Posts made by Grayson

Boil kettle. Open pack of fresh pasta tortellini from fridge (the stuff often keeps for a month or more, and it's not hugely expensive). Add stock cube/pot/whatever to bowl. Add boiling water. Stir until stock. Add pasta. Ignore for a bit. Eat.

It ends up like an Italian sort of won ton soup, you can pick the type of stock and what stuffing you want in the tortellini, and it's filling. I've got a plastic container with sealing lid and steam hole that'll fit a whole pack of pasta, so I just have to add boiling water, stir, add pasta, and wander off with it.

@Auspice I've shared a character with a friend. It was entertaining, especially when we were both logged in at once, using 'think' to communicate with each other IC and switching external control back and forth as the situation required. We'd deliberately set it up as two souls in one body, and both gotten approval as a joint app.

It was an absolute hoot.

I play Raymesin, partly because they wouldn't let me be Grayson Grayson.

Something to do with the code might object...

@Ominous Yeah, it's a right-here-and-now thing.

@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.

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

I'd suggest that most Garou don't treat kinfolk like baby farms who don't count.

I'd also suggest, however, that very few Garou see Kinfolk as their equals when Garou have a hierarchical society that kin can't really make much headway in.

There's a lot of room between 'bloodstock' and 'equal'. Most Garou are somewhere on that line, rather than at either end, and if someone's looking at playing a kin character as their first exposure to oWoD werewolf it's a good idea to make sure they know what they're letting themselves in for. Especially when while the pack they're with might consider them a valuable part of the pack equal to any Garou, the rest of the Sept... probably aren't.

The question I have to ask is 'are you absolutely sure you want to make a Kinfolk?'

If you want to be a useful part of a pack, another werewolf is often the best way to go. There are some types that are more easy-mode than others, when it comes to learning a new game, and there are enough tribes and auspices that most sorts of characters can find a niche.

Kinfolk, however - well, to be honest, the first question is 'are you as a player okay with your character being forever being a second-class citizen', and the second question would be 'did you actually want to get involved in Garou stuff'. If you're okay with being a lesser sort of being and not being able to get involved, the questions are 'what do you want to play' and 'what does the pack need'.

@Caggles Nooooooo.

Another WC person! Hi!

@Packrat It comes to something when the most interesting thing in a city's history is apparently the railway...

@thesuntsar See this thread: https://musoapbox.net/topic/2960/derbyshire-estate (originally called just Derbyshire). Cue confusion from the British contingent.

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.

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?'

oWoD wise there's Sheltering Sky and GarouMUSH. Other than CoH, that's about it right now that I'm aware of.

To me, the theme is more the undercurrents driving things.

In historical games, we might see 'Christianity versus paganism' or 'Serfs are people too'.
Urban fantasy is usually 'The things that go bump in the night have their own problems' and 'Mortal man really doesn't need to know this shit'. But in there we also get things like 'Dominance or Submission, there is nothing else' or 'If you can't justify anything, you aren't trying hard enough'.
Fantasy is frequently 'Game of Houses' or 'Breaking the universe, one bit at a time - try not to break the bit you're standing in'.

Theme is the overarching thing you're playing. Even two WoD games with the same ruleset, same spheres and same setting can be very different, depending on where the emphasis is placed.

I think for me it's about understanding the mindset.

I'm more likely to play a man than a woman, because I don't really get the whole femininity thing. If I play a woman she either ends up not really getting the whole femininity thing, or she ends up a total stereotype. Stereotypes are fine for the short term, but I can't build a long-term character out of what I don't understand.

I'm more likely to play a character who's not straight. I'm not straight. I understand that different people find different things attractive; I'm not drawn to physical attributes, and faces are the things on the front of heads, so I find it hard to tell people apart and I've no real idea of what constitutes 'pretty'. It's all pretty academic to me, so I'm not overly bothered about it personally. I've also spent most of my life having my sexuality assumed for me, to where I talk about my bloke instead of my partner purely so people don't get absolutely shocked when they meet him. Being gay doesn't define personality or presentation, it's just another part of a character, and I understand it. No problem, off we go.

I'm not likely to play a dark-skinned character in the modern world - particularly in the US - because I don't really get the experience of a dark-skinned person in the US. I'm not from there, I'm aware that it sucks to degrees I simply can't comprehend, but the only thing I have to go on for the people themselves is stereotypes. Again, I can't build a long-term character out of that. A black Briton? Sure, I know plenty of them, I can play that - but their experience is rather different from the American experience, and I don't know where the pitfalls are.

Trans people? I got misgendered a couple of weeks ago, and I'm cis. I was able to laugh it off - even consider it a compliment - but if I wasn't absolutely sure of who and what I am it could have been devastating. This may change in the future, but I'm at not enough information for a long-term character at present.

Basically, I can't build a long-term character out of stereotypes. I know the stereotypes are wrong, but I don't have the experience to tease out the truth to where I can understand it.

This same thing is why I balk at playing American military. British military, no problem, I understand that. I've brushed against it since before I learnt to toddle, to where I've helped other civvies handle forces and ex-forces people. American? Not so much. Part of British Basic Training is extracting the personality, breaking it down and rebuilding it to what the military needs. I've seen what that does to Brits several times over, including the differences between those who've seen combat and those who haven't, from a wide range of backgrounds and eras. Americans? It's a similar process, but the results are different, and I don't know where those differences lie.

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.

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.