@rinel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
It is storming and my power has gone out
My power went out during the hurricane and now it is out again
I say we tear down your city. Raze it to the ground and rebuild from the ground up with a newer, more sensible plan.
@tragedyjones said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
Chronicles of Darkness is a superior system to nWoD 1 in all ways, in what it is designed to do - be an amazing system for a group of players and an ST. It is not at all designed with a MU in mind.
This is literally what we've been saying about every game ever created though. "These were all made for tabletop, they were not created for MU." That isn't even WoD specific. You can say that about anything from DnD to Fate. That isn't a damnation of the system, it's a reality of games in general.
@Auspice said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
feel they absolutely must achieve one every scene to keep up with the XP overachievers
Which is why there is a cap on totals.
@Auspice said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
and so they sit around waiting for scenes
This part is the problem. Your aspirations are not passive. They are active. You shouldn't be "sitting around waiting," you should be using them as tools to go out and do things, find people, get RP. Etc.
If you're using aspirations as a passive tool that just requires more paperwork, then you aren't actually using them to good effect.
Lol, I appreciate it! I dunno. Maybe I'll take a full inventory of how much this is gonna set me back and start a gofundme or something. It just hurts me in the pride, because I feel like there are people that need it worse than me, and all of this is because of stupid first world problem bullshit.
So my general thoughts on this:
'Power levels' are kind of a red herring, because a 'power level' is really defined by what a character can do within the world, and whether or not there are more powerful people than them.
Take DnD, like you mentioned. What is the actual different between a level 1 and a level 20 character? Better gear, better abilities, but does that automatically make a level 20 character some kind of god-king, destined to rule over all that he sees before him? Or does it make him a seasoned but still very human (or whatever) member of his profession, just as mortal as the next guy but far more capable of keeping himself alive?
In the series I'm reading right now (A Land Fit for Heroes), all of our protagonists are incredibly capable individuals that have survived numerous tribulations and probably qualify as high-tier characters in the DnD world, with fantastic weapons and magical abilities, plus fighting finesse that outstrips pretty much everyone else alive. But you get them surrounded by four or five mooks and they still worry about dying, because they aren't that different, really.
I think that's the ideal that I would shoot for. Rather than focus on power levels, focus on the role that the characters play in the range of their various powers, and keep it grounded and somewhat realistic. Yes, that 20th level wizard has some impressive magic at his beckon call, and that 20th level barbarian can probably cleave his way through a small crowd -- but are they unique in the world? What level is the captain of the guard? The army generals? The king's protectors?
Give them enough to make them shine without outshining everything around them.
@silverfox said in RL Anger:
You've already set up an account but 110% I suggest a credit union.
I did, in fact, go with a credit union. 
Great minds!
I used to be a fairly letter-of-the-law person when it comes to policies.
Now, I'm super not.
Nobody is going to be pleased by every policy. (And for every person that says they won't play because of X, I guarantee you that 3 out of 5 will be there at some point during the game's tenure. It just happens. It's happened for decades. Big social noises are big and then the jones starts and the curiosity takes over.)
Now, I feel like it's better to explain my intention to players, and to let them know that yes, there is gray area here, and that things may change with or without notice in order to facilitate some thing that I'm shooting for.
I do try to be clear about explicitly what I'm shooting for. I don't try, any more, to document every possible violation in some sort of legal codex because it's more trouble than it's worth and just invites people to try and lawyer.
I lawyer enough in RL and I'm not even a real attorney.
Just tell people what you want to create, and why, and let them know that you will be implementing policies and taking actions in pursuit of those goals. Flesh them out a bit, but don't feel like you have to be so specific that every loophole is accounted for.
There are a lot of paranoid voices on these forums, and frankly, from the numbers of the ones that show up anyway, I think a lot of that is just show. Do what makes you comfortable, let people know that up front, make it known that you aren't trying to appeal to everyone under the sun (god help you if you are), and see what happens. The results may surprise you.
I cannot stand actual tomatoes... but I adore the smell of the tomato plant.
You know what I mean.
So envious.
But too much work to have the smell of a slimy thing I shall not eat. 
So, I've been learning Ares, and looking at a couple of things:
Where you start really depends on how much prior knowledge you have.
If you have a good working knowledge of python, for instance, y ou can probably just pick up a ruby syntax guide and go from there.
If you've got a decent grasp of at least programming logic, you could start with something a bit more fast-paced. The Well-Grounded Rubyist I've found offers a decent speed and doesn't hand-hold you through every little thing about programming ever, presuming that you already know how most of this works and they just need to teach you how ruby applies to that basic framework.
@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
You can lose the weight!
But that's the problem: the research flat-out suggests that this is mostly untrue.
Most individuals cannot lose more than 30% of their current body weight at an absolute maximum, and almost none of those will ever come close to this number due to a number of internal metabolic regulatory processes. It's not a convenient reality, but it is the reality for the vast majority of people. Most of that weight is regained and then some within 5 years, but brings with it insulin resistance and metabolic damage from the methods used that your biological processes will actively revolt against, resulting in very real biological trauma to your body's processes.
That's what these podcasts are about: looking at the various science and debunking the cultural monomyth that slim is healthy, and that everyone can be slim if they just eat right and exercise, and that pushing people to lose weight is being concerned about their health.
It's just not true. No nation has decreased its obesity rate in decades, despite a number of approaches, and the cultural alienation that this ideology causes for obese people is crushing.
So while, yes, there are certain steps you can take to improve your overall health (and should!), telling people to lose weight is extremely unhealthy for basically the whole world. It does severe biological and psychological damage to people, and pretty much ignores all of the other unhealthy habits that you can't actively see on other people. Thin people are just considered healthy by default, and overweight people considered unhealthy, lazy, and noncompliant despite weight and health not being nearly as correlated as people used to think. Doctors, in particular, are pretty terrible, and receive less than twenty total hours of training on nutrition and metabolic processes, getting just as caught up in the cultural mythos as everyone else, often giving obese patients measurably worse care than thin patients, which leads obese people to avoid doctors and healthcare in general due to the quality of care they receive.
Like -- this is a real thing, and we should talk about it in real terms.
@Ghost said in Image Attribution & Creative Commons:
@Auspice Or this.
As a longtime fan of that series, that doggo has too much skin.
I'd probably be of no help on this one. I think that we should have a nationwide vaccine mandate. Get the NRA people involved. Let them drive around with tranq guns full of COVID vaccine. Whatever.
But given recent RL evens I am probably biased. And angry.
I've found that it's much easier to start new people out with @emit or the \ or \\ shortcuts. Say, pose, and semipose are useful for shortcuts later, but tend to be confusing for newbies, whereas @emit just outputs exactly what they type and can cover the functions of all three of the former.
@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
Assholes need to pay better.
This is pretty much universally true no matter what field you work in.
@Coin said in Plot Advice:
structure it to make sure they aren't plotlocked (i.e. make sure they can continue playing around the plot between its scenes).
On the back of this -- also make sure that your group composition is flexible. Don't have it depend on having every member of the group, or even a specific member of the group. That's where most scheduling falls apart. Just set it up so that you can take whoever can make it. The more people you try to lock down schedule-wise, the harder it's going to be to get everyone on the same page.
While I like the theoretical idea, you'd very quickly run into the issue of people playing nazis just wanting to be trolls instead of trying to legit tell a story, and people getting all kinds of upset that there are like -- nazis. And people are playing them.
I see this going poorly, but if it could be done, it sounds fun as hell. Especially if no outcome is predetermined.
Lower Decks is fantastic! Haters gonna hate.
Thank you for that nightmare fuel picture.
