Best posts made by Bobotron

I came from a Transformers game and was really not sure if the place would be anything but trolling. So I picked a generic name for WORA. Bob o tron.

@icanbeyourmuse
There used to be an 'after the Shadow Galactica War' MUSH that was 'all the Sailor Crystals find new hosts on Earth'. It was terrible.

The problem with doing a Sailormoon MU* and not allowing the FCs is... you end up diverting some of your core audience, and the push behind Sailormoon is often a love of those characters and a desire to RP as them or with them. And that will cause the core group who might be interested in the game to turn away (it's the same thing that happens with Star Wars and Jedi bans, or Transformers without <X> character setup, or any genre-based game where the features are what makes a lot of the desire for people to come).

Now, you could go the route of the Shadow Galactica arc and use the manga-stylings. Have Earth be the final battleground for all Soldiers in the galaxy (prior to going to the Galaxy Cauldron, anyway), both those Galaxia hasn't stolen the Sailor Crystal from (thus having powerful soldiers ala the manga, where everyone is powerful and can blow people up) and those that Galaxia has (and thus giving the capability for Animamates, and the potential healing of those Animamates into their normal forms, like Aluminum Seiren into Mermaid, for example). Gives you room to work, even with the FCs.

If you're dead set on not having FCs, have it be done in the Sailor V-style, where it's the same world and it references (like Sailormoon references Codename: Sailor V), but in another city where agents of Galaxia are set up and hunting Sailor Crystals (or go the manga route and do Star Seeds, which means random dudes can get attacked, due to that weirdness.)

(Yes, I am a Sailor nerd. Don't judge me!)

@Arkandel

Status/Social Influence

The LARP version for Masquerade from By Night Studios has a lot of actual good shit done with status, because it's meant to be a heavily player-driven system. When people ask me about how to do status, I point them at that (and if you like, I can print out that section to a separate PDF and dropbox it for you).

Ultimately, Status there is named traits for recognition; however, it has mechanical teeth. Each Status Trait has a Passive and Active Benefit, and the Active Benefit is when you 'pull your weight' with that Status trait.

For example, the Status Trait Defender allows a character to carry weapons on restricted areas (passive) or acting in defense of the city you can mitigate portions of degeneration (active). The trait Honorable makes it so people who openly wish to insult you must use one of their status traits (passive) and you can make yourself remain in or join into a political scene you normally couldn't (active). It works really well in my experience with it, and could be adapted for most any setting easily.

In our LARP, people weave the words of using their Status into their roleplay and discussions, which also helps people declare when they're spending it. ('As an Honorable member of the court, I would prefer to remain while we discuss the Sabbat's impending raids...')

This ALSO applies to Negative Status, which has some interesting benefits that mimic how Vampire status is supposed to work. Warned, for example, socially enforces your fuckup; if you are Warned, you can't talk to an officer of your sect in public unless that person gives you permission or talks to you first, or contradict them when they give you permission (censure), though an officer has leeway to make other punishments (don't grow back that hand you numbnut). If you break the censure, you gain Disgraced. And so on up the chain, until you fuck up enough to get Forsaken (which is kciking you out of your social group and stripping you of your protections).

ETA: Here's the base Status that goes between sects; there is also specific status for Camarilla, Anarch and Sabbat that could be mined. I can print those too if you want. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t3t1c455rcnlcw/METVtM Status.pdf?dl=0

@BetterJudgment said:

@Bobotron said:

Also cheated and looked at possible rings for my partner and I (this July is the 14 year anniversary, I think it's sentimental mostly but I really want to do it, even if we can't legally get married here in Kentucky).

I think you will be able to soon, and that's something I didn't think five years ago.

My partner and I went to Iowa in March to get married back in 2011 after 22 years together. Our rings are simple titanium bands; mine only comes off if I'm putting on hand salve. Don't knock sentimentality, especially when it involves asserting your rights.

Wow, that's awesome. Congrats on the marriage and the time together; that's awesome. We haven't really discussed marriage too terrible much, but our friends (who've been together for 25 years) got married when Indiana had their legal for it. So we'll see. It'd be awesome to legally be married in our home state.

@surreality
I am in agreement; the expectations must be clear. Which is why I find it odd when there's things that end up as issues that, for some reason, are not in part of policy. I look at the concept of policy from a community-agnostic approach, treating everyone equally and fairly within the bounds of what I want the policy to be.

I think the unspoken rules are what hurts things; people go from game to game within the same community/genre and assume that, when they weren't 'doing something wrong' on one game, they wouldn't be doing something wrong on this other game too.

@Miss-Demeanor
Eh. I'm going to be the dissenter here and, once more, say, we're splitting hairs about something that is NOT DESIGNED for MU* being NOT SUITED for MU* environment. Quelle suprise!

Kiths are meant to cover specific situations from fairy stories and fairy tales. In this instance, it's very much The Dancing Shoes. However. Using dancing to add to socialize, persuasion and subterfuge, IMO makes sense. There are plenty of media examples where someone dances super close with someone else, in order to wheedle information out of them while they're distracted, or plant false information, or whatever. It's meant to be a representation, IMO, of 'that dude there is distracted while I'm dancing him six ways from Sunday'.

It can be useless, yes, especially if social rolls don't matter, and in a MU* environment which they aren't built to be used in, but it CAN be useful if the ST makes it useful. MU* STs just seem to have a hard time finding out who will be there beyond 'I can throw eleventy-seven dice of damage at it AND become invisible while I do so!' and account for that or, better yet, build challenges that will take someone's unique abilities into account.

Going to the doctor and finding out you actually have the flu.
Stupid flu strain that gets past the flu shot.

What's the POINT of the XP tax? I mean, I get you're trying to find a way to 'use or reduce' a skill, but this is not a good way to do it. It feels like minutiae just for the point of minutiae and a system that doesn't ADD anything to a game.

Being completely frank, I would never play on a game using an 'XP tax'. Especially if you have to upkeep your starting dots. It wouldn't promote anything on the game other than making sure you had enough beats to upkeep your baseline; what's the point of buying things if you need ever-increasing points to KEEP the things you ALREADY bought?

If you were doing increases and such based on time-learning, and 'use or forget' type stuff, a downtime/time tax might make sense (you must spend X hours to keep a stat of X).

When I was younger I did some journal-based RP on, at the time, greatestjournal. It was one of the best RP experiences I've had, partially because of the setting (Harry Potter year 6) and the players (who were top-notch, even if there was LOOOOOOOTS of snogging RP). But the RP went fast and furious and was unique. The writing style of things, like doing IM group chat RP, worked just like a MU*; heck, we even had someone who did the job of cutting all OOC chatter out of important logs to chuck up into the main GJ threads.

It can definitely be somewhere to pull for new MU*ers from, you just have to advertise on their advertising communities on Livejournal and such.

Saw X-Men last night. I was really pleased with it. Looking forward to the next couple now, very much so.
The after-credits scene was nice.
Casting choices were good. Olivia Munn looks like Betsy/Kwannon, and Sophie Turner did a really good job as Jean (I was a bit surprised, but I'm not far enough in GoT to see her as a more assertive Sansa, so that's coloring my views on her). And Nightcrawler was so adorbs.

NECRO TIME

I installed Penn fresh on digitalocean today. Other than a few hiccups on what to install as far as missing packages, it ran pretty smoothly using CentOS.

==Installing Penn==
Here's what I did, and had zero issues.

• Spun up the CentOS 7 droplet.
• Logged in and changed root password and set up a sudo user.
• Logged into the new non-root user.
  • Installed: nano (sudo yum install nano), wget (sudo yum install wget), dev tools (sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"), OpenSSL (sudo yum install openssl-devel).
• FTPed in my version of PennMUSH (I didn't use wget but could have)
• gunziped and untar'ed it (gunzip file, tar -xvf file)
• cd pennmush
• ./configure to install
• cd game
• make update per normal
• make install
• edit mush.cnf
• ./restart

Everything was working in less than a half hour.

Thanks to people for the initial tutorial!

@TNP
Scion requires so much house ruling though, it may not be worth it, as there are flat-out broken and 'if you don't take this choice if you qualify you are stupid' powers, like Serpent's Gaze and its upgrade, or Untouchable Opponent.

I've recently been reading the Buffy and Angel RPGs and I like the Unisystem mechanics. I think Buffy would benefit from drawing on the Season 8/Season 9 comics for some inspiration on the post-Slayer Awakening period. Or go full Wishverse to give something... a bit different...

Saw Rogue One tonight.
I have never wanted to cry and scream in exultation at the same time SO HARD as I did with this movie. It was super excellent, and a worthy entry.

Plus as a SW nerd, all the little things you see/hear referenced from other canon (and some EU, so... hints to future canon?) in there was awesome.

@reimesu

Betrayal is the only answer. There is also an expansion for it now.

ETA: Fury of Dracula is really good too.

I think most of mine come from factional, consent-based con-death games so this is probably going to sound trite for some people who really consider 'antagonist PCs' to be capable of killing a PC.

But I think some of my best antagonist PC memories are from my time playing Rock/Megaman at Megaman MUSH. For a really long time, I played Rock and one player played Bass (Rock's counterpart in the Robot Masters group), and we had a really awesome rivalry and a lot of fun times.

1. It was a PC. For the longest duration that I played Rock (about 2 years) the same player played Bass. He also worked with the rest of his faction (and the other villain faction, the Mavericks, though in more limited scope) to make the antagonist parts of the game fun.
2. Long-term. The characters we played were diametric opposites IC and we really enjoyed playing that.
3. The fact that the character was able to be an unending source of IC antagonism and conflict, without that falling over into OOC. He really grokked the theme as determined by Megaman MUSH's staff, and he was a very epic villain; he didn't need purple prose or multi-page poses, he was able to concisely and effectively portray his intentions, malice and antagonism without resorting to overused. And when we found something neat to pull from other media to work in, we did so.
4. The fact that we could have a huge IC rivalry and the fact that we were able to take it multiple directions, with a lot of nail-biting IC tension of the actual rivalry. Some of the things, like Bass' attack on the Maverick Hunters' outpost that ended up with me and Bass faced off, essentially re-enacting the Buffy vs. Angel scene from the end of Season 2 of Buffy was a scene I remember to this day. And the fact that he was a source of not just physical antagonism, but social antagonism -- Rock was very naive and dating a human girl and Bass was always a source of social and mental antagonism because of that. It was great to have philosophical discussions about that type of thing as 'combat banter' while we were trying to blow each other up.
5. The player's chill attitude and ability to separate IC and OOC and keep it that way. The antagonism never went OOC. We were always talking to each other about things we did, things we wanted to see, little tidbits that one would have noticed in the other during the last battle or in, say, news reports and observation/spying since. We worked together to make it really epic, and it was, not for just us but for the rest of the playerbase -- setting up a scene where, say, Rock falls and is nearly beaten to give the spotlight to other PCs, or setting up a scene where we're supporting other PCs and giving them opportunities to interact with, and sometimes beat, the 'big bad' of one of the factions.
6. I think it was fine. It's really one of my litmus tests for 'we can fucking hate each other IC and be buds OOC' type of situations.

I've had this type of relationship with characters at lots of games. The player of Deathsaurus when I was Optimus Prime at TF: Generations; Rock and Bass (and to a lesser extent, Sigma) at Megaman MUSH; my tenure as a villain who had major goals at Beast Wars MUSH (Aftershock, who fucked with the Maximals REALLY hard...), and to an extent the same PC at my own BW game (Aftershock, but also a tenure as Megatron); and particularly as Gavin/Gate at X-Men Evolutions (the transition from an X-Man to a member of the Brotherhood, through the lens of a disaffected teen who was really affected by Genosha as a mutant prison/slave camp was really epic, and the players of Wanda and Pietro, and Kitty and Storm and a bunch of OCs on that game were really stellar).

I think the biggest 'antagonistic' issues I've ever had were, when playing an antagonist, you get the 'I'm a good guy/had a good application/have good stats so I must win all the time!' type situations, which is more of a player attitude thing than a game attitude thing. There was a player who I worked out some neat stuff for a plot I ran as a player at Beast Wars MUSH, and he was super hateful OOC gloat guy when he 'won the big fight against Aftershock' and was hyper bitchy when he lost a fight. It wasn't a good situation, and he was eventually pfired from the game.

@Coin

In the words of Yoda...

" Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."

At least she's at rest instead of suffering and kept alive by machines...

@Cobaltasaurus said:

@Thenomain said:

FF8 it is.

... Next time Squeenix has a sale, you slowpokes.

Once Steam processes the request to give it to me, you can always use ahem "friends and family" permissions to play my FF8 copy.

FF8 was the first FF game I played and shall forever remain my favorite. FOREVER. Though I have a soft sport for FFX-2 (~dress up time~).

Is it terrible that my impression of FFX-2 was strong enough that I wanted to somehow run a TTRPG with the 'super magical dress up in combat' angle?

Found while digging around for something else.
Anyone know anything about it? Might scratch the Awakening 2e itch that a lot of people here have.

http://fallenworldmux.com/wiki/Main_Page

Picked up Kubo and the Two Strings on DVD.

It's SO pretty. And so good.

@SG
Try it with:

$^\+adice ([0-9]+)d([0-9]+)\+?(-?[0-9]+)?$:@remit %L=<Dice> %N rolled %1d%2[if(strlen(%3),if(gte(%3, 2),+,)%3,)] for [add(die(%1, %2),%3)].

Looks like that might get rid of your trailing -.