Because this is the peeve thread and not the "Jesus God, I want to tear down the fucking Confederate flag and and its flagpole from South Carolina's 'Confederate War Memorial' and make Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley recreate the 'ass to ass' scene from Requiem for a Dream with it" thread, I'll just say that I wish I didn't ruin cooking good food by eating too much of it. Especially the last bit, where I chomped down on a nearly whole Thai pepper.
I park my cart in front of the shelf that holds the giant-sized packages of Chocolate Frosted Marshmallow Corn Syrup Bombs while I trot down to the other end of the aisle to get the big bag of Flavorless Gluten-free Fake Cheerios, just to irritate the people who voluntarily eat CFMCSB. (Because I sure don't voluntarily eat FGfFC.)
@il-volpe said:
When people who've come from there talk about it (You may talk about 'Blood of Dragons' on 'Game of Bones' though I do try to discourage bash-sessions about it unless you're doing so in private or on the channel that's reserved for being rude) the usual word goes that they either cannot get a scene, or the RP is repetitive nobles-having-huffs-at-other-nobles + tourneys, or that the player in question has been verbally abused by the staff there and cannot stand it any more.
When I played on the game briefly early on (I think I was among the first people to create and play a non-CGed character), I swear that every IC post about current events ended with someone flouncing out of someone else's private apartment. It seems like a great game for people who create obsessively detailed characters that they talk about possessively and at length OOCly but are unable to do anything interesting with in actual scenes, probably because their imagination and creativity is entirely second-hand.
@Rook said:
From the Random Bitching thread, conversation about manliness brought this to mind. Highly recommend.
Their giving space to some self-promoting survivalist makes me roll my eyes, but they did teach me how to talk to my barber, how to tie a full-windsor knot, and a lot of other dressing and grooming tips that I think my father would have told me once I was grown up if he had still be alive. (Too bad that he probably would have had to wait until I was in my 40s before I would have listened to him.)
@Jeshin said:
That being said without knowing the agreement between GRRM and the staff of this game it'd be hard to determine where the lines are. For example Shadows of Isildur has to maintain a PG-13 rating as per their agreement with the Tolkien estate. They have to adhere to book canon in all major storyarcs. They also have a few other obligations but they do actually have a legal agreement and documentation of their status with the Tolkien estate. It is possible this game has one as well and if they were willing to share it might shed light on the situation one way or another.
Isn't part of SoI's agreement with Middle-earth Enterprises* that the game not profit in any way, either from the game itself or from its site? I know it was Google ads on the site that prompted them to send Traithe the cease-and-desist letter that I assume led to this agreement. As far as I know they never bothered Elendor, which had been established longer and which post-Jackson trilogy got huge for a while before slowly dying.
(This is starting to look like it should be a different thread. Games and IP, maybe?)
* edited: I just looked it up, and the former "Tolkien Enterprises" is now "Middle-earth Enterprises" though still a division of The Saul Zaentz Company. At least on Wikipedia, Shadows of Isildur is not listed as a licensee of Middle-earth Enterprises, and the Tolkien Estate doesn't list any licensees.
@il-volpe said:
Honestly, I think it's quite possibly a mistake to suppose that Elio García is responsible for much of the hijinks, and it's also quite likely true that he's done the better part of the skilled and useful stuff for the fandom. Grapeviney-hinty-shit there.
I'll bow to your certainly superior knowledge. It is kind of hard to imagine Nymeria doing much other than threatening and posturing; on Elendor, someone one correctly (and humorously) referred to her years-old character bit as "furniture."
Linda Antonsson and Elio García are skilled and energetic. They are überfans, and they seem to be more dedicated to GRRM's books than at times he has been himself. Unfortunately, they are also grandiose and deluded enough to think that their MU* characters' descriptions are copyrightable intellectual property and to pressure service providers to shut down sites that they think impinge on that property. This isn't about respecting GRRM's work or about serving a community of fans. Every time they've written about this, they make it clear that this is about their rights as mediators of this work. If you want to play on this game, do it knowing what you're feeding.
@Tempest said:
Wow, this guy is a serious asshat. Can't imagine playing on a game run by him and some chick that is a legendary level PHB.
They're simply grandiose, predatory, and dedicated to their own sense of importance. I understand why a decision has been made not to post The Infamous Description here, but the whole flack about that shows how crazy these two are. Who knows what they would have done if they hadn't been able to attach themselves to and profit from someone else's creative work--probably started the Swedish equivalent of Westboro Baptist Church.
@Sunny said:
I would almost say it's a difference between roleplay-intensive and roleplay-exclusive, almost. Like, intensive implies that there are still other things to do besides roleplay, there. That it's not absolute...which is accurate. Mushes do not fall under the category of RPI games. They aren't. They're RPE. If you aren't roleplaying, you are not doing anything that means playing at all.
However, MU*s give you the opportunity to interact with people OOC (for good or for ill) and even to design and run plots. The RPI MUDs I've known remove all OOC communication in the game and even police official forums to prevent people from revealing who their characters are and what they are doing. The claim is that this makes the roll playing more immersive. The reality is that the ban on OOC communication combined with game staff's insistence on keeping all coded elements secret from the players (including XP earned, skill levels, etc.) simply produces constant problems with cheating that is organized outside the game. When I played on SoI, it was IRC "cheating rings"; I'd guess that now it's Skype. The result is that people who want to play by the rules often end up with the short end of the stick.
This is an awful lot of strenuous effort for something as historically ephemeral as a MU* resource site.
So basically a lot of MUSHes are running their own "codebase" in a sense.
(Probably you could just read what @Rook wrote several times to greater benefit, but here's my bit anyway.)
No, not really. I think part of why some people are becoming frustrated with what you are saying is because it is hard to communicate past your misconceptions.
TinyMUD derivatives like MUSH and MUX (and I think MUCK and MOO as well, although I don't really know how much game-specific content the various MOO Cores) are both content-free and content agnostic when you start them up. Their codebase is nothing more than the collection of mechanisms that enable them to start up, have characters, and have rooms, and allow connections. So, saying that "a lot of MUSHes are running their own 'codebase' in a sense" is really just a misapprehension of what's happening.
Likewise, MUSH is not a genre. A game's genre is concerned with elements like setting, whether conflict is primarily PvP or PvE, and so on. MUSH (from my non=coder's perspective) is more like machine code than it is like an operating system or even an application. Looking at it another way, mystery stories are a genre. Those stories can be created as films, television programs, books, and plays. To think, however, that books are intrinsically mystery-telling devices and to ask a fantasy author, "What kind of mysteries do you write?" just produces confusion and in the end doesn't really tell you much about stories, writing or books.
@Jeshin said:
Is there a reason the majority of the underlying systems for these games are nWoD / WoD? Is it because of the very graceful way that that RPG system approaches incentivizing RP? Is it just something that started and kind of stuck in the community?
It's because of where you are. Many here were also on WORA, which was predominantly concerned with WoD games and had participants whose involvement with WoD and other MU* genres like Shadowrun and Pern dated back to the late 1990s. I came in much later and peripherally because I was playing on an Anitaverse MU*, but most of my experience has been on other types of games.
At one time I would have recommended that you look at Elendor and especially at its combat and resource systems, but it is moribund. You might still get something from logging in, poking around, and talking to those still there. Even though The Greatest Generation is also gone, I bet at least some people here could talk about that game, which I bet would be right up your alley.
@Jeshin said:
Sometimes players get scared though. They get overly attached. They become complacent. They need a helping hand. It is here that coded systems can really assist them by giving feedback and stimulus outside their own thoughts which they can seize onto and run with. Oh I made a mistake and a buck gored me... What can I do roleplay wise with this unfortunate turn of evenets? Oh I accidentally bought to many mugs of beer. Hey there's a dude over there, I'll give one to him and chat him up. Oh traveling from this city to the next city over is codedly very dangerous. Let me plan ahead and possibly hire other people to escort me and interact with them.
That sounds good (if paternalistic), but from my experience on SoI, Shadow Siege, Harshlands, and Armageddon, here is some of what code typically does on RPI MUDs:
Another thing that RPI MUDs have also been doing well for over a decade is trumpeting themselves as the most advanced and immersive text-based RP games and the salvation of text gaming. They're not; they're just another way of playing Let's Pretend.
@Thenomain said:
I loved URU. URU, for those who don't know, was an MMO by Ubisoft and Cyan. The idea was that everyone would play an explorer in the abandoned D'ni ruins and solve puzzles. But here's the problem I had with that: Once the puzzle was solved, you're just following in someone else's footprints. Why, I wondered, did someone not put a rope ladder in this key spot so I could reach this keystone? One a conflict is resolved, it's resolved. It's done, over with, and if you want to engage it again that's cool and all but it's not the kind of game that RPGs (traditionally story-based) are meant to be about.
I don't know if this is why URU failed, but fail it did. It tried to be about a story, using tools that were about playing games.
In case you didn't know: Myst Online/URU Live. No updates and still with all the faults you described above, but free.
My partner, who in his mid 70s is in better physical condition than most men in their late 40s, was rapidly and completely debilitated by sciatica last year. It took one x-ray for the first doctor to say "You need surgery" and one MRI for the second doctor to confirm that. (He had two badly extruded lumbar discs that were five vertebrae apart.) He says he woke up from the discectomy/laminectomy with the pain completely gone, and two months of PT followed by continuing exercise have kept it gone. I'm not one for advocating surgery, but it sure worked for him.
@Arkandel said:
@Luna said:
Unpopular opinion time...some revealing clothing should just not be worn by some people. And furthermore, we're back to don't be trashy. Revealing clothing isn't always trashy but some sure as hell is.
I'll just talk about guys. Spandex-wearing guys that is, bicycle-riding ones. People who don't belong in tight-fitting athletic spandex-made clothes with brand names and logos on them. Come on, that's not an attractive look, and no one thinks you're an athlete because you're wearing $500 worth of athletic gear from SportChek.
I knew a bicyclist who absolutely should not have worn spandex--not because he wasn't athletic (he was), but because his nickname seriously should have been Tripod. It was both intimidating and embarrassing.
La Follia: music by Antonio Vivaldi, Baroque dance by Robin Gilbert and Carlos Fittante (playing a Cassanova-like character), and live performance by Voices of Music, which is the best early music ensemble I've ever heard, all in high-def video on YouTube.
@Ganymede said:
What they need to do is kick Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, B:TAS, and other WB cartoons into prime time slots. Also, grab the rights to Exo-Squad from Universal.
I'm clueless about most of this, but I do think that Animaniacs is the closest I've seen to the late 40s - 50s Warner Brothers cartoons.
Are any of these networks showing Duckman? That needs to be kept alive.