Best posts made by bored

@ixokai Right, but I think that's mostly a matter of them again being a little more cautious due to what happened with the 3.5 SRD (which was basically the entire PHB minus... the actual leveling rules?). Just because it's not in the document doesn't mean you can't use it, although for safety's sake you might want to change the names of features, if not the mechanics.

In any case I feel like it would be pretty unlikely for them to go after a game like this unless it was actually for profit (and thus potentially a competitor to Neverwinter / Sword Coast Legends / etc).

@faraday said in Spotlight.:

They don't want to be hero-adjacent, they want to be the hero.

Which is perfectly fine if you're writing a story of your own. It's even perfectly fine if you're playing a tabletop RPG and the GM can ensure that your particular group of 4-6 people are the most awesomest, most famous adventurers ever. But the scale breaks down when you have 30 players all wanting to be the Luke-and-Leia level of heroes. @surreality points out that even second-tier characters in GoT get their moments sometimes, and that's true, but nobody(*) wants to only get one or two cool things to do over the lifespan of their character. They want to be Daenerys or Jon Snow.

It just doesn't work. Starring roles are limited. Everybody(*) desperately wants one, and then they get bent out of shape when they get passed over.

I think MU players of any... veteran degree are going to understand that being the star all the time, or even ever (if we're talking Luke level), is impossible and would be quite happy to settle for something along the lines of the GoT secondary cast. Heck, a lot of MU players are used to such degrees of abuse, disregard, and favoritism that something remotely fair would be pretty amazing. I'm just not sure this is what actually is being offered, and that people are turning their nose up at Sam.

What I think people tend to get rankled over is when A) they don't get to be Jon and yet someone else does (ie there are some very clear star players, and almost certainly some favoritism at work) and/or B) they sign up to be that supporting cast member, but their 'big moments' amount to 'well you get your name in a list of names in a post/emit that one time.'

And I'm sure its mostly a staff size / resource problem. But when things are scarce, they do tend to go to the inner circle of staff-alts and close friends.

Mine were all on L&L or period-setting games and mostly on Firan. Most were pre-existing (roster characters) or pre-established (joining a game with a friend). I think my commoner on Firan was the only one where we actually had the whole courtship, an IC ceremony, etc.

None of the Firan characters ever divorced, though one died. I dunno the longest I played one was, ~two years? Shortest was some Western themed game I showed up with a friend on and... the game imploded within a week or two of opening? (Edit: we'd also arranged a pair of marriages on Realms Adventurous... right before the game changed hands and we all quit. I dunno that they actually got finalized, we weren't really doing it on camera.)

I've met various MU people online and generally, things do trend more toward 'the real life people are way cooler/nicer than I ever imagined.' People I've thought were dull, annoying, or big fat cheater jerks turned out to be interesting, fun, charming, etc. Of course some of them go right back to being cheater jerks on game, and a small percentage weren't great RL.

On really negative behaviors being warning signs for RL, I really only have one or two data points for this in direct or nearly direct experience. But it can be a thing. Knew of a guy with quite the rep for shady gross stuff... who was also definitely grooming people for RL meetups under very dubious circumstances (on a game infamous for NOT having an 18+ requirement).

So mostly people are cool, but uh, a few are definitely not and it does tend to correlate to their online behavior. Unfortunately that doesn't have much predictive use.

@zombiegenesis I am a little confused as your post seems to have two completely different sets of assumptions using two different sets of rules. If the main question is between systems, I am generally adverse to highly complex systems for super games. I am capable of doing the min-maxing and spending a gajillion points on a gajillion widgets, but I am kind of over it and it often feels like it works great for some characters but terribly for others and ends up being more pro-math than pro-RP.

I would suggest that if staff is making sheets for FCs, they should probably make them for OCs too (if you end up allowing them, if not, no skin off my back), at least in more complicated systems. Otherwise you'll get min-maxed OCs tooling on FCs.

Beyond that, app process wise, I think there's only so much that's useful on a comic game. I find it tedious to have to write up the well-known backstories of well known characters (aside from a basic which version I'm playing, if there's multiple), and more valuable to have information that is a bit more player-oriented: what comics/other media are their favorite appearances of the character (can tell you a lot about the tone to expect), what kind of scenes/RP are they most interested in (big cinematic fights, plot-y cerebral, ts social, etc.), etc.

The difficulty of getting balanced, comic-appropriate OCs is another part of why I say staff should handle both statwise.

I think you'll get much better results if someone apps with a brief overview of 'I want to play an electricity-manipulator who's an IT professional in their civilian ID' and the staff comes up with some reasonable powerset and weaknesses. Instead of getting, y'know, that OC cyborg/electricity/technopath/whatever who could absorb all tech and grow to theoretically infinite size and and and and.. etc they had on UH. Or whatever example of people being little twinky fuckers that you want.

The people who argue for OCs say they need them for various reasons of creativity, variety, and even diversity of representation, and yet I cannot think of an OC I've played with who wasn't a nightmare like this. Cut the bullshit, call their bluffs: let them do the creative part, you do the power part, and if they qq about what they get show their munchkin ass the door and you're not worse off.

@deadculture Ehn!

There's a couple different arguments here, and I'm not in the mood to debate liberal vs. conservative vs. death squads in your neck of the woods (yes I know that's mostly hyperbole) vs. SJWs vs. whatever. We've had plenty of those conversations in more detail and the people I care to talk politics with know where I land on that stuff.

I'll leave fighting the newbie-oldbie to others!

It obviously really depends on the game. People have given single parameters in some case (size, genre, level of conflict, etc) but it's really going to be a mix of all of these, sometimes.

The traditional Pern games had massive player counts in their heyday and ran 99% on player faction leaders. Some of these were naturally wizard alts but on those games, the wizbits were really there for code reasons and nothing else. This included the dragon-getting process which was ridiculously drama-filled. Still, all handled at a PC level. Everyone kept to (an albeit thin) theme, but they were also low-conflict close to nearly full-social games.

A raw PvP-fest game could be run with little to no staff at basically any size if combat was automated. See the standard MUD/MMO model.

WoD is kind of the perfect storm of being shitty for this, though. It's high conflict but generally can't be automated because it's a fundamentally exception-based rules system with tons of separate moving parts. It risks a lot of thematic drift because while it has source material, the abundance of crazy power shit perfectly well lets someone play out their RapeOtter fantasies as if it was FurryMUCK.

@misadventure It really depends where you're from.

While I'm sure my IP addy isn't very useful (big city & common provider, shared with another player/poster, just a jumble), I recently had a case pop up where it was trivially easy to peg a player based on theirs. Basically, if you're from somewhere less population dense, even if it's dynamic, it can be pretty identifying .

@meg I'm familiar with the history of the policy, because my stance has always been against Advertisement being a propaganda zone. It's been contentious every time it comes up, and it will be contentious again.

(Also, there's no evidence of what portion of 'people' wanted it, only the mod trifecta decided on it).

@faraday said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

I don't understand why we can't just lock the ad threads once they're posted. Preferably to the owner so they can update it as needed, but even making them post a new thread each time would be better than this constant bickering we've had for the past year. Either way, having a policy that isn't even slightly enforced is just invitation to ignore other policies too.

I would also prefer this solution, tbh. 'Constructive criticism' is impossible to quantify, and 'praise only' creates misleading threads and hides valuable information.

I play D&D (5th also) weekly on maptools (java client-server program, more technical know-how intensive than roll20 but for our uses more convenient and powerful) + separate voice chat, as well as an L5R game purely on Discord. The latter doesn't use a map, but does use a dice bot to handle rolls (FFG system).

As for experiences/schedules/etc I imagine that's going to be very personal to your group. The D&D game I play with people I've gamed with since college, so for us its as much a means to keep in touch as a way to play. We've kept it going for many with some minor player adds and drops and schedule adjustments between campaign chapters. We've done this even through the inevitable 'oh I am having a kid now' and such as the group has aged. So if people care and are invested in making it happen, they'll make it happen. Flakiness I imagine is just the person not really valuing the game.

The L5R group is new but people have been enthusiastic to play the new system.

@Arkandel I've never really had a situation where there was an option to compare RL/online with the same group, we do it online because we're all far-flung (hence the keeping in touch component in general). But if I had to guess, I'd say it's easier and that's going to make up for any lack of pizza related draw.

Adding to what @Jeshin said: Obviously, the engagement is different. Online plays slower, and you'll never quite have the feeling of all being at the table together constantly cross-talking or fiddling with the map together etc. But if you're talking about people who would be hard to schedule otherwise, it may actually kind of be an advantage?

If a person has to field a work email on their phone, that's a fairly big interruption in person. Online you won't notice. And family wise, yeah, they will be in the background disrupting. But? We have one new parent in our group. As of 2 weeks ago, we have another soon-to-be. The first time, we joked we'd never see the guy again. In fact? He missed 1, maybe 2 sessions and was back at it. Committing to be out of the house for 4-6 hours leaving the other parent alone is a huge difference to setting aside that time (minus travel) to be at the computer but able to get up and lend a hand.

Basically, yes, there will be distractions but I kind of think it's a strength, in a way. Just make sure you set basic guidelines so people know what pace of play is expected and can judge when they'll be too busy to keep up.

@Alamias My mom and all her friends are Broadway people and she took me as a birthday present. I'm not sure which was more awkward; General Butt-Fucking Naked, or one of the cast miming a blowjob while colorfully trash-talking her (I assume friends?) over on the Wicked cast during an intermission.

The one memory that always sticks out to me, not just in regard to gaming but interest in other common nerd topics (history, etc) was my mom taking me to the MET to see the Arms and Armor hall. Full suits of plate mail, swords, ridiculous exotic polearms that looked like they came right off that page in the AD&D PHB, the wing off to one side with samurai stuff (for a dash of weeb inclinations), etc. I don't even remember how old I was, probably ~8? But that memory is extremely vivid to this day. I'm lucky my mom was a teacher and always focused on taking me educational places!

After that, it wasn't long before I had my RL Stranger Things posse playing D&D.

For starters, there was some failure here in communicating the exact nature of the issue, as it only became obvious in the later pages.

Allowing Wayne Enterprises and not a dozen other corporate clones is one thing, because there's something to be said for keeping your setting focused. But if your'e specifically banning DC lore references because its a Marvel game, this particular application of that 'rule' does seem very arbitrary. It seems like they were willing to compromise for Batman (Wayne business, but no Gotham) but not for people with similar asks (with arguably even smaller lore impact). I don't know what they may or may not have offered @ShelBeast, but if you're going to accommodate some players you should at least make an effort with others.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I disagree that TS is always irrelevant to story. Rping out sex can have an impact on the intimacy of characters that is very difficult to replicate through simple ftb. Any kind of story can be off camera, but there is always more room to maneuver and express where you actually rp versus where you offscreen. Whether you are off camming the boning or the torture or whatever else.

This is the only thing I really consider a valid counter-argument here, but I still think there's a fundamental difference between what most people are talking about when they say 'TS' and what you're describing.

TS itself can be a vague term. I played briefly on a game where my character owned a saloon/brothel, and he had several scenes hiring new employees (tangentially: lol, everyone wanted to be a hooker). I had no prior relationship with these players and so I always told them we could play with any level of explicitness they cared for, or could straight ftb. Some went straight for the TS. But I also had one scene that fell into the vague middle ground of this, where we RPed enought to indicate some of the traumatic elements that went with the job/setting but without posing, erm, juices and whatnot?

I'm not going to indict someone as ethically bankrupt because they have one scene in which their NPC and some PC bone, and they do 2-3 poses that summarize the activities, emotional involvement, etc.

I am going to sideeye any relationship between a staffer, their GM-PC puppet, and a player that involves ongoing, lengthy, descriptive TS to the point where it reaches textual mutual masturbation.

@Roz We're talking about core ethical policy and divides on how people even conceive of NPCs.

You discussed it happening on a game, publicly. That means it's at the very least, no big deal there, and it means those staffers do not see that ethical conflict. It means all of them are free to do it. Exactly many extremities go in how many holes for what kind of quid pro quo is pretty irrelevant at that point.

This really just circles back to age-old discussions about consent-only games, and I don't think there's anything new in this particular approach to it.

A unilateral veto is pretty much unworkable in what's supposed to be a large, cooperative environment.

@Lotherio The problem seems rooted in the fact that they want the playerbase draw of a 'multi-verse, crossover, any comic and version' game... but they only really respect the Marvel side story-wise. That's fine for broad theme, setting (ie NYC vs. Gotham and Metropolis), story direction, etc. It's a problem if you're inviting people to play DC characters but tell people they need to be explicitly weaker than any Marvel analogue (with special exceptions for a possibly staff-buddy Batman, iirc from earlier in the thread). On any game like this, no one should be getting superlatives (smartest, richest, strongest, etc), really - you should just have a tier of 'top tech characters' that hey maybe will RP together. Weird idea.

I think the Hulk Hogan/Superman thing is a whole different problem, basically of trying to use a narrative system approach with players that are looking for simulation-style information. Whether it would or wouldn't work for a game, I can't really say, but it's a somewhat nontratditional approach, at least in MUing, so I can understand players having difficulty with it. 'Why is his +4 better than my +4' is a valid question (even if it has a valid answer).