Best posts made by Bad at Lurking

The Wiki is lovely and functional, with an appropriately professional aesthetic. And the information contained within is excellent.

Well done!

One possible solution is to have slow FTL for making transit and travel front and center and fast FTL (as in galactic and instantaneous) for data transfer. So bored free traders, off-duty space marines and passengers between systems log into a galactic VR world and do stuff.

It's a little meta, but it gives people a chance to RP with people not on their ship and do stuff.

It's funny how MUSHing (and RPG gaming in general) is slowly, fractionally being dragged towards reasonable adult behavior, usually kicking and screaming the whole way.

I can remember the first time I was playing on a MU where the staff actually had to make a rule that you couldn't pressure people to participate in rape-related RP. (City by the Bay, I believe it was.)

If an X-card helps with situations like that, I'm all for it. And honestly, there are situations I need to nope out of myself, though they usually only come up in games where there is a competition to be the edgiest of edgelords.

I keep coming back to the idea of 'The Series: The Mush'.

Basically a shared universe (ala most anime mushes) for the cheesy, fun urban fantasy TV shows like Buffy, Supernatural, Grimm, Highlander, The Crow, etc.

There have been a couple of fun places that tried it, but I think they failed because they tried to bring in urban fantasy novels and/or video games as a part of the same world, when the conventions are really quite different in some ways and because they split everything up into several urban centers, like a superhero mush.

I keep coming back to the idea of lifting 'Seacouver' from Highlander: The Series and throwing all the glorious oddness into one big pot while keeping things semi-cohesive. Basically, fun, cheesy supernatural drama with a distinct 'tv show' flavor, as opposed to WoD games.

@Kanye-Qwest How DO you get the cows to turn the crank long enough to MUSH from Amish country? =D

Hey, don't knock the hollow earth. One of the best RPG campaigns I've ever run was in Hollow Earth Expeditions, with danger archeologists beating up Nazi dinosaur wranglers at the center the earth.

Flat Earthers, on the other hand, are willfully ignorant, which is worse than being just stupid.

Here is what I'm thinking of. It's not perfect, but I think it gets across the important stuff without trying to be some pseudo-legalese charter.

Rule 0: Be Excellent To One Another.
Don’t be a jerk to each other or staff. This includes harassment, stalking, exploiting code bugs and anything else that might end up being problematic. Give each other the benefit of a doubt and be kind, OOCly, to your fellow players and staff. We’re all here to have fun together.

Rule 1: Be An Adult.
Players and characters must be 18+. No NPCed minor characters may be posed in sexual situations, whether participating or merely present. Whatever players get up to in private scenes is their business, but no sexual situations or violence beyond an R-rating should be posted to the website.

Rule 2: Be thoughtful.
Rape, sexual abuse, graphic torture and similar topics are not things we’re exploring on this MUSH. Don’t introduce them as elements in scenes, plot points or parts of backgrounds. In addition, respect your fellow players and staff members and their comfort levels. If somebody asks you to fade to black on a scene they find disturbing, do so. That doesn’t mean the consequences of IC actions are avoided, it just means the players and staff will work out the outcome without the details and stress the player is avoiding.

If you have a question about any of the above rules or want to discuss the possibility that you or somebody else may be breaking them, please talk to us. Staff can’t enforce rules if we don’t see or hear about the rules being broken and we are eager to work with players to help make the game more comfortable, welcoming and fun for everybody.

It's like what would happen if somebody had asked Jack Kirby to design a gaming PC. Right down to the weirdly elaborate bends on the piping.

Honestly, nothing is more depressing to me than the thought I have to provide adults with a detailed guide on how not to be assholes to each other.

And very happy holidays to all.

I found out this evening that I'm basically fired as of Monday. BUT that's a good thing. I'll be honest, I almost cried tears of relief. My stress level has been through the roof since the summer and only having been crushingly poor before kept me at that job.

I have a reasonable amount in the bank for rent and utilities and the larder and basement freezer are full. I'm very comfortable for an extended job search, if that's what it takes. Hell, I might just decide to skip winter this year.

I know my boss didn't mean to give me an amazing gift, but he did.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/2FoknuG.png[/img]

Just what the title says, I'm wondering if there are any Cinematic Unisystem character generation and task resolution coded bits still floating around out there anywhere?

I have server space paid for for the next couple of years, just finished catching up on the Buffyverse comics from Dark Horse and am thinking of doing a modern take on that universe. Or possibly even a post-apocalyptic/dystopian one like the setting of Frey.

I thought Ibiza was just the place that British people go to be excessively British ... but with tans.

@prototart said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

i now badly want a 1950s beach movie oWoD game just saying

Bloodbath Bingo!

Hopefully, it gives McKinnon enough assets so he can be sued by all the game writers and artists he screwed over with Guardians of Order. (His last company.) Last I heard, he'd literally conned folks out of an aggregate high six figures/low seven figures amount of cash.

@darc said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

We are, as of today, OFFICIALLY OPEN! We got things off to a bang with a speech from our Mayor, Johnny Depp (I'm not paraphrasing, the actor has gone into politics)

And now I want to make a reporter character covering the political beat just to write a scandal story titled: Depp Charge Blasts City Council

You are the wind beneath my MUSHing wings. Thanks for putting this together.

@Ghost I know GRRM settled out of court for all the extant copies of the game that GoO had left in their possession and then sold them via his website for a couple of years. I'm not sure if he honored McKinnon's preorders.

I know the only reason BESM 3E customers received anything at all was because White Wolf stepped up and ate the cost of printing and shipping after acquiring the BESM license. (Which they have apparently leased or sold back to him, now.)

Stargate AU?

Now THAT is a cool and new idea. Color me interested.

On day, in the not too distant future, there will be just MU. And it will be WoD. And all coffee shop RP, all the time. (Maybe with a bathroom for the TS.)

It's basically this hobby's version of the entropic heat death of the universe.

Long story short:

BESM made a fair amount of money and McKinnon got very ambitious with his plans for the company. He started soliciting work (art and text) from many, many big names in the industry at the time (Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Borgstrom and many others) for Silver Age Sentinels and Ex Machina and other games lines, as well as entering into exclusive licencing agreements for the ASOIAF (Game of Thrones) RPG conversion and new editions of Amber and Nobilis, among others. He also entered into distribution agreements with several small game companies (which were really one or two-person shops) and took money from them to distribute their books under the GoO banner.

People handed in their work and didn't get paid. People paid for preorders and no product was forthcoming. Questions started being asked. McKinnon then simply vanished off the Internet. He didn't even give his contracted contributors a 'sorry' email. He just ghosted. The freelancers looked into legal options, but given the relatively small amounts (10k here, 15k there, 30 elsewhere), they were told that the cost of pursuing their money would be more than they'd lost already, with no guarantee that he'd have the assets to pay up when they won.)

The only person who got any traction at all was George RR Martin, who was starting to bask in that filthy fantasy doorstop money was willing to take a loss to get his IP back. He did, along with all the remaining stock of the ASOIAF hardbacks, which he sold on his own website for several years.

On top of that there were the customers who didn't get their preordered and paid content. Since at some point after going radio silent, McKinnon sold the rights to BESM to White Wolf, they made good on HIS back orders of that product and fulfilled printing and shipping on 3rd edition BESM.

The freelancers and 'partners' never saw a dime of that money and it drove a few of them into deeply unpleasant financial straits. Some people were stiffed for literally months of full-time work.

And now the dude is back and his position is that that his old company owned them that money but it's gone (he has not clarified if he actually declared bankruptcy and I am definitely not a lawyer so I'm not even going to pretend to know how that works) so he's not liable. Tough titty, basically.

But GoO and this new company were/are one-man shops with McKinnon as the only company officer. Morally, if not legally (and maybe legally, again, I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea), he's responsible for a truly huge amount of financial loss. Last I heard, between the stiffed freelancers, the missed licencing opportunities and the publishing fees he took knowing he couldn't fulfill his responsibilities, the amount lost was pushing up into the high hundreds of thousands or more.

TL;DR version: Dude is a scamming asshole. His business didn't just fold. He bilked a lot of people out of a lot of cash knowing he couldn't make good on his contracts before it folded.