Posts made by Ghost

Is there a max # options for polls?

@Coin said:

Hell, if I brought any of my monster characters around for BITN I would hope they die in the most spectacular fashion.

Agreed. If this option were available I might be tempted to "give away" old characters/concepts for the GMs to cause trouble with and then eventually have them beheaded by some final girl.

At least I put some love into the concepts, you know? I'm never gonna play them again, so I may as well put them to good use.

@Arkandel Nope, you're not miscommunicating. I was just putting my 2¢ in on the idea.

The reason I am so excited about Mortals-only (and wouldn't be a fan of Monster PCs or former Monster PCs) is because all too often on WoD, players/characters think/write from the point of view of expertise. Even if the vampire has been a vampire a total of a fortnight (high five to myself for fitting fortnight into a sentence today!), they tend to write from the point of view of a character who gets it, or at least has some heavy handle on this strange, paranormal world.

Mortals make for different stories. They make for all of the varied responses of discovery, or how they deal with these discoveries. It's "What would my quasi-fish of a Starbucks barrista do if encountered with a vengeful, fucked up ghost?" It will allow players to make people we might pass on the street or in a club, and apply our real-life models of society, responses, pop culture, and lack of knowledge towards dealing with things that aren't supposed to exist.

Well, when you're a vampire, this is all old fucking news. Having a job, being a barrista, giving a fuck about Arby's changing the flavor of Arby's sauce...all of that is useless, old news to vampires or monster PCs.

This reminds me of the time a company I worked for brought in a guy from the California office to train Windows OS Tech Support guys, but the guy from California only knew Mac computers, so he couldn't train us on what our job focus was...support for windows machines.

...and we still had to finish the training.

@Lotherio Wouldn't that setup take any incoming text that uses the word "pages" and throw it into a spawn window? You'd get pages into spawn window, sure, but you'd also get any pose that was like "...she rips out the pages of the book" into the spawn window as well?

FS3 worked for large combats because the combat system does most of the work in determining who hits, how they hit, and how much damage is done. All people need to do is write a pose for who they're targeting and then roleplay the results. It really does a great job of queueing people to where they need to be in a scene. There's no time spent by the player in compiling their dice pools, either. It's pose, then run the round of combat, and pose.

Very simple and effective for mass combats. IF I ever ran a game I'd want the possibility of large combats, so FS3 would be my go-to.

I think any massive scene that is a mass-combat scene needs smaller, more concise poses. GMs and other players don't have the time to pick through a ton of colorful language, descriptions of how they feel, etc while trying to get the important details from mass combat poses. We did pretty good with this on the BSG-themed games.

• WHAT are you doing?
• WHO are you addressing in dialogue?
• WHAT are you attempting to achieve?

To get that information across, please please please don't provide a two-paragraph pose that starts with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

As for mass-social scenes, there really are no good alternatives other than to break up the social scenes into pockets of activity, use some kind of +place code, or make sure every player has their client coloring their name (and that players are making sure to use the NAME of the person they're addressing in every pose.) During mass-social scenes, almost everyone wants to showcase their character in some fashion.

In terms of horror, I always feel like kids are a low-ball attempt to get a reaction out of your audience, much like everything associated with Human Centipede. I hope to run a few horror stories on BitN, but don't expect me to throw kids into the mix unless it follows the themes of either keeling kids safe or investigating the killing of a younger person (the killing would be off-screen, perhaps in a police folder, but never roleplayed on screen). Kids can be fantastic in horror, though:

• Newt in Aliens
• The People Under the Stairs
• Poltergeist
• Del Toro's Mama

I just feel that when it comes to horror, people sign up to be scared and not scarred. They want the amusement park ride with all of the screams and increased heart rates, but not really ever to feel like absolute shit when the story is over and they have to lay down in bed and think about it.

You should change your name from @faraday to @ralphmacchio, because...

@skew The Hills Have Eyes...in the sewers.

@Arkandel Oh, God, I'm sorry.

DO NOT GOOGLE CHUD FROM WORK

The least gruesome way to explain CHUD is this: You've all heard horror stories about a baby alligator flushed down a toilet, and then in the sewers it becomes an horrific monster that kills people? Well...CHUD is the same story, just replace alligator with human

@Lithium Oh God yes, CHUD babies. It's impossible for people to not have an opinion on CHUDs

• A state hospital with mental patients sees an upsurge in violent activity, and most patients have different stories of something strange bothering them at night.
• "He took her home from the bar and was found dead the next day."
• The haunted stories of the forest from the summer camp seemed fun...until we found Mary Barton's cabin.
• Something whispers to me through the drain in the shower.
• People begin receiving links to YouTube videos of people watching them sleep, filmed inside of the room.
• A local internet blogger's feed shows his descent into madness and suicide, but when you click frame-by-frame...something shows up in the room.
• A popular paranormal TV show hires local experts to be their guides for an overnight in a violently haunted place.
• Bodies have been found in an apartment complex. Their bodies were found half-fused into the wall, with no visible breaks. We thought it was just one apartment building...but it's happening next door.
• "Confess your sins". Someone, something, is coming for sinners, and bodies are being found with communion wafers in their mouths.
• Mortals recreating the events of movies like: The Purge, The Crow, You're Next, or The Strangers.
• A man walked into the diner tonight saying that he has something to show us. No matter how hard we try...we cannot find a way out of the diner.
• " Thousands of snakes surround the cabin, as far as the eye can see. We can hear them. We're running out of food. Jake thinks we should make a run for it..."
• "Something is chasing her. If we can keep her alive until dawn...the curse ends."

Scenes I wanna have, pt2:

• The grid or setting relied upon is destroyed and a migration is needed.
• The status of power is destroyed, rendering the powerful to now sit in the same seats as his/her one time vassals
• Predator becomes the prey
• Waking up married and not knowing what happened.
• Accidentally stumbling into Mafia/Vampire/badguy activities and having to deal/run/talk/fight for your life

I think it's also easier if you and the other player go into it knowing who will win, lose, or if the point is for it to be a bitter stalemate. You don't have to decide on how the win/lose will eventually happen (save this for RP!), but you'll likely avoid any feelings of butthurt if the two players walk into it knowing that eventually playerB will take the bad guy role and eventually lose to playerA

@thebird said:

Lately, I've wanted an IC Nemesis so bad... Not just some NPC, but an actual character on a game. I feel like, sometimes, just because my characters have boobs, means that people can't not (double negative for the win) get along with them. I know that, generally speaking, people don't want to overstep, or whatever, but come on... Makes me miss the days of all the smaller MUSHes I used to play on. I guess since we were more of a tight nit group of players at the time, there was more ooc trust, which led to more IC risk.

So... No specific scene I've wanted, really. Just a series of them.

Also, as an ST, a scene where someone actually responds and catches on to little nuances in plot instead of skim-reading and missing half the shit I planned. I was just getting back into STing after years, and someone ruined it for me again,.kind of. What's the point of RP if you're not going to read? =(

I've done the IC Nemesis thing before and it's great. I think you just need to find a good player and have a liiiiiitttle OOC conversation that goes like this:

"Let's have our characters hate each other and be nemeses for our OOC fun. Deal? Deal. Make sure to tap me on the shoulder if you get uncomfortable."

That's pretty much how it went with me, and then while our characters were being horrible to each other, we were giving each other high-5s over pages.

If I mush again and you see me on? Look me up. I'd be willing to do this.