Posts made by Ghost

@Testament I liked that game. Shame.

Bioware is definitely in trouble. Inquisition wasn't critically panned, Andromeda failed, and so far Anthem has failed. I can't remember if it's a rumor or if it's official, but Disney is allegedly taking the Star Wars license away from EA and putting it into LucasArts again.

Bioware's 3 major hits (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Kotor) are now failing to please their target audience, and I can't remember if they have the rights to produce any D&D content. (Their 4th major hit was the Baldur's Gate games).

I think what you're looking at right now is the next AAA developer going away like Ion Storm did, or like how Midway/Atari went away and sold the license for Mortal Kombat to Warner Bros. After SWToR stops being able to make new content, I imagine you might hear about Bioware dissolving into the greater EA whole.

2k games got REALLY lucky they didn't go under after the Borderlands Pre-Sequel and Battleborn getting bootstomped by Overwatch. So I suspect 2k will come back to the forefront and CD Projekt Red will become one of if not the hottest game developers come 2020.

You really wanna fuck someone over in Paranoia?

Paint gear that is security clearance level yellow with red paint. When a security clearance level RED character starts walking around with what they assume is a RED piece of equipment the computer may assume they've stolen equipment they're not authorized to use.

@Runescryer YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@jibberthehut hahaha yes.

Taking the "parent character" thing here.

How fucking LULz would it be if there was a character who was a new dad and was tired all of the time, but during some kind of vampire hunt it led to a strip club. The hunters want to go in and pose as customers to find the vampires.

"No. No. OOOOH no. The last time I did this I had to sleep on my couch for a month. Do you have any fucking clue what it's like to live on a couch for a month? I couldn't even explain to her that the glitter was from a fucking vampire. She made me go with her and the baby to swim lessons for a one year old. Does that even fucking make sense? Swimming at one?!? Man...I dunno."

Phone rings...

"See?! It's her. She knows things. Now she's asking me to pick up formula. I have a fucking shotgun on my back with shells that shoot fucking fire and I'm getting texts to pick up baby formula and Wiggles videos. Guys...I love you but I think I'm done. Done. Gotta retire."

@Wretched Yeah I got the videos, too. They're a great workout. FUN FACT: The videos do not help you lose weight if you only do the intro part that walks through all the poses once a year. I was not aware of that.

We gotta clean out a spare room to make room for it, too. That's the shitty part about spare rooms. You use it for STORAGE...but then have to move stuff out of it to use it for yoga.

Anyway, YES, the Wrestler was fucking great and I understand it's pretty accurate. Stuff like dead cartilage in the knees, getting paid $50 bucks and leaving with a concussion that would cost you hundreds to thousands if you actually got it looked at by a doctor, etc.

I enjoy wrestling, but I'd enjoy it more if I knew the talent was better taken care of. There's a lot of buzz right now that per John Oliver the fans might actually chant or have signs for Wrestlemania this weekend for the better treatment of the talent.

@Wretched said in Pro Wrasslin':

@Ghost Damnit I was gonna link that here. As somone who grew up with Andre and Undertaker, and Hulk and Macho Man, and Honkey Tonk Man, and and and... yeah. That was a good watch.

I remember waiting for the icecream man in the late 80's early 90's for those ice cream sammich bars that had the wrestlers printed on the bars and they came with trading cards. They coist like a whole 1.50 when everything else was like 50 cents.

Holy crap I remember those. Back in the day I was a huge Brutus the Barber Beefcake and Demolition fan.

That stuff about Roddy Piper and Jake the Snake really gets me. Those guys were just so run down and their bodies were toast by that stage in the game. The part about how Roddy said he wouldn't make it to 65 and then died at 61 misted me up a little bit. Those guys really do take a ton of punishment and have to keep performing despite.

Diamond Dallas Page is doing good stuff (he's in that video). He started a form of yoga that's helped a lot of people with weight and joint problems, and in recent years has brought in friends like Razor Ramon, Jake the Snake, and a few others and it seems to have helped their "post WWF joint and body ache" issues. Jake the Snake looks great now.

DDP yoga's good shit.

@Grayson said in MU Things I Love:

@Ghost I used to play half of a character with a very good friend who played the other half. We came up with the metaphysics and the background to fit the setting, we both had access to the bit, and when we were both online at the same time we'd make creative use of code so the two souls sharing the body could communicate internally and either one of us could communicate externally.

It was an absolute /hoot/, but it takes one hell of a lot of trust to make it work.

That sounds fun as hell. Especially if you compartmentalize what one knows vs the other. I'd have totally been in on an idea like that.

@Auspice said in MU Things I Love:

@Ghost said in MU Things I Love:

You know what sounds like a fun idea?

Playing a character bit with MPD where the login is shared by 3 players who keep 3 different sets of notes and each prepares their own distinct personality for the character.

You'd log in and ICly people would be like: "Hey, about our text conversation last night..." and you'd be like "Urrrrgh that was Jared uhmmm..."

Or your character wakes up in bed with some gorgeous other player in the bed.
"Good morning."
"Ohhhh hey...good morning..."
"Janet."
"JANET right..."

I actually discussed this as a lol concept years ago. MAYBE EVEN WITH YOU.

Maybe. I know the Always Sunny idea started off with us LOLing over pages. Dee as a bird Changing Breed. LOLz.

You know what sounds like a fun idea?

Playing a character bit with MPD where the login is shared by 3 players who keep 3 different sets of notes and each prepares their own distinct personality for the character.

You'd log in and ICly people would be like: "Hey, about our text conversation last night..." and you'd be like "Urrrrgh that was Jared uhmmm..."

Or your character wakes up in bed with some gorgeous other player in the bed.
"Good morning."
"Ohhhh hey...good morning..."
"Janet."
"JANET right..."

@RDC Yeah it's clever but a bit nefarious.

Core box contains a LOT of physical materials. Cards, a game board, books, etc. These usually contain the descriptions of what things do.

The BOOKS are 10x10, so they're square and not easy to photocopy for character sheets. If you try, the sheets are either weirdly distorted or when printed on standard paper have a lot of space at the top or bottom (I got around this by purchasing a journal and turning it into an art project, like a zine for my character).

There are some 3-4 books in the core set that compartmentalize information between the books. There's the "Key", which focuses on character generation and how to spend xp, with references to things like spells, secrets etc that aren't in the KEY book, they're in a book in the core set. In the core set book with spells? There are the names of the spells, but not the descriptions. The descriptions are on the cards in the core set.

The "vislae kit" comes with a copy of the Key and 10x10 character sheets, one for each kind of vislae, and those aren't easily reproduced because few people print on SQUARE paper.

So one of my big issues is this. I don't have any books and I'll be damned if I'm spending $100 on PDFs for a game that I'm not entirely sure that I like. I joined this gaming group after they'd already purchased and received the kickstarter, which included a campaign remotely assisted by Monte Cook himself. This is cool, but was also expensive.

It's hard understanding the game with the hand-out PDF of the key, since the setting, spells, etc aren't in that book. I can't look at the OTHER books because a lot of that stuff contains proprietary information that the GM uses, so my GM has requested we not peek through those books. So a lot of my setting/understanding of the game knowledge kinda gets trickle fed to me by the GM...

...who is also having apparently tons of side-rp and scenes with 2 of the other players.

So I may game with them, and let's say we're all the equivalent of some level "2" type character. I'll come back 2 weeks later and these guys will be all: "Oh! I did downtime stuff and got these spells and this xp and ranked up in my order and investigated a murder", so now I'm the equivalent of a 2.5 level character and they're level 4.

It's a neat game where you can create a lot of custom content and the game is really limited by your imagination, which is COOL, but it's also a MASSIVE risk for people just going all kinds of crazy and spending hours per week obsessing over it while I'm doing stuff like...working, sleeping, hanging out with friends, drinking coffee, getting laid, playing video games.

Anyway, my issues with the group aren't the point. I like to joke about this game as being the white privilege of RPGs, since they've definitely countered any risk of piracy with making it mostly accessible to people with the ability to throw away some 300 per group and an additional 30-50 per player.

John Oliver WWE Spot

NSFW. It's very entertaining, but John Oliver rips into WWE for how they take care of wrestlers.

Are there any Invisible Sun players out there?

I'm in a group for Invisible Sun, and I'll freely admit that I'm both enjoying it and not at the same time. I'd like to get other people's viewpoints on the game if they're players and how to approach it.

My main issue is that I'm typically the gamer that only games at the table, but this game has a TON of side-roleplay suggestions, like sending downtimes to the GM, and it's turned into a few people in the group showing up each session having earned and spent a bunch of acumen(xp for skills, spells) and crux (xp for powers/order) from stuff they did all offline. They seem to have a TON more free time to play around with this than I do, and it's getting overwhelming.

For those of you not aware, Invisible Sun is a Monte Cook game that is both ingenious and nefarious in terms of release. The base game is expensive as hell and support for content, character sheets, etc is written up in this purchasing scheme that has done a pretty decent job of keeping the game from being pirated. It assumes the whole group pays around 200-300 dollars for the core set, then each player buys a "vislae kit" (vislae are the PCs) that includes a book, character sheets, etc for (i think 30-40 dollars). Things are weirdly compartmentalized. Example. The PCs get to choose spells. The books have listings of spells, but not what they do. WHAT THEY DO is only printed on actual cards in the 200-300 core set, or on the PDFs they're selling for around $100 per PDF purchase.

The game's fascinating, but it's just...a mess in my opinion.

@Arkandel I think this is one interesting byproduct of living in this crazy cool era where a lot of our nerdy stuff is popular. My mom sent me a message saying she's excited for Avengers: Endgame and asked if this makes her a nerd. I told her: "Nope, just that you have good taste".

I think a lot of people didn't give this stuff the time of day because there was a stigma surrounding the concept of the nerd. Revenge of the Nerds was a thing. The image of the Louis Skolnick pocket protector nerd or the neckbeard spending all day at a comic book shop was pretty prevalent. Cut 20+ years later and people are excited about the new Dune movies, my mom knows who BANE is, and fangirls over Bucky Barnes. Right, because it was good shit if you got out of your weird self-conscious box to give it a chance.

ETA: Oh, and her Winter Soldier thirst is a thing. Jesus Christ. Thirrrrst.

My story?

My folks are Catholic and I got raised up in the Satanic Panic era, so comic books were okay but D&D wasn't. For me it was Dragonlance novels and for some reason Steven King, Clive Barker, and Dean Koontz novels were totally okay. So I mostly grew up a comic book and horror nerd, and was into Dragonlance novels before I even knew that Krynn was even some offshoot D&D setting. I think my first book was the Riverwind book. Buff native barabarian dude vs dragonman on the cover? Good shit.

By high school I was playing in bands, little metalhead goth guy, staying up late watching Hellraiser films and drawing horror comics with my buddies. We used to camp at a Village Inn in Omaha (Oakview Mall, for you Omaha people) sometimes until 1am just piling on a bunch of gothy nerds drinking coffee and rotating who's dating who. Mostly at that stage we were all punk/metal/goth show kids who went to a lot of GWAR concerts and snuck wine coolers out of our parents' fridges and smoked a lot of weed.

Around that time I got invited to a D&D game and played one session (Necromancer. HUGE SURPRISE THERE). D&D didn't exactly latch, but my first love was Vampire the Masquerade. Soon thereafter we were playing in a Little King sandwich shop after close (from around 9pm-1am) because the storyteller was the shop's manager.

When I found out there were girls, notably goth girls that were into RPing VtM? hoooooked

VtM on AOL chat rooms, VtM on the White Wolf chats, moved to where I live now and got into VtM LARPs and occasional side D&D games. VtM is really my first true RPG love. Truly.

@Arkandel said in What's your nerd origin story?:

@Testament Sturm Brightblade's end... man. That was harsh.

Man when Sturm <SPOILER> that got me good. I had to put the book down for a week. I loooooved Sturm. Hell, if Dragonlance ever got the Lord of the Rings film treatment, I'm still lobbying for Sam Elliot.

@Tinuviel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

When I was in the US I was told that it's apparently better to write a zero dollar tip receipt and just give your server, or whomever, cash. Due to taxes, or somesuch. Is there any truth to that idea?

https://musoapbox.net/topic/1943/real-world-peeves-disgruntlement-and-irks/2108?page=106

I'm in the card payments industry. Kinda went on detail previous page.

Hierarchy should be:

Cash > Credit with 20% tip or less > Credit with 20% or under tip and over 20% is cash > Credit with tip over 20%

The ones that get me are the ones who write a $0 tip receipt with a note that their tip will be donated to Jesus.

"Sucks you're minimum wage, brah, Osteen needs a speedboat."