Best posts made by Bennie

Someone should get a Pirates of Dark Water off the ground.

Screw it. Stargate MUSH. The new wormhole only goes to an Urban Fantasy address. Worlds forever linked. One normal, one very similar... with monsters.

I love BITN. I want to get more RP going on that isn't in private homes.

What I don't get is why divisions exist at all - the conversation is fine, it's the Us or Them that bothers me. If you pose exposing your character, tearing a shirt off, flopping free, or what-have-you, and the next pose you read is not interested, opposed, angry, frustrated, freaked, cop-calling, violent, damaging, involves initiative and combat, or anything else than a free, hot-and-heavy reciprocation of similar, all sorts of things tend to happen.

People page that person for their content. There is something not right that you're being the asshole/bastard/prude/other and wtf is wrong with you, this is gaming, don't you know, why aren't you enlightened, you're so wrong, what a jerk, omg did you just get on the 911 channel? Other sort-of negative OOC response to your unexpected response. You get treated even worse if you just FTB, robbing that player of their sense of contribution. You get treated even worse if you start a Scene stating that nothing related to TS will take place at all, pre-writing it out.

That's my experience. If you are posing something other than participation in the TS that is being presented to you, you're somehow not a whole person, you're defective, you're troubled, you're negatively labeled. You are not a true gamer. Back in the day, this is what felt, to me, like the original division with the TSers. The accused would say, "You're just a TSer." It's a chicken-and-egg argument, I know, you cannot say for certain which came first. But they seem to come about cyclically.

So is the problem the TS, or is the problem how it's handled when someone doesn't effectively participate in the TS in the expected manner? Is the conversation really one of censorship and/or liberty? Is a part of the conversation about the health of transparency? (E.g., being transparent about pro TS or against TS having an impact on your community acceptance.)

I know my opinions are always unpopular, but if it is an ignore function that works for messaging so that you can ignore unwanted people sending you unwanted chats, that seems perfectly fine.

If you're going to butcher threads by selectively omitting anyone who displeases your sense of belligerent, self-motivated, untouchable net troll - like you're some tribal dictator with an AK and an indiscriminate trigger finger, or maybe just a Senator from a southern state (bud-bum-bum) - then you're missing the entire point of this being the MUSoapbox, which is about exchanges about both the community and the games we share, moderated already by classy mods who seem to be doing a damn fine job keeping the worst we have to offer at bay.

So if they do make an ignore, I hope it's just for Chats. Which, btw, you can already set-up to not receive if they're bugging you that day.

@lordbelh I think you would do swell writing a Rome game. I would pay to open that game, honestly. And I think the new rulebook would make it perfect for Mortal with flavor. In fact, bringing it out of the purely supernatural world and placing it much more squarely in house against house, senator against senator, conspiracy, religion, and so forth, rather than zapping one another with Psychic abilities, would imo make it even better. (Although I wouldn't balk at a werewolf, or some Infrastructure, or a vampire here and there 'behind the scenes'.)

Hurt Locker seems to have some nice items to include as well, what with sword and board and spear fighting and phalanxes.

My 2 cents:

The story should be about people. A lot of players who play with supernatural Endowments and psychic abilities and thaumaturgy want the story to become about their phenomena. It's about their hellfire and demon wings and ability to make the air cold. These should be, at best, and even in Second Sight were described as, doing what you normally could do, but with an alternative capability.

I can put my ear to the door and hear what's going on inside, but you clairvoyantly do the same thing, and she uses technology to accomplish yet the same feat. Different strokes, for different folks, but the story should be the same, the Storyteller tells you what is going on inside, given success.

All things being equal, no single element of the game should trump any other element, so surviving whether by pikes, guns, traps, staying out of reach, walling yourself off, running, convincing someone to do the fighting for you, or psychically throwing zombies away, should accomplish the same goal: to not get bit, to not get scratched, to not contract an illness and die, and rise again. To find water, and shelter, and food.

Working together should bring about things like infrastructure, and that should be a game unto itself. The casual player should be able to log in and have fun, but the canny player should be able to find other like-minded players and create something of value to them. Enough people working on it, can make the local water plant produce clean water, just the same as digging a well, or tracking a fresh spring down. Enough people on it, can make electricity by wind power, pedal power, solar power, water power, etc. The casuals should be able to get by without doing any of the above, just not reaping better benefits in the process. (E.g., they can have gear, just not the best gear in the game.)

The true story is in whether any given faction tries to take from others - that's what makes it survival horror. Do people sacrifice one another, so they can escape. Do people hold up traits like character, honor, decency, and try to avoid barbarity. Are the rules for doing so any better than what the barbarians are doing? E.g., is the ex-lawman's willingness to execute people at the end of his guns in the name of justice any different than the cannibal gang willing to eat their neighbors for a good meal. Your Morality system should be a central emphasis for both casual and hardcore players.

I think regional issues are super important to the overall story. Who is checking on the local nuclear reactor? Is the pressure in the damn upriver going to eventually be a problem? Is there any kind of fallout from burning cities, burning states, such that weather becomes a factor. Was there enough widespread destruction that nuclear winter happens? It isn't just about finding a place to grow crops. That works if you are distant enough from civil engineering that you aren't in a situation where the things we have - that we never consider - that protect us from man-made dooms like floods don't, unmanned, become catastrophes. If the collapse of civilization is fast enough, has no warning, then a lot of systems are left unchecked. Not everyone turns the light off and walks out with a secured facility. And I don't know about you, but I sure don't know how to turn off a freakin' nuclear reactor.

This isn't even mentioning things like blizzards, hurricanes, tornados, pick your region, and the like, which now can come upon us without warnings we had in the past. Can you tell if the sea is rising for some reason fast enough to make escape from coastal regions possible?

The average person likes to believe they are pretty capable, but when the chips are down, the people who know how to swap out a part on an engine, or even the difference between types of engines, know the difference between something poisonous and safe to eat, know how to check water's safety, know how to start a fire unassisted, know how to keep smoke from signaling others that you're there, know how to live in the wild without power bars and mountain bikes, know how to survive in cold or hot conditions for really real and not with their REI purchases, know how to conserve and make choices like what's more perishable and what's more collectable. They're few and far between, and not every PC will have the Streetwise, Survival, Investigation, or Academics and Science to know. Even ranch hands and farmers don't necessarily know what you think they should. Every skill should count, from Larceny to hide your food, to Politics, to sense if the new Mayor is in fact a cannibal, and the Merits that you allow should be extensions of them. Again, the casual player can ignore nearly everything, but the hardcore player should be enjoying the process of wielding what they have traded their Experience for, and reaping the failures of what they're not covered for.

Finally, I highly suggest creating an actual inventory system so that people can play that mini game of collecting things. These give tangible benefits already within the system, like bonuses to rolls in Skills. By making everything have uses, from a bar you swing at something's head, to the rounds in a gun, to the number of times a door to your hideout can stand an assault, you can obtain something and have to re-obtain it, meaning that the benefits are constantly wanted while the casual player simply goes without them.

@SunnyJ said in I will design you a MUX:

Requiem for Rome is best Requiem.

Would love! I do think, though, that you would have to accept a certain 'enhanced reality', like a Ridley Scott movie or how Breaking Bad does things (yes, it is real, but... 'cinematic'), so to avoid people who REALLY love historic acuity from butting heads with anyone who is relaxed about it.

Yeah. Inspire it by Requiem for Rome. Historical accuracy is eye-splitting most of the time in my experience.

I'm suddenly picturing the caravan in Reign of Fire driving around on highways while shooting zombies who get too close.

Speaking of zombies. I am enjoying this book series, the Remaining by DJ Moles. Guy is part of a program that has bunkers dotting North America and they basically get paid to live somewhat rurally and quietly and just present a normal face to their community. But sometimes, just sometimes, they get an alert that they have to go into their bunker and they stay there for however long and follow prescribed rules about when to leave.

In the book, the man hits the surface after a bacterial infection has killed much of the population, and left the rest as hyper-aggressive and predatory. They're not stupid. They are animalistic and territorial and have a pack mentality with others infected. And as such they do things like attack one part of a fence while breaching the fence on the other side of the place uninfected are holed up. The predators are just plain fun to read.

But still in all, a nice bread and butter setting. Generators still have a bit of diesel left. Building an enclave to hole up in, and making sure people are treated before the disease progresses to the brain and causes the damage that results. People still being able to use a car, or truck, or weld if you can find the utilities to do so, hey great. So it has a lot of creativity, like chain link fence building during the day when the predators are mostly inactive.

Long story short: It can be a fun setting to have characters moving around. Let them move in their own groups, or link together however they want. They all really just need their 'default room' which they can desc how they like, be it a highway, or a house, and let them 'survive'. Storytellers occasionally throw stuff at them. Have the highway group roll through the town where the other group are hole-up in a house. Let them organically link, or even clash. Above all, have fun, in this failing world.

This all seems very gentle handed, but I feel like the sandbox and sandboxing exists for a reason. If I, and 3 other people, want to have a more meaningful evening once or twice, adding hoops doesn't make that happen. It just forestalls it happening. And in truth, it is just a way to weed out the unwanted. "Only someone really dedicated is going to 'do all this' so we have nothing to worry about now. We'll have dedicated players!" It's a weeding process, honestly.

The truth is, a lot of games have all these processes, submissions, tracking, and so forth, but the reality is most players are going to quietly sidestep all that and attempt - with the least amount of effort and investment - to find a solution that lets them return to "I, and 3 other [friends], want to have a more meaningful evening once or twice". Which means, for all your tracking and effort, you're missing all the unsubmitted material that people simply hide.

It's sort-of like learning to read when it's banned. People will likely, with the lights down low, sitting in the quietest place they have, read a paper that has been passed around with the fish deliveries for the last six months. Least amount of chance of being caught, most amount of reward, just a few quality moments spent together. It's a weird way to reinforce bad behavior, creating checks and balances that require monitoring of people's sense of privacy.

Now, the opposite is being freer. Most freer games that have an open policy and little reinforcement are likely imo to find that players are much more open, inclusive, and interested in keeping others, and Staff, up to date on the pitter patter of trickled storytelling. Which means, in the end, that you've created a space for people to have little trouble getting in, getting involved, getting active, and the benefit is they're excited afterward to involve you in what happened, because their sense of pride in fun well had is replacing their sense of being invaded and controlled, so there is no need for them to feel the need to be sneaky.

I think every game can be more active. I think every game can do more. But I think passing the buck rather than staking a claim and trying to have fun around it is a poor excuse - and an overused one. I admire any game that keeps trying, and I admire the people who keep trying too. Try not to look so hard for faults in every direction.

I've seen that before quite often. Someone pages you for RP, so you RP, even if it is just baRP. But at some point they either page, or OOC the room, about taking advantage of them, and silence fills the virtual space. "Pardon?"

@Catsmeow man, if someone changed my Template without asking me, my boot would lodge so far up that ass, it'd require a new zip code.

I become frustrated when minmaxing players are automatically presumed to be dicks, bad RPers, terrible folks, and so on.

I become more frustrated when minmaxing, you are approved, and then a game actively engages in a house rule overhaul to manipulate their internal systems into either flat-out removing the benefits of your minmaxing, or making what you decided to minmax into an actual method of cheating.

I become even more frustrated when the staff refuses to let you start all over in light of their manipulative house ruling immediately after your trip thru CG.

There is nothing more obnoxious to me than sitting on a character that has been effectively neutered, actually liking the character you made, story-wise, and having little reason to play the character because it's sheet is now either effectively a mess, or completely useless, or worst case, completely inappropriate to the game.

But the worst is when players automatically treat you badly when it gets around that you minmax characters. I've seen players engage in everything from rumors - "Don't play with them, they're just out to PK you, ruddy minmaxers!" - to outright complaints to staff that you should be sanctioned, punished, or even removed from the game because you 'ruin it for others'.

We all log in to have fun, and to be entertained. Sometimes players don't think that minmaxers have feelings too.

Can someone make a Demon game set in the future and let us have Mechs?

@Arkandel which is why historically the Dungeon Master has usually said this is a Level 3 Campaign and your characters need to all be Level 3. Didn't they actually attempt to do this with White Wolf for a while? They did their little Storytelling Adventure Synopsis or whatever that had like Mental 2, Physical 4, Social 2, and required a character between 40-80 xp to qualify.

So maybe the point is that the way in which Plots are advertised is too lazy. inviting the All Game to the rodeo instead of saying Characters 100-200 with Social primary is an option we should be exploring.

No I mean like, even the half-breeds and mortals could have mechs.

@Catsmeow You know what I hate, is the "ST" - and I use those quotes loosely - who start the combat by saying, "We won't be rolling any dice today. Just have fun and pose what you think your character can do!"

I was pretty skeptical about BITN but I have to admit it is pretty darn fun. There have been new players all last month. I hope more players give it a shot.

@Sunny I keep picturing this scene where the dancer is doing high leg kicks in a saloon girl dress at the gate to occupy the guards who are scratching their heads wondering wtf just happened, while the 3 werewolves abscond with the truck on their backs, will powering through death rage so they don't break anything as they tip toe out of the industrial parking lot.