If given a choice, the former. Though I would eschew Cyber and Steam Punk and go with Diesel Punk as a middle-ground, though it REALLY actually depends on your societal backdrop, really, to determine what kind of "-Punk" you wanna be using. Steam/Cyber are fundamentally different in what sort of world they typically exist in.
@theonceler said in Good or New Movies Review:
At some point in the last two decades did we decide that Maximum Carnage wasn't one of the worst crossover events in the history of comics?
You people are making me feel very confused.
The fact that Maximum Carnage, and also The Clone Saga,were horribly managed and produced, does not make their core ideas horrible. Both had, as one of their main flaws, that they were too fucking long, especially the Clone saga, but Maximum Carnage was hilariously, horrifyingly long, too.
This is a flaw that is fixed easily if you're making a movie, because a movie isn't long. You can have a long movie, but you're still going to get a story that distills the essences of those stories into something much briefer.
Maximum Carnage or The Clone Saga as movies could work, and tell interesting and evocative Spider-Man stories. saying they wouldn't work is like saying "man, Civil War was a MESS, it would never work as a movie". Except it did. Because they distilled it, changed it, and made it work.
@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.
@auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:
@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:
It goes without saying that anyone who spoils Infinity War here... let's just say we'll unleash @Ganymede completely on them.
God have mercy on your soul after that because no one else will.
I GET TO SEE IT AT ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE THURSDAY EVENING AND YOU MOTHERFUCKERS DON'T
Ahem.
There.
That's out of my system.
I get to see it in a movie theater on Thursday night (at around 8PM EST for your guys). 
@tragedyjones said in New Vampire Release:
I wish I could convince myself to still give a damn about Masquerade.
Same, brother.
@saosmash said in Purple Prose Desc Challenges:
@kestrel has already won this game now tho.
It was the first song that came to my mind, too; I just couldn't sit down and type it out at the time. Although, I don't know that it's the winner. It's not really purple.-prosed, it's just the song in prose format.
@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
@coin said in Heroic Sacrifice:
I can't tell you how many times "but all my XP, I had like 3000 XP on this character and now they're dead! What a waste!" Guess what, now it weas all YOUR XP and what you spent on the character has been funneled back to you and you cans pend it however you want. Make a new character, buff some of your other ones, I don't care.
Although I want to downplay the importance of losing a character in the context of this thread (involuntary PC death happens pretty rarely, all things considered), I agree with that solution.
When your character is lost for any reason there are two things you mainly lose:
Your mechanical progress (usually XP, but also rank, connections, etc); obviously a number is easier to carry over than the rest.
Your identity. You are Joe, and once Joe dies and you become Bob. This is a subtle loss but not one to be underestimated since it does matter, and there's no way around that one (since it'd be really confusing to explain this Joe isn't the old Joe but it's just the same name for a different character).
Some things can't be quantified and that's a bummer, but oh fucking well.
In a game with XP, Status should cost XP. If it doesn't, then every area of "specialization" should have some thing that can be gained for free and lost when a character dies. Artifacts, Rank, whatever. I don't recomend it.
A few notes, though everyone is touching on important things:
Many MUs aim at reaching a certain "critical mass" wherein the game can sustain its activity on player inertia alone, so that staff don't overwork themselves into burning out. Catering to only one sort of player ("story players", "XP players", "TS players", "combat all-the-time players") will usually not allow you to reach that critical mass. There are always exceptions, so no one needs to roll out their list of examples.
On @Seraphim73's Karma idea, and touching on some of @Pandora's critique of it: it's not bad. I would aim for a middle ground. Pick a number of "areas" a character can be skilled at (I will go with 6 and all my examples hereon will work off of that)--say, "combat", "academicism", "mechanics", "socializing,", and "sorcery"; then create some subgroups--("combat with swords", "cavalry combat", "war strategy,") ("history," "physics," "chemistry,"); ("automobiles," "crafting weapons," "improvisational mcgyvering"); ("throwing parties," "animal husbandry," "manipulating allies,") etc, etc.
Then have a character pick 1 Area they are good at, two ares they're okay at, two areas they're very average at, and one area they're bad at. We will give these ratings: 4, 3, 2, 1.
On a tie, the character with the most amount of applicable sub-specialties (as exemplified above) can decide the outcome--they can lose on [OOC] purpose (barely), or declare themselves the winner (barely). Their specialization gave them the upper hand or made them too cocky, or whatever other justification they want to cook up.
If both players have the same amount of sub-specs that apply, they can bid Karma again. If it ties again, roll a single die or flip a coin, or whatever other method you want to break a tie.
You can only ever have 1 Good area. If you drop from Good to Okay, you can work your way back up to Good by spending Karma points to succeed without failing. Five successes in a row can raise you a level.
Through losing levels in Areas, you can't havemore than 6 Bad Areas (because there are 6 areas, but if you choose a different number, that number). You can't have more than 5 Average Areas, you can't have more than 3 Okay Areas, and you can't have more than 1 Good Area (all this working within the '6 areas' example).
Your absolute best spread is your initial one; but this system allows you to switch. Maybe you want to have your initial combat dude become a sorcerer, etc.
Some things can cause you to drop in quality. If you lose an arm, your Good Combatant probably becomes an Okay Combatant, at least until they find a way to overcome their missing limb, etc.
It's not perfect, but it would force people to focus on playing up their flaws and rationing out their "moments of awesome".
Last thing: more and more I am largely an advocate of XP being a player-gained thing and not a character-gained thing. I am so tired of the math games. You want five characters? Fine. You get to spread all your XP however you want among the characters. The person with 1 character is obviously going to have a more concentrated spread (i.e. only one character) but will also only have that one character. We give XP for people doing cool things, and this would also pretty much get rid of a lot of people's concerns (those who value XP anyway) when it comes to character death.
I can't tell you how many times "but all my XP, I had like 3000 XP on this character and now they're dead! What a waste!" Guess what, now it weas all YOUR XP and what you spent on the character has been funneled back to you and you cans pend it however you want. Make a new character, buff some of your other ones, I don't care.
Again: not perfect, but so much simpler, and directly rewarding to the PLAYER, and not the abstract concept of character they created to represent their power fantasies. 
@coin Knights of Sidonia was another. There's a fair few foreign stuff that is supposedly: Netflix Original which is not.
Like outside of America, Netflix had the rights to Star Trek: Discovery, and it had Netflix Original tags. Clearly not true.
Yep. I watched it on Netflix. Legion, too.
@wildbaboons said in Good TV:
but did they make Troy or just buy the rights to it?
I'm pretty sure the Illiad's in the public domain by now.
I am pretty sure they're asking if Netflix made the show or just bought the rights to it like they do with a lot of other stuff. Not everything that says Netflix Original is actually by Netflix, they just dumped money and bought it for airing. I can give you examples later, but juast off the top of my head--Shadowhunters.
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.
@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(?)
@arkandel said in Canon/feature characters:
What provisions in policy or mechanics should be in place for some of the following things to work:
- Successfully mixing canonical characters (Batman, Luke) and original ones in the same game.
For this, I think you need to integrate them all as much as possible. Mix things as much as possible.
I once had a whole write-up of how the Kree are actually the descendents of the first exploration sent from Krypton--explaining their phonological name ("kree"-ptonian), their enhanced strength (a byproduct of living under a sun that gave them powers, though not as much as a yellow sun would have, over the course of millions [thousands?] of years and generations), and even their naming scheme (I mean, come onnnn, Mar-Vell, Kal-El, Yon-Rogg, Lor-Zod, Chan-Dar, Lor-Van... at most we can say the Kree got rid of the weird patronymical style and the Kryptonians did not). (Skin color--and also the far lower power leveles--can be millions [thousands?] of years of evolution based on where they live--or even just in-breeding with the native species.)
I also had written up how Namor was Prince of Lemuria instead of Atlantis and was "technically" under the rule of Arthur Curry, but had for all intents and purposes struck out on his own and, while they shared sympathies due to similar origins as hybrid human-atlanteans, they were fundamentally different in philosophies, leading to different nations, and the Lemurians were one of many off-shoots of Atlanteans, etc, etc.
Basically, I think you gotta go back FAR and dig DEEP for it to work well. also, these are all very macro examples, but there's no reason Luke Cage can't have been experimented on by some organization that is a subgroup of Cadmus, for example.
- Power balance - can OCs be as powerful as FCs?
Absolutely a decision that needs to be made by the game developers as soon as possible (and I would say before even beginning to work on this stuff). It will heavily decide who will be interested in your game and who will be absolutely turned off. Neither answer is wrong.
- Thematic integrity - can the Avengers be led by or consisted mostly of OCs?
This is a little bit like the above. Again, something you need to decide early on. This is especially important when it comes to OC vs. FC viability as narrative capital in the game: if OC and FC are worth the same, and Batman can be an Avenger and Wolverine can be in the Justice League, then OC should have the same prerogatives (even to the point of the Avengers being unrecognizable--is it important for them to be recognizable or is it just a name? Game devs need to decide that).
- Character development - how much freedom should FCs have? Can Rand al'Thor find true love in the arms of Jane Sedai?
I personal find this to be a no-brainer, but as long as the person follows the characterization they've offered in their app (since characterization is so wild and all over the place in source material in general, especially comic books) then they should then be allowed to veer in different directions than canon as long as it more or less follows that characterization. This is a slippery slope, because who's to say what is or isn't in character for someone? Personally, I like the "let them do whatever, see what happens" approach.
- How does history revisionism work best? Is it okay to soft/hard reset FCs when they get a new player?
I wuld personally suggest it's okay to soft-reset some things but there should be a list of important events/relationships and qwhen the character switches players there should at the very LEAST be a notion as to why some things have changed.
Or an in-game reason why the character is completely different, say, alternate universe counterpart!
Add your own to the mix!
Yeah. "The Lottery" is just--it's short, classic American horror. That's why I was surprised.
@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:
@coin I've not read that one, so I can't comment! But I probably should, since it's one of my favorite genres.
Pretty surprised you haven't read "The Lottery". 
@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:
@thenomain -- If we're talking about the height of the genre and not modern American Gothic literature....
It's important to remember that one of the defining characteristics is the intense use of the setting to define the narrative, to the point that it almost becomes a character unto itself.If you want a modern visual example, think of those long establishing shots in True Detective, through the swampy, dilapidated, isolated areas of Louisiana and how that comes into play. (Seriously, Cary Fukunaga is fucking brilliant at using setting to create atmosphere and his version of Jane Eyre is one of my favorites as a result, even though others more accurately follow the storyline from the novels.)
In British Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th century, this usually results in the story of a young woman facing the mysterious and quite possibly supernatural in a castle, an abbey, or a mansion (think The Mysteries of Udolpho or, if you'd like to use a modern film equivalent, Crimson Peak, which I also recommend). This generally evokes an overall atmosphere of corruption and of decay, of something sinister and inherently wrong hidden behind a facade of beauty and, often though not always, class and wealth.
American Gothic literature, by contrast, was often set against a backdrop of the wild and the unknown, which makes sense given how -- from the colonial mindset -- unsettled and deadly anything outside the very narrow centers of 'civilization' were. A lot of early American Gothic deals with themes of survival, the animalistic nature of man, and being driven to madness by extreme situations. You're also more likely to see direct -- and for the time, very shocking --- violence as well, as opposed to the looming threat of it. Edgar Huntly pretty much centralizes all of those themes into a single novel and even though it's not especially well known, had pretty profound effects on the writing of, say, Joyce Carol Oates and even Poe, though of all American authors in the genre, Poe relies most heavily on the British Gothic tropes.
This obviously changed and developed over time, as Southern Gothic literature -- which now makes up the bulk of the American canon -- also has profound themes irony, social issues, and warped communities, too. But.... that's the start, and The Witch does that really, really, REALLY well. I cannot recommend it enough, even if the 17th century dialog takes about ten minutes to get used to.
IMO, one of the best ways to see the stark differences between British Gothic and American Gothic is basically to read Ann Radcliffe (aforementioned The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Shirley Jackson ("The Lottery" in specific, as The Haunting of Hill House is a bit more modern horror-esque) back-to-back.
Sure, Jackson is post-American Gothic chronologically--she's 20th century, after all, but I think that (especially in "The Lottery") she condenses the things British Gothic is about (as explained above by @Aria) and then twists them until they fit the American Gothic mold. If you read it directly after Radcliffe, it's fucking brilliant.
Aria can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, though.
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.
IMO, you will need to decide how realistic you want your representations to be, not just in their isolated nuances ("what does it mean to be pooooooooor?") but also in their intersectional nuances ("what does it mean to be white and poor? what does it means to be a middle-class Latinoin a gang-ridden neighborhood? what does it mean to be a wealthy African-American in a world --class wise--dominated by white people?")
I don't know if you want these intersectional nuances or not, (maybe you just want to leave that bit up to your players on a case-by-case basis) but you definitely should know if you want them and how much you want them represented in your system.
Also, as an aside, and I don't say this because anyone has harped on it yet, but sort of as an introduction to the topic: "balance" is a myth. If you're going to have different mechanical effects based on class, then you should--IMO--not worry about it being balanced. White men with money have it better than women of color without it (to name two hugely distant extremes), and trying to balance this ("well, people with money get +2 in X, but poor people get +2 in Y") is disingenuous. It implies people play a certain class for the mechanical bonuses (some people might) instead of the theme (I hope all people would do this latter).
@cobaltasaurus said in Awesome Youtubers and Videos?:
@coin Bright is my Trash.
Hey, I watched it (and mostly enjoyed it), too. But it's still trash.
@cobaltasaurus said in Awesome Youtubers and Videos?:
@thenomain said in Awesome Youtubers and Videos?:
@roz said in Awesome Youtubers and Videos?:
I really enjoy Lindsay Ellis's pop culture stuff.
I am also incredibly glad that I watched her breakdown of Bright which was a mix of writing theory and history of the film itself.
Man, I'm not sure I wanna see her tear apart Bright.
I just watched it. It's great. She defenestrates the shit out of it. XD
