Posts made by bored

I'll check it out when you've got something concrete. Still iffy on doing unique theme over FS since it would just save you a lot of work and unique tends to be harder to get and keep players for, but I'd give it a go regardless.

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.

@Arkandel This is not only the bane of multi-sphere MUs (and why I basically gave up on the genre due to Mage being everywhere), but also the bane of logic fundamental logic in most fantasy settings, too. Massed warfare makes no sense when fireball is a thing, castles are dubious around fly and dimension door, etc. Or let alone economics or fundamental population demographics. There was actually a project some people undertook to make a D&D setting that tried to render society in a realistic way taking the magic into account (I don't mean Eberron, though it did it at a much smaller level and at least tried to acknowledge some magic-tech stuff), and it's amazing just how unrecognizably different it is from what the tropes usually give us.

@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

You know what a much easier way is? Get the person playing the Thraxian High Lord banned and give the rostered character to someone else who saw what happened to the last guy who played a certain way.

Aka Firan staffing 101.

Also color me not surprised on the Custodius front. He's friends with the frog-crew, and she's the reason I'd never step foot on that game in the first place.

@Lithium I don't think that's really something that can be said of 'villain players' (if there's even such a thing) so much as about MUers in general. There's as much resistance from the heroes to ever losing (which is essential to any kind of worthwhile villain arc) as there is from the villains toward ultimately being foiled/caught (which is also necessary).

I think its evidence of people being selfish douches more often than not.

@fatefan Much as I would like to lay claim to awesomeness, nope.

... my Deathstroke was cool, though ('No charge!'). Or maybe it's just hard to be a badass old man and not be cool.

@lordbelh I think the issue is that, to be anywhere true to the comics, it should be absolutely nothing like Camarilla vs. Sabbat. It shouldn't even really be PvP. Villains shouldn't be winning in the long term, outside of particular story arcs that necessitate it, and they definitely shouldn't be winning because 'lol man I took <leet power #9> and rolled a 6, you ded superbro.'

I'm all for PvP in some games or settings but it just seems bizarre in the comic context, especially with the perpetual fluidity of power levels as writing demanded. I feel like the only way it would work was with a very narrative-minded system, where maybe people were bidding story tokens of some sort or another and the actual powers/abilities of characters mattered almost not at all.

The only superhero game I played recently allowed villains and they were fairly widely played (I was Deathstroke, Zod was around, etc). But then again it was also a game run by a crazy person that imploded pretty hilariously.

I found that playing a villain was kind of hard, though, as comic books treat villains in a way that can be tricky to get people to go along with on a MU; ie, generally even the most ridiculous villains with the lamest powers get amped up 1000% so they can beat up the heroes (often taking on many at once) and be a threat for a while, but of course are ultimately defeated (but still escape to fight another day, or get locked up and immediately break out, etc). It's a hard push-pull to get people to accept when PvP instincts kick in.

@lordbelh said in Game Concept: Paying for rare things:

@Auspice I liked their system. You couldn't start out your first character as super special, but eventually everybody could be one if they just stuck around for a bit. Or you could exchange the cookies for XP. So you had the choice between being special by being better, or being special by being fancy unique.

I think I ended up doing something like this on my short-lived L5R game, although it was death-based: you got some amount of transfer XP when you died (and I think there were bonuses for dying gloriously / heroic sacrifice / seppuku / etc). You could also spend some of it to unlock the rare shit that wasn't in normal CG (Imperial chars, really weird schools, non-clan monks, really snowflake-y merits, Void shugenja, etc). Overall it was meant to both gate the weird stuff and encourage people to accept character death given the lethality of the game and a setting where people are supposed to willingly kill themselves to preserve their honor.

As the game didn't last that long it didn't get a lot of trying out, but one person lost their first character fighting an Oni on the Wall (as tends to happen!) and used it to get a fancy monk and seemed happy with that.

So I'm pretty in favor of the concept. It fits in with my general (and often loudly-stated) belief that chargen should be fair and everyone should have to pay for their special stuff instead of staff just handing out awesome feature/tiers/etc to their friends and ending up with faction leader special snowflakes who are also the best swordfighter and lover in the land. I really feel you need to impose these kinds of costs somewhere, because they make people choose what's important to them. It's a concept as old as RPG character creation, really.

I dunno, I figured the tropical diseases and cannibal pygmies were part of the appeal!

(* I don't know that there were actually any diseases, but there definitely were cannibal pygmies)

Drums was a prior @EUBanana project, same codebase as was used more recently for Dystopia (ie somewhat MUSH/MUD hybrid like Firan), but set in a vaguely middle eastern historical jungle colony. It was actually a pretty cool concept but didn't really last due to nicheness, I guess.

You should probably go look at the thread and notice that I'm responding to posts @ me and not actually harping in any way. I don't think @ixokai thinks I'm being particularly abusive or anything? But way to escalate the hostility level yourself.

I have no interest in engaging with this fallacy, which is a very common defense of bad games (not that this one is), policies, and mechanics (it's these latter two): that 'success makes everything OK.' Firan was a very successful game, but also featured some of the most horrifying staff policies and culture in the history of the hobby, and one can imagine it would have been a better game if it did all the things it did well while also not being run by an incestuous staff clique full of high school mean girl personalities and a couple borderline sexual predators.

Saying 'it did well!' does not justify bad choices along the way. A game doing well while having FCs does not make FCs a good idea. Etc.

Congratulations on completely missing my point. I'm in no way, shape, or form saying 'this game will fail because of FCs.' I have never said anything to that effect, and I'm sure the game will be about as successful as similar ones in its category (genre, ruleset, etc).

Nonetheless, my feeling is that, whatever level of success the game achieves, it would still do better if it did everything else exactly the same but simply didn't include them. I feel they add little (ie, mostly some 'ooh shiny factor' for a subset of people who just have to play their favorite character from the movies, and possibly some CG shortcuts) but subtract a lot (mostly in the form of creating negative experiences for the non FC players).

@ixokai said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

Please note that no one affiliated with this game said you bashed the game nor have any of us taken the criticism as bashing: nor did we turn aside criticism.

I know, that wasn't really directed at you. You seem sporting about the discussion, and probably like reasonable people staffwise (detractors should take note that even in one of my early posts, I clarify that I think in the majority of cases, even staff making bad decisions are doing it for what they feel are good reasons).

@WTFE

Ok? None of this is emotional. I'm not saying that I'm some perfect logicbot that never rants and flames (I did it plenty about games I actually played on and had valid, personal beefs with, like Firan) but the idea that I'm raging about a game I haven't tried is a little far-fetched.

If I'm being an asshole, well, definitions vary there. Maybe I cling to the WORA posting norm where I don't feel the need to hold off from saying 'X is stupid' if I think X is stupid, and maybe that makes me some % of an asshole. I'll deal.

@Apu

I'm not writing the game off as a failure, I'm writing off the policy as being beneficial to the game because I've never seen the policy be beneficial to any game (in this genre context). SW games have succeeded, for some amount of time, with FCs, but my feeling is that's a case of in spite of, rather than because of.

It wasn't my intent to 'bash' the game, but to offer vigorous and honest criticism. While an open alpha may not be an invitation for a popularity contest on MSB to determine policy, it is a moment in time where the game creators can probably make more use of criticism than at any other time. That they choose not to is fine, but I'm not going to sugar coat how bad an idea I think FCs are (the same way I won't really sit and equivocate on the typical nepotistic tier/feature character stuff in other genres; it's always a shitshow, and you're bad for doing it, and no your explanation as to why you're not bad isn't an exception).

The bukkake thing was just a callback to a prior joke. I thought it was a humorous summary of one (of many) issues with FCs, how they tend to get into very non-canon relationships that are often cringeworthy and theme-damaging.

@ixokai said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

I think this comes down to: there's no pleasing you It's not the game for you and that's fine.

Well yes, I think I made this pretty clear to begin with, nor am I expecting you to please me, but rather just discussing game design. To me, FCs are a fundamental, unsolvable problem. You could 'fix' all of the issues very simply by not having them, and all experience and evidence I've ever seen tells me your game would be better for it, but you are set on having them, and that is that.

I'll still look forward to the proposed Luke-Rodian bukkake logs to make it to the wiki, always good fun!

@gasket Obviously there's a lot of overlap of these two issues, yeah, although each has some unique characteristics. With FCs, it's not just the issue of stats (although it's often that also), but also the implicit degree of spotlight time, plot shield, etc that comes with being who they are.

@ixokai said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

I'll point out that our FC's do not get any special privileges. If they want to be a leader in the rebellion (like, Leia), she pays for it. If an OC wants to be a leader in the Rebellion too, they pay for it. Our OC's are exactly in line with the FC's, power wise. If someone apps a Tier 1 Vader, he will have the exact same amount of points, powers and privileges as someone else apping a random Tier 1 Sith.

Being a fate game, this is somewhat easier but also all a bit wishy-washy since I assume the 'cost' is that they have an aspect 'Rebel General' or something like that, which is worth either a) exactly as much as any other vaguely officer-y aspect, or b) whatever you decide it's worth in the totally arbitrary and hard-to-quantify terms above (spotlight, leadership pecking order, plot shield, etc). Which is why I really find it hard to trust the whole thing. Even if Leia doesn't get better stats than Rebel Officer #132, Leia is Leia.

Put another way, when I hear stories about Luke getting killed in normal combat and Vader getting demoted and locked in a box somewhere because the Imperial officer corps is tired of him choking their Admirals, I'll believe you that it's really equal... but then still probably not want to play in a universe where Vader is a bitch. Double edge sword there, I guess.

@Apu I'm sure that nearly all staff everywhere come in with, at the very least, some mild self-delusion that they're going to be fair, with the goal of 'not being like that'; it's fairly rare for staffers to be actual, intentional, self-aware tyrants. It's generally the case that they think FCs will enliven the game, not shut out 90% of the playerbase. No one goes in with the aim of 'this will really make my game suck, yeah!'

At the same time, I restate my observation that the rate at which they succeed in these aspirations is 0%. Outside of all/mostly-FC games like comicverse kind of stuff, FCs basically always end up being a net negative. That doesn't invalidate the one time someone knew someone who played a really hot er I mean well-characterized Princess Leia, but generally I find these games worse off for the attempts.

@ixokai

I think you misread my comment about the single planet thing, although it's understandable as my sentence was ambiguous. I meant that, given your setting is totally divorced from anything in the movies, it makes no sense to get movie characters into things.

I didn't mean that I didn't get the motivation for picking a single planet, but for shoehorning in Luke Skywalker when we never see him do anything on Corelia anyway.

Took a look but honestly having FC characters makes it a very hard sell for me.

The success rate for this on Star Wars games, in my personal experience, is a flat 0%. Especially picking a specific planet that isn't in any of the movies, I don't really understand the motivation.