Posts made by Ghost

@Admiral said in The 100: The Mush:

Staff is right and you are wrong. That seems to be what Seraphim73 is trying to relate. Whatever problems you had either weren't problems, or aren't problems anymore.

Couple that with Seraphim73's character being the star of the game and you've got a recipe for literally every single game run by a married couple ever.

Right. The main complaints I'm hearing from my friends who have left the game, or former players of this couple's previous endeavor, is that the game is awfully railroady, cliquish, and that the main IC clique is so embroiled with their own enjoyment of the game (as led by staff PC), that complaints get an "I don't know what you're talking about" response, or that the issues people are having with the game are non-issues and are explained by staff as not being issues, which is what we are witnessing in this thread.

I raise you a cybernetic Morgan Freeman making devil horns with King Diamond. #SoEffingMetal

@surreality said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

I was there around... '97 I think?

I was a hopeless clueless newbie and highly dumb. I was Mayor Mike, the six-armed stripper chick that ended up elected when the guy who was always mayor didn't feel like doing it for a term and it was open. I promptly ended up having to leave the game due to RL (my grandmother, who raised me, was dying ) but not before the character got married to someone whose street name she knew -- but not his real name.

She did not realize his name was Edgar Caine, and that she was now...

...Michael Caine.

Sometimes I love this hobby for the accidental hilarious weirdness.

Shouldve had a baby named Myko.

Myko Caine.

My cocaine.

#JOKES

From an advertising perspective, what I'm really curious about this game (aside from the earlier question about Grey-Grounder staff romance) is this:

1. There are two factions. Are there any non-staff PCs in leadership positions who have the freedom to direct their faction as they see fit, or for both factions, are the factions run by staff NPCs/staff PCs, and these faction heads give direction to the PCs?
2. Have any non-staff PCs been granted the freedom/responsibility to be the inter-faction liaison to perform diplomacy as the player sees fit?
3. For players who feel they are outside of the clique (and perhaps some who are), what is the response like to +jobs or ideas that direct plot, ot tiny plot, in a direction that the non-staff player sees fit?

I think ultimately, the question is, is this a game where the non-staff PCs decide the direction of the game, or is this game a conconcted story idea by staff that will require close monitoring and staff-PC plot control to avoid derivation?

I said staff being central to plot and doing the diplomatic work. Not staff disseminating roleplay. Keep playing

@Arkandel So long as people remember that staff-PCs being central to plots and doing the diplomatic work to disseminate roleplay is accidental

What I really wanna know is: Have Grey and a staff-alt Grounder hooked up yet for the inevitable "romance across political line" thing?

Somehow this thread is reminding me of a psych study I read about, where a group of non-criminal civilians was split up into the roles of prisoner and prison guard. The study had to be stopped early because the prison guard roleplayers started to get physical with the prisoners.

I imagine on a game where the common trope for all characters being "criminal", whether it be falsely accused or not, would also naturally gravitate towards the edgy, brooding, quasi-80s punk bully loner without a cause tropes. For some reason I'm not entirely surprised to see this complaint about the game, because written into the assumed genre, even for the players who have never seen the tv show, would have to assume a degree of antisocial behavior, if even it is brooding due to being falsely accused. Then, add in the teenage trope, which on any given MU always seems to gravitate towards social bullying, underage sex, and drama-mongering.

People play a facsimile of what they identify these tropes with. Being that the grand majority of us are mistreated nerds who all sought private, non-physical-contact means of social roleplay, I wouldn't doubt we've got a whole gaggle of formerly bullied outcast types and players who feel that urge to rekindle those younger, more teenage freedoms.

I'm not a player on this game, I think that's pretty clear, but I wouldnt doubt there to be a large number of prison guards in a prison guard clique (and an IC/ooc clique) on a game with a Delinquents faction.

Are we really surprised about this? Truly?

I think the genre of the game applies, too. In Game of Thrones, being the victim of a villain or facing justice for being one, usually isn't a pretty sight. Whereas Darth Vader's TIE fighter can get beaned and float off into space "CURSE YOU, LUKE SKYWALKERRRRrrrr...."

How this could be implemented highly revolves around the IC stakes of the game. WoD, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc would require a lot more creativity to determine what kinds of defeat don't equate to death, but if you look closely these genres DO have villains that are defeated, evolve, return, etc.

I really do think that there is a "if you show me yours, I will show you mine" factor when it comes to two players putting their characters at risk in this hobby. No one wants to be the only one risking their character. We want other brave souls to make the charge with and against us...but the last thing we want is to be the only, stupid character ever getting PKd because we were the only ones foolish enough to consent.

One thing that has been a problem with me (du temps en temps), is that people will page me and ask "why are you ruining your character?" when I purposefully allowed characters to fail, or be slandered, or be humiliated. The answer? It's all part of the show, but the sheer number of times that I have been asked that has led me to feel like there may be a very large many in this hobby that don't play to roleplay failure, they play to be awesome, and that doesnt bode well for faction based settings in whole numbers want to avoid failure altogether.

I think we've been here before @faraday and the conversation (last time) segued into whether or not people are the main character of their own story.

I apologize if I stirred up a storm, I'm just promoting defeat as being healthy ya knows? I often work defeat/back on horse into when my tabletop players lose.

@silentsophia said in Tips on Güd TS:

Honestly, the big thing that pisses me off about someone seeking TS is if they ignore 'potential competition'.

This kind of baffles me when it happens. I try to roleplay through everything. If some male character wants to try to muscle in on my character's girl? I say go right ahead. Roleplay through it. I've had characters cheat on my character with zero OOC drama on my end. But! I've been the male character in a scene getting ICly flirted with by more than one girl at a time and have watched the two female characters outright ignore each other, and I have to admit, that is definitely one of my red flags for both players when that happens. It tells me that there is a chance that both players aren't separating IC from OOC emotion and that I need to pay close attention.

Note, @Fantom per my villain-based policy idea post, I have decided to pony up and will be aiming to make a villain character on Rogue, one to give protagonist characters a force to bump heads against.

@Arkandel That is, actually, one of my pet peeves with MUing. Having to sift through or identify the players that are there to play the story versus the ones that are there for WoD-themed(for example) kink only, makes it hard to function and puts so many people on KinkRPer alert. I've seen characters get semi-blacklisted before even RPing due to theories that per their wiki page that's all they're there for, which sometimes turns out to not be the case

@lordbelh said in Tips on Güd TS:

@Arkandel I have to admit I just hate the you, and slap that on to a TS scene and it will make me run for the hills.

Agreed, I respectfully agree to disagree with @Arkandel on this one.

YOU always reads to me like JEFF, THE GUY AT THE KEYBOARD and not NAILS, THE POST APOCALYPTIC ROAD WARRIOR. There's something about the idea that the other player is proxying my character as an extension of who I am on an OOC level that takes any shred of TS or romantic rp and turns it into "Us, the OOC people, make-prentending our bathing suit regions touch". It makes me run for the hills because the last thing I need in life, or on my conscience, or on my karma, is that I'm involved in some kind of RL situation. No. It is not ME, it is HIM, my character, and if the other person refers to him as YOU, then it's all the more likely that the other person views their character as HERSELF, OOCLY, at least on some level.

At that point...something very different than a rp scene is taking place. It gives me the willies and I want nunovit.

@lordbelh said in Tips on Güd TS:

I'm the kind of RPer who really doesn't talk to people all that much OOC about what I want from my scenes, or my relationships, or the direction I'm looking to take my character in. My general philosophy is what happens, happens, and part of the fun is the mystery of it.

Amen on this.

Aside from generally figuring out comfort levels, I don't really like to talk about it either. Just like someone putting YOU instead of <charname> in poses, the concept of bartering into another player's ooc fetishes or wants just seems too strangely personal to me. It makes me feel like the eye has been taken off of the ball; that it isn't about roleplaying the character, but about the players, and in that some romantic scene ultimately becomes some kind of RL cybersex situation. I'm that guy that doesn't want to be some online proxy boyfriend to another player, so the more it is about the characters, the less it is about some vaguely personal ooc connection, which never ever ever ends well.

It definitely is a tenuous balance isn't it? I've seen the IC stalemate at its worst from two different poles on SerenityMush. There was a "Space Pirate" faction that openly had the best weapons, armor, and highly xp-dumped chars, to the point that no one ever really challenged them unless they were also from some kind of UberOrg with questionably easy access to the best weapons and equipment. Then, at some point, Jade and Frost had a showdown, which on an OOC level was the equivalent of racing for pink stripes. Both players consented to PK and IIRC it was a 2-3 hour fight scene that ended with a really dramatic, really Tolkein-long death moment for Jade, who lost.

I'm not a fan of PK-lust, because all too often it becomes a bullying system for god-level characters, and their players, to consolidate power (COUGH REACH COUGH). But I am a firm believer that, like the Walking Dead, if players have to arrange to be defeated or their characters die, then the suspension of disbelief breaks, the fourth wall crumbles, and the game is no longer about the characters and story, but about the players.

So IMO, it doesn't have to mean death, but I think it is very important to have policies or systems in place, as well as mature rpers, so that someones wings can get clipped or tickets can be punched from time to time. Not necessarily death, but at the least, a Player vs. Player situation where someone is going to lose, and the rp AND dice are going to help decide it.

I am such a whore for genre. So whenever I run a tabletop game IRL (using Star Wars as an example), I try to make my protagonists feel Star Warsy. So, for example, Star Wars has a small range of antagonist tropes:

• Throwaway redshirt bad guys (queue Wilhelm scream!)
• Mid-boss thugs that die over the course of a trilogy (queue Grievous, the Fetts, Jabba the HUTT, Darth Maul)
• Power players that are defended by a gauntlet of either of the above, or defended by political power/intrigue (Dooku, Palpatine, Thrawn, Vader). These guys are the major boss fights who don't often risk themselves to get the job done. They have mid-bosses who can Wilhelm scream
• Villains who are intetended to have turncoat/double agent storylines, who may or may not join the protagonist pool (Ventress, Former Sith, etc)

So, in my head, the thing to remember is that DEFEAT doesn't equal char death, but it does equal defeat that your protagonist players can celebrate, which means (rough math here) for every 25+ redshirts defeated, eventually a midboss gets killed/captured, and after doing that enough a good assault on a big boss makes sense. People love a good campaign, right?

And let's not stop at the Empire, for example. Antagonist/Villain could also be applied, as needed to Rebellion type characters because really, the Empire bad guys, they're just striving for ORDER right?

Anyway, just still spit balling ideas, but my overall point is still "how do people who run games FAIRLY (and by fairly, I mean both realistically via story and fair to each warring faction) create an environment of warfare/competition and incentivize players to roleplay risk, without requiring it be some unrealistic Mary Sue waltz through a nuclear explosion with no ICC?"

If players aren't willing to pony up on the death/capture/defeat, then the STs have to put the weight of this on NPCs, but the problem is that if your PCs are running the show (being mid-bosses and big bosses) and if neither side can ever score a victory against a PC, then the faction-based genre of MU fails.

... that's us.

I've probably said this a dozen times, a dozen ways on different threads, but I think the ultimate killer of faction based games is the "never-ending stalemate" factor. Protagonist players don't want to lose their chars to PC death. Antagonist players don't want to lose their chars to PC death. It becomes two opposing forces circling each other and...nothing really changes unless staff railroads something.

So I guess the thought behind this idea is to find creative ways to get players to loosen their death grip on their characters, provide some hard-earned IC victories, and suspend the disbelief that the dual tommy-gun and katana wielding villain/hero survived another nuclear detonation, got away, and the player base will inevitably groan going into next time...knowing that there's only a 1% chance they'll be allowed to defeat the bad guy.