Best posts made by Grayson

Two friends gone, in the space of a few weeks. Neither one of them was much older than me.

This year's started out brutal.

Another WC person! Hi!

@redjellybean Also, if you find yourself in a forced dungeon/boss, people get a bonus if someone hasn't done it before. It makes everyone more tolerant of a wipe or three.

I'm with Packrat. It's just weird being told that a place half an hour up the road, big enough to contain a city and several towns, a place I visit fairly regularly, is a mystical location existing in a dimension that's not quite earth. There are a million people living in the Derbyshire that does exist in modern Earth (present day), and it really is in a realm of its own - just not quite in that sense. It's like calling your game Kentucky and it having nothing to do with fried chicken.

There are parts of Derbyshire (England) where the idea of a mystical location could absolutely hold true - some bits of the Derbyshire Pennines (big hills) are absolutely stunning and it's easy to believe that if you walked into one of the caves you could walk out somewhere completely different - but most of Derbyshire's a bit boring unless you really enjoy walking, caving and trains.

tl;dr Anyone from the UK was going 'huh?'

It's nowhere near as bad as it could have been. At least one of the rose windows - possibly two - is intact. The towers are still up, and so is most of the stonework. Where there's a will to do it, Notre Dame can be restored. The spire was a reproduction, as was a chunk of the roof, and the important statues on the roof got taken down a few days ago as part of the restoration works.

York Minster went through a similar process when I was younger, and now there are thriving stonemasonry and stained glass workshops in York, and the fire is just another part of the building's history. Notre Dame will live on.

And, of course, the most important question: Will there be playable Mandalorians?

I live within 50 miles of this street:

Cis female here, somewhere between bi and asexual. I mostly play men (two reasons - first, I don't understand most women, and second, I do not and never did want the sort of attention that men frequently give women whether we want it or not, I get enough of that without asking, I can think of no earthly reason to want to fill my pretendy funtime with that too). Most of the men I've played have not been straight. Most of the women I've played haven't been straight either, but they tend towards the asexual, mostly because I still don't want to have to deal with that shit. I usually FtB, though, so not many worries there, and I do at least try to do my research.

What I have learned to run away from are the incredibly subby gay-man-played-by-a-woman types, the ones who just want to lie there and pant while you put all the effort in. If I wanted to wank into a dishrag it'd probably be a sight more erotic than repeats of 'X moans as you Y'.

Trouble over my characters' sexualities? Not often, partly due to the archetypes my characters tend to be based on. Trying to seduce the evil overlord doesn't usually go too well for the seducee when he's just not interested, for instance, but he's going to wring as much advantage out of the idiot's compromising position as humanly possible. It's not as though he doesn't advertise exactly what he is - but there's always someone who doesn't read the warning labels, signs, notices, announcements and .bulletins, or thinks they just won't apply to them.

@nyctophiliac Intelligence doesn't mean critical thinking, common sense or anything else like that. I've seen any number of ludicrously intelligent people who hadn't the wit to come in out of the rain.

I recycle names and archetypes, and I do it a lot with several base archetypes. But. They're reworked to fit the setting, what's needed and which aspects of the personality I want to play up this time; the Dresdenverse half-demon is all about knowledge and bargains and temptations where the Arxian lowlife is about survival in a harsh world - and if a Silver Fang Theurge and a Shadow Lord Philodox are identical, or identical to anything Dresdenverse or Arx, then I'm flat-out doing it wrong. Sure, they may share a name and a rough personality/physical archetype, but they're different characters.

I actually quite like seeing a) how I can make this character fit in this game, and b) what happens to them this time around with those changes. If nothing else, while I'm playing 'em a new concept might spark. It's how I got the archetypes I run now, after all.

Edited to add: One thing I don't do is port a character unless the second game is a direct, acknowledged descendant of the first.

@Rinel Speaking as someone who got a diagnosis for a different-but-related condition? I was fine that afternoon, but then it usually takes time for me to have these things sink on. It was the next day that it hit me, and it hit like a ton of bricks. Had to take a day off work, and everything.

Hell, there are different pools of players in the same damn genres. I played on several oWoD games, and yet looking through the various playlists here there are a lot of people I was never on the same game as.

@silverfox I can get traction on my brainweasels by pointing out that it's an emergency. Emergencies suspend the normal rules, and you do what you have to to get the job done. It may not feel like one when you're sitting at a desk, months into it - but it is still an emergency, and emergency rules apply. You do what you have to in order to get the job done as best you can.

Good luck.

If the information available had clearly stated exactly what was going on here, you'd probably have had a different reaction. As it was, there was absolutely nothing in the ad (or, apparently, the wiki) that said this wasn't a reflection of the Derbyshire some of us know and, er, know. If we have to explicitly ask to find out that the setting is nothing like our Derbyshire, something's gone wrong.

In exactly the same way, calling a game New York and talking a lot about a place where the monsters who protect reality live in a dark fantasy super-hero tale is going to leave a certain impression in people's minds, and having it then turn out to be a one cow town in the middle of the grain belt is going to be a sharp left turn from the setting that most people would be mentally geared up for.

While your Derbyshire might well be a really cool concept, this feels a bit like a bait-and-switch to those of us who a) know the modern Earth (present day) version and b) are a bit fed up with American Stock Setting #23561.

It's fine to call it Derbyshire, absolutely fine. I've visted Washington and Boston (Lincolnshire is a lot more boring than Derbyshire, I promise), and I visit Birmingham regularly. We know that places can have the same name. What's less fine is having so little detail available on your setting that we can't tell which Derbyshire you're on about.

It's not like a shire with a million people and a city in should really be mistaken for a former estate with attached village.

@JinShei Tom Lehrer. Autocorrect is not your friend.

@Ominous Someone's character starts doing something stupid - getting in a high-Rage werewolf's face on full moon about eating venison, while wearing a meat suit, or something - I hit +warn <whoever>. It gives people the chance to think twice about whether they actually, really want to keep doing that, because they've just been told that there will be consequences.

Sometimes, they'll back down. Sometimes, they'll ask for clarification. Sometimes they'll keep doing it, and when my character walks away having administered (or occasionally taken) a beating I can say 'Well, I warned you'. Either way, I found it solved a lot of problems.

@ninjakitten The SO did indeed get the job. And on the first day, was greeted by someone else who'd heard the quote from the hiring manager.

@Auspice said in Fantasy Avatar Generator:

is there any other way for Norwood to look?

Horrified?

She does, it's true. Amazing portraits.

I tend to play things I think I understand or can reasonably extrapolate. I understand or can reasonably extrapolate the experiences of white men and white women in the UK across many time periods, sexualities, etc. I can reasonably extrapolate on a more narrow basis for a few other backgrounds and cultures, too, either because I have enough data points, or because no-one who isn't an expert has enough data points to say I'm too far off base.

I don't have enough data points to extrapolate for a not-white character of US descent in the modern era. I just don't. There's a whole lived experience I don't have, and if I have no starting point I won't learn anything in the process. I barely have enough data points for a white character of US descent, never mind a non-white one.

MMOs, though? I've developed a habit of playing darker-skinned characters in the last year or so. Because fuck it, why not.