Best posts made by Ghost

@Sparks said in Good TV:

@Auspice @Rinel

For the record, my issue with the trope is not quite the same one you're describing.

***=SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SO MANY SPOILERS***

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My issue is not with Q's death specifically, but the end of Quelliot. The show has plenty of diversity and representation in the characters; they're superb at that. (Plus, I suspect about half of the characters are at the very least bi-curious.)

But in a show that feels chock-a-block with different relationships, the Quelliot ship was the only one I can think of among major characters that was not the 'default' of a heterosexual relationship between two people. So this still feels a little like the 'kill your gays' trope, just with a relationship instead of a character.

I know that's not what they were going for. And narratively, killing off Q made sense. The death was handled incredibly well, both in the writing and execution of the episode, and everything leading up to it this season. All of that is why I'm just a little upset/annoyed over this particular aspect of it, rather than actually angry in any meaningful manner.

But the problem, as always, is that if you have a cast or story dominated by one particular thing (mostly white folks, mostly dudes, etc.) then the one odd-thing-out ends up becoming a proxy for that entire class of thing. If you have a show that has a cast that's, say, 8 guys and 1 woman, then if you kill off that woman it ends up coming across way worse than if the show had 6 guys and 4 women and you killed one of the women off. If you have a cast that has 7 white folks and 1 black guy, then if you kill off that one black guy it comes across way worse than it might otherwise. Etc.

And if you only have one relationship on the entire show that's anything other than what people think of as the 'default', then if you torpedo that one relationship it's likely going to come across worse than you probably intended.

***=Spoilerificish Comment***

I could never connect to MUs at my favorite coffee house because disabling incoming telnet connections on port 22 is standard firewall security these days. Telnet is a massive security risk.

The IPv6 thing is weird. I'd suspect that first and if it still fails I would suspect a telnet block.

@Ganymede Congrats!!!!!

Also, if I were a Changeling that fed on sadness, this weekend would be like the Super Bowl. I have a feeling Game of Thrones and Avengers are gonna be tear jerkers.

SO DONT LET THAT SPOIL YOUR VICTORY

When money enters the equation everything changes.

• Open source code bases usually remain so on the basis that they aren't monetized. If you charge for a game using a code base you didn't write you could be in an actionable position. It would be wrong to monetize an FS3 game without @faraday OK'ing it or getting a cut, but even if fara didn't care that doesn't mean other coders wont.
• If your content isn't original (d&d, star wars, world of darkness) and you're monetizing it, you're actionable
• Use PB's? Because every player and npc PB is now a monetized use of that person's image without their consent.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. MU is a text based amateur quasi-fan fiction writing hobby with slight gaming elements with less than 200 identifiably active players. The amount of money required to monetize a game isn't worth the amount that would be earned, and the likelihood that some jilted player will take things to extreme lengths for a refund (small claims?) is high.

That game VaultGirl or whoever was running where they were taking $$$ donations for extra xp, gear, etc was using Fallout's IP. They're lucky they didn't get a tap from a lawyer because when the MU doesn't exchange money it's a cease and desist, but when money is traded the question of how much of that the IP holder is entitled to comes into play.

@Rinel said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

flibertigibbet

Jesus, just think about the threats of small-claims lawyers contacting you for the month you played (though didn't pay for) because staff forgot to freeze your character.

Fuck that.

Jack LAME

On one BSG-themed game, a player made a special snowflake character whose skills (aside from being the best fighter pilot ever) included Zorbing (Australian/New Zealand human ball bouncing) and LEGOing.

A player tried to explain to her (SPOILERS) that Battlestar Galactica took place hundreds of thousands of years before Earth culture discovered/invented LEGO and/or ZORB. She promptly reported this person to staff for harassing her.

Fact is this: if one out of ten players ignores theme, then the fourth wall gets broken and the thematic feel of the game gets spoiled. Theme really is important for making people feel like they're RPing in the chosen universe. Be it Pirates of the Carribean "Arr" space pirates in Serenity or people drinking Coca-Cola in ancient Rome, theme helps hold the players to the game's fabric.

And to take it a step further, if a player joins a game with a theme with no interest in upholding the theme, then is the game really important to them at all, or is it just providing them an outlet for their play space?

Thus, it is important that all of the staff agree in the range of what is or is not important to the theme, make a synopsis of that available for incoming players to read, and then require players agree to roleplay within theme.

@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:

Spoiler-free but can we all agree the music score not just this season (although that, too) but for the last several years has been knocking it right out of the park?

What an incredible soundtrack GoT has. I can't say enough about it. These people are so good.

Ramin Djawadi pretty much scores everything these days. He's fantastic and I love his use of cello. Reminds me a lot of the cello in Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro, which is burned into my memories.

Ever. Y. Thing.

Pacific Rim, GoT, the Strain, Westworld...

@Cirno that kind of drove me crazy on Fifth World. Becoming a knight takes YEARS of training and dedication, right? I can absolutely understand being a knight that likes to get laid, because all that requires is hormones, but a ditzy knight that acts like being a knight is secondary to some sexy bikini photo-shoot roleplay doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There was a bunch of that on 5W, too.

"I've spent my whole life training to be a knight....but somewhere in there I also became a world-class actor/movie star/dancer/baristas/pastry chef!"

@Auspice Rain: Dobie Gray "Drift Away" reminds me of sitting on a porch with a light rain going on, having a beer.

@Cirno I'm still keeping my eye on Fifth World. Long after the game closed down it was brought to my attention that the people who were running the game were writing a novel in that setting and had the characters, houses, etc written up in the novel. There was no disclaimer or sign-over of usage of contents in the game as material for their book. They have since removed everyone's access to the wiki. The wiki is still there, but you can't edit, add, or alter any of the content because all of the users were removed.

I have my logs and character's embellishments, wiki, etc saved. It would have been FUCKING NICE to know that there was a chance anything I did was going to be taken as their novel fodder. It really, really would have been nice.

I will reiterate my prediction from a few weeks ago that this short 6 episode final season was going to feel very:

AAAAAAAAAAAndABunchaStuffHappenedThankYouGoodbyeTHE-END!

This story is wrapping up at lightspeed pace.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

A lot of the examples of MU* campaigns mentioned here touch on something I think is important. I think it's a LOT easier to do a satisfying, game-wide story on a game that's focused on PvE, rather than PvP. This is one of the reasons I prefer those types of games, though far from the only reason.

Agreed.

That is precisely why I think @faraday BSG games worked so well. In a hobby where so many thin-skinned people are worrying OOCly about who gets this or that snowflake privilege, a game that pretty much said: "You're all fucked and now live in a shitty bunkhouse with people who fart in their sleep. Now get out there any fight on the same team before we all get GENOCIDED" worked so well.

EDIT: Also, as a side note, since all of the characters (unless you turned out to be a Cylon, which I never was, goddamnit) weren't defined by some kind of supernatural phenotype, people had to shape personalities, quirks, and hobbies to flesh out their characters. I genuinely believe this led to more meaningful roleplay.

***=Another Meme...***

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#endspoiler

I try to be realistic about this. You see, if a game doesn't have a dice system to arbitrate risks/plot twists, then you're going to have a game with a wide population of "main characters in their own story" who will only choose the outcomes that fit what they want for their character's story. Only...not everyone can be the Space Admiral, or the TOP pilot, or the special snowflake telekinetic rarity, or the fabled only person in the universe with the unique skill. I've been in plenty of scenes where it was just a bunch of "main character" players leap-frogging over each other to be THE hero with the winning solution.

Dice solves who hits, who doesn't, and saves the game from having a bunch of free-form roleplayers from all being the super magical wonder person or ubertragic lone survivor trope.

The problem with games/systems that don't allow players to die, is the theme of the game needs to determine the tone of the story. Let's use the Battlestar Galactica Mushes as an example. In BSG you had horrific headwounds turning characters into brain damaged translators. You had gunshot wounds to the knee leaving a character with an amputated leg. You had military-grade trauma. SO, if a character can survive a CRITICAL MASSIVE HEADWOUND by a round shot from a Cylon Raider, through the cockpit of their Viper, and into their head, then the round clearly isn't a paintball round or pellet. That would kill anything. That hit would kill a rhinoceros.

When you are playing a game with stakes, it is important to identify that there are players that play fair with damage. Their massive leg injury becomes a limp that will negate their ability to pilot Vipers. Their head trauma results in a mangled, scarred appearance on their once attractive character. When other players do not play fair with their damage, or risk of damage, in lieu of telling their story (because their want for a story > the story as a whole), then the game breaks. Why? Because the players who are willing to suffer negative consequences due to bad dice rolls or fairly judging how to roleplay damage incurred as part of the story that involves the whole of the game are not only caring about their story, but the story for the whole of the game. They are willing to suffer a negative character angle because it makes sense to the story and the damage incurred was part of a scene involving other players.

Any player who ignores damage or deadly wounds received because that gets in the way of telling the story they want to tell, is pretty much saying "I am picking and choosing the things I think were important out of a scene involving 10+ other players, and since I don't want to roleplay my character being hurt, I'm just going to ignore that part about being hurt."

I couldn't disagree more that character death isn't important. Not everyone can be superhuman or come out of so much trauma and damage unscathed. Sometimes, to build drama, an unexpected character death is necessary, and if the player isn't so busy worrying about themselves over the good of the story as a whole, they'd understand that shrugging off damage or death because its inconvenient to their wishes as a writer breaks the fourth wall for everyone else trying to immerse into a story.

Who has a sweet Loki gif and met Rey Fenix, Pentagon, and Rey Horus aka El Dragon Azteca Jr tonight?

Cero Miedo