Best posts made by Derp

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Rinel said in Separating Art From Artist:

@Derp said in Separating Art From Artist:

Despite may vocal voices to the contrary, there is not an objectively wrong belief or practice. For every argument against, there is almost always an equally valid argument for.

Ew. No. Good lord, no. Just because people disagree on morality doesn't make it subjective. Yech. This is how we get FGM apologia.

Yeah I wasn't going to touch that one but I'm glad you did.

There is no equally valid argument for genocide and other atrocious nonsense.

Try making the same arguments about male circumcision and watch how many people that love to talk about personal agency and bodily autonomy and self-determinism come out of the woodwork and point out how it is an important religious and cultural practice and how dare you.

Point being -- the validity of any argument has nothing to do with how you feel about it. It simply requires that the premises offer a logical justification for the conclusion. And that's actually a pretty low bar to meet.

There are arguments for nearly anything, and whether you find them acceptable or not is entirely subjective and rooted in beliefs and standards that are non-universal. And rach and every one of us have things we find acceptable that others are vehemently opposed to precisely because there is no objective standard, and logically valid arguments can be made for multiple avenues.

@surreality said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

@apu said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

I think the phrase 'questionably viable' is a bit subjective. A concept that might cause one person to raise their brow at it might be perfectly fine in the opinion of another person.

It's more a factor of what some of the folks in the thread earlier were describing, re: characters that work well in fiction, but don't often make grand PCs on a MU* for a variety of reasons. (Some may make awesome plot NPCs or short-term antagonist NPCs, but they don't make for enduring PCs very well.)

There are versions of these tropes that do work -- for instance, the 'lone wolf' who is grousing all the time about all the teamwork they have to do now in <theme> when they'd rather be working on their own -- but they tend to have players aware of the limitations of the trope and compensate for it intentionally in ways that make the character not actually that trope at all in practice. Without that awareness on the player level, you have that asshole who is filing a dozen jobs a day and sucking up staff time like a shopvac on steroids because they have to do everything solo, and if they're not interacting with anybody but staff outside of OOC socializing and minimal BaRP brooding quietly in a corner and not talking to anyone, well... why be there at all?

This can also work for the lone wolves that volunteer to work on the team, but make everyone sort of uncomfortable.

Dorian: What would you say Blackwall's best feature is?
Vivienne: His absence, of course.
Blackwall: I can hear you both.

@WildBaboons said in Tastes Less Carrot-y:

Because this thread was born from Arx..

Carrot will soon go the way of the banjos, mangos.. and katanas.

This image is somehow uniquely satisfying.

I think that people are reading things a bit too narrowly. Leadership doesn't necessarily mean position. Leadership can be leading by example, or grassroots type stuff. I think it's more of a force of personality mechanic than a 'you get the Crown by default because you're hot' mechanic. There's a lot of ways that you can slice this.

And your Seeming has kind of always been dominated by your personality anyway, in one form or another. Whatever purpose you were put to is more often than not whatever your Keeper thought you would be good for based on what they observed. It might be a twisted version, but it's not exactly completely out of bounds, either.

I've seen this complaint about the other 2E gamelines, too, where people are like 'argh they changed this and now I hate it'. Except often, that thing has always been there, it's just never been at the forefront. It's always been in the text somewhere, but not as highlighted. I think that most of the stuff I read in Changeling so far backs up those same basic principles.

Those basic principles are often just ignored on MUs to the point where people think they aren't the norm, when they really were supposed to be all along, so re-reading them has a certain level of shock factor.

@Auspice said in Separating Art From Artist:

sexuality,

Only in like two circuits, where sexual orientation is regarded as an inherent characteristic of sex. Otherwise you sure the fuck can be fired for being whatever.

Okay, so to crib @MarsGrad's example above and give the 'on the other hand' version of that:

Space Cowboy might be a masochist according to your story, and he might have a deathwish. But in this scenario? His 'Masochistic Deathwish' stat just got beaten by Johnny B. Goode's 'intimidating jerkface' stat.

If you want the kind of character that never blinks in the face of such things, then -invest in the stats that make sure you rarely lose those rolls-, and then when you do lose one, figure out why this time is different.

Super major peeve -- your character doesn't get extra stats/immunity based on backstory. That also isn't the way this works, and we need to be realistic about that. People have crafted the most convoluted backstories ever to explain why they're immune / resistant / not afraid of X thing, but then rock like 4 dice in resistances on their sheet.

Those resistance stats are what should be determining how much of a badass this person is in their backstory. Not the other way around.

@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I would rather take my kids to a Motley Crue concert than a fucking Paw Patrol show

Dark Sun. Or at the very least a DnD game focused on just surviving and getting through the day against impossible odds, where you take what you can get and there are few shortcuts. Maybe Cataclysm-era Dragonlance.

Just anything other than yet another game where everyone lives in a super prosperous city and just collects magic items because there is zero conflict inside the walls.

Also, please yes do allow for evil alignments.

ETA: But seriously, preferably Dark Sun, because it is already basically built for this out of the gate and has cool mechanics.

I all of you. I needed a laugh this morning.

@ganymede said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

Alzie did, actually.

Oh, so they did. I stand corrected! But that doesn't really negate the point, either. While Cobalt can come back with a snide 'maybe you should read further before commenting', I did read further, and her later reply seemed like equivocation justifying being mean-spirited toward another forum user earlier in the thread. It's not cool, and this is the kind of stuff that somehow seems to slide under the radar, even though we're in the constructive part of the forum. Again. You shouldn't get a pass for being catty toward another user just because you come back later and say 'well I suppose this could be ok to a certain class of player'.

As far as the actual chart goes, I've always found this to be a helpful tool. I saw this years ago, and have a copy saved on my computer, because sometimes it proves to be useful.

@eye8urcake said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

The baby (Isla) has 2 bad genes, so cystic fibrosis. They told my daughter and her husband, at their very first newborn 'well-baby' appointment that their child wouldn't live past 40 so that was fun.

It seems incredibly weird that they would say this. As someone who has been in a long-term relationship with a CFer that still has basically full lung function and almost no organ issues, along with his various family members that have it, and the people in the CF wing that have it in the rare event he gets a sniffle and they want to pump him full of kidney-killing drugs for two weeks -- this seems inaccurate. Especially if it's Delta F508, which it's statistically likely to be, since they have some kickass new drugs for that.

That seems like a doom and gloom prognostication since I know plenty of CFers over 40 and doing decent.

Ogres were true monsters that did truly mostrous things. If you don't come out of Arcadia feeling regret for that, you're gonna have some issues. The atonement aspect makes complete sense for that. I'm not sure why people find it so kneejerky.

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Every company should send a rejection notice if they aren't gonna proceed after they interview you. Even if it's a form letter they just hit a button and have auto-emailed.

But if you take a test (coding test, writing test, whatever) for them? Then they abso-fucking-lutely should do this. It should not be a week after I interviewed and then spent a weekend on what was probably about ten hours of work on a writing assignment without hearing word.

This is bullshit.
You can spend two minutes to either acknowledge receipt, let me know you won't proceed, or scheduling the next interview.

Some companies take weeks to make a decision on who is going to move forward, especially if they have something intensive like that. You might not be out of luck yet!

@thenomain said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

It only starts to work when you apply the guilt onto the character's foundational personality (where The Wyrd's psychoactive nature taps into), which seems to me to be a silly act of an RPG reducing player agency over their character.

No, it works when you take into account that it's in their very magical nature to do this.

Look, no player has 100% control over his character. Vampires are subject to the Beast taking over and ruining their fun, mages can get paradox in their heads and go on a magical spree. Werewolves have Kuruth.

You are playing a game in which there are a fixed set of choices that you can choose from, all of them with various strengths and benefits. Sometimes, you don't get control over every choice and thing. That's part of playing a system with predefined stats and pre-sorted mechanics.

In this specific case, you are playing a person who has had their agency taken away in order to fill some sort of meta-tropey-idea-thing. I cannot stress this enough -- if agency is your thing, changeling is not the game for you. You're gonna have a bad time of it. Or you're just gonna ignore the rest of the theme anyway.

We can fight about the limits of player agency all we want, but at the end of the day, changeling is still the most flexible system by far, so.

Seconding Noble Blood. That one is fun. It's specifically about nobility that has a bloody story, starting with Marie Antoinette. The latest is Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. However, they also tie in various stories of these people and how they relate to the present -- the one on Lord Byron, which tells the tale of him and one of his lovers that just went super south and devolved into this really sad madness, also covers Ava Lovelace, his daughter and the world's first computer programmer. Well worth the listen. And yes, I would listen to the narrator read a phone book as well. Her presentation is lovely.

Philosophize This! - A history of philosophy, from ancient times to modern. It starts with the greeks and winds through the middle ages, and the latest episode is on Nozick. Another one that's well worth the listen if you're interested in philosophy at all. It's a super deep dive, but very approachable and broken down for complete newbies.

Future Perfect - A podcast about new (or old) ideas that have the ability to radically change the world as we know it.

Science Vs. - A podcast that looks into the science of various things we think we know about and sort of debunks them. One of my favorites is the Pandemic episode, which talks about disease vectors and how they tend to fire up -- and quickly die.

The Secret History of the Future - A podcast about historical things about modern ideas that people don't know. Likewise addictive.

Brought to you By - A podcast about how major companies have shaped world culture through time.

Nice Try! - This one is really interesting. The first season looks at the various (failed) utopias that have been tried throughout the years and how they still affect us today. Like how Biosphere 2 almost killed its inhabitants because they got the math wrong, and how Oneida made silverware to fund their utopian ideology.

WorkLife with Adam Gant - A podcast that explores various topics in modern work culture and how to ensure that you're making healthy and productive choices. Sounds boring but it's actually super interesting.

Crazy/Genius - A podcast that looks at interesting questions of tech and culture, like 'How the Far Right Took Over the Internet' and 'How Has Netflix Changed Entertainment'. Just scroll through the titles. It's a fun one.

Court Appointed Another one from the same family that brings you Sawbones (above) and MBMBAM, a lawyer/judge (Mike Meadows) and his non-lawyer brother-in-law (Tommy Smearle, father of Syd from Sawbones, IIRC), talk about various legal topics so that the layman can get a handle on how the law works. They tend to be pretty funny.

I'm with @wretched and @tragedyjones . But I have been for a long time, too.

I don't always agree with Wretched, but in this case I do. I already dislike that social stuff is hamstringed by agency arguments, removing it explicitly just gives people a warrant to be combat monsters.

And I already have an ancient thread about why Doors should be a thing for PCs, as TJ says.

@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I somehow question just how organic the turnaround is.

It's not organic. No more than anything else when it comes to social progress, anyway. It happens because an extremely persistent group put their shoulders into it and pushed to get the changes that they wanted in a way that it would be a social faux pas for the equally small group of overall decisionmakers to ignore.

Kind of like the Supreme Court.

So, let me try and respond to some of the points that have come up here:

@Ganymede said:

I probably am not being clear on channel. What I mean to say is:

"I'd like to RP with you, in one way, shape, or form. I'm willing to run scenes to do this, and am willing to run anything that I feel I'm capable of doing. All you really need to do is respond to this message."

What's frustrating is the silence. I may not be the best storyteller out there, but I really cannot do it if no one tells me what stories they would like to be a part of. And what kills me is that many players cannot even tell me that.

I'm one of those players that will respond with silence. Not because I don't want to RP with you or anything, but because I absolutely am one of those people who doesn't wish to participate in all the things all the time, even if some of the people that I like to RP with absolutely are those kinds of people. I invented entire character hooks as reasons to back out of / not get into certain things. I like certain types of scenes. I don't expect anyone to cater to those things. They aren't the kinds of things that really require an ST, for the most part, anyway. They are exactly the kind of social things that some of the previous posters have distinguished as NotPlot.

Which brings me to:

@ Some Other People said (basically):

Get togethery type things are not plot.

Bullshit. Sorry, but this one really irks me. I mean, I like murder mysteries and bar brawls as much as the next guy, but... oh. Wait. I kind of -don't-, actually. The kind of thing that I like most involves a battle of wits, or a battle of charisma, or something like that. The ST need not provide a challenge for me to find a challenge in it I want to face. I really just enjoy being in a room with other people, working toward my character's goals. I tend to not favor huge scenes because of spam, but this is absolutely plot, and are absolutely character focus. It is a group of people with similiar interests who might not otherwise RP getting together under the direction of an organizer. And I know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Coordinating <sphere of influence> gatherings tends to be pretty taxing for the one involved, and usually at least some order of business is discussed there. Character development -does- happen there for certain types of characters. Discriminating against this type of thing, and these types of characters, is a huge trigger of mine. There are books and books and books out there where this sort of thing is -central- to the plot. Calling it NotPlot is narrowminded and elitist.

Edit to add: The reason that most of these things probably seem like NotPlot to many people is that the Big Name NPCs are reserved for Staff Use. So if Staff isn't there to bring them, they aren't there, and it feels emptier. But they -could- be there. They, like players who chose not to show, just didn't show. That does not make the scene lesser. It just means that you can't try to sweet-talk the Big Wig because the Big Wig was off doing Other Shit.

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Kestrel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Back to RL peeves, disgruntlements and irks.

I just saw a fashion advert on Facebook for stylish anti-pollution air masks.

If that's not peak capitalism I don't know what is.

Yes/no.
It's showing up because of that virus, but they've been a thing for a handful of years at least because of kids with severe asthma and allergies and such who need to wear them.

And I'm pretty in favor of lettIng the kid with a health condition have a cool thing to help them feel better about it.

The partner has one for CF reasons, too. His is kind of badass.

Quick double post:

Players should also be limited in how much they can change the setting to suit their whims. One of the other big problems in Mage is that there are basically zero consequences for bucking millenia of traditions and indoctrination in favor of egalitarian utopianism. I have seen almost every Mage game have an even split of Council seats based on Order. This too creates problems, because:

1. No Order can get a leg up on the others politically, which limits sources of conflict

and

2. The Free Council literally has its own government, which shortchanges them severely.

Path-Based Council Seats have a deep in-game meaning in terms of legitimacy of their combined authority, etc. But everyone seems to open up as some kind of democratic experiment, which is completely antithetical to the sorts of rigid hierarchies that almost every Order presents.

There should be consequences for bucking the norms of ancient mystical Orders, but there never are.