Posts made by Ghost

@Misadventure said in The Case Against Real PBs:

overwrites the imagination

I loved that.

And I get it. I'm not a "slut shamer" or whatever. I don't even mind TS in theory, but in my experiences a lot of the TS is more linked to "what's your ooc kink" than "what's your character's kink", which is why I liken the concept for a number of players to it as less of a writing thing and more of a personal gratification thing.

But either way, my litmus test is "is it wrong to use a 'real' person's image (ex: Facebook, your RL girlfriend, or someone's mom) as a PB?" and if the answer is yes, then for the same reasons it's wrong to use celebrities, too.

But if it's not wrong then fuckyeah I'm gonna use every one of the cliques uncle's as PBs, right?

I think I've posted about this before, but I've been generating a lot of art lately (Ai and digital) and it made me think of why I'd always prefer that to using actor/model/actress PBs. I thought I'd share.

Real People Puppets
The first thing that has ALWAYS creeped me out about using actor/actress PBs is I'd say over 90% of the MU community uses famous people as PBs, but I'd easily put the % of MUers who partake in TS to be over 70%. This means that they are using a real-person's likeness as a sexual gratification object. It made me wonder what I'd think if I met the person.

"Hey dude, im a huge fan. I use your image to entice others into having cybersex with me, but its okay because its ART" (Airquotes)

At what point is it an unapproved sexualizing of another human being without their permission? If the MU community is the same people who lose their shit playing watchdog for people who are annoying, one would think that not using another human being as a gratification tool would be higher priority. I assume it's no different from Anime: Despite the fact that it sexualizes 10-16 year old girls with fan service and panty shots...."you leave my favorite anime alone!" Anime is largely given a hall-pass on some pretty rank behaviors and I think this behavior tends to be ignored with PBs because "My hobby/story" comes first. Too many people rely on the hobby to find human connection, so like TS=Cybersex, it's just one of those things that talking about would be rocking the boat.

To that, I say...

Rock it.

IT IS A -WRITING- HOBBY
When I started the hobby no one used PBs; they used text description. Granted, I think the use of PBs in the hobby is mostly used like an advertising scheme

"Do you fap to that one girl from that one TV show? Then roleplay with me!"

Or.

"If I use an image of a famous person, then I dont have to be so creative about describing how they look, nor do I have to properly make an actual character. I'll just emulate Rovert Downey Jr"

...which misses the whole point of what the hobby was supposed to be. The amount of this before I ultimately quit the hobby was crazy, and from what I hear it hasn't changed.

Own your content
This is what got me, too. Sure, with your own art (or even Ai) you can actually OWN the material, whereas a good number of PBs used are probably at risk for "cease and desist" as in most cases the photographer or the PBpuppet actually owns that image and how it is used.

Now, this last part is going to sound snide, but it's just me trying to speak plainly and logically:

For the people who have put 10, 20, 30 years into the hobby, and if you want to feel as if you accomplished something other than a revolving cast of closed games and constant slashfic, you really should be attempting to make your own organic content. 30 years of "I sock puppeteered Daniel Craig in over 200 TS scenes" where you used the person's physical likeness and mannerisms isn't actually creating anything, even if you say Daniel Craig is named Steve and is a vampire. The basic building blocks of everything done in that scenario isn't creation; it is emulation, and if the hobby were truly about writing and not about PBs, TS, and constant relationship and coffee scenes there would be more thematic risks, more focus on prose and original concepts, and more games with original themes.

Instead the "bee's knees" is Margot Robbie PB as Emma Frost TSing a Tyler Hoechin PB as Superman on a superhero game where every city and organization (Metropolis, The Green Lanterns, the Xavier Academy) are other people's creations.

Putting it all together in my head, I now see why I didn't like PBs to begin with, and it's not me being some old man shaking a cane at those darned kids.

@reimesu Second-in-command the Bake-Off. It's so relaxing and Noel is my spirit animal

Batch of actually good TV show recommendations:

Crime

• The Killing
• Three Pines
• True Detective

Horror/Weird

• "From" (like a...silent hill meets 30 days of night)
• Twin Peaks
• Fall of the House of Usher (Flanagan)
• Midnight Mass (and really anything by Mike Flanagan)
• Channel Zero
• Slasher
• The Silent Sea
• The Last of Us (omg nick offerman... )
• The Strain
• Black Summer

SciFi

• Battlestar Galactica(04)
• Silo
• Monarch
• For All Mankind
• Ark (2023)
• Invasion (2021)
• Quantum Leap (2022)

Reality that isn't horrible

• The Circle (GO SHOOBY)
• Too Hot to Handle
• Squid Game Reality Show
• The Physical 100
• The Devil's Plan

Comedy

• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Future Man
• This Fool

Animated (not necessarily anime)

• Invincible
• Arcane (league of legends)
• Aggretsuko
• Food Wars
• Castlevania

Try something new:

• AEW pro wrestling (TNT/TBS)
• Iron Chef

My GM approach:

I feel that sometimes GMs get caught in the trap of writing some puzzle or riddle that feels obvious to them, but then in roleplay it's like you're in a game of 30 questions but aren't sure if the wrong answer is gonna get your PC killed:

"Is it...a chair?"
"No, guys, the riddle clearly says 'I wait by the eastern wing of the sky in june'..."

My method:

1. Decide the kind of investigation (murder, robbery, etc)
2. Decide what really happened. (The cook killed the maid!)
3. Get an idea of 2-3 ways it could be solved, leave some evidence, and then let the players show you how they intend to solve it.

If they head towards one of the 2-3 ways you were prepared for? Great. If not...wing it and have fun with it.

Edit. Other things.

• I will let them fail, but mostly if they try to metagame (see next point) through it or ignore the investigation for other things.
• I will require players to actually roll relevant dice to receive evidence/information no matter how much PlayerA tries to convince me how it could be researched over the internet with no experience in real life.

I think the main point is to give the players a scenario to run through where they're doing stuff. So you have to let them do stuff to resolve it, and railroading never makes players feel like they're accomplishing anything. But, if they're successful I usually end the investigation with someone stolen from other pieces of fiction, like a car chase or a hostage situation.

@Devrex yeah you can filter by game system and by time, so I have to set my desired times and do the systems I want one by one to make sure I'm not getting a hundred dnd games. No offense to people who love dnd but I'm now in my early 40s and I don't know how many more "_________ cleric" or "_______ rogue" I have left in me.

I think 15-20 is fine. I rationalize this by saying "I would be willing to buy dinner for my GM" so I set the bar at how much I'd be willing to pay for dinner.

@Devrex Yeah, there is a downside to SPG. About 90% of the games are D&D and there's no "exclude this game system from search" option, so there's some "go fish" involved.

The other issue with SPG is some of these people are asking $25-$35 per session on weekly games, and most of the people doing this are the ones trying to turn being a GM into a full time job. So one game may net some GM 500/month. Shit, I saw one this week where a guy was asking $75/session per player. There's also something different with the GMs who are trying to supplement an entire income from SPG; the ones I've been in contact with tend to be really militant about filling those player slots and booting people for being absent because it's more about the income and less about the game.

Regardless, I don't think I'd ever charge more than $15/session, but it is a good platform for finding GMs who are actually looking to produce a quality game experience, because if they're shit GMs their players will drop. There's something I like about the arrangement where I'm a paying customer and if they're flaky and keep canceling games I'm not risking a friendship by quitting.

@ZombieGenesis Right on. I'm always in the market for a good Supers system, because supers games are either way too "free form rpg" (BESM) for my tastes or are eye-meltingly crunchy (Champions). I haven't gone through the book post-beta, but I'm hoping they put in a solution for the challenge level system I found to be somewhat confusing.

@ZombieGenesis I actually looked up startplayinggames and have had pretty good success finding inexpensive GMs of quality games so far, and might throw my hat into running games for a little side cash.

My docket right now consists of V5 Vampire, Aliens, Walking Dead, Secret World (when I get it), and the new marvel rpg. I was also in on the kickstarter for Alchemy and that looks like it'll be a super sweet vtt for running streamed games.

@reimesu TTRPG has been good to me. More consistent, less drama, and my creativity isn't restricted by the social side-game. I'm fixing to run some v5 here soon.

@hobos said in Observation:

I'd feel less of a hypocrite if there was less attitude of "we're better than other people". The abolishing of that attitude is more what I was trying to accomplish, I suppose, rather than encouraging an environment of verbal fisticuffs.

And Macha said it's not about being "better", but "less vitriolic"... only, that kind of means the same thing, to me, and it doesn't align with the acts I've witnessed.

As Hella pointed out, the quiet is more due to people fearing that their happiness will be disrupted anyway if they try to talk about anything relevant. I'd love if Hella didn't feel that way because I would genuinely treasure an environment where her and people like her felt free to express themselves.

Unfortunately yeah it seems pretty unsolvable.

I would have also loved if back when people were jumping on someone with unfounded accusations... those people would've listened to anyone else who was trying to be a voice of reason and fairness.

But human nature is a pretty unsolvable conundrum, too.

I can't really make a post without taking a stab at a solution though, so how about... we try not to care if anyone tracks us down, and let our current behavior stand for itself if anyone does figure us out, because all that will do is let us know who our friends are... and we try to legitimately have better current behavior -- including being as actually fair as our theoretical code demands, when push come to shove?

LOL OMG I'm sorry I'm legitimately laughing RL at the degree of SWERRVVVVVE I detected in that post. Like: sweeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrve*dimPleWinkAtCamera seeWutIDudDatDere wiiiiink.

Poetic. I'll give it a 6.5.

heh I don't really even give a fuck anymore about putting effort into using nicer words to describe some of the people I've met in this club. I have met some of the strangest and most desperately full of shit people in my life in this hobby, and that's saying something since I've been at music industry parties and concert after-party shit. God it's so dumb. the amount that people care about any of this drama is just dumb. LOL the people in the hobby that are constantly high-browing like "they're the problem, not me", when you think about it, are less relevant in life's mysterious journey than an attempted musical reunion of Robert Palmer's weird clone dancers, but only without Robert Palmer. THAT is the level of relevancy this drama has in actual global terms. lol. The amount of "shit don't stink" around 9/10ths of the people who think their opinion "holds weight because I'm popular" is hilarious. What? Coolest kid in the fuckin' Power Rangers club at Walt Whitman High? That's you. You're the coolest person. -There-. I swear to you that the gates of Valhalla are -enthralled- with your life's story and importance because you think you're the "social ace" out of a society of people who "fight with each other over who's most important" in a hobby consisting of *roleplaying as Paul Fuckin Walker as 'sexy werewolf stud part 6' on a server with like...10 people on it.

I shouldn't type high. This is hilarious and just...dumb.
So dumb.
lol so dumb.
I gotta send this lol so...oh my god. so...so...sodumb.

Sorry gotta edit. I'm dyin' here. @Derp yall about to get like 30 "PROVE YOURSELF TO THE MORAL RIGHT THAT YOU'RE NOT A CORRUPT FUCKWIT, SLAAAAAY GHOST TO SATISFY OUR NEED FOR TRIBUTE."MESSAGES. Fuckin hilarious. Slay my "identity" and ban or whatever if you want or don't. Y'all know everyone's going to be watching to see if a new account like "NotGhost" shows up and you swept me back in under the curtain, anyway. lol jesus I am not good enough a writer to properly describe the level of 'this is dumb' I mean to convey...

@Macha said in Observation:

@Warma-Sheen Well, when you consider a LOT of the MU-threads of the title before, was a lot of negative talk about things, people playing there or here, and so on?

To be honest, if I /am/ playing somewhere, I'm not likely to talk about it. For reasons I would feel are obvious.

I'm playing all kinds of places right now that people don't want me to be at.

Or am I? idk. I'm currently into PBs with dark haired guys with stubble. Figure it out.

All jokes aside I 100% support you playing under the radar. Everyone should. It gives abusive personalities less of an attack surface.

@Warma-Sheen said in Observation:

abandonment

Was it really abandoned, though? really abandoned? <hand-wobble>

@hobos said in Observation:

People are going to act like people, pretty much all the time, I guess. But I'm probably weird because I almost prefer being reamed every time I open my virtual mouth on any issue, to the feeling that I am participating in selfish hypocrisy by posting here.

A bit to unpack, here. So you're saying that you prefer to be verbally accosted every time you open your mouth to participating in a "selfish hypocrisy" that has been mostly tame and quiet? I gotta say, you sound 100% purely dedicated to an environment filled with positivity and "normal human-type communicative behavior" and it shows!

Bizarre statement altogether, imo. It's kind of a "Scottie Pippen Fade Shot I'm not saying something factual but saying something potentially provocative but idk lol j/k grr i really mean this but not sure what this means" statement. It's not really helpful.

I think that if you look at it from a certain perspective, the rift was probably the most directly honest thing to happen in the hobby in probably 20 years.

Yanno, it's been a while.

I just wanted to point out and say how much I appreciate how civil this forum has become, and how it's become a lot less stressful to check in and see what's going on over here.

If there ever comes a time when someone is considering shutting the place down or turning over the DB to other people, hit me up.

@ZombieGenesis duh I should have known it was Renegade, with how much of a v5 fanboy I am

@ZombieGenesis said in Unmakeable Games:

@Ghost I ran a M&M game a very long time ago. It might have even been first edition. Maybe 2nd. It did okay but did run out of steam.

I do agree that ease into entry is very much a big thing. It's why I've ultimately given up on trying to use any sort of RPG system on a game unless it's FS3 or a basic traits system. If there was a fleshed out CoD/WoD plugin for Ares maybe that would be included.

RE: GI Joe, I actually do think you could do that fairly well with FS3.

GI Joe, I can't remember, is that modiphius or free league? Those systems aren't terribly complicated. Heck, I would totally play the TTRPG.

@ZombieGenesis

For starters, I will disagree that people in the MU community are mainly interested in Urban Fantasy and Super Heroes. I think for many these games have revolving tropes and character concepts they revisit over and over and over again. Most hero MU players you'll read say things like "I'm a psylocke, emma, kitty, etc" and have close ties to their "relationship" roleplay partners oocly who have, on multiple occasions, romanced their characters with Booster Gold, Hawkman, whatever.

Fact is that SH games are popular because of two reasons:

• Comics are a never-ending spank bank a lot of us have had since our youth
• The system of popular successful most SH games is...typing. There's little to learn.

Point in case, IIRC was it you @ZombieGenesis or someone else who tried Mutants and Masterminds as a system and it didn't last long? I imagine any super game that used any of the crunchy systems like FASERIP or Champions would fall flat so long as a "write out your sheet" SH MU with somewhat passable staff existed.

WoD/CofD are somewhat similar. There's a lot of Anita Blake in those games and in my experience I've encountered 3 kinds of players on Urban Fantasy games:

• Person who hoards xp and uses it as a justification for everything
• Person who gives zero shits about the system outside of cgen, doesn't go to events, and wants to have in-theme TS in peace
• Person who actually likes the system and wants to use it, but has to find people who also will use the system.

Some players are just so used to WoD/CofD that the learning curve is over and they're familiar with it.

SO, ONTO THE TOPIC...

I think all unmakeable games fall into association with these concepts.

I think that people would absolutely play in the THEME of Shadowrun, CpunkRed, Eclipse Phase, Traveler, or any other crunchy system so long as the crunchy system isn't something they have to learn. I will go so far as to say that most MUers are NOT TTRPG players and there is such an aversion to dice deciding anything contrary to what they want for the dreaded my story that introducing a system and ACTUALLY USING IT is a fool's errand.

Now, the only caveat I have for this is Firan/Arx, because there were automated wealth/powerbuilding systems that people could metagame on the side. The systems were a little more complex, but there were clear, established ways to get up and over most players through ooc networking, asking people to do wealth system stuff that (like a pyramid org) came back to build your own character, and as I understand it...in the end led to power-locked, unbeatable factions who churned this to the point of no return.

So, tl;dr?

Cool setting, less dice. Otherwise it's dubious at best.

@ZombieGenesis All good points.

Now I knooooooow I'm a fucking broken record about the whole "it can be a MU or a TTRPG but cant be both"...but I think you're like me, ZG, in the sense that you're primarily a TTRPG player that leans more towards playing the MUs like a bunch of people playing the system/setting from the TTRPG. I like game systems. I like the classic feel of dice and I like resolutions being decided by dice rather than freeform/argument.

If you can code it? Go for it...but have you also considered maybe running games through https://startplaying.games/ ?

You could charge for VTT session games and run a roleplay server on discord, so you'd get the best of both worlds.

@ZombieGenesis I know there are some people that don't want to do FS3, but honestly I think it's the best system altogether for the MU crowd. Here's why:

• You could take the FUCKOFF HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME required to code in anything from Cortex to Modiphius 2d20, which would probably feel like progress, but in my experience a lot of players don't give a fuck about dice because they never consent to much of anything, don't like their characters dying, create a new post every 4 months about how "social dice enable rape rp", and none of the system stuff is required for the revolving door of "in-character(kind of?) romance roleplay" that seems to be the target of most players on most games
• THEN once you've coded this new system, you become subject to people finding vulnerabilities in your code (that they exploit) or you wind up with people min-maxing and hacking the system. As a staffer you will spend a lot of time either fielding issues with people breaking the game with their unbeatable dice combinations, leading in players from the previous bullet point having issues with the min-maxers and "dice intimidators"
• Both of the prior two bullet points will result in people getting upset with speed of character approval or "complaints" about staffers either giving favoritism to some players by the system where others have their character's denied due to a ruling on how the +sheets are run, resulting in the ever-exhausting "but if you don't approve this my character is unplaaaayable and I'll be incapable of playing anything else because my spirit will be crushed." Boom. Your game becomes a topic on the ever-progressive and inclusive chat board run by nice people who wield bullying in the name of riiiiighteeeousnessss and you've just spent 1 year coding for a game that's going to be cooked and abandoned in...5-6 months?

Anyway, I don't mean to be negative, but now that I really think about it, I don't think coding a dice system is worth your (or anyone's) time in this hobby, anymore. The average shelf life of any given game is less than a year/year&Half. Why spend an entire weekend in the kitchen preparing a gourmet meal for a bunch of people who will complain about it or not even notice it? Then, in the pure spirit of so much online roleplay, it will come down to "sure, but can I use it to write fuck scenes?"

Just use an existing code base, add your theme, and spin up a wiki. Being realistic about "Effort-to-Output" will keep you Sane. Ares provides that framework in a way that'll work until it doesn't.

@ZombieGenesis IMO WoD/CofD have endured in the MU population simply because there are coded systems that are reusable. It is/was easy to reuse/rebuild/repeat dozens of times over. It might actually be worthwhile to the playebase to introduce some new blood in terms of gaming systems.

Having said that, also keep in mind the amount of people who don't want dice resolutions and are mostly going to utilize the space for "relationship roleplay", so it might not be worth the time and effort to encode an entirely new system.