Best posts made by GangOfDolls

@Thenomain

Ehnnnn.

I think it depends ultimately on storyline taste and personal asthetic, so grain of salt but I think this is Humble Bundle is 1/2 okay stuff and 1/2 total crap.

I find Locke & Key to be kind of vastly overrated. I know that people like Joe Hill because he's Stephen King's son and Heart Shaped Box got a lot of play but fwiw, I think they could deliver a much tighter story in much fewer issues. L&K feels lack a money grab to me.

The 30 Days of Night Series (original installments) was actually a good turn on the vampire tropes. The later stuff taken over by other writers was kind of lame re-tread.

The rest of it kinda gets a meh out of me, like it won't be hateable but it won't change your life, either.

Other titles I would suggest:

Paper Girls: Has a Stranger Things vibe in a good way (though this series started a year before ST aired on Netflix), set in Ohio in the mid-late 80s with 12 year old girls with a paper route with weird things happening about the subdivision. The writers have a good lock on what its like to be 12 in the suburbs in the 1980s.

Sex Criminals: 2 people realize that when they orgasm, they can stop time. Shenanigans ensue. There's also an accurate and unvarnished but ultimately human take on what its like to have ADHD and major depression and function in the world, which is not something you see in comics a whole lot.

Revival: The dead are coming back to life in Wisconsin. It's a bit like The Returned, if you've ever watched the US or French version in terms of vibe and atmosphere.

The Umbrella Academy: Quirky turn on what happens when you raise superhero kids to be superhero adults but with a lot less hugs and Professor Xavier. Also by the dude from My Chemical Romance, who might be a better comic writer than screamo singer.

East of West: Post-apocalypse, NWO dytopian setting with The Four Horsemen as little kids. The writing is very good and a good ethnic mix, no one is brown and magical which is pretty fucking awesome for me.

Kabuki: David Mack's art is beautiful and the story holds up even though the series came out 15 years ago. Cyberpunk/NWO themes.

The Wicked and The Divine: I tried to read this and hated it. But! I know so many people who love this series and the writing is also really good, I think I'm the one with the problem but we like what we like and don't what we don't.

Wormwood: Gentleman Demon: Wormwood is a little worm demon, he takes over corpses and sort of trundles around in them. He fights crime! Also, its pretty funny.

I'm assuming you're speaking on No Return, which lets not paint lipstick on sweating dynamite, was pretty terrible but I do want to set the record straight(er) on a few things:

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

1. PLAYING HOUSE: that eventually resulted in plenty of scheduled yoga lessons and movie nights.

I played the PC who was "teaching yoga" though 1) I never actually taught yoga in in character because I would have fallen asleep at the keyboard the idea is so fucking boring and 2) that wasn't really what she was doing but the +bb posts maintained a certain atmosphere around misdirection. I guess it worked!

That said, there were definitely a lot of movie nights, indepth scenes about what color to paint the baby's room, and cheerful community building social events that I generally skipped because I wasn't looking for this, either.

2. I GUESS I'LL SCAVENGE?:

The scavenge system was at least better than people tripping over huge cashes of C4, BUK missile launchers, or infinite cans of perfectly good pears. But it also took over the game in a weird, resource dominating way in that it if you had it in your personal stash - there was no incentive to interact with anyone else, which justified people to continue to shack it up and ignore the apocalypse outside. Most of the plot in the beginning had something to do with resources and if you wanted something to do in game, you were going to have jump through the hoops of scavenging 99 pieces of twine to build a dinglehopper. And because staff wouldn't facilitate that any way but obtusely, it was hella annoying to have to go find these things knowing that Ella, Brick, and their NPC child were holed up in their build with all the twine and wouldn't even be bothered to pretend other people on this game existed.

3. HIGH DANGER, LOW MORTALITY: On one such game, cancer was diagnosed, operated on, and eventually cured without much electricity, access to imagery machines, important medicine, and proper tools.

Unless this happened on No Return's failed spin off, I'm pretty sure you're talking about the staff PC who had a brain tumor. The whole concept was pretty terrible, partly because it was a staff PC so it was way more precious than it should have ever been and also in true Phoenix's MO, he just griefed everyone constantly for zero interesting or passingly logical reasons. Anyway, there was talk of trying to operate but the player of the doctor was more sensible than perhaps given credit and decided there was zero chance this was going to be successful and wasn't interested in going through the motions of total failure. And dying on the operating table while a reasonable expectation is also a fairly boring narrative for the dying PC. So instead, it got dragged out even longer and there was an insufferable funeral social scene because ded staff PC ... which many people also skipped.

4. OMG ASSHOLE CHARACTER

I understand this but I also don't, in part because I RPed with some of the asshole PCs and actually we had a lot of fun because at the end of it, we had other things in game we wanted to do besides obsess over who got a puppy from the NPC dog that had puppies. I can't stress how big of a deal this was for several players- if they got a puppy, what was it named, and what did it look like and and and to the point where the owner of the NPC dog was sorry they'd ever mentioned it as IC flavor. Anyway.

I think though the problem with post-apoc/zombie/dystopian wasteland games is that most of the conflict is not environmental. It's Other Groups who want to kill us and eat our faces. And there is, for a certain fan of this genre a reluctance to want to play with PCs that look way too edgelord for their own good because they are often attached to players who are here to pick lethal PvP conflicts with players who are not here to kick some PC's head in over a cantaloupe. There is a small population attached to these games that does attract the NO RULES, NO RULES, YOUR RUINED FUN IS MY CAKE and many of these games are not good at screening these assholes out or corralling them into being useful in their otherwise terrible motives. Or in the case of NR, passive aggressively encouraging it. Good times.

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

@GangOfDolls

For the record, I wasn't critiquing that there WAS yoga, just that as I understood it, the town in No Return became so sheltered at one point that it was getting near Gilmore Girls Star's Hollow levels. I apologize if you felt slighted by the yoga mention. I don't know you, and it wasn't about you. Just about...the setting and stuff.

I'll let the topic get back on track nao

Yeah, that's cool. I felt compelled to say something because nerds. Also, we got kicked out of Stars Hollow by staff because they didn't want anyone having private builds anymore via plot. And then they stuck us in a summer camp. So. Yeaaaaah. Anyway.

I think @Lisse24 , @Ghost , and @Thenomain have called out the same thing in different ways, which I happen to agree with:

Antagonism is best when its motivations in the character are pure.

And much of antagonism might maaaaaybe start as character pure motivations, it rapidly dissolves into motivations in the player being less pure and those lines getting utterly blurry if not outright motivated in OOC butthurt.

Much of antagonism as I've witnessed it recently are players through their characters being big time, small time dicks and taking obstructionist actions in game that have no end. They don't want to move a story along, they just want to stop something in its tracks. They just want to stomp on a toy that doesn't belong to them. They mostly play checkers moves motivated by out of game spite instead of chess.

@surreality

I agree with this a lot.

That said, alot of my experience with antagonism including a mild form of it this week didn't come with negotiation. I think if it had, then it wouldn't have occurred the way it did but a lot of antagonism on games that I've seen is NIMBYism on the part of the player. They just don't want something to happen on the game, often irrationally because they equate it happening to a sense of loss.

I think if that player who is having that NIMBY reflex in reaction to something asked more questions out of character and negotiated the situation it might be avoided or at least made somewhat interesting.

Or it just hangs a flashing neon sign around the person you should just avoid in the future.

@Thenomain

Right, totally. I don't think a pure motivation is equal to correct one.

Your post reminded me of that line from Into The Woods:

"Nice is not good."

So, purity for me is that the character's motivation is his own- no matter where the needle jumps on the morality scale- and isn't so much a projection of the player just trying to obstruct someone else's fun in the game. That's not a story, that's just being dick.

I agree but there are plenty of people who jump into game themes without having read the books or watched the TV show. I can say for certain that about half of the people I encountered The 100 had never even bothered with the TV show and then were taken by surprise some of the game content. The 100 wasn't nearly as dark by half as The Magicians, so I don't think its a good idea to assume that everyone has bothered.

And there are players, when left to their devices, have a completely different idea of what dark and intense means.

I'm not saying don't do it; I'm saying clearly label what's on the tin.