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As this is an FFG thread, its worth explaining that FFG L5R weakens the role protection/delineation between the traditional Bushi (warrior) / Shugenja (priest/mage) / Courtier / Monk / (Ninja, shh) schools considerably.

In prior editions, you picked a school, it fit into one of those categories, and you got a technique each rank from that school (or one technique + access to a new spell level each rank for Shugenja). So, absent (supposedly very rare) multi-schooling, Bushi would only get more combat techniques as they went on, and Courtiers only more courtier stuff. This meant that by higher ranks the niche protection was extreme: bushi could one-shot Oni and courtiers had abilities approaching mind control.

In FFG, the technique divisions exist not in Clan schools but in categories: Kata (fighty stuff), Kiho (monk chi techniques), Invocations (spells), Shuji (social, meditative and leadership techs), and Ninjutsu (dishonorable stealth-based techs that no one admits exist). There's also a general 'Rituals' category that includes stuff that is basically universal Rokugani practice (like the Tea Ceremony). Individual Clan schools have access to 3 of these, usually 2 'specialized' ones + Rituals. And MOST Bushi and Courtier schools have access to both Kata and Shuji. The differentiation comes in a rank 1 school specific advantage, and school 'curriculum' that reward you for advancing in a semi-defined path and provide early access to specific techniques or possibly even toss in something special 'out of class' (IE the Hiruma Scout has the usual Bushi selection of Kata, Shuji and Rituals, but can access a couple specific Ninjutsu techs for sneaking around).

On the whole, everything is much more mix-and-match, pick-and-choose. And with only Rings rather than stats, there's not much of the potential min-maxing statwise that would generate socially inept Bushi in earlier editions. Being high Earth means you are enduring; that can mean shouldering blows on the battlefield, but it can also mean standing firm in court. So basically, it's much truer to L5R fiction in that the average Bushi will be socially competent if they put even the tiniest effort into it.

But yeah, it also expects that you roll social stuff, in part because everyone CAN participate. If you're not comfortable with social dice, it's not a good choice of system whatsoever.

How is any of this shit L&L related?

Who is fucking who drama happens on literally every MU ever and will happen on every MU ever.

Oh, we're having this thread again.

Courtesy of @Auspice's advice on the xbox pass thing, I've been playing The Outer Worlds, and while I think it's a good game I can absolutely understand anyone who would have criticisms. It's pretty clear that the game benefited hugely from comparison to Fallout 76 and is being hyped in response to it. I've talked about the whole BioWare/Black Isle/Obsidian/etc lineage so these comparisons are reasonable but it does give people an agenda in wanting to love one and shit on the other, even though The Outer Worlds is... 80% Fallout in space, with a visibly smaller budget.

The writing is great. But the companion quests are really thin. Having seen the reviews and chatter, I was primed for the Parvati stuff but there's... very little to it? The idea of dealing with her sexuality being one thing you talk about was intriguing, yet it being the full extent of the character was a let down.

And compared to a game that focuses on it (I think this is relevant to @Thenomain's comparison with Borderlands) the combat is mediocre: there are all of... I want to say a dozen different enemies in the game (if you don't count variants), and RPG wise I wouldn't say the numbers and systems are well designed: armor has close to no value on 90% of enemies, plasma is almost always the right damage type, stuff tends to get one-shotted or kill you equally fast, etc.

I did like the character creation a lot, but there are still cg traps despite the 'play your way' hype. This is actually exacerbated by the respeccing, since some skills are really only useful in the between-mission sense, so that its better to respecc in and out occasionally than actually play with them (looking at you Science). Experimenting with the Flaws, they're not fun, just punishing. The drugs (and consumables in general) are underwhelming or outright terrible: why would you ever use Adrena-Time?

This isn't to say it's bad. Its a fun game with a solid story and some great characters (ADA continues the creators legacy of hilarious artificial characters) and probably worth one replay for a different playstyle and major decisions (and hardcore mode), but its definitely not the holy savior of gaming that some of the coverage is hyping it as.

Yeah, to people ( @Arkandel and maybe others) saying its the # available, my universal anti-FCism applies in the typical WoD/SW/L&L/etc-game usage of it (ie 'cool overpowered plot-shielded char that gets given to a staff buddy') and not the Comic FC vs OC sense where if there's tons of FCs, they're totally fine (probably even the norm).

@Nausicaa said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:

I don't really mind FCs in general. They can be fun if handled properly. I think my main hold back is only that Hawke is a playable FC. Hawke is basically a blank slate with an identifiable name.

Yeah, this is the reason it makes me the MOST uncomfortable. Since the character doesn't have a set identity or anything, the only thing turning a PC into a Hawke does is mark them as more special. They're not constrained to move the plot along in particular ways or serve some specific thematic focus. It's akin to letting someone play a non-canon but still feature Bob Skywalker.

Obviously there's kind of a balancing point on the 'players who will not bite no matter how hard you dangle bait' (insert crude humor as appropriate) and 'anyone who can't figure out the precise right stuff to +request and expresses frustration clearly doesn't care enough so fuck them.' The former behavior is very common, but so is the latter attitude in staff, and both are pretty shitty.

I think it is important to take player feedback about inaccessibility seriously, especially if its being actively expressed to staff. Most willing to actually say something instead of just idling into obscurity is probably at least somewhat willing to be involved, and struggling with the how. The overall involvement culture of any MU tends to become impenetrable within a month or two if you're not there on day one, and the difficulty of busting in is one of those things that tends to put every game on a pretty dramatically ticking clock of viable lifespan.

I've always been a fan, at least in theory, of that kind of played-prologue sort of thing. I would definitely say it's better off keeping it strictly that, than trying to run X months of the game as one thing and then time-skip and switch things up.

As much as people say they like character growth, they also hate change. Particularly the sort that upsets their status quo of existing RP circles, relationships, accomplishments, positions, and so on.

@macha said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:

@arkandel See, the Takei and Franken thing are part of my whole "If you say no, and they stop..." thing. The guy who accused Takei admits once he actually flat out said NO, Takei stopped and let him leave. Same thing with Franken, when he rehearsed that kiss. She pushed him away and said NO, that was the end of it. Now the picture - he's not actually touching or groping her. I've worn a flak vest, and you're not going to get a feel through one of those. So that picture? Tasteless, deserves the apology, and move on.

This is absolutely my line, too.

There's a whole continuity of behavior here, of degrees of consent (particularly if you want to make the standard 'enthusiastic') and its violation, from being assumed when it shouldn't be to its explicit refusal being ignored... to premeditated drugging of people so that consent is not even on the table. The fact that all of it can be lumped under some broad umbrella of 'sexual misconduct' doesn't make it all remotely equivalent behavior, legally or morally. Frankly, I'm inclined to think more positively hearing about someone doing something unwise, getting rebuffed, and stopping (and owning up to the initial ill-conceived action) than I am to want to skewer them. We're all human and we all err, but those are pretty much the moments that separate the redeemable from those beyond.

Additionally re: Takei (and I'm repeating something I saw elsewhere, but agree with): He's 80. His first sexual experience was as a victim of child molestation, but he doesn't view it as such, and I can only imagine this is because there was no open, accepted, healthy avenue for him to come into his sexuality. When all of gay culture was underground because it was criminal, it's not surprising that the clandestine behavior people were forced to engage in might endanger proper consent practices that we're still struggling to normalize today. This is how I took his Howard Stern stuff, particularly, as him trying to be honest about his behavior but not being able to gracefully put it in context.

So, taken alongside his activism, I'm willing to give the guy a lot of benefit of the doubt. I will be very sad if it turns out he was more like Spacey, if we find out there's a larger history or one of him abusing his power specifically.

@lordbelh I think it rises above 'possibly being discomforted' to nearly baiting people to get into fights on pub about religion/politics and I really don't think that's something any game really needs. And I say this being far from the sort to worry about offending/triggering/etc as a general matter of policy. I don't think these topics should be off limits (and I presume an alt-earth version would still have religious violence, all the horrors implied by war, etc), but from a pure 'I want my game to succeed' level I think it's probably a landmine @Lotherio would be better off not setting for himself to step on.

@Seraphim73 I've never really liked the 'just pose cool for bonuses' way of doing things. It was a mechanical fad for a while ('stunt dice', etc) but it can often become meaningless when everyone poses something 'ridiculously cool' every round to get their bonus dice, turning the cool moments into the default and penalizing people in the odd case where they just want to stab a motherfucker.

I think in something like FS3, it's probably best to mostly leave thing to flavor and stances (and indeed, various stances probably cover both the flavor and mechanics of... 90% of swashbuckling moves) and not try to GM excessively on top of self-contained system. The one thing I'd probably do in FS3 GMing to reward particularly impressive (as opposed to 'cool for the sake of cool') play is occasionally mess with the NPCs. It's easy enough to make an NPC skip an action, remove one from combat early, or even create penalty stances or something to that effect. Thay way you preserve the limited complexity of player-side input but can give them some flavor feedback if you prefer.

And yeah, definitely agree. Railroading on that grand scale is perfectly OK if it's telegraphed.

If you call the event 'The Fall of Malachor V' or 'The Crusaders Last Stand' people are going to know what they're signing up for.

The key thing, of course, is to give people other ways to matter. They can't save the Neo-Crusader movement, they can't win. But they might, for instance, save a single ship that goes on to form a camp-colony which becomes a center for future recruitment and continuity of the Mandalorian culture.

If anything, their adaptability is one of the coolest things about the Mandalorians in the EU. Once you get past the Boba Fett speshul factor of omg we r best bounty hunter, it's a pretty fascinating invented culture, what with its nomadic, species-agnostic, and yet somehow ageless nature.

@Arkandel

***=We the spoiler thread***

@tempest said in FCs on Comic MUs:

tl;dr Nobody (except dumbasses) cares if you play a 'good' Wolverine/whatever who just happens to be gay, while staying active in your sphere/etc. When "I am playing gay so-and-so" becomes the focal point of what YOU as a player are doing, rather than just "I am playing so-and-so", is the problem.

Yeah this is really my issue with gender/sexuality swapped characters. It's oh so rarely that someone just happens to have said sexuality, it's that it's almost always 'Here is Gay/Lesbian <Name> (TM).'

And it almost always happens to specifically service active pursuit of TS and so it's hard to split them apart in terms of being bid old red flags. Wanting to have a particular line of sexual RP open to you is not, in and of itself, a valid reason to tweak an FC, imo, because that just proves you're using the character for that and not for general play and I don't think that justifies the slot.

And yes, that applies to the straight folk too. My contempt for Ruby's Rogue (and Rogues everywhere, it seems - the fact that they always seem to have some gizmo to turn off her power is a big tell) knows no bounds.

I think generally the trend on MUs in recent years has been toward grid minimalism. It's almost guaranteed to be less work (fewer descs!), and @faraday highlights some of the other benefits. That said it's not necessarily the only answer and there are some arguments against.

Firstly, to do the standard pompous intellectual bit, 'Explorer' is identified as one of the major player motivation-types in gaming. While RP MUs use this less than MUDs, they do benefit from it and there are players who enjoy it. I know many people who explored (and even mapped out) Firan's mega grid, and some locations that focused on this (including some coded exploration puzzles) were very popular. Visiting the sunken cave as a ritual of bravery was a standard of kid RP for a while.

Secondly, there's a benefit to certain kinds of players who enjoy spontaneous RP. While a big grid seemingly keeps players apart, it actually makes chance encounters more contextually meaningful. Bumping into someone in 'Big City - Western District' says basically nothing about what kind of RP might happen, while 'Big City - Western District - Sleazy Strip' (or 'Dark Alley' or 'Tech Market') might suggest quite a lot. Common RP hotspots (bars, shops, training centers, etc) can also be utilized players who may be interested in RP but who are too shy to ask on channel or commit to a planned scene in pages. The location serves not just to advertise that they want RP, but what kind.

Finally, the costs of a larger grid to players who don't like it can be minimized (+hangout and +travel code, +meetme, etc) whereas the reverse is not true in the same way. +temproom code can give infinite variety, but it can never offer spontaneous encounters nor true exploration.

Of course, Superhero games are also their own thing and inform this discussion in various ways. Exploration may not be relevant to a Metropolis setting, where the city is cast in grand strokes and encounters are likely to play out across the sky at high speeds. Here you might need no more than a few neighborhoods and iconic locations: the Planet, LexCorp, the Watchtower, etc... along with some access to off-grid spaces like Themyscira and Atlantis. On the other hand a Gotham game might be very different and benefit from some nooks and crannies to explore and give the city its depth and factional hangouts to be used by criminal gangs.

There's never a one-size-fits-all answer to this kind of stuff.

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

even writing screenplays for this different long format as we had TV before

This is one places where the differences can easily stand out, as we saw it very clearly when GoT went from 'premium TV long form writing' back to something more traditional TV-like. So it's not necessarily a guarantee in all cases, but I would say that the 'Golden Age of TV's biggest impact is definitely these long-form stories. It's also as big of a part of the problem the movie industry is having as streaming more broadly: people have gotten used to more meaty narratives, and can actually recognize that 2 hour adaptations of massive novels are often insufficient. Heck, people invest in the MCU because it's effectively a big screen premium TV show rather than the other way around.

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

Piracy, I'm talking about piracy. While there was just Netflix and it provided a great service for around $10 a month torrents and other streams were simply not worth the inconvenience. Try to cram 4+ services down people's throats and that is going to change very quickly.

Particularly the services that obviously don't have much value or content and thus have decided to 'force' you to stay subscribed by releasing their shows with a delay rather than all at once (looking at you 'already failed and subsumed by HBO' DC Universe). Intentional inconvenience is just begging people to just pirate them. And... I do (while simultaneously having things like Netflix).

You nail it with Netflix's convenience. This is also why the Disney service is actually a viable competitor: Netflix was buoyed every bit as much by people having a convenient way to watch The Office or Friends (and may suffer seriously without them) than its fancy originals, and now Disney(Fox) has things like The Simpsons along with a huge back catalog. Most people are not going to torrent dozens of seasons, but they will sit there and watch a season at a time when it just autoplays.

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

If the purpose is to support civil discourse about MU-related topics, then no - the UH thread did not exemplify that purpose.

If the purpose is to support no-holds-barred discussions to hold people accountable and wield the power of public opinion to bring down games, as the old WORA did... then you're right.

I don't think we can have both, and this thread is illustrating that rather emphatically. Feel free to prove me wrong.

I don't see those as mutually exclusive. They can happen on the same forum, possibly in different areas. IE: In column A, we point out shitty games being shitty and why. We give people a place to speak out where they cannot have their posts deleted, @mailboxes raided (lol), etc.

In column B, we talk about solutions to the shit we see brought up in A.

And, as pointed out, the 'bring games down' thing is a laughable fiction. No one sane thinks that, and it's most often a straw man trotted out by game admins trying to shut up discussion here. Please don't replicate their behavior.

@JinShei Only one of the streets? Amateur:

@ganymede I mean, basically what you quoted or what I said in prior posts? To vaguely summarize, uh, I'd like an area where:

• Criticism needn't be constructive ('Spying on players is bad!' <- not constructive, but OK!)

• It is OK to criticize specific people for specific behavior on-game ('Look at these corrupt staffers doing X, Y, Z' 'Look at this creeper creepin', etc).

• That said, I can live without pure raw bile ('So and so is hitler,' current @Vorpal / @Tempest derail, etc != OK)

• Content/derail moderation should only really happen when there's clearly no relation to the game/situation in discussion ('I hate fucking Vampires' 'Uh that's nice this is a Magic Space Ponies thread') not to prevent people from following natural threads of conversation ('Hey we're not talking about my NPC-as-PC abuse, we're talking about XP spends!'' 'Sorry bub, you play, you take your chances')

• Violators of any of the any of the above generally be dealt with as to (re)move the minimum of content (maybe already being done, but worth saying)

I also really want to stress that it's fine for us also to embrace higher general standards. It's all about balancing things. If we have a public critical area, Constructive can probably be more moderated, and Hog can really be more focused on the meme-laden shitposting, which would seemingly make the @faraday etc crowd happy (and even help avoid, say, the blow up I had with @surreality - she'd have a space for positive-only feedback, etc).

I'm pretty familiar with the whole 'Jewish-adjacent' concept, as I have the ancestry but not the religion (on my dad's side, naturally), and live in New York, so I've always been around the culture and faith without being in either. But here, it's just pretty much normal. If you're throwing a party, you make sure you have kosher options as much as vegetarian. My mom regularly goes to Shabbat dinners with a long time coworker's family. Etc etc.

But making it trendy is weird and creepy. I can get behind creating resources for interfaith couples (the article makes a good point that the alternative is usually pushing people out, because 'ancient tradition' loses most of the time if you make people choose), and in the end, someone is going to make a buck on it. But the Jewish Grandma on Food labels thing is pretty bad. As is generally the case, I'm all for cultural interchange and set a pretty high bar for calling things 'appropriation', but uh... some of this definitely vaults over said bar, regardless.

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

But I will say this: We talk sometimes about the future of MUSHing, about how hard it is to draw in new players, etc. As someone who knows writers who might be interested, who has a daughter who some day might be interested... I can't in good conscience invite them into a gaming community that is so darn toxic. And I'm not just talking about MSB here, because the same attitude that feeds the Hog Pit pervades the games too.

I had a bit more on whether MSB is actually causal... but @surreality got it (bizarro world continues). I just don't see that MSB is anything more than a sample subset of the hobby, and if anything, we at least grapple for self-awareness, whether or not we grasp it. That's better than average. I think we're better than the average.

My issue comes to this: You to want to promote this place as a center for discussion of game design etc. I'd love that! I love systems and I love talking about them. I love thinking about how to structure them to create the play you want. But (and this is a huuuuuge, Sir Mix-a-lot worthy but): even in the absence of people vitriol'ing those conversations don't actually happen all that often here, and certainly not to the point of treading novel ground with any frequency. There is, right at this moment, a thread about xp earning rates for... whatever, some game I don't care about. I only saw it in passing. Yet I could have the entire argument with myself at this point, because I (and probably we) know all the beats.

Now, you are one of the very very few people on here who can actually lay any stake or claim to having done something to meaningfully advance the hobby, so it's not on you personally, but if you want to bring other people along with you... I'm not sure simply telling them all to 'play nice' is going to be sufficient.

If we want those conversations to really drive the board, they need to produce. And we have basically two possible sources for insight: pulling it out of our ass (ie, just coming up with novel ideas, which seem in short supply) or analysis of actual play, ie, the shit people do on games. And that second one is why I think robust (and even occasionally harsh) criticism is so important, and especially why we need to allow it without automatically denigrating it by Hog-status. When we conflate those things, it makes it very hard to have any kind of meaningful conversation about the games we're actually playing.

And I think that's just as stifling as a new game runner getting some push-back on a concept.