Posts made by Bennie

What do we like better, Player-Run Plots, or Staff-Run Plots, and why?

What are some examples of either that we liked, and want to share?

Log into TR - or any game, for that matter - and type +where and do the ratio ( 170 : 7 in this case ). Great, we have the virtual online recreation of Weeds and on every single game is this doing anything but bandaging people's self-serving irrational triggers?

So far it looks like the next games coming out better have a map and a room for each point on it, along with the allowance to build your own too, or nobody's going to play...

Heaven forbid people socialize unless it's on an impersonal thread system. Good gum. How dreadful an idea. We need to recreate us sitting at computers logging into third party nets like the Soapbox here just to log in to the games we play.

There's no 2nd ed mummy yet I don't think.

There's PRP rooms on most games too.

• Maps. To me you can have a map of the game world without having every square inch of the map actually built. We have so many options these days, for how to build a grid, that nothing really implies that the spaces all need to be built specifically, not when someone can easily go to temporary rooms off the OOC on one game, or use a temp room code on another game, to go left or right, when the grid doesn't give you the option, and the map does. I think it is very easy to be conservative, while still allowing your player base to be creative. Plus. I really dig people who actually draw a map with little trees and little buildings and little named places and upload them someplace people can see. Heh.

• Ownership. Ownership is so weird! What is it we're looking for, a place we can lock? Some places can't even be locked. Do you want a dark exit?? What is it you want? A place you can desc how you like? A place you can boss people and say, "Get out!"? I don't think people can even define why they want a personally owned space on a game. As far back as the 90s it was all about being able to idle and not get moved someplace off grid. But the ways individual games handle xp now, even that isn't relevant anymore. So what is it we're all looking for when we want to own a bunch of things? Can we even define it anymore?

Ninja Scroll on blu ray or nothing.

It's funny. I can't stand Anime (or 99.9995% of Anime) but I am ga ga for the cinema. Seven Samurai. Sanjuro. Yojimbo. Throne of Blood. The Hidden Forest. Harakiri. Grave of Fireflies. Kagemusha. The list goes on and on.

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

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

New PCs are not at a substantial disadvantage, but can still compete with older PCs.

Do you have any concerns about abuses? For example:

1. I make multiple novice alts so that if I lose a position, or a character, I can step into a similar position in a new window that has baked in the oven long enough to reach the soft cap? Once a group leader, always a group leader.
2. I defeated Kenny by killing him. But he shows-up an hour later as Kelly wearing the same orange hooded down-filled jacket because he picked Advanced just to get back in the moment?

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Mind, this does not mean I would suggest 100% xp rollover. But I do like that its easy to drop a character and pick up a new one without wondering if I'll retain interest/stay alive/whatever long enough to make starting from scratch worth it.

Related to Rollover is my larger, broader question: What do you do about the revolving door players? Is there a weird equilibrium to be maintained between "This is what you are allowed to have" and people who skirt your policies and house rules to maintain their revolving door of ideas?

You end up with Damascus@TR and Nessa@TR - although obviously I've seen the same behavior on games before TR - and that Oo Shiny behavior where people become cyclical: new character, freeze, unfreeze old character, freeze, new character, freeze, unfreeze old character, freeze, new character, freeze, new character.

Being creative is great, and in always seems any policy of XP Rollover will support these more free spirit-oriented folks. But at what point should it be acknowledged the behavior is a drain on your staffing? Should policies and HRs shift when someone starts to squeeze the system for every iota of it's worth towards bopping around the game? Should we have an alt policy that supports single-handedly peopling every possible sphere and every possible organization?

Given the number of characters I see week after week that seem utterly predisposed to this Anita Blake worldview. The author may have issues. But fuck if she doesn't have a huge MU* following, apparently. Because I mean, damn. You see these sorts of characters described above on an almost weekly basis everywhere you look.

@Coin missed my perfectly valid point, obviously.

If video games today - such as AC - had no discreet method of saving progress, like games were in the arcade oh so many years ago, fueled by nothing but coins, much of the most popular games, most laden with story formats, would not be so popular.

The average player does not wish to start in the tutorial every time they sit down to play a game that has a form of progress. Nobody wants to start each AC game in the tutorial, every single time they play, no matter what you say. There is far too much exploration, map opening, far too many puzzles, far too much currency management, equipment upgrading, and so forth, that goes into most AC stories, for you to turn the game off and start in the tutorial in the morning, hoping to beat your record time to the place you left off before lunch. Worse, is if you had a random power outage, or someone who kicked the cord out, after you just spent the morning getting to where you were last night, and oh yay, you get to start in the tutorial again, sux to be u.

If you did have to beat yourself to get to where you were, every time you played, AC would not have the popularity it holds tonight, because finishing a story like that is too complicated in such a system with no saved progress.

It is different when you are playing basketball in the driveway and start at no points, but for the record I also don't see anyone mid game saying we should reset the points to zero just cuz it'll be funner if we do.

Most people like to have a way to preserve progress in anything they do. We like to have a place to pause. Yes, sometimes you want to grind out that old game, dusting it off and putting it in, starting without a saved game, but this is why we call that nostalgia. I don't see anyone complaining about how unfair it is they get to save so often. I also don't see most painters complaining when they reuse an old canvas as opposed to spending a few days mounting a fresh one every time they get the urge to do some painting. As human beings, we like the convenience of our conveniences.

Next time you want to try out how fun it is to start at 0, go to a hockey game and suggest at the half that they start with 0 after some goals were scored. See where you get. I'm betting they would look at you like you were a fool.

I stand by my statement: You could earn a rollover. You could save one up, and use it when you think it is appropriate, but you could also have a few enough rollovers available, that you have to make hard choices between when you want to start over completely, and when you want to not start over. Just having some sort of option available is something nobody is going to ultimately turn up their nose at, even if they never use it. It's just nice to have it available.

This is doubly so in a MU* environment. It is just nice not to start over when where you are headed is peopled by friends who are so much more advanced than you are.

The biggest fence to living healthy to climb over is boredom. Part of why they upsell a lot at the gym is because the gym is about more than working out. The week should be filled with activities. Boot camps on the weekends. Exercise during the week. Cardio almost every day. Classes in different kinds of activities, from hitting the bag with gloves, to riding bikes, to walking, to group grocery shopping. The idea is, if you get bored, if things get stale, they become a chore, and nobody likes chores. Long-term, chores add up, we begin to see some of them as optional, especially exercise, and we start to cut it out of the schedule, eventually we spend more time sitting on the couch at some kind of a control, than we do anything else.

When the convenience of something easy to grab to sate hunger takes over and you aren't eating correctly anymore, you don't fuel the entire process. You want to fuel your activity, and avoid the potential for boredom. There's a crazy algebra at work to the whole thing, and it requires consistency and context. You have to keep track of measurements like the girth of your hips, waist, chest, the width of your shoulders, the circumference of your thighs and upper arms. This all has a meaning in comparison to how much you weigh. You can figure out, using your height too, how many calories you need in a day, how to divide it up so that your internal metabolism fuels the activity you are undertaking, so that you can increase your endurance, flexibility, strength, and focus.

It's like fine tuning a car. You can live with the ping, and the lack of horsepower on hills. Or you can make a few changes, and be consistent, and have a car that sounds and runs great, even on a grade.

It always feels like, yeah, they try to upsell the gym stuff, but there is a certain point between the sale, and the not getting any benefit from what you are doing. How many people do you see go to the gym and stay fat for 6 months, a year, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10. All that exercise does nothing if you are not fueling it in the right way, and maintaining your math.

When you find yourself resisting the activity. When 30 minutes on that machine is just too much. When you find yourself locking up. You have to look at why. Maybe you need to roll out for 10 minutes before your exercise, or roll out for another 5 minutes during, and 10 minutes after. Maybe you need a better way to warm up and cool down. Are you afraid of sweating? Do you think someone's looking at you sweat? You want to sweat. You want to be out of breath. You want to feel hot. This is what warming up is. It's getting things to work so that you are burning the right calories for the right reason to fuel continuing and succeeding.

People who stand in front of a fan at the gym drive me insane. You just spent 20 minutes warming up and you're forcing your body to cool back down. Way to go, super slick. You just defeated your own purpose.

In a nutshell, anything we do in life, we have to have some sort of a commitment to it, otherwise, you just get no benefit from it. There are better places to socialize than the gym. But you want to suffer, you want to have heatstroke, you want to crash. And then you want to change how you eat and how much water you drink so that you don't crash. You are creating a resistance. The way to battle that resistance dictates how you succeed or fail.

I don't like the idea of being down on whole demographics of people:

1. People in a timezone that have trouble finding RP are being punished.
2. Shy people who have trouble getting into the game are being punished.
3. People who feel like the scenario unfolding within the given area they play (such as Spider joining their Cabal suddenly) is unpalatable are being punished.

The list goes on. I dislike the idea of punishing people for wanting to switch. Sometimes you take a role, like Prince, and it just isn't working, in fact, the whole Sphere isn't working for you, and someone just invited you to join their higher-powered Werewolf Pack, why should you be the baby of the Pack? Why are we punishing you?

Even WOW I can throw money at the issue. I can just x-fer an old char from Server/Faction A to Server/Faction B if my cousin finally becomes active again.

Sometimes you want the grind, you want to level-up, and sometimes you just don't. Gaming, in general, isn't about starting over on the same game. Could you imagine how well Assassin's Creed would sell if you had to make a new char every time you turned the console off?

So, if you are going to talk about this kind of a system, imo it should talk less about "That's too powerful" and more about "how can I provide fairness in as many circumstances as possible"?

You could earn a rollover. You could save one up over time and make a choice whether to use it on your vampire or your psychic. This way you have at least a chance of not having to start at scratch on a bugger off situation. I put in my time, it didn't work out, ok, try again. But if I want a do-over the very next week, I have to wait on that, at least until I have earned a new rollover opportunity.

Time Zones wouldn't be a problem if there was a way to recruit more people. I feel like MUSH has the people. The people are out there. They are just not logged into the same spaces. There's more than enough people in any given timezone. They just need congregation.

What we need is like the Online Database Of Gaming Times for people to add themselves to and for you to be able to PM one another to come on over and join such-and-such game, where a growing community of YYY-1 is coming together.

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

That begs the question, do we think we will ever see a game that uses that model? A game where you can purchase Attributes and Skills ad infinitum as opposed to the 'human' cap of 5. We already have specific ways to raise Attributes over 5, but has anyone ever thought of incorporating a specific system for Skills? If not, why not? If yes, why not employ it?

I was thinking this week about quite the opposite: Why 5 dots? In so much as, given rules for working together, fighting as a group against a dangerous foe, and so on. It got me thinking, we never seem to touch on the idea that the world doesn't really operate solo. You don't see a single soldier making up a squad, for example. Backup usually involves more than one more cop showing up to make an environment of two. There's never only one person in the ER. You never see just one legal assistant working late at night.

Most things come in groups. So if you apply it to the GMC rules most things can be accomplished successfully with a group, and the rules seem to make this pretty obvious, whereas alone not so much. Would this be something worth integrating into the MU* environment? Why don't we push for this more often? Why is it so often a Me Against The World motif?

This begs the question, in a MU* environment, strictly using GMC, how fast is too fast to gain Beats? In an unlimited environment - long term speaking - how fast is too fast, how slow is too slow?

I don't see the difference, truthfully. Whether you are given 85 and 0 in all 3 categories, and told to go forth and be fruitful. Or whether you are given a spread. I kind of lean towards the fact that you could certainly make a more compelling specialist, if you could forego having to take things like Athletics and Survival on your doctor with a terrible bedside manner who is a fantastic neurosurgeon in residence. Why do I want to jog? I want to be fat with 20 dots in Mentals dammit.

Vampire sex is overrated.