@coin I just watched a teenage girl use a sewer vampire as a bloodhound to track down a sexy cannibal child molester bug lady. I'll be the judge of bad, thank you.
I've watched Buffy many times already, so I can judge as much as you.
It's almost like this stuff is subjective!
@il-volpe
Not sure anyone was having a whinge.
Defiance needs a tighter script. Its budget is good for it, dammit.
@Pyrephox said:
I've always liked the "you create an alternate universe when you go back in time" solution, where the AU starts from the baseline assumption that it's the same as it was in the prime universe, but you can send it completely off the rails by dicking around with it, without invoking any particular paradox. But once you hop to an AU, you're stuck there, so if you go "forward" in time, it's going to reflect the new reality, not your old one (which still exists, but in another universe).
Add a capability that allows some people to jump AUs (or help other people do so) so you can get back to your original timeline--
Except you can't do that at any point in time before the last point in time you were there.
e.g.
On June 4 2015 Earth-2398 I time-traveled backwards to January 3 1945. I stayed there for a while, fucked up Hitler, and saved the world, creating Earth-9675.
But I want to get back home to Earth-2398. I have the ability to "universe hop" and get back...
But I can only do that once I'm in June 4 2015 again. Because otherwise, I would be creating a third timeline (and thus you're not going back to the original).
So you either have to have the ability to time travel forward (likely), or you have to sit and wait. Heh.
@Misadventure said in Let's Break All The Rules:
Or digital personalities/Artificial Intelligences/Memetic Viruses.
The sci-fi version of being Loa.
I've actually been pretty interested at different times in the opposite: one player controls entire organizations, with a limited amount of PC-level characters that they can control in them. Maybe a group of characters does. Sort of how in RPG video games you control the whole party.
This would be great for world-spanning games about conspiracies and groups trying to fight for control over shit, etc. Plus, it would get rid of "he had his own PC help his other PC!" stuff since yeah, of course he did.
You can alter this to "one player has one PC human and several entities that can possess that human, giving them different powers/abilities/goals".
Or, especially fun for a Demon-only style game: every player has one entity and several humans that that entity possesses/uses depending on what they want to do.
That last one is particularly fun if you can design the humans with different skills and the spirit's boosts to them can change depending. So using nWoD rules as a branching off point: a spirit has a Hacker and a Fighter. When it possesses the Hacker, it probably puts all its Power Attribute levels to boost the Hacker's Intelligence; but for the fighter, it probably boosts the human's Strength with those same points.
I would have a lot of fun with that.
If you're running a game and you need an intermediary between staff and the players, then there's a problem somewhere, probably in the way that staff relates to the players in general.
@WTFE said:
@Coin said:
This is true of any rabid fanbase, though.
I don't know. I've seen loads of fanbois. This felt … special. Like well beyond "short bus" special and into "station wagon driven by a nun" territory.
It's just the relative size of the fanbase that you're reacting to. The more popular and larger the fanbase, the more likely that the least articulate and stupidest of the fans will be present in a large enough capacity to make waves.
There was a show called Drive that lasted four episodes, with Nathan Fillion (among others). And I once ran into a group of fans in a forum. The one rabid fan was super stupid. Everyone else was just a fan. If you blow that up exponentially to "Hollywood pseudo-philosophical blockbusters by world-acclaimed, award-winning, track-record-having director," well...
@de-villefort said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@lotherio Sounds fun to me. The problem with places like that though is that if you set games in modern times, with modern tech and modern social standards it just turns out boring.
The world is too safe today.
That's why star wars always had their characters rocketing off to some dirt planet like Tatooine, a frozen planet or a planet already controlled by enemy droids.Technologically advanced societies always end up being boring and crime free.
Look at Star Trek. They spent hours every week reliving Shakespeare plays, old books and visiting beaches in a holodeck. The only place anything actually interesting happened was deep space far away from the federation.
...
I mean, not to be contrary, but what?
If modern technology is barring you from making a game feel/be dangerous, the problem isn't the setting, it's the storyteller(s).
@arkandel said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
@catsnake said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
@shaggy Is there anything in particular you don't like about it?
Not saying this is your reason (though maybe it is) but I've discovered a lot of MU people won't give other platforms a chance because "it's different". It could be the best RP of all time ever but since it's on ChattyBox (madeup) software, some people won't even give it a chance because "It's not a MU/MUD".
People will always, and I mean always go where others already are.
It's a matter of attracting a critical mass of players interested in a genre first. The rest will come, invited and recruited by their friends or just because it's where RP already is.
Which is why if you want to start a game you're best off with ten or so players ready to dive in from the word go.
@Silver said:
I guess I don't care enough about his movies.
I don't care enough about any media to act like some of these people.
@de-villefort said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
@coin
It's more modern society+modern technology. Modern values are all about protecting life. In a good game you can't have those values.Imagine any RPG where the characters weren't allowed to kill monsters or other people because the cops would investigate, track them down and throw them in prison. It would suck.
For a game to be fun, you can have either modern technology or modern morals, but not both.
People cared about human life when Jack the Ripper was killing but they didn't have the tech to catch him.
In Blade Runner and Cyberpunk type settings they have far more advanced technology but the value of life is low so they only investigate the crimes that victimize the "important" people.
You can have the power to stop evil or the will to stop evil, but if your game has both in it, it's going to become boring fast.
I think this is the reason most World Of Darkness and Super-hero games die a slow death.
The older and/or more powerful characters can stop the less powerful ones from doing anything that can cause dramatic tension or kill/capture them the moment they do so there is never any real danger to anyone.
Lol, what?
Again I say: if you can't find a way to tell that sort of story because of modern technology or modern morals? The storyteller is the problem. Not the setting.
@Thenomain, I tend to think generation labels are stupid, personally, because not only are they dependent on when you were born/raised but also where, and it's that second bit that no one seems to care about (because how could you possibly justify calling a 30-year-old a Millennial if they grew up in a village in Perú?). But, aside from that, the "Xennial" thing (which I technically fall into) is because there is a group of people in the "civilized" (re: with access to modern technology and media) world that grew up analog (like your generation) but transitioned into digital (millennials) before they hit full adulthood. I mean, i was using a CD player in 2001, and then I skipped directly to MP3s around 2003, no minidisc in the middle. My brother has never listened to a cassette except as a vintage relic of a past age (you know, the early nineties) whereas I can vividly recall my teenage years always carrying a BIC pen to save battery life on my walkman.
Yes, these differences are contextual, but they're real, so when it comes to the (often annoying and silly) labeling of generations, there is a very real gap in between Generation X and Millennials. Like, I remember when I wasn't a Millennial, but instead Generation Y.
@three-eyed-crow Yeh. I don't get it. It's especially jarring when those positions of authority also come with responsibilities to create and distribute plots and RP and they don't do any of that, or do it once every blue moon, lol.
@skew said in Unnecessary Messenger System - +txt code:
@auspice do we really think tums beats ums?
Uuummmmm idk I'll think about it.
just do it, we're all gonna call it that anyway
Man, I just went back to the office yesterday and for some reason NONE of the Ares games I play will load on my Chrome (or other browsers) at work. None of them. They load the tab icon and the background image for the site, and nothing else.
No idea why.
But I can log in to the games via client.
So, you know, thank you for keeping the client compatibility around.
@Sponge Well, I suspect it would be really useful for when you get disconnected and come back to people having posed... so it being client-based would be pointless.
@WTFE said:
Never really followed DC anything in my short stint in the comics scene, so I can't really comment on the Crisis line.
Essentially, it's even worse. Ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths, all the crises have pretty much rebooted the universe.
@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
@coin That just comes down to what ports your work firewall has blocked. The fact that they're draconian enough to block the web portal ports but somehow missed the client ports says more about your work IT than the superiority of MU clients
(But seriously - if you can look at the browser console (View -> Developer -> Javascript Console in Chrome; other browsers vary) it will show the exact error. Maybe there's something weird going on. Feel free to PM me with details and maybe there's something to be done, but I doubt it.)
I was less lauding the superiority of clients and more just thanking the variety of connectivity options. XD
It's weird af because I used to be able to get onto the portal. Ares Central works fine, too, as does the Discord webapp. So it's really weird.
But I'll take a look when I go in on Monday and see what it says. Thanks.
