Best posts made by Coin

@de-villefort said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@lotherio

I didn't think I needed to explain this but here we go...

There is no idea, no cause, no statement or even fact backed by thousands of years of research that everyone agrees on 100%.

We can't even get 100% of humans to agree that the earth is round.
There will always be some chucklefuck that will find something to argue about even the most obvious truths.

When I write, "Everyone thinks X" It means "A great many people" think X is true.
When I write "Games who do X result in Y" it means "Quite often games who do X result in Y"

There are no absolutes. I would have assumed that as adults, everyone here would understand this but that is my fault for assuming the intelligence and maturity of the posters here. I shouldn't have assumed. You have my sincerest apologies.

lol, the level of pedantry you're shoveling here is amazing. maybe take it to the Hog Pit; this is the mildly constructive area.

if you want to be a chucklefuck, this is not the appropriate place in the forum.

@Luna said:

I'm a map I'm a map I'm a maaaaaap!

I'M A MAP, I'M A MAP, SUCK MY BEEEEEEACH, I'M A MAP.

First of all: you're conflating your job with staffing, and they are not the same thing. One of them is responsible for you being able to sustain your way of life and, you know, eat (and possibily feed your family), whereas the other has the much less severe responsibility of... processing a few jobs on an online game. So if you're doing something your boss told you to even though you're against it, it's understandable (to an extent), whereas no one can actually force you to do jack on staff and if something is that ethically dubious, you can always say 'no' and not do it. Seriously, this comparison has got to go.

Second of all: The division between a player and a staff bit exists for the reasons I stated above in my earlier post; but to further expound: you shouldn't page me about staff shit on my PC bit because I am going to have to use my staff bit anyway, and you are likely spamming me on my PC bit. Yes, even if I am in the Quiet Room. I page other people while I'm there, and keeping conversations separated on different screens helps me help you. And as stated before, I'm probably going to have to look at a job or something anyway, so I'd have to go to my staff bit. If it's not on, that means I'm not doing staff stuff. It's a clear indicator I am off-duty. Paging my PC bit about it anyway--or following up on Skype or whatever--is rude. Yes. But not because I see some internal division between my staff-persona and my me-persona. It's just a matter of common courtesy.

@mietze said:

Yep, but I would say that probably anywhere there are far more people who are comfortable with an off the cuff hunt and combat scene than they would be for a spirit negotation one. For whatever reason, IME the ephemeral stuff seems to add another barrier. I didn't say it was impossible, just that if you are going to cap easy entry PCs (eliminating rahu or combat types) because you want to diversify your sphere and don't have a good chunk of available people comfy with running spirit negotation or fetish creating/gathering scenes, then that's not really going to help get an /active/ diverse sphere.

I'm concentrating on a specific topic here:

I'm happy to talk anyone through ephemeral systems to make this easier. That said, I'm also of the opinion that if a system is making it harder for you, find a way around it that makes it easier.

The ephemeral Conditions, for instance, are meant to have plot based around them, not to have to be shoe-horned into plot, and this is counter-intuitive to how a lot of MU storytellers go about things.

For example:

A spirit of racism needs the Open Condition to possess a person--but what if the person is not racist at all? This is a problem if your plot depends on this otherwise non-racist person starting to act that way because of the spirit and having their friends and family slowly notice the change; or using it as a clue for the PCs to notice something is wrong (especially if you need it to happen quickly, not over a long period of time). So what do you do? You ignore that bit of the system. Fuck the Open Condition. That dude is Urged now and everything he would normally do comes tinged with a little bit of racist. Maybe he starts singing Avenue Q without enough sarcasm and spouting racist stereotypes.

If something is a barrier and ignoring it doesn't feel like a big deal, then it probably isn't. I'm not saying "ignore power limitations" or "grossly overpower them" or "make a spirit of X act out of character". But there are things a person can ignore, largely because what you want to do is still possible, it's just a matter of time or doing it a specific way that can be annoying to have to figure out off the cuff.

Ephemerals can be particularly complex because they have an entirely separate system regarding how they work, and it can be annoying. But it's not too complicated once you get it. One of the best things about spirits, IMO, is that spirits are hyperfocused. Basically, everything they do has to do with their nature. a spirit of fire wants fire, flames, burning, nownownow; it doesn't have complex emotions, motivations, and schemes. It is fire, and fire burns. Smart players will exploit that; smart storytellers will twist it in interesting ways.

I ramble. I would love to see more spirit negotiation stuff, and low-key possessions, urgings, etc., and am happy to help anyone who needs a quick tutorial regarding it. Even a Rank 1 or lower-tier Rank 2 Spirit can cause havoc for a werewolf pack in the hands of a smart storyteller, not to mention what they can do to people who aren't adept at handling spirits.

Edited to add that I would also love to see people taking initiative when it comes to spirits affecting their daily roleplay. Is your character an angry person? Have a spirit of rage or frustrating or violence Fetter itself to them; see where that goes. Do you spend all your time running around trying to bang as many people as possible? Lust, sex, and STD spirits galore; or maybe you find yourself fucking in a place where something horrific happened to a ghost that still haunts the area...

It's the world of darkness. As has been said before, that doesn't mean everyone has to be a dick; it means that the world is full of bad shit. It's really easy to make that bad shit part of your daily roleplay. And the scenes don't even have to conclude in anything other than "ah fuck ghost ghost ghost" and your PCs running out of there and never looking back. And if seven months later you want to revisit that chance scene? Maybe someone shows up dead in that place and you say, "fuck, it's time to bust this ghost" and you get into your firetruck and... you get the point.

@Darinelle
Oh, baby.

@Roz said:

Man, and I came over to totally yell about why we couldn't have a 1984 game instead.

That's it. @Roz, we need to make a game where there are three warring nation-states, one based on 1984, one based on BNW, and one based on F451; and these societies are all warring with each other trying to figure out which one is the most dystopic and can crush their citizens's sense of self more efficiently and with less dissidence. (It's a very cold war.)

We can call it Dystopia³.

@Arkandel said:

Holy shit, how is HR still breathing?

Through a tube. That's the real reason he isn't posting.

@2mspris
It's okay to like something; it's just not okay to hype it up so much that everyone else feels obligated to absolutely fucking loathe it.

@WTFE said:

@Arkandel said:

We're a pool of sharks.

Shit! I knew I was doing something wrong. I thought we were a pool of hippos.

Hippos are worse than sharks. By a lot.

@carma said in Balancing wizards and warriors:

Avatar seemed to do it fine most of the time. You have plenty of characters like Jet without bending power who can go toe-to-toe with many benders. Physical projectile weapons seem to be pretty handy against benders, in particular.

If you're trying to balance numbers, that's going to depend on what numbers you want to take into account.

If you're trying to balance freeform play, I'm sure that Avatar core rulebook will be pretty handy.

I'm not sure why Avatar is the first thing I think of. But this would be the same discussion if you were balancing ghosts versus fairies, demolitions experts versus vampires, or pirates versus cats. It's all a matter of making flavor match balance.

And if you have too many people picking cats and not enough pirates, why are you making classes equate to factions in the first place? Let the cats join the pirates to be part of the seafaring faction and let the pirates find solace amongst the sewer cats, sailing the unseen seas.

The problem with Avatar as an example is that Avatar's characters can go toe-to-toe with each other based on narrative need. Sokka can hold his own against a bender because it's necessary for the narrative; while Aang can take on twenty trained soldiers who've been specifically trained to battle benders because it's necessary for the narrative, etc.

That doesn't apply to game balance when you're using stats and dice rolls. Not unless you're okay with the GM fudging pretty much everything.

@Selira said in Selira's Playlist:

@Coin #SOCKS. eso si que es.

@Ashra said:

I think a Firefly or Killjoy type space opera would be interesting, if you structured it in such a way that each "crew" had a storyteller (one or more) who ran stuff for other crews, and they in turn would run things for you.

So many people have tried this "St exchange" and it just never ends up working out. No reason not to try, of course, but yeah. It looks great on paper, not so great in practice.

@Jennkryst

Music is math! </overgeneralization>

@Misadventure said:

Also, please don't read my personal feelings or attitude into things, and I will do the same for you. If I am trying to be condescending, I will let you know. If you hear condescending without it being sent, adjust your reception.

This is both dumb and grossly self-unaware. I'm not even a part of this discussion and I read condescension in the way you express yourself. And in fact, telling him he has to "adjust his reception" if he feels you're being condescending is pretty condescending. Maybe if someone feels you're being condescending, you should adjust your emission. We may like to think we're in complete control of how we come off in text and even face-to-face, but we're not.

@Jaunt said:

@Coin said:

I think the basic premise here is that none of the Optional Realities crowd (except maybe @Jeshin?) have interacted with the rest of the community on any thread other than this one; and even if they have here and there, not to an extent that it's noticeable and makes them feel part of the community.

So if you want to be part of the community, you need to actually, you know, take part in it, not just the very small sub-section of it that promotes your own thing elsewhere.

My feeling is this. Until I feel like I'm able to have a conversation with folks here without it going off the rails and becoming personal, I'm not going to shit up your other threads with my outsider opinions when it's just going to offend people. If I feel like this thread can be steered back towards positivity, then I'll be likely to branch out.

Then you're never going to manage it. We're never going to actually look at this thread favorably if it stands as a testament to you guys wanting to promote your own project without being able to engage in ours. If you're scared of posting on another thread and mucking it up... welcome to MU Soapbox, please take a complimentary helmet.

Every single time any of us post our personal opinions on these forums we are opening ourselves up to everyone else disagreeing and calling us out on our potential shit. If you had actually looked through the forum in detail, you'd see I get into opinionated verbal scuffles with tons of people on some threads, and get along just fine with them on others. Hell, @Miss-Demeanor and I disagree constantly (likely because she loves to argue--potentially the one thing she won't argue with me about) and yet I'm pretty sure if I open up a chat box with her and say 'Hi', she'll be totally cool with chatting about whatever. I disagree with @Arkandel or our dearly desk-flipping, indignantly-quitting @HelloRaptor all the time. I can still talk to them amiably whenever. They're friends--or at least amicable acquaintances.

If you're worried about shitting on our other threads because you still haven't been able to make this one work? You're approaching this entire community in the wrong way.

Dive in and take it like the rest of us, or don't complain that we don't integrate you.

The only part of @Sunny's system that I thinkis a mistake (as opposed to my just not liking it, which isn't the same thing) is making the cap a yearly thing. It would be much better in my opinion to make the cap an constantly rising goal based on how long the game has been open. The following are examples only.

Let's say the "yearly" cap is "100 experiences". This is how much you can spend in a year. Every year. We can apply this to the first year wholesale, but the second year you'll just jump straight to 200. That's problematic if you have people who bank XP and just want to be able to spend all their XP when the limit goes up. Instead, after the first year, raise the limit per day.

100 divided by 364 equals 0.27->

If you raise the limit up by 0.25(-ish) per day, you can easily create a steadily rising "wall" without huge, sudden leaps of XP for those people who don't give a flying fuck about your transitory stuff, they just want MOAR POWAHZ.

Another thing to remember is that this system will undoubtedly generate further "front loading" on "useful" stats while people leave behind stats they would buy if it didn't mean it curtailed their ability to buy the useful ones. With wait/spend times being the arbiter of what you can buy, you still have people who just bought Brawl 4 buying things like Persuasion 2, because they can't buy Brawl 5 yet, and they have the XP for Persuasion 2. But if the arbiter of what you can spend is universal--a top limit of how much XP IN TOTAL you can spend on your stats--that Persuasion 2, which might actually make sense and be relevant to the concept, is gonna fall to the wayside for the more useful and commonly rolled Brawl 5.

Yes, I know, the difference to how it is now will probably be negligible. But it came to mind.

He's also just kind of a jerk? I don't play at Arx (not yet anyway) but in every other game I've seen him, he has been rude, confrontational, annoying (at best) and downright insulting at times to people for no reason other than he disagrees with something. He's also creepy as fuck, if reports have any validity at all, but that last is second-hand knowledge.

@Entropy said:

Again, perhaps it is idealistic, but I also don't think it's impossible. It's more about creating a small set of checks and balances when it comes to staff decisions.

And maybe the staff favoritism/corruption stuff isn't as prevalent as it once was, but you still have a lot of talk about the Troy/Sonders, VASpiders, Zero/Elsas and whoever else I'm not thinking of at the moment.

In my particular case, I'm wanting to experience a game that is similar in feel and playerbase as Brave New World is, without the crazy shitstorm that is the One Staffer To Rule Them All. HeroMux isn't a bad alternative, but it certainly has it's share of staff problems, too. Comux is fine, for the most part, but then there, you have two staffers who make up about 80% of the total PC population of the game and run pretty much everything.

I've spoken with a number of players from these games, and they're all pretty much in agreement. They stick with these games because they're what they've got. I just... would rather try to make something that's better, even if only incrementally.

As per @Arkandel's response above, I think you are savagely underestimating all the problems that come with a fully democratic style of game running.

I would hazard to say that what you want is not a "democratic staff style" but rather "benevolent dictator who isn't fucking batshit".

@Arkandel
I think it can be fun to walk the grid. You certainly find more random RP if the game fosters a culture of hanging out in public and walking the grid; together, these two can lead to some nice impromptu scenes that can make you get to know people you wouldn't otherwise meet.

Oh, god, not you...