Posts made by Autumn

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.

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.

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.

@TNP I hope this won't come across as a nitpicky question, but: can you give some more examples of characters who would be disqualified for "very strong spellcasting ability"? I ask only because there are a handful of already claimed characters who I would have thought would be over that line.

@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.

@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.

TinyFugue. And yes, as a matter of fact, I do churn my own butter.

Congratulations on your opening! I've been looking forward to this, and now I just need to quit waffling and figure out who I think might be fun to play and fun to play with.

I have a great love for blue heelers:

But ... and this is a significant but: they are extremely human-focused. If you don't think you can handle getting that 'WHAT NOW MAMA' look for 16 of every 24 hours in the day, or if the idea of trying to keep a very, very smart breed entertained through their waking hours does not sound practical or enjoyable ... maybe something else. Because they will make their own entertainment if you don't provide any, and the way they do so may not be entirely to your liking.

Greyhounds are also a wonderful low-maintenance dog. I know everyone thinks of them as sprinting all over creation, but the truth is they're active for about thirty minutes every day and sleep on the couch for the other 23:30.

I watched Aquaman. It was okay.

Jason Momoa remains charming. He has great screen presence. And he looks like he's having a good time doing this superhero thing, which is at least a nice change from, to pick a name out of a hat, Henry Cavill.

There are some great visuals. A soul-crushing amount of work must have been expended on creating the undersea kingdoms and the "make people look like they're underwater" effects, and a good thing, too, because probably 75%+ of the movie's run time happens there.

But Aquaman has, to my way of thinking, three major flaws to go along with some little ones.

One is that it had the bad luck to come out less than a year after Black Panther, another movie about a man born heir to an isolated kingdom of amazing and wondrous technology, who has to overcome the machinations of an evil relative in order to become the leader he was always destined to be. And, unfortunately, Black Panther is the better movie. That in itself is not the kiss of death, because Black Panther was itself pretty darn good, but it doesn't help. And ... look, call me a humorless scold if you must, but "divine right of kings" movies set in the present day make my hackles rise. Do we really want to be telling people that superhuman power and rulership over millions comes from being born to the right parents?

Problem number two is that the movie is so stuffed full of exposition, and moves along at such a breakneck pace, that I really have no idea what the stakes are. Maybe this is not a problem for fans of the comic, but it's hard to empathize with anybody when everyone is mostly interchangeable. They tried to help me by casting a blond Aryan-looking fellow as the bad guy, so thanks for that, but there are still seven different undersea kingdoms and neither the fishtailed folk nor the crab people nor the Deep Ones nor, for that matter, the differences between the two mostly human-looking realms are explored enough for me to know what the heck. It's just exhausting trying to keep up with the prophecies and laws of Atlantis and rules of the universe and I guess what I'm saying here is that the movie would have benefited from focusing more tightly on a smaller portion of the underwater world rather than trying to show it all at once.

Problem number three is the schizophrenic tone. Is this a serious drama about the costs of broken-up families or a lighthearted rom-com? Is it Game of Thrones or Camelot? Aquaman can't make up its mind and wants to be all things to all people. Toward the end of the movie, thousands -- maybe tens of thousands -- of Atlanteans die in an elaborate CGI battle in which we don't really know who outnumbers who or what either side's capabilities are or much of anything about the people being attacked. And then good triumphs and the good guys make a couple of wisecracks and it's happily ever after. Pardon my language, but what the fuck? Are you trying to make us think your protagonists are careless self-absorbed narcissists? You just showed us the underwater Battle of the Somme and now it's back to smug one-liners! If even the people ruling Atlantis don't care about the vast numbers of lives lost, I can't really be arsed to care about them either, and that fatally undermines my ability to take what's happening seriously.

I'm making out like I hated this movie and I really didn't. Yes, it was overstuffed with so much CGI that it might as well have been an animated film, and yes, it was a little repetitive, and yes, my interest in comic-book action setpieces has been mostly exhausted by the past decade. But it's not bad. I'd rather watch Aquaman than, let's say, Dawn of Justice, or Man of Steel, because for all its faults at least it doesn't completely shit on the character it's trying to build up. If you aren't tired of superhero movies yet then this is a perfectly acceptable example of the genre. If you're looking for something beyond that, though, this ... isn't it.

• I am slightly red colorblind, which makes fashion decisions a constant adventure.
• The smell of canned tuna makes me physically ill.
• Every level of mathematics above geometry was difficult enough for me that I was lucky to pass.
• I am a mediocre cook but a mean baker.
• One of my characters wore a t-shirt that read "I like to take hot showers so I can practice burning in Hell", and this sentiment is pretty much mine.
• In 25 years of reasonably constant employment, the only thing I have ever worked on that you are likely to have heard of is the Kepler project.
• Even modest levels of spice give me vicious heartburn, so living in New Mexico is challenging.
• I am so WASP that there is a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about two of my direct ancestors.
• Tea, never coffee. My parents drank their coffee black, no sugar; I have never been able to enjoy any coffee drink. No, not even the crazy syrupy sweet Starbucks confections.
• I am rarely without a pocketknife of some sort, and I insist on having a wide selection so I can fit my mood and the occasion. (Do not carry a knife in your purse. It will cut you.)
• No ink. No piercings besides ears.
• Going too long without telling a story of some sort makes me anxious, and my attachment to the MUSHing hobby is a direct result of this.

@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!

I've been thinking of trying another supers game lately, so I look forward to seeing this one.

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.

I also have lost contact with her, alas, but share the sentiment.

@faraday The usual MUSH/MUX scheme is actually a fair bit like that, except that the original FCs are usually active PCs.

The very earliest Amber games were a lot like the early Vampire games, in that being Someone Special (a member of the royal family or an actual supernatural creature, respectively) was pretty restricted. More recently the style in both genres is to accommodate whoever wants to play whatever, although the last few generations of Amber games have also been pretty good about making characters who aren't royals be able to operate on a mostly equal plane with them, in case someone doesn't want to be part of this lunatic family.

Unfortunately, the early genre was heavily influenced by Erick Wujcik's vision of the book characters as people you Did Not Get To Beat (there's a particular notorious story about Morgenstern and a PC's magic dog), and so they tended to get a lot of stuff that other PCs simply did not get. That has softened some over time, so that, for instance, RtA's Benedict, Corwin, and Eric are actually beatable in swordfights by nonbook characters (something that was literally impossible on AmberMUSH), but even the most liberal game visions tend to place the book characters, or at least some of them, as special in ways that are difficult or impossible for others to equal.

I understand the reasoning behind this, because what's the point of having Benedict as a character at all if any random yobbo out of chargen can whup his ass? But I don't really like the effect it seems to have when those characters are PCs (see sentiments expressed by various people above).

@lithium Yes ... but it never really has the feel of an ancient and glorious empire. It's one guy's invention and he's in charge for almost all of its history. Amber feels more like a very stretched out version of Henry VIII's England than it does like the eastern Roman Empire at or after its apogee. You'd need to go far enough forward that not only is Oberon a semi-mythical figure, but even his sons and daughters have been gone for long enough that people argue over what they did or didn't do like academics discussing whether Shakespeare was really Anglican or a secret Catholic.

Or you could go completely the other way, and have an Amber that's basically that of the books, only all of Oberon's still-living children have up and vanished one bright morning, and it's up to the players to figure out why. Or to not figure out why, and instead get straight to the important business of who's going to sit in the big chair next.

Or you could do an Amber that shares only the basic concept of the Pattern and Shadow with the original, and comes with a whole new geography, history, royal family, etc. (I'm partial to an Amber City that's vaguely Venetian, so people can get thrown into canals at the end of duels, or wax anxious about how hard it's going to be to walk the Pattern if the water's four inches deep in its chamber.) To me this is kind of the most fun direction, but it's also the hardest creative job, and it asks a lot of the players in terms of unlearning what they already know and learning different things.

I don't really have a strong attachment to a particular setting, or I'd probably be working on a game -- I just know that when I think about the standard Amber game approach of "let's throw a dart at the known timeline of Amber history and set our game there; now, everyone get your feature apps ready, aaaaaand GO!" I feel a tremendous disinterest.

I like the Courts of Chaos as a concept ... but the concept is of a place so alien to my way of thinking that I have trouble wrapping my head around it, and when I can't get my head around something I have trouble playing it. It feels wrong to not play Chaos as something so truly, deeply, fundamentally weird that I can't comprehend it. Playing Chaos as "Amber, but with bizarre scenery and a bigger SFX budget" feels like a copout.

You could go the other way round and make a more Chaos-y Amber: skip forward in time a few thousand years to when Amber is an ancient, glorious, and decadent imperial culture ruling over uncountable reflections of itself, and the royal family has gotten so large that it's organized itself into noble houses.

@helvetian I definitely don't want to seem like I'm slagging on RtA (which of course has its faults, as all games do); that's where I played arguably my favorite RPG character ever, and I have a lot of fond memories both of the game and even, yes, of RP I had with some of the book characters there. It is probably the most enduringly interesting Amber game I've seen (even more so than AmberMUSH ... which lasted longer but was really several different games at various points in its existence, and which anyway had become kind of a self-parody of itself by this point in the lifecycle.

@sunny There's no reason it wouldn't work just fine with straight DRPG stats also ... but I've gotten somewhat disenchanted with DRPG stats. Part of what I like about RtA's scheme is that it allows characters like Flora and Llewella -- who in the DRPG tend to get fuck-all -- to be powerful and effective characters in their own right via high stats, and yet still not threaten (sardonic eyeroll) the supremacy of the boys in swordsmanship because of the lack of bonuses.

RtA Flora is actually someone you care about having on your team. AmberMUSH Flora was ... not, except inasmuch as people gave her more rope from name value. But this is a part of my much longer and more cranky rant about what worked on AmberMUSH and what didn't.