@boneghazi said in Good TV:
I tried, in earnest, to watch Outlander. In fact, I got to Season 2, Episode 5 before I had to officially call it quits.
Outlander is one of those shows that I wanted so badly to like. I was so excited when it first came out. It ticked off so many "right up my alley" boxes - time travel, WW2, highlanders, medicine, female leads. And yet... meh.
@Thenomain said in Hyper Focused Game Setting:
My favorite space setting is "space station". It's certainly small enough that everyone has an excuse to know one another.
Yeah there were a bunch of Babylon 5 games way back when that got good mileage out of being a tightly-focused theme with a revolving door of visitors. Battlestar games have the same narrow focus, but the post-apocalyptic nature of them make it harder to have visitors coming and going all the time. Western games do pretty well with this too, generally being very small towns with people passing through. Apoc games like No Return... I'm sure there are others.
I think the most narrowly-focused theme was The Greatest Generation. Play usually centered around a small 'front' of the war du jour and a field hospital.
Long story short - sure, it can be done. Has been done.
Just once I would like to be able to make a grilled cheese sandwich on the first try.
Inevitably it takes forever to heat up, so I get bored and distracted, and then ZOMG EXPONENTIAL HEAT RISE = charred bread. Sigh.
Deliberately encouraging or forcing specialist approach isn't necessarily by design.
Yeah, I mean... the system lets you enforce skill limits. You can force the doctor (in code, not just in app review) to be well-rounded instead of just pumping all his points into Medicine if that's what you want for your game.
You can also completely configure the XP progression to fit any model you want. You could completely disable any raises above level 4. You could restrict them to only have 1 skill at 7+. You can make XP a flat cost instead of exponential, to mirror chargen. The fact is that most games don't leverage these features, and then people throw up their hands and say 'the system is designed to suck'.
At the end of the day, it's not about pure realism and it's not about pure fairness. It's about blending the two together in a way that suits the game you're trying to run.
Thing is, I'm not even talking about oppositional/jerk-ish behavior. This is a kid who is literally in tears over math homework because there's an insurmountable wall of awful in front of them that's keeping them from reaching their goals. Or one who gets so easily overwhelmed by Big Feelings (anxiety, anger, disappointment) that they have constant meltdowns where the rational, thinking part of their brain just goes on walkabout for a little while.
Society - even family - rushes to judgment, because failures of executive functioning and emotional regulation are seen as failures of character and/or parenting. And it drives me nuts.
In other news: https://www.additudemag.com/social-media-makes-me-feel-bad-adhd-hypersensitivity
@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:
Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay".
I think the mistake people make is equating it to "right or wrong" instead of calling it what it is: a spectrum.
ROLL <---------------------------------------> WRITE
Or to put it another way:
GAME <---------------------------------------> STORY
Different people have different preferences and fall on different parts of that spectrum. Different games do too. But I think that MU*s in general fall more to the right side of the spectrum, whereas MUDs and MMOs in general fall more to the left side.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is somebody saying that someone whose preferences fall on a different part of the spectrum is an idiot or playing MU*s "wrong". (Not saying you were; just saying in general.)
@derp @silverfox Yes yes yes - so much yes.
And somehow deal with the media angle. Headlines like "Study shows chocolate cures everything!" Actually no, it didn't. A preliminary, non-peer-reviewed, pre-print study with a microscopic sample size showed a barely-interesting possible correlation that should maybe be looked at a little deeper.
@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:
Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."
I think you're missing the point that some of us are saying that "I cook the meth" is no more satisfactory than "I lie" or "I treat the patient" or "I fight Bob". We come for immersion. We come for story. We expect some measure of detail in poses -- all poses. Social skills are a little different because they're harder to fake. Not everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for medical stuff or meth cooking, but everyone has a BS-o-meter tuned for socialization, and socialization comes up literally all the time.
It's fine to have a different point of view. Really it is. It's not okay to dismiss the alternative as some form of "I just want my character to be immune to social stuff" powerplaying just because you don't understand and/or agree with it. That's insulting and dismissive. Lots of games do this successfully. It's not some alien concept that's never been tried.
@23quarius said in Autism and The MU* Community:
So to read the idea of people encouraging you to NOT disclose, it seems to set you up for getting fucked.
Obviously applying for a full-time job and then being all: "Oh, no actually I can only work part-time" is a stupid thing to do. You need to be able to fulfill the basic duties of the job.
But there are reasons that employment law limits an employer's ability to ask about disabilities. Prejudice is a very real thing. If you can do the job with reasonable accommodations, why give them a reason to NOT hire you based on some preconceived (and probably incorrect) notion of what <diagnosis> means?
@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:
This is you being insulting and dismissive.
No it was me laughing because your comment "I'm not sure if you've ever read a combat pose" is a ridiculous thing to say to someone who designed a widely-used combat system and has run several successful war-centric MUSHes. It's a pretty insulting and dismissive thing to say to anyone, really, but I found it hilarious.
@macha You could try requesting things explicitly in writing. Your documented request coupled with their refusal probably says something about them.
Or do a defensive documentation thing like an email saying: "Just to follow up on our conversation on <date>. Just to confirm, we agreed <things>." If they email back to confirm or deny, you'd have some documentation.
Good luck. Sounds like they're horrible.
@Lisse24 said in Eliminating social stats:
Muers don't think that way. In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives.
I'm going to echo @WTFE by saying that while that may be true on the games you've played -- I'm not here to question your experiences -- it is by no means universal. I have had tons of compelling storylines on MUs with zero dice involved.
I'm also not saying "dice are evil". I mean, I put an immense amount of effort into making a dice-based skills and combat system for goodness sake. I'm just saying there is a natural tension between rolls (which by their nature are random) and narrative (which by its nature is planned), and different people have different preferences on what an appropriate balance between the two is.
@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
If you want, you can PM me about this. Because this smells like something an employment lawyer would feed on.
Yeah, seriously. That sounds shady as heck.
@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:
Yeah, except I'm not sure how you expect anyone to be able to pick up on whether your character is lying or not when you don't actually pose the cues that would suggest they were doing so.
Well I can't speak for anyone else, but stuff like this has always worked just fine for me:
"It doesn't worry me," Cate says. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Ahem. "I just resent the implication."
Not my best pose ever but it proves a point: You don't need social stats to work these things out. Consent and lightly-non-consent games have been doing it successfully for decades.
If that's not your preferred style - that's cool. I'm not knocking anyone else's right to play games differently. But this pervasive assumption that everyone who dislikes social stats is some kind of powerposing a-hole who never wants to fail is just freaking exhausting.
I am sure that is all I'll be remembered for-- the times I needed your help.
I remember you for being nice in the times we chatted about Ares. Also for making a game that looked neat, even if it wasn't for me. Best wishes.
@Auspice said in Adapting FATE for MU*s:
The last time I sat down and tried to puzzle out a good way to do it, I got a headache.
Yeah, I mean... the mechanics are easy enough to adapt. But what makes Fate cool are the freeform epic aspects/stunts and the collaborative chargen / resolutions. Those are exactly the things that make the idea of using Fate on a game with dozens of strangers sound like a nightmare. You could strip them out or tone them down, but then you're getting away from what made Fate neat in the first place.
@prism said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I have a pain in my ear again, the same ear, and when I called the doctor they told me that they can't keep treating it with antibiotics or I will build an immunity, and as long as it's not making me scream in pain, I should endure and be kind to my ear for a while.
Had a family member who had an untreated ear infection that got so bad their eardrum burst, which can lead to permanent hearing damage. Also have had my kids need multiple rounds of antibiotics to get rid of stubborn ear infections.
So, I am not a doctor, but this seems like unsound medical advice. May be worth seeking a second opinion--possibly from an Ear, Nose and Throat ENT specialist.
Hope you feel better soon.
@ThatGuyThere said in FS3:
I have always been curious how FS3 would work for a Star Wars game.
There have been a couple places that tried it. Jedi are the big problem there. FS3 doesn't scale well for superpowers. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the difference between starting PC and max PC levels is relatively minor. This is by design to avoid the "dino problem" endemic to MUSHes but it also means that it's hard to be really super duper awesome like jedi are supposed to be. And there's no "riposte" type action for deflecting blasters with your lightsaber.
Shields are also something it doesn't really model, though you could maybe fake it somehow.
Obviously "interesting" will vary depending on your tastes, but here are some fun things I did when I visited Phoenix:
A little further out of the city (but not as far as Vegas or the Grand Canyon):
I like a lot of the definitions earlier, particularly @Arkandel's mention of "overall narrative" and @Seraphim73's description of metaplot as the "spine" of the game.
It's also good to note that a game (and a TV show) can have more than one metaplot. As @Thenomain mentioned, the "presidential stuff" in BSG wasn't really related to the war metaplot, but it was a different metaplot about the rebuilding of society (including the government) post-apocalypse. That touched a lot of episodes.
Firefly is another show that had multiple metaplots: the "hands of blue" Alliance/River thing was a big one, but there was also a running subplot about keeping the ship afloat, and another about the lingering effects of the Unification war, etc.
Some MUSH examples...
Babylon 5 MUSH essentially just reimagined the metaplots from the show (coming of the Shadows, leading to the Shadow War, the Earth/B5 political strife and independence, the Narn/Centauri war, etc.)
Sweetwater Crossing's first metaplot was about a range war between two neighboring ranches. The second was about a railroad baron trying to come take over the town.
The various BSG games have all had war-driven metaplots, though BSG:Pacifica also had a big metaplot about military/civilian tensions.