second fiddles in a game ostensibly about them).

I'm sure it's possible to handle this well. And honestly, the first option is probably a feature rather than a bug for a lot of Exalted fans. Just makes me twitch, is all.

@Auspice said in Image Attribution & Creative Commons:

I almost feel like there should/could be two descriptions. The overly fancy (more for your own sense of ego) and the one that gets down to brass tacks so that someone can look at you mid-scene and go 'okay, that's right, she has green eyes.'

Isn't that what shortdescs are for? Or is that too little information?

@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

@Autumn said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
You can be a Communist and not a Stalinist, you know.

Of course! I was just trying to draw a comparison back to the issue of monarchist characters. I'm just genuinely curious how people feel about some of these hypotheticals, irrespective of whether they would be permitted by the game rules or not.

@lordbelh said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Furthermore, clearly while the character worships the Emperor, she blames the higher ups in the military for the actions of Imperial Japan at present. We can argue how much blame Hirohito deserves (seems a decent amount), but that's really besides the point.

I wanted to go back to this post for a minute, just to think through the more general question of how informed we should expect characters (not just this specific character) to be in the context of their time. The abovementioned hypothetical Russian Communist character in 1938 might very well be ignorant of a lot of horrifying things that have been done at Stalin's behest; probably the great majority of actual Russians at the time were. As far as this brawny Russian lad who wants to go and shoot some fascists in Spain is concerned, Stalin is the warm, benevolent, fatherly figure who protects the Soviet Union from fascists and counterrevolutionaries, not the guy who had the kulaks rounded up and shipped off to Siberia.

Is that problematic? Is it less problematic if the character finds out about the horrible stuff that's happened in the Soviet Union since the revolution, and, revulsed, abandons their loyalty to Stalin? Conversely, is it more problematic if the character finds out about them and refuses to believe it, remaining convinced that Stalin couldn't possibly do those things and it must all be the fault of counterrevolutionaries? Or if he finds out and believes it, but supports Stalin anyway, because sometimes hard measures are necessary to stamp out the cancer of fascism? Does whether or not that character continues to profess adherence to Communist principles make a difference?

I'm not suggesting a particular answer to any of the above questions. But it struck me as interesting grist for discussion in light of the rest of this thread.

@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.

@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?

I loved Crimson Skies. So, two thumbs up!

@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.)

48 hours into the flu and I don't feel significantly better than I did the first night. This is misery.

Worse, my poorly-timed illness has killed a trip that sweetie had been totally looking forward to and now I feel extra awful as a result.

Please send non-hostile thoughts and try not to pick up any of my germs.

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.

@Cupcake Dibs on Hudson Leick as a PB!

@Taika I am perilously short on time lately (although maybe that will change now that winter is descending upon us), but I have been following the developments with interest!

@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.

Blizzard suspends Hearthstone player for ‘liberate Hong Kong’ statement

Pathetic.

@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 said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Speaking for myself I'd love a D&D MUSH. Something based on a city in any of the official settings with PCs starting out as nameless nobodies hoping to get a job in local taverns becoming seasoned adventurers or growing to legends.
There'd need to be some adjustments, such as accounting for how multi-party environment can cause issues not present in table-top D&D games - inflation comes to mind, for example, if higher level characters pass down their gear to newbies.

I'd really enjoy an action-oriented fantasy adventure game in a D&D setting and making use of all the D&D tropes; I just don't think any of the D&D systems are especially good for multiparty, heavily multiplayer venues. Sure, they could be re-engineered to make them work for that, but I wonder whether it might be worthwhile to just start out with something simple and quick that rewards jumping right into fast-paced action scenes rather than the kind of tactical decision-making that most of the D&D editions I've played seem to end up as.

***=NSFW content***

@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.