Posts made by Ganymede

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

To use factors from that short list above, if my character and yours are both trying to become the new Sheriff but I only have two hours a week to log on and you are on every night, your PC simply has a better chance of making it.

In this situation, I think staff would need to decide whether the new Sheriff needs to be on for only two hours a week. Whether a character is put into a place of IC power is a little different than failing a roll.

What I'd ask though is whether we can - or should - systematize so that even when I don't get to play the Sheriff the impact from 'losing' is mitigated.

I find this example difficult to work with because whether a player's character gets a particular role on a game or in a setting, if it is of some importance to the game or setting, should be determined not from a roll but from the player.

I would be the first to say that, given my limited time to play, I do not expect and should not expect to be given a position of IC importance. That's just a recipe for eventual burnout. I do not think there ought to be some sort of compensation for what is a purely personal issue.

I thought we were talking about game systems which incentivize failure in resolving conflict.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

One of the issues plaguing this hobby since its inception has to do with perceived unfairness - usually by staff. Someone succeeds because of favoritism. another is defeated because one person cheated to get ahead.

This is a little different than incentivizing IC failure. In this situation, success is determined not only in a manner outside of a player's control but also as a result of someone else's influence. The only way to incentivize anything is to give a player agency over their character's fate.

Even though these types of allegations will likely never go away, it strikes me that one of their underlying causes is that IC failure is often perceived as OOC failure, too. And I wanted to see if - and how - we can do better systemically to better distinguish between the two and ultimately incentivize conflict more than its resolution.

The Chronicles of Darkness, aka New World of Darkness 2.0, does this very well by providing a character with extra experience if they suffer a set back or choose to surrender. In other games, I have incentivized failure by providing some sort of reward if the player chooses failure; for instance, in a stressful situation in a Werewolf game, I let my players choose to voluntarily fail a frenzy roll in exchange for an XP reward (if I feel it isn't too disruptive to the game or if I think the outcome would be very funny to me).

In a way, FFG does the same with its intriguing dice system, which seems similar to Blood Bowl to me. In that case, the stats determine what you roll and who gets to choose the result form the roll, where each face gives you a certain outcome. Sometimes, choosing "Success, but with a drawback" is not as appealing as "Failure, but with a boon," or however it goes. But either way, the focus should be on giving the affected player a choice. And if given the choice, if there's a reward for failure, it may be taken strategically.

@bored said in Comic Games And Scope:

My preference is not to play on a style of game. My preference is to play a character I want to play, and get recognizable comic-y RP. Any game that serves that goal is acceptable, but many games will fail at it.

In my elder, snobbish age, my experiences with comic games have been mostly poor because I am apparently unable to ken the way to RP consistently with players with whom I can RP comfortably.

This may be because I just don't understand what the drive of most players on these games are; most of the time, they apparently want to scream look at me and how awesome i am, and I just don't have the time for that.

@hella

Season 2 is where it breaks out. Season 6 is when it is at its best.

@tooters said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:

A character of mine just died ( or more accurately, was rendered unplayable). It was for a very justified IC reason that I knew about when making the character. But even if it wasn't, I genuinely wouldn't care.

I have a similar mindset if my PC is dead or unplayable as a result of my actions.

I get fussy when my PC is killed or rendered unplayable by someone else because they are having a snit.

@spinitch

I am sad to hear of this, but thank you for letting us know.

@rightmeow said in RL things I love:

I appreciate that you exist. I appreciate that you take space. I'm more than happy to share mine with you.

Well, cats, so --

@macha

Oh, we all know where this is going, and I call dibs.

@hella said in Random funny:

You know, in case you ever wanted to hear Nickelback's 'Rockstar' as a slappin' sea shanty.

There's sea shanties, and there's sea shanties.

@macha said in RL things I love:

We need them to be straight because there's no other relationships in mainstream media that don't have the man outright loving his wife.

Wouldn't "thriving bisexuals" be living out their full sexuality instead of hiding it?

And neither of them could see any reason for why my POV might be valid, or see why I might need to see what I see.

“To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not.”

@lotherio said in Of Dreams and Nightmares:

I like the approach of location first but agree its important but could easily become esoteric.

As esoteric as it may seem, I still believe it is the fundament on which everything else is based.

If the location is "city," then it is going to look different than "countryside village," or "moon base," or "planet." It is going to affect the sort of stories that can feasibly be run and the feel of the game itself; City of Mist, for example, is very specifically set in some city, as that's the sort of game the system is useful for (heavy-narrative noir). Regardless, I believe that too few games pay enough attention to this part of its design, to its detriment.

I'm leaning towards a steampunk-ish post-apocalyptic feel for the game. Location-wise, I'm vacillating between a destroyed Las Vegas or Narshe from Final Fantasy VI (it is the mountainside village the game starts in).

It also helped to offer ideas and generate collaboratively, if you want someone to write things for you to say no to alot, I can throw out lots of things.

I'm good with a PM chat. Anyone else who is interested, lemme know and I'll toss you into the room.

@macha

Take pride.

@lotherio said in Of Dreams and Nightmares:

Regardless I'm curious how your take would go in world building; but I like the world building aspect of things over the crunch of mechanics myself.

The first step is not the world, but the location. I think that a homebrew system and setting needs a very particular location to start with, in which all of the important elements are displayed and explained. Where is the tension? What does everyone else (the NPCs) do? And where do the characters fit into this microcosm? A location needs to be a place that encapsulates all of these starting questions.

That's where I am right now: where to start? City of Mist puts the PCs in a City, and that's always an easy place to drop someone. So, I'm thinking of starting there, but I'm not sure of the overall location. Will it be a fantasy world? Post-apoc? Modern reflection? The selection is important because the more esoteric the setting, the more difficult it is for a player to get engaged.

@reimesu said in Of Dreams and Nightmares:

Are you talking about something like what the Corinthian did or how Fiddlers' Green behaved? (I'd elaborate, but if you've read The Sandman, you know, and if you haven't, it's a spoiler.) Or something more like Matthew?

I'm not sure how to answer this question, except by stating where my mind was at the time I wrote my comment.

I was actually at a local karaoke bar, doing my weekend side-gig as a doorperson. It was a busy night, with lots of folks deep into the waters and wailing out good renditions of popular 80s and country songs. Some people wonder why I'd pick up the gig, given how demanding my full-time job + family + school life is. Simply, it is because you learn an awful lot in the bar business just by talking and listening to people's stories.

So it came to me, as it usually does in the din, that the reason I'm so compelled by Gaiman's numerous series is because the man understands stories so very well. And so I thought it would be neat to take the concept of a Morpheus-lost and put into the hands of the players a PC created from a dream or nightmare. So, you'd have Fiddler's Green personified, yes, and the Corinthian, but perhaps you'd have different bits and pieces whose merits and flaws involved around the stories they were crafted from. I would caution against following Gaiman's world precisely, but I do not think that the idea of "other realm escapees" is unique to his work. In fact, there's a part of me that wants to work with that theme for players, and throwing it into a fantasy realm.

This could be an Aberrant game or an adapted Changeling: the Lost game. I really like City of Mist, and its underlying premise fits into the game and setting I'm thinking of. Regardless, while I can work on story elements I would need assistance in coding it up. Given how I see the game working, I sense that I might need to homebrew a system that would give the game the feel I envision, which would be narrative-strong, as opposed to mechanics-crunchy.

@zombiegenesis

How about this?

OC supers, but they are the way they are because they are escaped dreams and nightmares. Played in the Sandman mythology. Every OC has to identify with a particular dream or nightmare, and have a power set to match.

If you can code, I can write.

@arkandel

But they did fail.

Despite their victory and the death of the Emperor, the Rebellion was unable to defeat the fascist regime at the core of the films. This is an important part of the overall narrative.

Unfortunately, it is also the point of realism that keeps the series from spinning off into pure fantasy.

@too-old-for-this said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I feel like I've finally hit some sort of achievement where a company is going to fight to keep me in my position!

Hail to our conservative overlords, who have brought us back to the 50s.

@faraday

Yeah, that seems kind of stupid.

If the assignment is to distinguish and contrast argument styles, then there's no reason that you can't compare MLK's "American Dream" speech to Shakespeare's "St. Crispin's Day" speech. Hell, compare and contrast Ned Beatty's speech (as Arthur Jensen) from "Network" with Jack Nicholson's (as Col. Nathan Jessup) from "A Few Good Men". It's not about content: it's about style and it's about how and why these speeches are (probably) embedded in our memories.

Any study on George Wallace should be on how he should be pilloried and forgotten for being anything but a hopelessly backward man, to join the many that seem to hold us back these days out of their fear.

@faraday

I don't know where you live, but this is a "find someone to present this bullshit to a school board" moment.

It's nice to look back and see a whole lot of homebrew bloodlines that I threw together a few years ago. And I'm glad to see that it is doing well.