Posts made by faraday

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

There was no reason for the entire thread to be moved. IDK why this is difficult for you and Ganymede to understand.

Nobody said there was! My first post on this thread agreed with you that splitting the thread was the right thing to do. Ganymede admitted it was because they didn't know the right command to split it more surgically and Arkandel said they didn't have time to do it tonight. Why are you being so hostile about waiting to have a thread divided?

@Tempest What's the big deal here? The thread was moved to the hog pit when it turned into a flame war. @Arkandel and @Ganymede have both said they're looking at splitting it up more constructively. How about we give them some time to sort things out instead of screaming insults at them?

And really, I think everyone who saw the title on your new thread was placing bets on how long it would be till that got moved or renamed. All it would have taken was a title like "Alert about UH" or something and you would've been fine. There's no need to try to turn this into some kind of "@Ganymede has a vendetta" thing when the title was quite obviously not constructive.

@tempest Moving my ETA to a double-post because I was too slow.

I agree with you that Enarei's posts became equally hostile when the name-calling started. It wasn't just the GIFs. But I can only speak for myself there.

@arkandel I think splitting the thread would have been a great compromise. It was civil and constructive for the first page or so, so that part of the thread is OK. Then it veered off into a debate about private channels that really should have been a thread of its own (but I think everyone - myself included - was just too lazy to create one). It's only when the defenders started stirring the pot that everyone got all riled up and turned the thread into a dumpster fire. Those posts could've just been split off into the existing hog pit UH thread or a new one.

I have no interest in silencing legitimate constructive criticism of any game.
I just don't want to sift through pages of "F You" "No You!" posts. There's a reason I'm not in the Pit Crew.

My process is similar to what @Seraphim73 mentioned. I start with an "elevator pitch" - or what Fate would call "high concept". This usually has three parts: a professional hook, a theme hook and a complication.

For 100 MUSH: "veteran archer (prof) who served in the Ice War (theme) who's all 'I'm too old for this s----' while saddling up for yet another conflict (complication).

For BSGU: "mob doctor (prof) for the Space IRA (theme) forced to work with the enemy for the greater good of defeating the Cylons (complication).

From there it's just a matter of fleshing out a few key details to make the character three-dimensional - family, career path, hobbies, that sort of thing. I use my character creation article as a guide but rarely hit every point for every character. Unless some important bit of personality falls out of their background, I usually don't figure that out until I start playing them.

I'm somewhat leery of pre-existing background ties with other characters. It deprives you of a lot of the MU bread and butter "getting to know you" RP, and it strains my inner sense of continuity because there's so much about the relationship that my character would know that I don't. I'm not the best at winging it and often feel off-balance playing that sort of thing. But I have done it sometimes - siblings, cousins, old comrades, old flames - and it can certainly be interesting.

I will totally replay concepts, though the theme hook and complications usually help me put a fresh spin on it each time.

@surreality Yeah I never said tech was more important than those other things (in fact I said the exact opposite to @Seraphim73 a couple posts ago). But thanks for the condescending lecture.

@surreality yeah I’m obviously not getting my point across clearly and I’m giving up. My experience with sci fi games has been very different than yours it seems. I’ve seen waaay more nitpicking on historical games than on any sci fi one.

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

Baseline info would cover the things that are egregiously unthematic or deeply absurd for the setting

I agree in broad strokes. The only place I think that breaks down is when you start talking about science. How do you make a "baseline shorthand" on your wiki for physics? Or biology? This is not a problem unique to sci-fi games, but I do think you get a bit more disparity on the "commonly accepted baseline" on those games. And wikis don't normally address it at all.

@surreality I really do think we're talking apples and oranges here. You're describing ridiculous levels of pedantry that, yes, would be obnoxious.

The science/tech stuff I was talking about wasn't "OMG you've got the wrong color dress for this time period" level of stuff, it was more like "OMG you're wearing jeans and a t-shirt on this Game of Thrones MUSH". It's insisting that Batman can fly (under his own power) or that morphine can cure the common cold. Some things are just egregiously wrong, and correcting people (politely) to maintain a consistent theme does not make you an elitist or theme dictator.

@seraphim73 Also agreed.

I think for techie types, telling how something works helps to answer a lot of 'what can it do' questions in one fell swoop. It's the same sort of shorthand that you might get if you said, for instance, "gravball is football with (this change)."

@seraphim73 said in Original Sci-Fi?:

I think that that tipping point is further out with culture/entertainment than it is with tech, but that may well just be me.

I don't think it's just you at all, but I do think it's different for different people.

We shouldn't be crying 'wrongfun' just because you'd prefer knowing the details of gravball (to some extent) and I am content with "football-ish".

We shouldn't be crying 'wrongfun' just because I'd prefer knowing how the teleporter works (to some extent) and you're content with "it's a teleporter".

We shouldn't be coming down like a ton of bricks on people who make a theme mistake: "OMG don't you know anything? Gravball is only played with 5 people."

We shouldn't be treating people like they're evil just for politely asking people to RP the theme. "Oh, actually... gravball teams usually have 5 people."

@seraphim73 said in Original Sci-Fi?:

All of this information can really enrich the world, and the characters living in it, a whole lot more than knowing how a teleporter works.

I think you can make the same argument with culture though. Some of it is absolutely vital, just as some of the tech stuff is vital. But beyond that, people have different tolerances for handwavium.

I'm perfectly happy handwaving "She's listening to Caprican music" without needing details about what Caprican music is like. Is it hiphop? Classical? What do those terms even mean when you try to apply them to a completely alien society with twelve worlds not rooted at all in Earth customs?

Same with sports. BSG has pyramid and you can give a few shorthand notes, but a lot needs to be handwaved unless you want people to read an encyclopedia on the subject. And what about the other sports and games? Would they even have golf? Chess? Where do you stop describing things?

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

The difference is that I've not seen people call it out as elitist or 'theme dictator'ing in sci-fi.

For someone who was getting bent out of shape that I indirectly made you feel stupid for liking something, you seem awfully eager to call people out directly as "elitist theme dictators... (you) want to hit ... the enemies of fun" for liking the opposite thing.

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

It's just that most other genres, people will call this out as making things less enjoyable;

See, that hasn't been my experience. In every genre I've ever played, you have a gulf created by different levels of suspension of disbelief. The "that's not the way it should be" crowd versus the "it's just a game" crowd, if you will. Historical, sci-fi, fantasy, military, even modern day. I know from tales here it happens in comic games and L&L. Is there seriously a genre out there where it doesn't happen?

Often the "that's not the way it should be" crowd gets painted as the "bad guys" for making it un-fun on the people who don't want so much realism. But the fact is that the "it's just a game" crowd can make things just as un-fun for the people who like a grittier setting. It's important to set appropriate expectations for a game, because you can't please both sides.

@surreality It was not my intention to make anyone feel stupid and I'm sorry if it came across that way.

Editing the rest because the first stab was poorly written.

To many people, science is an integral part of science fiction, and sci-fi that ignores basic science/tech facts is viewed just as poorly as a historical movie that tromps all over history or a medical drama that gets all the medicine wrong.

Suspension of disbelief is always a thing, but there's a difference between swallowing basic tenets of "what if" that make the theme possible (e.g. space travel or AI) and something obviously impossible (like bullets shooting around corners or radiation melting people). The latter just seems like lazy/silly writing, unless there's some explanation to why the basic laws of physics don't apply here.

None of this means that people are stupid for liking things that "get it wrong". It just means that different people have different tolerances for when it's acceptable to suspend their disbelief versus when something takes their disbelief into a back alley and beats it senseless.

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

Some folks -- myself included -- are far more interested in telling the human (or not human!) stories of how people are affected by the danger and isolation of being in space, of how to handle matters of scarcity (The 100 is a great example of this)

That's where the problem comes in, I think. Because yeah, The 100 tells some great human stories. But the science/tech in them is COMPLETELY F-ING RIDICULOUS. That show is practically unwatchable for me because the writers don't even bother with the most rudimentary levels of plausibility.

So to take that and go play on a game where the theme basically says: "Abandon all laws of physics and common sense, ye who enter here..." That is not fun for me.

Note: I'm not saying it can't be fun for other people. Go for it. Just illustrating how "handwavium" can result in a massive disconnect between different players and their expectations.

@ganymede said in Original Sci-Fi?:

Anything by Palladium is something you don't want to get, darling.

C'mon, I grew up on the Robotech RPG Megadamage! I wouldn't want to play it now, but the multi-action combat turns are really the least of my concerns there.

Shameless plug for my book: Martian Dreams, about a medic who gets caught up in a brewing revolution on Mars. It was a prequel for Martian Dreams MUSH, if anybody remembers that.

I'm also a big fan of the Pike Logan adventure series, about a team of counter-terrorism operatives.

@ghost said in Original Sci-Fi?:

While I don't terribly mind the percentile dice system, there is no way a MU would survive a single combat scene where 6 different PCs and multiple combat opponents each got 3+ turns per round.

I don't get it? It would be like FS3 where the slow people only got to act once every 3 rounds. It would suck to be slow, obviously (been there - I'm looking at you Shadowrun) but I don't see how it's a dealbreaker.

Of course if you're not automating combat... then yes. Run away, run far away.

@thenomain But players aren't usually playing the 'average person of his day'. They're playing the Scotty's and Baltar's of the world, who want to reverse the polarity of the dilithuim crystals to save the day, or design a Cylon detector, or a Cylon-disabling computer virus, or hack the Cylon software so they can understand their tactics or take over a Centurion, or fly a Raider, or, or, or, or...