Best posts made by Coin

@ganymede said in RL Anger:

In my line of work, I like to think of some honor among thieves.

I am enraged when a party, five days before final hearing in a divorce case, decide that they want to have an in-chambers interview of a couple's 9-year-old kid regarding who he wants to spend more time with.

That's fucking low. That's really fucking low. And as much as I should blame the party and not their attorney, attorneys have some obligation to guide their clients into making rational decisions.

I wasn't planning to spend my spare time this weekend reviewing everything for the umpteenth time, but I want to be ready to destroy this motherfucker in the worst way on the stand.

FASTER, GANYMEDE, KILL! KILL!

Eldritch will be implementing some sort of registration, though it's less for alt-control (though it will double as that) than it is for XP control, since we have Player XP (i.e. XP that you can use on any of your alts, because you acquired it running stories and doing such things that are not character specific).

@aria said in Um...What?:

@cupcake said in Um...What?:

@aria said in Um...What?:

@coin said in Um...What?:

My brother didn't realize he was fucking a Nazi until he saw the Swastika tatoo on her boob.

I accidentally had dinner at a Nazi's house once.

And I don't mean, like.... a neo-Nazi. I mean a Nazi Nazi. Like, served on the wrong side of WWII Nazi. By choice. It was super awkward when I found out.

Story time!

He, meanwhile, does not seem to understand why I am so shaken by this and I have to explain to him that in the States, not only was pretty much everyone's grandfather was on the other side of the war? Sixty years later, we will still ship your swastika-sporting ass back to Germany* for possible trial if it comes out you were a Nazi, no matter how old and shriveled you might be.

Even without the chronological clarification at the beginning you can just tell this was at least 5+ years in the past, because no one from the States would say the above now-a-days.

I'm with @Tat. If you're gonna do it, do it all the way.

I have zero coding/programing/whatever experience/knowledge, or I would offer help. But a dedicated app that function as its own browser and client would be amazing.

I mean, it's also by far the most work intensive and what not, but it's also, I think the next logical stage for our hobby. I know we've been howling about how MUs are dying for like a decade in a half now, but at some point we need to admit that at some point, it will die.

Also, @faraday, you might want to look at and talk to the people of Wanton Wicked whom I believe have their own, custom-coded chat and charsheet interface, among other things.

For those who can't find said "system" on the Eldritch wiki (assuming anyone cares), it's basically based on, 'you get what you give', wherein everyone, including the storyteller, gets a basic amount of Beats (typically 1) for participating in a scene. Then, the highest amount of Beats gained through other means (Conditions, DramaFails, Aspirations, Taking Damage, etc.,) by any one player also gets awarded to the Storyteller, since it's as much an effort on their part, really. Let's dissect a little (and really I do this because the more times I explain it the easier it becomes to write up later officially):

• A character fulfills an Aspiration in your scene. You provided them with a means to further their story, so you also get a Beat.
• A character gets a Condition set on them. You provided the framework for that Condition, and are likely the source (via an NPC or whatever), so you also get a Beat.
• A character takes damage to their last three Health Levels. You provided a scene with significant risk to the characters, so you also get a Beat.
• A character fails a roll and converts it to a Dramatic Failure. You provided an experience wherein the player was comfortable putting their character at further risk (at your whim, no less), so you get a Beat.
• Et cetera. Other stuff of the like.

It's important to note that Eldritch will be tracking Player XP and Character XP separately, so the Beats the Storyteller is getting are spendable on any alt they may have. This, I feel, is a rather simple response to the age old question of 'gee, which character should I run this scene on?' Because why should it matter?

It's not perfect--but it rewards what I want to reward STs for. And if you don't feel like using the system to that extent, the reward is less, but you can still have fun and get a base reward for running the scene.

There will likely be a limit to how much XP anyone--player or storyteller--can gain from a single scene, but I haven't decided on a hard number yet. It will probably be 1 full Experience.

@derp said in Good TV:

@aria said in Good TV:

I'm two episodes into "Troy: Fall of City" and I can't decide whether it's objectively just not very good or if my recurring sentiment of ".......You cancelled Marco Polo but decided to pay for this?" is just spoiling everything for me.

Same, but with Sense8. Troy is crap so far.

I can understand them canceling Sense8. It had a relatively small audience and cost 9 million dollars an episode.

@surreality
Anything that presents me with the reality of people ignoring information that they purposely accessed makes me want to murder someone.

@auspice said in Good TV:

@coin said in Good TV:

@derp said in Good TV:

@aria said in Good TV:

I'm two episodes into "Troy: Fall of City" and I can't decide whether it's objectively just not very good or if my recurring sentiment of ".......You cancelled Marco Polo but decided to pay for this?" is just spoiling everything for me.

Same, but with Sense8. Troy is crap so far.

I can understand them canceling Sense8. It had a relatively small audience and cost 9 million dollars an episode.

They had a similar excuse for Marco Polo. 'It didn't have a lot of viewers and was expensive to make.'

I imagine Troy has a similar cost range and, at the reviews it's getting, will have even fewer viewers.

Hence the ire some of us have. Marco Polo at least was a new story (Troy has been rehashed a lot) and it was done well for 'as few' viewers as it had.

The whole point is that Sense8 and Marco Polo were about as expensive in their initial seasons, but Marco Polo had even smaller viewer numbers.

It wasn't even that good. I mean, it was fun, but it really should've been called The Misadventures of Kublai Khan and his Whacky White Buddy.

@somasatori
I find that the general problem with that is that players don't want to be antagonized, they just want to sit around and deal their drugs, so to speak. So if as a storyteller I drop a couple of mob enforcers on them during a scene who start muscling him out on part of the mob that runs that turf, the player is much more likely to get annoyed at me out of character rather than in character. This is why it's probably a great idea for a game's staff to be upfront about this stuff from the get go: if you want to play a criminal, be ready to have to deal with this sort of thing, much in the same way that if you want to play a cop, be ready to have PC criminals evade justice at some point.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

@Wizz Also, one thing that would be made easier by having the Auspices be universal (or close enough) is that if we wanted to add a custom breed (like the Camazotz, or something else) it wouldn't be a matter of creating a TON of new mechanical content. Only, like, half a ton. Heh.

@arkandel said in Spoilers:

@coin Well sure, but for example if I mention Hulk smashing Loki in Avengers 1 no one can reasonably complain.

So the question is basically "what is reasonable in this context?".

In general, I think six months becomes spoiler-free because if you haven't seen something six months after it came out (especially for movies, maybe not so much for tv shows or books) then how important was it really for you? But that's admittedly subjective.

I'd say anything within six months for movies, a year for TV/literature, should be in spoiler tags or its own thread (preferably the latter if the discussion is specifically about that thing).

Also, if anyone mentions they haven't seen/read a thing, don't immediately spoil it with a casual mention or toss up a spoilery meme and be like "well, it's past the time limit!" That's just asshole behavior.

lulzwhut at hating hashtags.

Like, I get it, a lot of people are supremely annoying with their (ab)use of hashtags, but what hashtags actually are are just an easy coded/visual was to recognize tags, which have been around for. fucking. ever.

Hashtags was just coders finding a symbol that wasn't widely used and applying it for a purpose, much the same way we use @ here to activate the code that calls up usernames, and how if you preface an active username with @ you get a link to their profile, and they get notified.

I'm just like, lulzwhut, hating hashtags. You can be grumpy about people who abuse them or tag stupid shit, but the hashtag is functional within the structure of how the internet and social media work.

Now, if you hate the internet or social media, well, have I got bad news for yoooooooooooooooooooou...

The problem I see is that for this sort of thing to work on a MU, you need a constant ST presence developing the NPCs for the vampires in the game.

You can easily set up an "Investment" stat in Vampire where the more a vampire gets to know someone the more Vitae each point of blood from that person gives, for example, or the closer killing someone you're Invested in brings you to higher Blood Potency (but also the further it takes you from Humanity, since killing someone you have a high Investment in is worse than killing a random stranger).

But the issue is: how do you build that Investment and make it impactful in the Vampire's narrative on a MU, where there's so many fucking vampires to begin with? You need a heavy ST presence or, perhaps, you could build a buddy-ST-system like with Wraiths and their Shadows (and Kuei-Jin and their P'o, among other systems) where a second player NPCs the character's Investments. That might work. (This is, incidentally, what I would love for Geist: for another player at the table to be the person's Geist and whisper shit in their ear, etc., you can do the same with a Vampire's Beast, even).

The point is, you can do it. It just would require a lot of effort that isn't really in the player's hands.

CofD's Skill set is the way it is for the same reason their Resource Merit works the way it works: the character sheet is an abstraction and meant to work within the context of a table, with a consistent storyteller that will look a master photographer who wants to suddenly write a Nebula-winning novel a look like 'yeah, okay, settle down, Renaissance Man'.

If your dude with Academics five is a historian, he probably shouldn't automatically know all about Law. However--he does have a 5 in Academics, which speaks to a level of dedication within an academic lifestyle that might, with some time (i.e. research) give him the knowledge needed. So someone with Academics 5 might be able to roll at a low difficulty (no penalties) to answer an obscure history question, but if the question is about Mississippi Law, he might be like, 'I can totally answer that if you give me a few hours and an internet connection'.

The problem is people don't viedw it this way.

Crafts is a weird Skill, no doubt. However, the things that fit into Crafts are often not terribly useful within a campaign as the game was designed to be played. You typically use Crafts for mechanics, of making explosions, or building traps, or eventually, making weapons. These are things that people in the situations the characters find themselves often need to learn to do as a group of Skills.

One good way of viewing Crafts is probably the same way Drive views riding motorcycles. If you're not familiar or forgot, if you have no Drive Skill, you can't ride a motorcycle at all, or at least with a lot of difficulty, mostly because you don't have the Skill (-1), and you don't have the Specialty (-2, see next point). If you have Drive, you ride a motorcycle with a -2 penalty. The only way to get rid of this penalty is by buying the Motorcyle Specialty for Drive, which works as a normal Specialty, and also gets rid of the Penalty (which is why if you don't have the Skill at all, you're at -3).

It would be easy to apply this backwards to Crafts and Expression and Academics, for example. When you take your first dot in the Skill, pick an area. Anything that falls into any other area gets a -2, unless you buy the appropriate Specialty. Of course, this comes with its own problem, because let's say my character has Academics 5 and he's a Historian. Okay, great. But he's tired of taking the -2 to Law. so he buys the Law Specialty. Now he has 5 Skill dice for History stuff, and 6 for Law stuff. WTF?

So, you know. Somewhere in between.

Personally, I'm fine with how it is. PCs should be special in some ways, and making people who have (often criminally underused) Skills like Expression, Academics, Science, and Crafts effective polyglots in those areas is fine.

Plus, while the CofD is gritty and all that, it's still pretty shiny in terms of character tropes. How many scientists on TV and in movies are surprise experts in basically every scientific field? It's almost like it should be a trope of some sort.

Most things can be reduced to "high school but [insert supernatural thing, insert other stage in life, insert whatever]".

The social dynamics that we experience in high school are built by adults in the way they structure and teach classes from the governmental level down, and in the way adults write and present young people in media. Very slowly are we seeing a slow change in the latter now a days.

Almost any game can be associated with an aspect of high school or, even more primally, to an aspect of life that is fundamentally challenged in the years we attend high school, largely because conflict is king and we're almost never as explicitly conflicted both within and without as we are in our formative teenage years.

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@Coin I respect your perspective as a linguist, but as a linguist I assume that you also know that textbook language learning only gets you so far, until you learn how people actually talk (which, as a presumably good language teacher, is something that I imagine you cover).

Native speakers of any language take certain things for granted because they already know how to communicate, to the point that they're not so much using "proper" language, but "common" language that most people around them who speaks the language understands. When I say that someone has no idea how language works, I'm saying that if someone is using colloquial language while not being self-aware about it, in the same post that they're railing against commonly accepted colloquial language, then no, I don't accept that they have any idea what they're talking about. It's picking and choosing what to rail against while doing exactly the same thing.

I feel like the argument is at best mild ignorance, and at worst hypocritical. I admit that I was an asshole about it, because to me it just seemed ridiculous, but I don't know how I'm supposed to respond to someone who arbitrarily draws the line between colloquial language they like, and colloquial language they don't like.

I will, however, say that your argument re: America is a hell of a lot better than that, and I don't inherently disagree with the idea that the nature of the way that we use the word "America" is imperialistic, especially in the context of other countries on the continent. It's also hard to argue that countries that don't give a shit about the continent beyond the United States have no reason to refer to it as anything other than America (Like for example, Japan). So, on the basis of this, I would say that your argument is significantly more valid than the argument ThatGuyThere was making, and I don't really disagree with what you on these points.

I don't know if I'm gonna suddenly start using different language or not, I guess that's something that'll take some thought. But this is certainly probably the only valid argument I've ever heard for not using the word America to refer to the U.S.

That said, we were asked to take this discussion out of this thread.

One salient point I need to make:

I'm not just a textbook learned EFL teacher. I lived ages 6-12 and 17-21 in the Bay Area. I am as much a native speaker of U.S. English as I am anything else, and I've kept up with it by communicating both vocally and textually with people from all sorts of English-speaking countries. This is perhaps a bit of information you did not have before when assessing my points, that you do now.

@seamus said in Vampyr:

I mean code wise all you would need would be a static npc obj or attribute. Then make various rolls to interact with it. Limiting it to say 1 roll per day. The more investment you cultivate the more blood or whatever your goal is that you get.. For example...

Hot chick.
+hunt hot chick
+hunt/act seduce --> You gain 0.1 investment

Rinse and repeat.

Yes, but the idea is to generate an investment that is also story-level. Make the character (and the player) reticent to do the bad thing. That it can be coded a million different ways was, I think, always just implicit and assumed; the problem is a practical one in terms of depth of characterization and investment of time.

@surreality said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

@Coin I dunno. I have no real objection to multiple rolls doing things with proper modifiers. (I may not want to play the character again after whatever it is, but that's a different issue.) Treating anything social as the equivalent of a one-shot-kill with superpower strength effects, though, is not horribly uncommon, and once somebody's been on the receiving end of this, I empathize strongly with the aversion developing.

I think the best storylines happen when people divorce themselves from their "vision" of the character they're playing and allow the story to mold and change them, including their interactions with others. But I can sympathize with the desire to play the character "as envisioned". I just think it's also one of the things that limits us from having truly great RP the most.

@Arkandel said in Social Combat: Reusing Physical Combat System?:

@Coin That's why I always advocate rewarding confrontations. If the only outcome of social 'combat' is that you either 'win' or 'lose', and winning essentially means you retain the status quo then from that perspective being challenged at all is never a good thing. The best case scenario for you is that nothing happens - at least from a systemic point of view.

Well, yeah. I think for Vegas, @tragedyjones and @skew and I are working on something a bit more rewarding for social confrontations.