Posts made by GangOfDolls

Smol question:

Spell check?

I think there's worth in questioning if the game environment you're in is really actually good for your mental health or if you're just treading on a wheel thinking that a change will come. Sometimes change does come along but often, due to sunk cost principal, FOMO, and the general idea that everyone else seems to be without struggle... we keep scratching away at something that isn't meant to be.

Sometimes a game environment is clearly a toxic dump on fire which is easier in a way because it's a much easier sign to get out. Sometimes it's just not a match and it's no one's fault.

It may be the case that this is your body/brain's way of saying that it needs a break from this hobby. Not forever. Not even overly long. But just for a bit until things don't feel so clouded over by an inner narrative that isn't making it fun.

I guess I'm just a believer in not forcing things when the answer might be to dust off a different hobby for a while and take the pressure off this one.

@derp

At least on the games I've been on, there was an awareness but election not to do it. The reasonings boiled down to the overall power creep in multi-sphere games and not borrowing trouble with the player base. Also a bit of: eh, what does this really hurt thrown in.

Which... it was hard to argue with in those enormous games.

It was also the case that mage spheres were often defacto cut off from the rest of the game. There were exceptions - The Reach had blended template families with dominant template type so there were vampire-intended families with some mages hanging around, for example. But on a higher level, there was a cold war agreement across most spheres that mages did mage things and everyone else should stay out of it and that followed on down the line with the vampires, changelings, and werewolves.

Even if the mechanical power structures were as @Ganymede pointed out apples to rocket launchers when you laid them side by side from template to template, the optics of restricting one template when giving another full freight to kinda just do whatever the fuck they wanted would have quickly devolved things into a crisis state.

On a game where its just mages and only mages, these rules can be enforced but it has to be enforced from the jump. The other thing that creeps beside power in mage games is the relaxation of what staff will allow as the game goes on, people stop being polite, and they get more and more worn out and worn down by the day to day of game running. Add to this in either single or multi-sphere scenario, plot focus as to start tight and stay tight which is also one of those 'this sounds great but when does this ever actually happen when humans start doing human?'

And to clarify what I meant about arcana caps is that aside of the mechanics limiting what you can buy arcana wise, I think its worth exploring if your PC is only allowed a set amount of arcana spread in total.

People tend to follow the mage books as a cookie cutter recipe book though all spells per arcana are both usable and also examples of what you can do at that power level so you can go off book. I generally don't see people do that but I think that's a different kind of discussion. But just, if your PC is a dedicated to the study of arcana much like in life - they're not going to have time to run down every little thing. You have to decide where you put your energy and what things you have to sensibly exclude. Otherwise, you end up with a arcana generalist which in theory sounds toothless but an enterprising player can really work that system and we get back to mage being a one person solves it all situation.

Mastery is intended at least by theme to reflect a lifelong dedication to study and practice in a particular Arcana. Because of power bloat and Joneses Keeping Up With, it's treated like junk food in a drive through - easy to get and with very little effort.

It's always jarred me a bit that 20 year old Mages are running around - fully inducted into their Legacies and Life masters when in reality, that's all really more intended to be a mage career phase where they're maybe just starting out as journeymen and some aren't even done with apprenticeship level training.

I'd prefer it if PCs were limited to one mastery only and it took a lot of effort to get but then again, in my hardline world - a 20 year old mage shouldn't be at a point where they can even be a master.

So wait, if your PC dies your option is to play a background extra? SRs in other games tend to be NPC+ entities that basically concierge for PCs. Is that what happens here too?

Mage is meant to be collaborative but you sure wouldn't know it based on how most nWoD mage games tend to go. And that's not really so much the fault of players in that a lot of mage plots are run in a way that people feel unable to share plot for fear of being edged out or left behind. Or there are plots that are so 'this job requires a hammer and only a hammer, gtfo with your ruler' that a few PCs in the game might be able to handle the issue while everyone picks lint out of their bellybuttons.

A thing I'd like to see but people will wretchedly hate is not only a cap on XP, gnosis, and overall the power is: a cap on the number of:

1. Paths
2. Number of arcana you're allowed to take
3. Legacies
4. No extremely snowflake or weird ass concepts that prove that you haven't opened a book and/or are stitching together some high nonsense (i.e. AA Blank Badge? Whu?)

...in any one game.

I feel like the only way to get people to work together in a mage setting is to make it so they can't self-solve everything. Mage wasn't really written to do that but in practice, so many games end up in this position.

@ganymede

It's been a constant variable in my own life that when I feel like I'm getting what I want and by that - I saw a thing, wanted it, set a goal, and went out and got the damn thing - I've come away from it not satisfied but unsettled and anxious that I got what I wanted. If it's something I've bought, it may just sit in its packaging for weeks or months before I begrudge its use.

I'm not saying you're going through what I'm going through but I identify strongly with what you're saying. I wish I had something to offer because I actually respect your insight on this board a great deal. So instead, I'll just say: I see your situation and respect it.

There is nothing like being trapped in an airplane seat with a drunk next to you. I travel enough for work that it's happened a time or two before and for the most part, those dudes just powered down the vodka and smelled bad before slumping over in their chairs.

It's different when the dude is drunk and wants to talk. And by talk, I mean he wants to get into it about how much he hates his wife and his life and asking 'making conversation' questions that are really designed to game out if I'm single and receptive.

There was no option to be reseated. I asked. The air attendant was sympathetic and cut him off. He luckily didn't rage out.

Ugh.

Also I tried to do the whole 'here's a list of games' thing. I keep meaning to get back to it.

But I got a job man that likes to shove me on airplanes and shit.
And friends (allegedly) who are mostly sure I am not a stack of cats wearing a trenchcoat.

So, I tried man. I tried. Sorry.

ETA: The constantly rotating GIF above me of Cap America throwing the arrow is a) huge and b) annoying as fuck because it is constantly rotating. Constructively, I request that people maybe not put up pagewide gifs or shit that literally never stops animating?

I really, really don't want to get into a whole situation where we're doing the whole toxic positivity thing that we see so many gamers do to each other, where we police all criticism unless its is worded in the most gentle glowing tones about games and their runners or people can get the hell out and die lonely and alone at the edge of the universe.

This board exists to call out bad behavior of which there is plenty, possibly too much in this hobby because all of the shit that goes on thrives in darkness and disconnection. So, it's shitposting. It's shitposting for an ultimately good cause even if it has to set shit on fire to clear the weeds out. With this comes people who are bad actors or are more often, horribly nearsighted about their own behavior and don't see how they've contributed poorly to situations. I can point out one specific incident that happened recently and actually concerned my character on a game. The decision to not clapback was based on the fact that the person doing the shitposting has their own history of bad behavior and ultimately, it didn't matter what I said back. People would decide that they were being horribly persecuted or like, perhaps maybe... they're just not lying but in fact more than a little self-deluded about cause and effect.

I think we need to give ourself more credit to smell bullshit when its bullshit, even if we don't clapback.

@kanye-qwest

Oh, yeah - I don't know that it was anyone's obligation to have take that on as a staff member. It's up to the individual on the receiving end of a player spiraling out to extend themselves like that or not.

I will say though that the character generation process is fraught for a lot of people for various reasons. Having staffed, I've been on the receiving end of some quality flip outs and obnoxious behavior- anxiety fueled or not. I guess from my cheap seats point of view, you do come to expect a certain amount of character generation/concept generation lack of road smoothness. How the staffer or game endeavors to deal with that is up to them.

It reads to me that things go very dug in on both sides of this situation after a certain point. I'm not sure there was a lot of hope of deescalation after that.

@kanye-qwest I think it's more - sometimes doing nothing is the right call. I don't think its about the partner so much as intuiting when hard lines being drawn in the sand or not even just that but trying to communicate specific ideas in that moment only causes the whole thing to spin out a lot more.

I think we've all seen those meltdowns generally in games where someone is upset, people are trying to get to the root of the problem, and doing so - the person who is upset doesn't feel like they're getting the situation untangled, they start to further unravel because now there's a spotlight on the problem which means there's a spotlight on the person having the problem.

It's anxiety logic which isn't logical.

Having experienced this myself, wanting to help and literally making it 100x worse for trying in that moment - sometimes all you can do productively is to stop moving and let it pass before any further decisions get made.

@too-old-for-this

The brand that I use/like is:

Sea Tangle

There may be others out there but I buy these at my local pan-asian grocery store. You have to pre-soak them to get them to soften but they otherwise take on the flavor of whatever it is you're cooking.

I would like to try lentil pasta but lentils are a heavy carbohydrate (but at least they're complex) source and they often made with semolina flour to stabilize them, so they tend to be nearly as sugar heavy as regular pasta. It's on my 'cheat day' list but as a more daily thing, I tend to avoid them.

@ortallus I wish I hate, hate, fiery rings of hell haaaaate squash.

I have found luck with black bean noodles, Palmini noodles, and kelp noodles. Of these, I like kelp noodles the most. Shirataki noodles are just okay to me.

@paris Oh, for sure. I use a lot of almond flour and coconut flour - with gelatin or xanthum gum, you generally get the same neighborhood of textures. There's also this: Carbquik

Pasta is harder to have/find when you're trying to cut simple carbs and sugars. That's the part I don't love because I love me the shit out of some Olive Garden.

I'm a simple girl with Bellini tastes when it comes mid-range fake Italian food chains.

Locking ads might be the way to go but this relies on board admin having the time and want to have to stay on top that. So there's that? @Arkandel - thoughts?

I personally don't mind active criticism of games even when its not constructive because unless its so blatant that everyone can recognize something as someone just doing a shitty thing out of spite or other bad intent - people confuse constructive pushback as 'I don't like this thing' with 'these people should die painfully' or other attacks when they're not.

That said, I advocate for moving things to places on the board that are more receptive to 'these people should die painfully' because in this hobby, there are enough poorly socialized people who are behavior blind and do that very thing which impacts the rest of us.

What I don't want is toxic postivity policing. That's a huge issue in this hobby in general, where if you can't say anything nice maybe you should quit the game and maybe the planet. And inevitability, instead of letting people have complicated feelings about a game they're trying to play on - they suggest that they just leave the game as a dismissive, condescending answer. That's bullshit and helps no one.

I like to think we're intelligent enough to take negative feedback (constructive or otherwise) with a savvy grain of salt. If you're being automatically bamboozled by every slightly irritated thing people have to say about games, you have perhaps a different kind of problem?

Fair. I bake a fair amount. Partly as I enjoy the chemistry and ritual of cooking and I like to try out new things. Also, I travel a fair amount of work and finding things I can eat without going too far off the wagon in airports is a challenge. It end to bake/make snacks that are adhere to the way I'm eating now.

I also make them for the movies as we have the AMC A List Stubs thing and watch a lot of them and it's a much cheaper alternative than spending 20 bucks on a box of candy and a soda.

Monkfruit has less of a 'chemical' taste to it - however small. I tend to use it as a brown sugar substitute in recipes that call for it, otherwise.

Swerve comes in a confectioner and granular form. I tend to use the confectioner form as erythritol requires a higher heat point to melt than regular sugar so in some recipes, the granular form doesn't fully melt and you can taste the granular texture. It's not terrible and some people like the texture but sometimes you just don't want that. The confectioners version doesn't have this issue.

I personally hate the aftertaste of Stevia, I find it to be too bitter. For the most part, I find that Stevia doesn't bake well for that reason but it depends on how you're using the substitute.