@Derp That's moving the goalposts a bit, isn't it?
Assume two people who have equal access/connection/whatever to an NPC (ie, two people in the 'small group' that interacted with your drug dealer). If you were spending 4 hours a night TSing one of them, there's zero chance that would take away from the others in that small group?
While I'm pretty pro fuckery...
@Wretched said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
Addendum: ALSO PLEASE STOP TSING PEOPLE WITH YOUR NPC'S AUGH
Yeah, I'm gonna come down on the 'if you use it to TS, it's a PC,' regardless of how pure you think you are about your separation of conflicts of interest etc.
If teh sex is needed to move plot along, that's fine. But teh sex (or, whatever, meaningful romance) can happen in summary without spending 4 hours typing elaborate bullshit with one hand. Once you're doing that, there's a player motivation involved that has nothing to do with any of the things that are supposed to be on the mind of a GM doing GM things. You're also by necessity devoting huge amounts of time to this person and that alone is a form of favoritism; people who are looking for NPC interaction to move their own plots along are not getting it in that time, and we know that time is precious in our aging hobby.
I can see why some of the people defending it are defending it, but. Yeah, c'mon. You can't pretend it doesn't open a huge can of worms.
Uh still spoilering I guess? yabba dabba doo.
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Actually overall I liked it. Also some text goes here?
***=Do I have to put fake text here too? Avert thine eyes.***
@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:
Sure, but that doesn't impact how a different series ran by D&D will turn out.
Apparently it would have involved the south winning the Civil War?
Perhaps, they will bring valuable experience as successful showrunners to the SW trilogy, leave the creative stuff to others, and it will go well. Yet their creative instincts do not seem particularly good, and their writing has been hacky at best.
The only time this ever came up for me was when, back in the WoD dark ages, I remember a couple instances of games closing but wholesale folding into other extant games? I moved a vampire across during one of these, and in that case it didn't feel too odd since the prior game's history was just a drop in the bucket of a Vampire's long existence, anyway.
Otherwise it feels really lazy, boring, and often a red flag of players who are too invested for their or the game's good.
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.
Yeah I never led a raid in the classic era, though I definitely put in the full time job-levels of hours into the whole thing that was required of even just participating. It was way more manageable with the shift to 10 and 25-mans. Which goes back to whether or not the classic thing can even work now. I'm sure we'll see some marquee guilds out to set new records, but if that will make the servers sustainable and lived-in is another matter.
@TiredEwok I just realized this, while thinking about it, but we kind of have an example of this already with rebooted Naxx.
I remember getting a case of nerves (hah) my first time raid leading it in WotLK. A college friend of mine in my guild asked me why: "You've done these dozens of times, they'll be easy now." And he was completely right. Things I remembered as being nightmares of 'how could they expect ANYONE to ever do these CrAzY mechanics?!?' (DDR, Loatheb, Thaddius, 4H) actually seemed really simple. To be fair, some of that was reduced herding-cats syndrome in smaller raids and general power creep, but the 'hard' mechanics really didn't feel that difficult.
On the other hand, Classic WoW is so far back I've forgotten nearly all of it. Something about a bomb running away? 
@TiredEwok Tbh I'm not sure that expectation will hold up for a lot of the early content? The difficultly of a lot of old wow content was in learning basic techniques and coordination. No one knew anything and it was tons of guesswork and fiddling around in an era before good wikis.
I know one of the devs actually spoke about this when they were talking about deciding to use the final patch state for itemization and bosses (instead of actually updating with their content phases): that they can't really restore the original growing experience because a lot of it was wrapped up in bugs, constant balance changes, and player learning. (Examples given were major boss bugs like those on Rag and C'thun, or people finally working out a strat for Nef's drakonids).
@TiredEwok Oh for sure. In all honesty, its still something I might play to level a couple characters (without being faced with the overwhelming amount stuff that exists now). In some ways, doing VC again with a bunch of nooby chars (and not worrying about Heroic modes on even that) is more of a temptation than returning to the glory days of waiting for people to loot Core Hounds.
On one hand I am pretty tempted to revisit those glory days.
On the other, I'm not sure it would really actually be fun another time around. Who has time for the grinding, the raids, etc. Is getting 40 people together and focused for 4+ hours even possible these days? Also, for me, classic wasn't really the height of WoW. The early expansions were great, opened up the world a lot and filled in key lore, and most importantly did a lot to make every class spec playable. One of the core 'classic' experiences is getting yelled at by your guild for being the wrong spec.
@GamerNGeek What's your exact question? How to decide what goes into the pool? How to read the dice themselves?
Er: nevermind, as I see her post: @faraday's code is probably the best answer unless you really want to do it from scratch.
@Arkandel Uh, sure? I'm less clear why this is @ me when you're mostly ranting at some guy on Youtube (I promise you did not by coincidence discover my secret youtuber identity). I could do that kind of analysis, as I'm sure plenty of the history-nerds that occupy our hobby could, but I recognize it's entertainment and that's why my mentions of those things were brief, not in a 20+ minute sprawling rant.
What I don't get is why there's anything wrong with someone saying they "enjoy something but..." and analyze it?
Action in cinema (and lets be honest that GoT spends money that puts it beyond TV quality standards) can be stylistic, but it still needs to be coherent. When it falls down (and at saner hour I could find some really bad examples to demonstrate), it's usually because of a lack of clear continuity of location, sequence of action, cause and effect, etc. Those things make the frenzy into a story. In this ep, the biggest problem was a bunch of disjoint 'peril' scenes that didn't connect to one another, were sometimes repeated or redundant, and did not build to the climax, but just waited for it.
If as the viewer you think 'oh wow they're dead for sure' as the camera pans away, then the next appearance of those characters should confirm what happened, either reaffirming what you saw (someone discovers bodies, mourns their loss later) or explaining how they in fact managed to not be dead. Failing to do that is an error. There was plenty great about the ep, but I think others (Battle of Castle Black esp) were far more coherent.
While I'm not on the 'omg its drivel' level, I agree with several people that the quality has taken a nosedive in the post-Martin era. TV writing feels like TV writing, and it yields a certain predictability of story beats as well as annoying shortcuts (the teleportation issues of last season). This episode was still a step up, it almost couldn't not be with the money and resources they poured into it, and it showed off a ton of characters and wow moments, so that's not something to scoff at. Detail wise...
***Yeah just gonna put everything in here***
@Tinuviel There's discussion upthread about encryption methods the practicality of using using those to achieve both the shiny-new tech and some degree of privacy for the users (although I still view it as a weak promise when one party controls the server). Obviously, if they can achieve the best of both worlds, I don't object to this out of pure malice or something?
But as someone who's had Observers pop out when they struck their tent, I am not that concerned about preserving my thin privacy protections on these games.
Players should either trust the staff on the game or not play there. If they don't, 'hardcoded' pages have never been the security guarantee people act like they are, and game runners always have had the ability to log every bit of text you enter with or without your knowledge.
If I ever ran a serious enough game for it to matter, I'd log everything. I might set some policies about when certain categories of logs would be referenced (ie, only in the case of harassment complaints, hacking threats, RP only if flagged public, whatever) and how long logs would be retained, but otherwise I have 0 problem with people logging everything and treat all staff like Firan staff in terms of my expectation of personal privacy.
In your case, the ability to make technological progress is far more valuable. Turning previously 'transitory' elements like pages and poses into database objects is a necessary leap for various enhancements of the mushing experience. There's no way around that if you want access to certain features and it's not worth upholding some ancient etiquette that was always a false promise anyway.