@arkandel said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:
Names. Very few characters are called Steve or Jen.
It's always Maximillian and Lillian.
I don't think this is necessarily because people hate common names as much as it's a consequence of character names almost never being purged, so very quickly common names will end up taken and people have to come up with more and more quirky names.
@Kestrel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I'm talking about stuff like pea guacamole, carrot hummus, or the latest nonsense I've seen, using bicarbonate soda to strip the skin off of beans and then scooping them out of the pot at a gentle simmer instead of cooking/enjoying them as they are. Just stop. Why? Why?
Maybe they just have a lot of time on their hands?
A nice thing about cooking is that once you develop a good feel for the basic process and the way flavors work, you can use most recipes as a source of inspiration rather then something you're bound by. Use their good ideas and toss away the bad ones.
@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
- Aes Sedai PCs used loopholes they didn't in the books. "I can't burn you alive but I can immobilize and gut you with this here sword", "I'll use magic to throw a boulder at your head, how's that?"
That looks more like blatant oath breaking then loophole to me.
@Aria said in It's where you putcher weed ...:
@SilentHills said in It's where you putcher weed ...:
Can you actually smoke yourself retarded? Are past over the top pothead portrayals accurate? What is life?
Like, permanently? No. Definitely not. And most highs aren't going to be anywhere near that, so these portrayals are, for the most part, grossly inaccurate.
There are indications that marijuana affects brain development:
https://www.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657.full
I think the concept of player privacy is an interesting game design aspect to discuss. I've been many games handling these issues in different ways.
In the first game I ever helped staff was built on digichat, in it was common practise for the Storytellers to wander around the public rooms invisible, watching the scenes going on and sometimes when appropriate they'd start running a scene on the spot. If you wanted real privacy you had to create a password protected private room. This actually worked out surprisingly well for the most part.
On RfK, we had a policy that we would never be dark on the grid, as I understand it due to various horror stories from MU* past. However what we did have was a debug channel which outputted information when most coded systems were used like rolling dice or feeding, the most interesting part was when after many requests a simple 'txt' code was added. It was really just an alias for page and like most of our other systems, it was set up to output into the debug channel.
This turned out to be really interesting and valuable for us in staff since we got a live feed of the things that characters were talking about ICly at any given moment, giving us a much better idea of the current state of the game.
The biggest problem I tend to discover in the transition from being a player in a game and staff in a game is that as your awareness of behind the scenes things increase, like player requests, metaplot etc etc you often lose awareness of what's going on at the player level since you don't get to interact with people in scenes the way that you used to. Spying on players is one way to gain that sort of awareness but it's something that is easily abused and can lead to the loss of player trust.
What are your experiences and thoughts on player spying?
Star Trek Lower Decks is the best Star Trek show of the decade.
I believe the sheer number of hours necessary to put in to actively run a great MUSH on a per player basis make it completely impossible for a P2P MUSH to function unless the players are all rich. I think you'd need subscriber costs north of $50 per month for it to make sense as a business.
Anyhow, more relevant to the OP. If you wanted to run a MUSH where every played had to pay to a charity, then I'd make the amount relatively low (Somewhere between $1-5 per month) and the purpose of it would be to ensure that everyone playing the game actually want to be there.
reclaiming
Doesn't that make it more of a claim then a reclaim? I'm a big fan of this kind of 'cultural appropriation', a good story is a good story and is often made more interesting when retold through the lens of entirely different experiences.
@Pyrephox said:
Regarding staff and plot-first stuff:
I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to have ST staff on time-limited appointments. For example, bringing people on for, say, three months at a time, specifically to run a plot or plots that will be wrapped up at that point. This works best, I'd suspect, in a setting that's open to having changes and variations in theme over time, and a game that's okay with some episodic things. But a) it would let STs have a discrete set of expectations to fulfill, and (b) the ability to exit stage left at the end so that they can concentrate on playing, avoid burnout, etc. It would also help /keep the game moving/, rather than risk the stagnation that you get with a core of burned-out ST staff. And you might find more people willing to sign on to be STs for a short term commitment rather than "until we get tired of you, or you learn to hate the game and avoid logging in". If it were me, I'd also want to put in a strict no-immediate-second-term rule. You MUST take at least one term off before reapplying, to keep a small number of perspectives from dominating, and as an anti-poop-socking measure.
In a world where you have countless of competent people volunteering to staff, anything is possible. The reality of the situation is that you usually have very few staff who are very overworked because most people just want to play and many who want to help with staffing shouldn't be allowed near a staff position.
If any big budget action director were to be given Star Trek, I'd love to see Nolans version.
@Ghost said:
Staff has a responsibility to protect their player base from predatory players, and the only way to do that is to establish expected guidelines of roleplay, conduct, and some realistic trigger rules.
I think that ultimately the best way to ensure this is not by having specific IC actions being prohibited but rather ensure that all players are on the same page when it comes to what is expected from the game. An asshole will always find a way to be an asshole within the letter of the rules.
@Warma-Sheen said in Good TV:
Matter of opinion there...
I don't believe you can take a core character concept away from a character and still consider it to be good. Fox Studios believed a superhero wasn't much more than their powers and that's (one of a few reasons) why their superhero franchises failed and continue to fail, especially versus other Marvel titles.
Sometimes height has nothing to do with a character. But sometimes it really does. I don't know enough about She-Hulk to know whether it applies, but I trust the Disney Marvel people to keep the core of her character intact and handle it appropriately.
I think staying true to the character is a lot less important then making a good movie.Most people know absolutely nothing about She-hulk just like they knew absolutely nothing about Iron-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy.
Where Marvel has gone the extra mile is that they're attempting to ensure that the movies remain consistent and coherent with each other so that if you enjoy one of them chances are good you'll enjoy the others too without jarring breaks in continuity or style.You can tell that there's someone with an overarching vision for the franchise.
Fox by contrast created a number of individually decent movies that had almost nothing to do with each other.
Well, the people caught at CG are usually the people who are either just completely unable to play to theme or unable to read and write the English language (We had to tell two people with learning disabilities that our game was not for them). The creeps are usually caught later.
@jibberthehut
Its basically faux Russia, faux Yuan(Mongol) China and faux Netherlands.
@Arkandel said:
@ThatGuyThere said:
How would you deal with this hypothetical.
You refuse Player A's request for something that needed to be refused. You have the stated yes first policy. So Player A then starts a campaign of Staff is unfair. Said player points out how staff said yes to Thing B C D who were all near the line you have but not quite over it. Up until this point Player A has not shown to be a problem.Someone in this thread made a point for clarity which was agreeable. To it I'd also add transparency is important.
"Guys, we made the ruling to refuse <X> in this case because $reasons, and when B C and D had a similar-looking we allowed it because $otherreasons. It is our believe $reasons and $otherreasons are sufficiently different to warrant a different approach." Then try to work with Player A to see if you can reach a compromise.
Look, eventually you'll run into players who are unreasonable. Just be sure you're not the kind of staff players run into who is rude and authoritative. So be polite and patient but firm and clear, then if it doesn't work even to the best of your ability and they refuse to take 'no' for an answer it's on them, not you.
Sometimes the reason for denying something is not something you want to air in public. When it comes to theme especially the reason for denying a player a particularly arcane concept is often that you don't trust that player to be able to play it, which is why another player can get the same concept approved by virtue of your confidence in that player to pull it off.
Trying to direct people away from concepts they are unable to convincingly play and direct them to things that suit them better is a subtle art. In Vampire for instance, there are very few players who can play an Elder that actually feels like an Elder.
If youre into mastermind/xenatos gambit kind of shows or mecha, then Code Geass is a great watch.
In terms of classics, I think most people will enjoy Ranma, Inuyasha, One Piece, Naruto, Bleach and Hunter x Hunter. They all have the same story structure which is a young protagonist who refused to give up in the face of adversity and grows stronger as they keep facing incrementally harder opposition.
If you want disturbing violence, then Elfen Lied is the show for you.
If you want a show that is willing to take a critical look at some mecha tropes, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is worth a watch because it takes a moment to recognize some of the horrors that most mecha shows gloss over.
One of the shows that has stuck with me the longest after watching it is 'From the new world' which depicts a post apocalyptic world where all remaining humans are psychics and they use sentiment mole rats as servants. As the show goes on, the main character keeps learning more horrifying things about how things are and came to be.
For something much less violent. I quite enjoy the board game shows like Hikaru no Go (main character gets possessed by best Go player of all time) and Saki(it is about a group of girls wanting to save their mahjong club).
@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? =(
You should RP with @Alzie. They're pretty great at stepping up and taking actual hostile action when appropriate.
For me I will almost never notice if a character is recasted between a book and a visual mediun like tv/movies because I dont visualize books in any detail and will usually not remember what most characters were supposed to look like in the first place.
However in a visual medium, you quickly get used to the idea a character is supposed to look a certain way. If a pale skinned woman flew around throwing lightning about, I wouldnt associate that with the character Ive come to know as Storm.
Though at the same time, I think for some characters the association is weaker then others. I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spiderman in part because their iconic look is fully suited up. Also once you start establishing a character can have different looks, people will get used to it, The Doctor has no true appearance for instance.
As a rule, as long as the show itself is good, I am not really going to notice ethnicity and I dont think most other people do either.
@AmishRakeFight said:
This also works because MUDs are generally hardcoded for combat. Garbage mobs spawn as part of code and you run at them and your PC dies or the NPC dies and if so, you pick up their drops or their pennies or whatever the reward. Or Arrgh! The Ninjapirate attacks you by typing in 'attack Bob' and you either defend or mash your keyboard as hard as possible as you frantically attempt to flee.
The key thing about making PvP work in a MUSH environment is to make sure that the conflict isn't about stabbing the other characters to death, but rather about trying to get some advantage and while killing your opponents might be helpful, it's also likely not.
On RfK this worked by the fact that killing another vampire was against city law, however murdering all their friends, family and businesses was not and torpor provides a good means to prove you could kill someone but choose not to.
The problem that RfK ran into was that the administration of territories, allies, influence etc didn't scale well at 100+ players, which is something a future conflict centred game can solve during the design stage.
I like how Tiger and Bunny is one of the more realistic takes on how super heroes would play out in that sponsorship money would be their primary funding and looking good for the camera would be increadibly important.