Posts made by Autumn

@Arkandel said in MU Things I Love:

You know, I like making a new character from scratch on a game I'm excited about and even PBs (and conversations leading up to picking one) can be fun, I've even even been known to hunt through my notes and the googlez for appropriate book quotes that fit the concept... but music? I can't find and wouldn't even know how to start looking for a soundtrack if I tried.

Sometimes a particular song is part of the inspiration for a concept, which helps.

I'll confess to being lazy enough to just open up my iTunes library and scroll through it looking for things that would fit with the concept I'm working on. Once I have that list noted down somewhere, I'll start googling for "songs about <character element>" or "<emotional state> songs" or whatever, and scroll through some clickbait lists to see if anything there catches my eye. And sometimes if I don't have enough ideas after using those methods, I'll try using iTunes "Genius" feature to fill out my candidates with songs like some of the ones I already like.

Sometimes none of these things work. And then I'll sort of backburner the whole soundtrack thing until some play happens and I get a better grasp of the character.

@Arkandel I think @Cupcake is basically right. I recall that people were uncomfortable with the historicity of the setting -- I heard several people express that they just weren't clear on how they should behave IC, not just in terms of attitudes that people find awkward or uncomfortable today but in terms of everyday language and behavior. "How are we supposed to talk?" is a pretty basic question, and if people don't have an answer they feel comfortable with it's going to be problematic.

Now, that kind of thing is catnip to me, and I really enjoyed researching the manners and mores and clothing styles and societal conventions of that time, but I can understand why people might be a little leery of it.

I don't think timeshifting was originally the plan; I think they intended to keep it Victorian. But I have no real proof of that, aside from having seen no sign of it in the game's background material.

I enjoyed playing a convention-challenging (though less so than @Cupcake's!) character in that environment, but I also felt a tiny bit weird about doing so. I'm not sure how to explain, except perhaps that I felt like I should have been conventional rather than a challenge to it.

@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.

@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.

I've never understood why people get so peeved about being carded for alcohol, and, now that I'm closer to retirement age than underage, I understand it even less. So, you're saying I'm not obviously well over the age of 21? How nice of you to say so!

I googled this and can't help feeling like I've read it before. Like when Captain America died, was resurrected by the Red Skull, teamed up with the Skull to do ... something, and then got stripped of his American citizenship by President Bill Clinton? That's still part of continuity, right?

Actually, maybe don't answer that. Either way, I'm not sure I want to know.

I enjoyed playing CoH for a while -- it's a great place to try those really off the wall concepts that you can't get out of your head, but that most sane places will look at you sideways for trying to get away with -- but ultimately it just felt kind of aimless. Part of that is my own fault, since one of the problems with playing an off-the-wall concept on a game where anything goes is that there probably won't be a lot of people you'll have much in common with. It was fun while it lasted, though, and I got some wonderful individual scenes out of it, even if the experience as a whole sort of went nowhere.

Right now I'm just playing Fallcoast. Though a KD character concept has started to poke its way into my head.

@Arkandel said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

Yeah you're right, but it'd have been easier - and more logical - to adjust CGen and match its scaling to the rest of the game than what they ended up doing.

I suspect that the inertia of the WoD brand was working against them there. Everyone knows you do character creation in World of Darkness by assigning dots from a pool. Changing that around would result in character creation looking very different, and that radical a change might have just been off the table.

@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.

@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.

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

@Arkandel said:

1. How important is the part where you find a PB for your character? As in, if it takes you X minutes to figure out what's allowed, write the BG, etc... what percentage of that do you spend searching for the right one?

Finding the right one is pretty important to me, since it tends to become my mental image of the character. Sometimes it takes no time at all (e.g., if the whole idea for the character writeup came from a particularly striking image). Sometimes it takes a while. I've gone without a PB for a week or two while trying to find just the right choice.

2. Does it matter to you what other people choose? For example if someone has picked the same PB as you, if it's a beefcake/hot model or a regular joe... and do you think the choice means something about their character or even player?

I think the choice always means something. Sometimes I think I know what it is, and am right; sometimes I think I know what it is, and am wrong; sometimes I don't have a clue. There are certain classes of PB that are more likely to make me think I know what the choice means, but this probably says as much about me (or more) than about them. I don't mind if someone picks the same PB -- it usually makes me think we must have something in common.

3. Do you find it odd these days if someone does things differently? Say... has no PB. Or chooses artwork over a real picture (for a realistic MU*, obviously it'd be different for a superhero MU* for example if you're playing a comic book character and used a drawing).

Depends on context. It would have been a little odd for, say, someone on the Reach not to have PB. It wouldn't be odd at all for a medieval game to have a lot of PBs from illustrations rather than photographs. But sometimes you just can't find the right picture for what's in your head, and that's cool.

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.

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.

For me it's a combination of being busy with real life, and there not being any games out there I'm really enthused to play at the moment. I'm mostly interested in Mage, and the majority of the current World of Darkness games don't offer that particular sphere, which doesn't help my prospects.

I'm sure I'll pick up again. Maybe a new game will open, or maybe I'll suddenly get jazzed about Changeling or something, or a different genre, or whatever.

Most people are reluctant to accept that they aren't safe. Almost all of us have something that we cling to in the (often unvoiced, sometimes even unconsidered) belief that if we do, it'll keep us safe. If we go to church every Sunday. If we lock our doors at night. If we give generously to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. If we vote for (fill in name of party here). Whatever; most of us have at least one, often more.

People who say things like "if only I'd been there I could have stopped him" are usually wrong, but I don't hold that against them -- most people who think they'll react usefully in the face of a serious disruption of their belief in their own safety are wrong. My mother was like that -- she was so convinced if she did the right thing that she'd stay healthy and happy, that when she lost the use of an arm and a leg she simply could not accept it, and spent the rest of her life wondering what she'd done wrong. If you can keep calm enough to do anything useful when someone's shooting up a theater that you're inside, you're well ahead of most people.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

How do you make the metaplot open to any PC? Not contingent upon one PC? And at the same time make PCs feel like they have a special part in the metaplot?

Have the metaplot be like the elevator pitch for a continuing TV series, maybe. You're not a writer or a director or even the producer for a particular season (although you'll probably wear all those hats at one point or another); you're more like the studio head who says, "I want to do a show about ordinary people getting superhuman powers, and how they deal with the way the world and their lives change as a result of that."

So you provide a framework that your sphere leads and plot creators can use to tell compelling stories in each individual "episode" and "season" that are all connected to one another, but don't necessarily intersect directly. You don't worry about the specific plot elements or antagonists that're going to be involved (except to lay down general guidelines about what the limits are); you leave that to the people who're doing the writing or directing or producing, and just worry about whether what they come up with fits in at a high level. They, in turn, can worry about crafting plots that're specific to the players and characters they have to work with, rather than feeling like they have to fit a square peg in a round hole.

After all, you don't really know what you're going to have to work with. Staff and players are going to come and go, and often at (from your perspective) inconvenient times, so you might as well build in as much flexibility as you can stand. That way when one of your producers comes to you and says, "Zachary Quinto is doing fantastic work as a brooding psychopathic killer," you don't have to tell him "Well, great, but he's still going to die at the end of the first season, or everything falls apart."

@Coin said:

I suspect the actual space would be an issue, depending on how much hard drive space the phone has. Other than that, you might get a very laggy MU. I don't know.

Unless databases have gotten a lot bigger since I last checked, I don't think that would be a big issue. Games with five times the number of objects the Reach's database has took up in the low hundreds of megabytes. I know we've gotten wordier since then, but if you can fit a phone-sized version of "Age of Ultron" on your cellphone, you can probably fit a MU* database much larger than you'll ever need.

I'd be a little surprised if it's even particularly laggy. Very large games have run perfectly well on 66MHz 80486s with 128mb of memory and 10 megabit ethernet.

@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.