Best posts made by Coin

@arkandel said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@coin I obviously don't know what your thematic goals are, but mechanically you could address this by making Seeded be an expensive trait or one that encourages specialization, then to reward well rounded characters.

Otherwise there are ways to balance these things out (if balance is a goal that you have at all, which isn't a given) by making specific kinds of enemies or even environmental hardships that affect Seeded far more than Seedless, encouraging the former to seek out the latter as much needed allies more than simply plucky sidekicks.

@pyrephox said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@arkandel I think they've talked about something like that before earlier in the thread, with monsters apparently finding Seeded /extra tasty/, and therefore tending to be attracted to and desperate to munch on Seeded out in the wilderness, etc.

We've also taken an approach wherein while the Seeded are "nobles" and Seedless are "commoners", the Seedless do have power and presence in certain aspects of life, especially many of the guilds. IIRC, the crafter guild doesn't accept any Seeded except those who are good with stone/jewels, but even if you are one of those and you do get in, you can't achieve the title of Master Craftsman unless you forego your Seeded powers for your crafting (which would put Seeded at a disadvantage, if you're doing something intensely physical).

I mean, balance isn't something I'm too hung up on and class disparity is definitely, definitely a theme, but it's nuanced.

@surreality said in Good TV:

Umpteenthing the Altered Carbon recommendation.

Another one that would make a fantastic game setting, too.

It's basically cyberpunk with practical immortality. XD

I'm the only good one in a set of triplets. Trufax.

@arkandel said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@pyrephox said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@arkandel I think they've talked about something like that before earlier in the thread, with monsters apparently finding Seeded /extra tasty/, and therefore tending to be attracted to and desperate to munch on Seeded out in the wilderness, etc.

That could work and mechanically it's not that complex to implement.

For example certain monsters could feed just off of the very presence Seeded but be weakened (poisoned?) by that of Seedless. So say a Tentaclewolf attacking two Seeded will gain +2X to its rolls while fighting them, so that a third Seeded joining the fight would only strengthen it even more to +3X. But if they bring three Seedless along instead the bonus is decreased to zero or even becomes a penalty, incentivizing bringing those guys over instead of just making Seeded-only parties.

One Seedless proto-concept we tossed around with @Cobaltasaurus was that certain "ingredient hunters" were almost exclusively Seedless, because the ingredients some Clora Chefs use for their special recipes are very dangerous for Seeded to acquire--either because the environment actively works against them, or the animals and creautres are dead-set on eating them, etc.

It's not that Seedless are more powerful against the creatures, or even that the Seeded are less powerful against the creatures, or even that the creatures are more powerful against Seeded than Seedless--

--it's just that if you're hunting a bear, you don't bathe in honey beforehand, and Seeded are basically just people made of honey, trying to hunt bears.

This sort of concept can be applied to a lot of things, not just hunting and wilderness and physical exertion, so that's something I'm looking at introducing broadly.

(P.S. I don't care how accurate it is that bears love honey, it's an analogy, work it out.)

Welcome to Night Vale.
Alice Isn't Dead.
Myths & Legends Podcast.
Fictional.
LORE.

Actually, I've played from work on gdocs with people and then just pasted the log on the wiki later. It's pretty easy. Just open a shared gdoc, and come up with a suitable 'end pose' marker. Two dashes, a winky face, the phrase 'cockgobbler', whatever. And then just check the gdco periodically.

@quinn said in Potential Buffy Game:

And Monster of the Weeks are always popular, even if there's no monster and everyone just gets to go play a prank on a rival school.

And you make the poor nerdy werewolf have to save the jackass NPC jock from the monsters. >:/

(I have a weirdly vivid memory for some stuff. Yikes.)

@quinn said in Potential Buffy Game:

@ixokai I staffed Devilshire for three years. People would stack things (or try) that created ridiculously overpowered characters. We ended up making lots and lots of house rules about it and at one point rewrote a ton of the offered packages. Some of the pre-built demons were ridiculous. People were always finding ways to try to start with Dex 9 or 10. Or have that character that couldn't take damage or be killed. And they were very creative with how they tried to do it! We would think we wrote or ruled out ways to abuse the system and then we'd get another crazy app.

It was ridiculously easy. Personally I just sort of surrounded my squishy character with those people, but yeah.

@arkandel said in Pineapple on Pizza:

@auspice Our people are everywhere.

E
V
E
R
Y
W
H
E
R
E

@Ganymede said:

@Coin said:

That's all right, I can agree to disagree. Or just disagree! I played a lawyer for YEARS and the amount of times actual lawyering came up were really really slim. I usually used it more as a springboard for behavior and topics of conversation.

I'll bet you were pretty terrible at it too. Everyone is.

Remember how we all bitched and complained about how stupid the Autumn Mantle 1 bonus was relative to every other Mantle 1 bonus? That's applicable here. The Dancer Kith is shit.

So, like, House Rule it, you nobs.

I don't know if I was terrible at it or not because the few times I played it out, I wasn't really worried about accuracy in my portrayal beyond "would this fly in a fly-by scene on a lawyer show?"

I did have actual lawyer friends who gave me advice on things, however, and one of the reasons I like lawyers as characters is that most of their work is not going to involve other PCs. My character spent time in court, in his office, in depositions, in deal meetings, etc., and all my scenes were, "coming home from court" or "on my way to a deposition" or "can we get on with this, I have a client meeting in ten."

My only real challenges were when other PCs were in situations where having a lawyer in that moment doing lawyer things in scene would be crucial (getting arrested, needing legal advice in a scene where handwaiving it would be cheesy, etc.), and most of the time, I looked things up or asked actual lawyers for advice--or informed the person: "I am not an actual lawyer so I'm going to pose this, and then if I figure out differently we can edit a little".

It's not that difficult to play a professional of any profession if you're willing to keep the actual minutiae (which tends to be boring as fuck anyway) out of scenes and as a base for the character rather than forefront details.

@wizz said in Potential Buffy Game:

@coin Yeah, and the First Evil is presumably at least as big a deal as the Senior Partners. But that's why I said her villains tended to be smaller scale.

I would say The First is like... like... the originator of the company that eventually became Wolfram & Hart. Like, I mean, The First is technically even older and worse than Illyria and she was old when the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart were bugs to be stepped on.

It's just that, like, the First is kind of old and tied to its ways (and maybe even mystically tied to a certain type of function).

There's a lot of theorycrafting one can do with all that.

Gosh, guess it's time to define "civilization". XD

@Arkandel said:

@surreality said:

And if you do make a decision, that's precisely how it is perceived: as taking sides. Not making a call, not even 'reacting to the glaringly obvious breach of policy' when such is actually the case -- but taking sides. Which is not really a good thing, and generally it's assumed you're corrupt the moment you make a call, since one or the other of those sides is the one decided against.

Although you are correct and I agree, one of the things I am most peeved about in any kind of making calls are staff is that all sides to an OOC conflict in need of resolution are necessarily equal to blame for that. And the reason for it is that, although in principle it doesn't sound so bad, in practice our hobby is sometimes frequented by some toxic individuals unable to cope with even lax social norms if they don't conform to their wishes.

So ultimately there are situations where one party is grossly mistreated by the other but staff, doing their best to appear impartial, try to push things into a state where everyone is equally unhappy; again, a noble sentiment on paper, but one where folks who lucked into having to deal with some truly batshit crazy players are put in the same basket as them and are portrayed as being partially their own damn fault.

It's not only bad staff who're responsible for this. In fact some of the best people I've met in MU* have done this. Not wanting to take sides is a very, very powerful factor in decision making.

You don't even have to be batshit crazy for this to happen.

I've had otherwise sane people quit and take their toys or stomp off in a crazy huff or throw tantrums because I made a decision they didn't agree with, even if it was my decision to make.

@wizz said in Potential Buffy Game:

@coin

The whole concept of the Senior Partners as the kind of evil you can't even really fight, but you try because what else can you do is just....HRRRRRGGHHHHSOGOOD

*pain too real because good thing *

RIGHT. The Senior Partners to me feel like the actual legit inheritors of The First, because like it, they cannot be ended, they simply will continue to be.

The First can't die because good can't exist without evil; and the Senior Partners can't die because evil needs to be fought.

It's cray-cray shit, man.

@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:

@thenomain Tread carefully, Theno, or I will bust out my gender theory analysis of Frankenstein and start waving it around. I mean, I have to do something with the ten pages I wrote on that shit.

Sounds interesting(?)

@kk said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

I don't have a 37 I just counted wrong, but...

I think tea would be a good 37. A warm cup of tea with honey can make everything seem much better.

I don't mind if anyone uses this list. Most of list is advice other people gave me.

Not reading ahead, so I don't know if someone said it already, but you have 38. 10 and 11 are in there twice (as numbers, not rules) because of formatting.

@arkandel said in Potential Buffy Game:

@ixokai said in Potential Buffy Game:

Oy, personally, nothing would kill my interest more quickly then turning it from a Buffy game into a generic urban fantasy game.

That's the thing though. What makes Buffy Buffy is a very specific blend of themes without which it is just a generic urban fantasy game. It needs the drama, the camp elements, and IMHO the teenage factor else what separates it from being a Hunter MU* is precious little.

In fact unless the game is carefully designed to specifically cater those tropes it would feel very generic.

Again, you really need to watch Angel because when people talk about a "Buffy MU" they are talking about a "BuffyVERSE MU" (usually, some people may differ) and some of those elements you feel are crucial, aren't, when you can add other elements to compensate.

@tragedyjones said in New Vampire Release:

I wish I could convince myself to still give a damn about Masquerade.

Same, brother.

@silverfox said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@Coin

... why did that need pointing out? (Honest bewilderment.)

Because before that, @Auspice asked "where is 37".

I mean, a question was answered, I noted that there was an error in formatting. Maybe @kk wants to fix it, maybe they don't. What's the issue here?

It's very Mass Effect-ish, yes, but also very Valerian and Fifth Element with touches of Farscape, among a dozen other sc-fi settings I've read/watched over the years.

I think the "haunted AI runs the place" is in part something that will make it stand out so try to focus on that (but not to the exclusion of anything else).

@arkandel said in RL things I love:

In a world that seems to admire John Macclain types who kill the bad guys on sight, I'm proud of Toronto for making a hero out of the cop who didn't shoot the mass murderer even though he could, and would have suffered no consequences for it, and even after he was repeatedly provoked into doing so.

Local stores have been inviting police in to give them free treats in appreciation - for not shooting the bad guy.

It's a fucking sad state of affairs when you're rewarding people for doing their jobs correctly and mitigating (if not nullifying) any punishment for fucking it up or even outright justifying the misconduct (often criminal) due to "circumstances" that they are trained to deal with.

I say this as a sad state of affairs GLOBALLY.