Posts made by Ghost

@Ganymede said in The Hockey Thread:

I mean, they aren't the Flyers

Oh snap.

Yeah I'm not giving up hope on the players. They play their asses off and I have a lot of respect for them. I also think it was a bad call removing Dave Tippett as coach. The roster is a good roster, and now that their goalie situation is less chaotic they should have some movement. Duclair is solid. OEL is solid. They have some decent talent on the roster.

I think their keys to this season will be their need to adjust to a new coaching situation and whether or not the right decisions are made at key times in terms of roster decisions. All too often the Yotes bump up and down from the minors (to try new options) and lose players to waivers. They've got to be careful with that and not be afraid to give the backup goalie more starting time if the primary (such as Smutty with contract clauses) is in a slump.

HOWEVER, the Coyotes have a definite local problem. They're on the far corner of the Phoenix valley so ticket sales are tough, arena management is tough, lots of ownership rotation issues. If the Coyotes win, more ticket sales will help their financial situation, but you can't find Coyotes-branded mercy anywhere in town aside from mall stores that sell every team's jersies.

I hope they do well, I really do, but I'm somewhat a minority in my support for the team. A looooot of hockey fans in AZ usually only buy tickets when their teams are playing, such as my buddies from Buffalo only going when the Sabres are in town.

This really makes me love the players on the roster more, and feel great for them when theyre doing well, because for the most part theyre all playing in a hockey market that only notices them when they're on fire.

Is this like a Vampire Hunter Bloodlust type setting?

I finished Destiny 2's first raid this weekend...

It was like this for about 20 hours across 3 days...

Then...all of the sudden...

If they could only extract the brain fluid of someone at the point of beating a Destiny raid (for the first time) and turn it into a pill form...depression would be cured.

You have to do the parts in order until you beat it once, so here's the approximate # of tries it took for the maybe 6 different teams I played with across the weekend until finally beating Calus.

• Part 1: Royal Baths (25-30 tries)
• Part 2: Royal Gardens (50-60 tries)
• Part 3: The Games/Obstacle course (10 tries)
• Part 4: Emperor Calus (30-40 tries)

But I did it! GO FUCK YOURSELVES PEOPLE WHO DID IMPORTANT LIFE WORK, HAD SEX, OR IMPROVED YOURSELVES OVER THE WEEKEND.

@Auspice The Coyotes drama is insane.

Gretzky and Moyes owned the Coyotes and tried to rush-sell the Coyotes to move the team to Ontario. So they tried to rush them into bankruptcy, but the NHL RACED to Phoenix to stop it all, because the NHL never agreed to the team's move.

For a while the Coyotes were owned by the NHL, which to date has been the best years of their franchise since the 96-99 roster (because WTF...Tkachuk, Roenick, Mike Gartner, Teppo, Tverdovsky, Khabibulin) and cut deeper into the playoffs than they ever did as a franchise (fmr. Winnipeg Jets).

But since the NHL found an ownership group it's been a mess. Glendale is diverting funds from road maintenance and teacher salaries to keep paying for the arena/team, there's been shady deals between the city of Glendale and ownership, and the Phoenix doesnt have a lot of passion for hockey or the Coyotes.

As a longtime supporter, I'm personally hoping Quebec City, Seattle, or any of these other hopeful cities make a decent bid and my Yotes move to a city/ownership situation that will take care of them. When that happens, I'll definitely be buying new hockey sweaters.

@Ganymede

Okay, okay, you make some really fine points and I will concede to you on the topic of Ovie. Collect your win.

On the topic of the Yotes, I've been avidly following them for years and have friends who have worked inside of the org. It was a mess when Gretzky/Tocchet were coaching, but that's a story for another time.

Az waited far, far too long tangled in Smitty's trade clauses, up to the point of sports psychologist visits. He was amazing in their franchise historic playoff run, but hasn't been the same since his concussion. At the time the decision was made to trade Dubnyk to the Wild, though, he was putting up far better numbers than Smitty.

The Yotes have been in a rebuilding slump and mired with an unstable ownership situation for over a decade. They've been trading players in the last year of their contracts right before the trade cutoff deadline with the assumption that if these playoff teams don't renew their contract they can get the players back. They did this multiple times with Hanzal, Vrbata, etc.

It's just a mess and I hope Domi and their new squad can get some decent work done, but with their arena, financial, and ownership situation in constant disarray they very well may still have problems hanging onto top talent (why play for AZ for X when Dallas offers you Y? Such was the case in a personal fave of mine: Vernon Fiddler).

Yotes are hockey team worth loving and I'm gonna miss Doan, but this back office stuff is just horrid.

Here's a picture of Chad Kroeger from Nickelback cheering on the Detroit Red Wings with Kid Rock.

This is all you need to know about the Detroit Red Wings.

One of my favorite tidbits about the Az Coyotes is Megadeth. In 1999 they basically made "Crush Em" the official Coyotes song for when the Yotes take the ice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhi61rVV90

I was at a lot of the games that they came in to a Megadeth song, which was cool being a metalhead.

Alas, they don't do it anymore despite Crush 'Em being probably the best part of the worst era of Megadeth, and they probably didn't want to have to pay Megadeth to use it per game anymore.

So now, for the most part, Crush 'Em will go down in history as being more of a song Megadeth wrote as some kind of pro-wrestling featured theme song to a Universal Soldier movie starring Van-Damme and Goldberg from WCW/WWE.

That's one of the things I kinda like about Jagr. That guy's gonna play until he's Keith Richards if they'll keep signing him.

Who says hockey isn't diverse?

But you can see, clearly, on the ice that all blood is red and all teeth are white varying shades of white.

So...the Las Vegas Golden Knights....

@SG said in Eliminating social stats:

After reading all this, I really want to mess with FS3 to make argument weapons now. Deciding faction directions and goals would be hilarious.

Donald wields Blather!
Hillary suffers a flesh wound to Ego!
Hillary wields Stick to the program!
Donald Evades!

Like that gun in mystery men that causes people to argue.

Fun fact: there's a cheap RPG called Monsters and Other Childish Things where you create a sheet for a young person and another sheet for their imaginary friend.

When the young person takes physical damage, the imaginary friend takes emotional damage. When the young person takes emotional damage, the imaginary friend takes physical damage, and vice versa.

MaOCT is amazing for making characters like a 7 year old red neck NASCAR fan with an imaginary friend that is a SUPER AMERICAN ARMY TANK COWBOY COP and then they go off to fight monsters in their closet, or things like alien xenomorphs, Freddy Kreuger, or their 2nd grade math teacher who is secretly an alien.

I keep editing this: It's basically like Drop Dead Fred meets WoD

M&M TELENUKE: Telekinesis with the range of perception paired with clairvoyance.

"I can see things happening thousands of miles away and have the ability to lift and throw 1500 tons. My telekinesis requires line of sight, which my clairvoyance provides."

My advice is to train your staff to look for these sorts of loopholes and as Misadv said, state that exploits will be dealt with. Power configs against the spirit of the game should be monitored.

In the above example, you could initiate combat from a park bench in NYC to drop an aircraft carrier onto the Kremlin.

(I didnt catch this one until we were in play. The player sat on a park bench and solved a bank robbery before the rest of the PCs made it to the bank. IIRC he was able to attack multiple targets in a burst.)

@Thenomain said in New Superhero Game Looking for Staff/Feedback:

@Ghost

I’ve been told before that you simply don’t do things like that on superhero games. The system may make it possible, but it breaks the theme of ... well, the entire superhero genre if you use your powers to do things like that.

Wild Talents straight up says “don’t do that”. You can do that. One game (maybe also Wild Talents) creates a system where losing your hero focus means increased negative effects.

I can throw a coffee mug across the coffee table into someone's face if they do this on tabletop night.

But I think if MU* has taught me anything, it's taught me that if you don't outright come out and say DO NOT DO THIS, you're gonna get an app for it and your player will argue it into the ground.

@Runescryer said in New Superhero Game Looking for Staff/Feedback:

@Lithium

Give me an example of how you think the system can be broken. That way, we can work to patch up flaws. No system is perfect and I'd rather be proactive about preventing possible misuse of the game system.

If you're talking about the Affliction rules, I'm working on a resolution for that.

One exploit to keep an eye out for:

Incorporeal + affect corporeal + extreme grappling.

A PL10 character can effectively make a mutant type char who can go Incorporeal where they can only be affected if their attacker has "Affects Incorporeal", then double down on their own "Affects Corporeal".

With a few cleverly added things such as grappling feats, they can effectively go Incorporeal, Grapple, and choke characters out. Any major defense to it requires a lot of pre-planned purchases on their target's behalf.

Suggestion: Characters with Incorporeal powers should set their powers to have limitations on what they can or cannot effect while Incorporeal, rather than a blanket "they cant touch you but you can touch them" schema.

@mietze Oh delegation is fine, I was more referring to the "I've picked the list clean of everything I've wanted to do myself, and everything else you guys can do for yourselves"

If you allow one person to BusyBeaver their way into doing all of the fun stuff alone and leave tablescraps for everyone else, it will happen.

@mietze Man, I remember this time I was on FC and there was a metaplot, it kind of went like this:

1. Metaplot is announced and asks for players to mail requesting involvement.
2. I send mail.
3. 3 days later I get added to a mailing list and it looked (dramatization) like this:

"Hi, this is <insert name of overbearing player character> and I've been asked to coordinate the investigation plot with the players! I want to send out feelers about who wants to involve involve themselves and how, but first let's update everyone on the current status of what's been done so far!"

• MY character has:*
• Done all of the computer investigation
• Arranged to personally handle all of the lab work
• Has gone to the scene of the crime and done all of the intelligence gathering
• Questioned all 5 witnesses
• Arranged 1on1 meetings with all 3 suspects
• Has a bow and arrow that rolls 45 dice and does an auto 300 agg damage and have already pre-rolled 3,000,000 successes to make sure my PC goes first when the inevitable combat happens

...what would YOU like to do?

THIS^^^^* is also a big reason metaplot fails on MUs. Because there are always super eager beavers who want to do all the things, list out everything they want to do without sharing the investigation, and/or try to funnel the metaplot towards their character in a way that doesn't involve sharing.

In fact, I can vaguely remember mails from players saying things akin to: My character doesnt communicate well with other characters. I want to be involved but to be involved I need you to give me things that he can do alone, one on one, with staff STs

Constructive Suggestion: Keep control of how much one PC can do in a time period. I don't care if you have to have signups for X segment of the plot requiring Y number of players. Treat it like a signup for a potluck if need be, but control the likelihood that one player will overrun everyone else's fun.

The difficulty with metaplot is in investment. It's easy to write something you want every character on grid to care about (the writer is invested), but harder to make others care about it.

IMO metaplot works better in settings where the setting itself is metaplot (Battlestar/PostApocalypse) or metaplot in segments (this affects the vampires only, or the Rebel Alliance and Empire only).

I think it's fair to say that not every player is there to RP outside of their preferred bubble. Some just want to sandbox with one player, or RP with a small group of friends, or only with things central to their character. I don't think these players should discourage others from creating metaplot, but it should be noted that when this happens, these players aren't always playing the same game that everyone else is playing; they're technically using the game's server to play something else.

@Arkandel I think this is a very realistic way of looking at it. It does happen. People who arent so skilled in what is considered to be good roleplay aren't sought out as much, and in turn suffer from a lack thereof.

To take it a step further, what is considered to be good RP is subjective, which is why I may be (EXAMPLE) passed up for rp by those who want to write graphic TS, but not by those who enjoy dialogue (which, I feel, is my strength).

I've said it many times, but this is a TEXT-BASED hobby. Writing skill is of baseline importance.

@Lain

I'm kinda picturing one side of this potential civil war having military BDUs with corporate sponsorship patches based on the modern age Plutarch who conscripted you.

"SERGEANT Bob McBob, United States Marine Corps, 2nd Ronald McDonald house Batallion as brought to you by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Wal-Mart, and Johnson and Johnson reporting for duty SIR."

Next life I wanna come back as a kangaroo. Fuck this shit.

I wanna be a kangaroo that hops around, gets in fist fights with koalas, and hooks up with a wallaby to cross-breed a wallaroo because, god damn it, I believe in diversity

@Lain I fucking loved House of Leaves. Big thanks to @Auspice for recommending it.