Best posts made by Bobotron

... and now I'm crying. The little brown one was so sad looking.

Thanks a lot, @Arkandel.

@thebird
My advice? If you have a genre you want, google "the genre here" dreamwidth RP, or "the genre here" tumblr ad. There are tons of dreamwidth RP (it's where a lot of people when when greatestjournal went down, along with insanejournal). Both of those are big into text-based RP.

@auspice

My only real experience with Alolan Pokemon has been me playing PoGo, so... yeah. Such Tresemme hair on the Dugtrio though!

@Arkandel
And that's why I could never work in a shelter; I don't have the capacity to burn that out.

@surreality said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

Pretty much this, all of this.

...or when, as is especially typical of WoD throughout the years, there are two totally different and wholly reasonable possible interpretations of how something works from the source text, but for the sake of consistency -- when you have potentially dozens of STs on the game -- you have to pin down which interpretation is going to be in use on the game to help ensure fairness in how the power is applied, regardless of who is running any given scene.

Yeah; clarifications as 'house rules' are a necessity when doing TT-to-MU*, especially when the rules are not written 'if A, then B' type situation. I think this might be something that more TT-to-MU* games really need to do. It's why the MES has an addendum clarifying this, so there's consistency across every ST for the big, questionable things. Now, I wouldn't recommend something as huge as the MES's addenda. But, I think this type of consistency really helps set boundaries.

This one is, I think, the most common kind of house rule I've seen, provided a game isn't creating piles of custom stuff (which isn't bad, either, if they pay attention to shit like balance and fairness and whether it fits the vibe/etc.). It's been the most common one I've dealt with, anyway.

And utterly necessary in many instances, especially if you're considering a cross-venue instance like OWoD where some things are written directly in opposition of each other.

Ditto this. It would take longer and be more of a pain in the ass to convert even CoD, let alone nWoD or oWoD, to something that isn't going to run into an inconsistency, unclear mechanic, or otherwise problematic system to maintain.

It's worked out well in my history, but it also really is often limited to combat, which is the biggest crux of issues a lot of times anyway.

What you describe re: insane mechanics, there really are a lot of those. A lot of things require judgment calls on the fly or direct ST intervention in the simple daily upkeep of the character, with some splats. This is not unreasonable for a group of 5-6 people who meet once a week to do their rolls, and it's not for a larger LARP group that might be sending in one downtime report every <game interval>, even though that number of players is larger. On a MUX, you have the larger number of players, and you have daily maintenance of those things if someone logs in every day -- which is just not terribly viable. 'Once per game session' in TT or LARP is generally not more than once a week; compare and contrast with 'potentially daily' and a large player group? Nnngh.

Oh yeah. I think you have a copy of how I adjusted the LARP downtime rules to work on a MU*. That wasn't difficult but it was a bit of a thought process of what ends up allowing for the most usability and versatility. Same with making versions of the Herd Merit and such work for the game. I feel like a lot of this is fairly simple, but things that people overlook when building rules for game,s whether converting TT or using an original system.

Will their be options to play within the concepts of Team Rocket or other antagonist groups? Because I sorely miss my cowgirl Rocket, Annie Oakley.

I don't have time to play right now (maybe when my FF tabletop ends), but you could do worse than Dragonlance as a setting. There's enough stuff going on around during the War of the Lance and just after that there's tons of room (plus it wouldn't be hard to divert and do your own thing).

@Luna
Unrelated to the discussion but there is a level of jealousy there, Luna. A very high level of jealousy.

@magee101

I have no idea about the community, and I couldn't get it to wrap, so sorry.

My observation that it has a similar look to the wiki and the same code as the Shadowhunters game is just that, an observation. This was posted on an elseMU* board on MUS*H. I was just chucking it up here 'cause it was a modern game per request.

@Wizz
I started watching Sense8 this morning. I'm on episode 3 right now. I just want to cry over the Nomi stuff in episodes 2 and 3. so far.

ETA: Fuck that. This Nomi thing, all I'm going to do is cry my eyes out.
ETA2: OH SHIT. LET'S GO KICK SOME ASS OLD LADY!

@Ganymede
This isn't about ridiculing a concept for 'speshul snowflakeness'. It's about finding another way to allow something that is problematic, or should be rare, in a different way than an application, a cap, or staff fiat. It gives player agency to the choices they make. Sure, everyone on the game might go OKAY I WILL BE JEDI AT 6 POINTS or somesuch, but the THEORY behind it is sound, as many of us have witnessed first-hand. It could be applied to the Jedi issue in SW to help alleviate some of the above insanity.

@Arkandel
This is why the choices must be good. You must have solid choices to really make the 'Do I do X cool thing, or do I do Y rare thing' matter. Feat Traps ala D&D shouldn't be a thing, everything you spend a shiny on should be useful and add to the character in a useful way. Balance is a factor too, but solidly-built options can work with the balance and keep it marginally crazy.

@Ominous
Exactly. In METVtM you get 7 shinies ever. The concept of a top limit of shinies, plus good options, is a nice idea. Again, mostly posted here because of the explosions in the other SW game thread.

@faraday
You're right, rarity and advantage aren't always the same thing. From the source where I'm yanking this, it often is just by dint of the powers that are gotten by more rare things, in the case of VtM. Most of the merit aspects are advantages anyway. Jedi is an advantage. Force sensitive is an advantage. Other SW options would work as advantages too, which is the crux of it.

There's also the extremely simple 'we use the canon of X up until point Y, from there the advancement from there is up to the players'.

@Wizz
As someone who grew up terrified that this type of thing would be what I'd have to do and go through, by being gay (because honestly, that's what the section I'm on right now feels like for Nomi, gay therapy bullshit that you hear about from the 50s), it's horrible to watch.

So it's striking a chord that I thought I'd left behind a long time ago.

@Spitfire
Also, with all the stuff that's only like, a teensy-bit left mechanically (things that say, do damage, you'd have to assign a base rating rather than just rely on success, or look at how Rites/Gifts function a little more if you need to convert over Lodge gifts or oddities), most things should be roughly mechanically compatible, sometimes with a little work -- and fluff is, as always, as compatible as you need it to be for your world.

@Wizz said:

Heroes and Villains MUX - Astronema (character staff)

...This is embarrassing to remember, but I was the Silver Power Ranger at H&V. (Also, a Silver Surfer knock-off, aaaaand I think an alternate-universe grandkid of Peter Parker or something ridiculous like that.) Probably the first MU* I ever played. Holy shit that feels so long ago.

I remember after I apped Astronema we had a pretty large Power Ranger cast on that MUX (including a REALLY creepy cigar-smoking Goldar who tried to TS me, then quit the MUX when I said 'I'm a dude, and I don't TS, man').

Don't be embarassed, we were all young then (and come on, it's pretendy fun time, we're allowed to indulge our nerd sides.).

@Arkandel
You're not alone.

I still regularly go back and read a lot of the Dragonlance and FR books that I have on the shelves (particularly the Cleric Quintet and the Age of Mortals stuff from DL)

On an 'works on things to apply on IC/in game'scale:

• We did some 'free retest' rewards in some of the LARPs I ran, rather than XP. You could get a few of them and they were a thing that people liked. Turn in your card, get a 'breaks the normal retest rules' retest. It wasn't even abused in a 40 person LARP. Something like that, spend it to get a reroll on a fail or somesuc.
• Ties to the 'world' at large. This is more difficult to put together, especially on a larger game, but having 'spend this to be tied to <X> thing, guaranteed'. People will come out of the woodwork for this, but staff must be willing to back it. This one worked out really well, as it turned more into personal plot for the players ('Wait... you're an Alastor? Holy shit, how did THAT happen?' ''Well, youseewhathahappenwas...') in my experience.

On an OOC scale:

• We did a 'player review' thing at a few of the TF MU*s I was on; you did occasionally get people who were assats, but most of it was a nice recognition roulette. We did the same with staff.
• Cookies. Like +reccs or votes, but for OOC. They weren't spendable, and we used them to make announcements like 'So and so has reached 100 cookies!' Mostly a method of recognizing people who were playing and active. So I guess like +recc's?
• MUSHwide awards. Mostly a follow up from the old Transformers newsgroup awards, where you'd do an Oscars kinda voting thing, and it had a TF MU* section. It was always cool to see people throw up your character and the criteria for why they put you up there.
• Working with players to enable their plots on a larger scale. I'm not talking just an open PrP policy, I'm talking 'OK, you have this idea. I like it. What can I do to help you make it happen?' or something along those lines. In my Masquerade LARP, I had a Giovanni player who ended up getting invested in the Underworld. Around the time that the Sixth Great Maelstrom/end of the Underworld was going to happen. He was interested in it, so I went out of my way to look up Wraith stuff. And he turned it into plot not just for him but for many other characters who he roped into helping him out. This type of 'player support' from staff isn't, perhaps a 'reward' but is something that more trustworthy players should be allowed.

The obvious question, I guess, first...

Is this going to be a sandbox multisphere game, or is this 'starting metaplot' going to be something you're going to push/continue to develop as staff? What's going to be different about this game to draw people in to help you with it other than ALMOST ALL THE THINGS?

I voted for medium with temprooms.
I come from games in the TF MU* circuit and superhero circuit with hundreds of rooms, which are large, BUT those are 'let's map the entire world plus cities' and sometimes multiple planets (mostly Earth and Cybertron). To me, small is up to 20; medium is 20-40 rooms, and anything larger is large.

My ideal is between 30-40. But I also am of the camp of building in concepts of districts or areas, rather than Fourth and Main and such things. Gives you a lot easier time of fitting X thing into the area, if you go 'okay, this area is the poor/low-income area; what goes here' and go from there.