Best posts made by HelloRaptor

@Cobaltasaurus
Thanks for the clarification on The Strain. I don't necessarily agree, but the objections make waaaaaaaay more sense than 'boring'.

However:

@Coin
Fringe.

@Cobaltasaurus
Nah.

Or do archery and just lol your way to victory.

I hate skinny jeans with burning, fiery passion.

....agreed.

@Three-Eyed Crow

I would probably consider a 'We don't have rape plots just 'cause we don't' rule a good sign for my own personal enjoyment of a thing, for what it's worth.

An absence of rape related plots or roleplay would do the same for me, but as a rule I try not to consider very personal tastes and preferences (even my own) a basis for game policy about what other people can do in terms of roleplay.

@Cobaltasaurus

Because most places don't say "please don't RP murder"? The truth is most places do ask that. They ask that by not allowing antagonist spheres. They ask that by typically not approving PCs who only goal is to go after other PCs and force them to play being killed by another PC.

That's kind of a false equivalency. I don't think anybody (certainly not me) would object to staff putting a foot on the neck of someone who app'd a character as a self-described serial rapist and saying no.

It's especially false as a statement if you consider how often people on games, and on forums discussing those games, go out of their way to champion the idea that if you're going to PK someone you should roleplay through it. Games even sometimes give bennies if you murder them through a scene instead of telenuking.

None of which has any real bearing on roleplaying rape, but the quoted statement does not support its premise.

@Cobaltasaurus

I'm not entirely sure why it becomes "ZOMG HYPOCRITES! FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION!" when someone says "please don't RP rape".

It's never been anything about freedom of expression, but given that I've more than a few times seen people who decry rape RP, in particular people responsible for game policies about it, either engaging in pretty fucked up (but not rape so it's okay) RP or responding to complaints by people exposed to such RP by reading them the 'This is a WoD game that deals with adult themes, you're free to log off or excuse yourself or fade to black but these sort of things happen in the game you're playing.' line? Yeah, hypocrisy is a reasonable description.

Rape is not the only fucked up, traumatic thing that happens to people. It's not even the only fucked up, traumatic thing that happens to a significant number of people. It is, however, pretty much the only thing people seem generally comfortable banning from games as if they're doing a public service. That they do so without banning other fucked up, traumatic things that people take issue with, is usually hypocrisy.

@Ganymede

There's nothing hypocritical about finding one form of RP more disgusting, disturbing, and unacceptable than another, and therefore prohibiting it. It may be unreasonable in your opinion, but it's not hypocritical.

Most games are ultimately in the hands of one or two people, who are ultimately responsible for game policy. If said person(s) wanted to ban a particular line of roleplay because they personally had issues with it and didn't want to deal with it there's not much I could say. But to pretend that's not what it is, and act as if that very specific sort of subject matter deserves to be stepped on because it makes some nebulous percentage of the population too uncomfortable to allow while virtually every other subject matter that makes some nebulous percentage of the population uncomfortable is A_OK? Meh. You can say unreasonable, but I'm fine with calling it hypocrisy.

The truth is that if you started banning roleplay that even a significant portion of the game population found objectionable, distressing, or uncomfortable to deal with/be exposed to, the list would be entirely too long. The World of Darkness has included examples of violence and molestation against children, cannibalism, truly gruesome and inhuman torture, physical and emotional abuse of family and friends, bestiality, and worse.

Shit, there are people who won't play, or play with Vampires, because the descriptions of the central element of their survival have often been far too close to rape. Whether or not others feel that's the case, there are those who do and that discomfort keeps them away from an entire sphere. If a show of hands were to indicate that the number of people who felt that way was significant, would anyone who didn't feel that way think it reasonable to excise the vampire sphere from a game? Probably not. I mean, except me, because I'm always down with banning Vampire. It is such a shitty game.

@Thenomain said:

@EmmahSue said:

It's a question for the community at large, not just Admin to decide.

You take all the fun out of this, you know.

You're starting to understand the truth!

@Arkandel said:

I guess if we're talking oWoD... a lot.

I loved the metaplot in Vampire. Loved it.

Yeah, this. I didn't really have a better answer because while I loved most of oWoD's stories and themes, I merely tolerate nWoD's because it's what people are playing.

I even liked Vampire's, despite not really liking Vampire.

@Coin said:

@Templari said:

@ThatOneDude When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."

"Eh. Jack's okay." -- Snake P.

"Those guys need a haircut more than you do." -Col. O'Neill

@tragedyjones said:

Oh for those who did not notice, Mage made it through the major revision process and is back to being sneak previewed. It should be out, by my reckoning, in 2015.

Yesssssss.

Maybe creative thaumaturgy won't be like having your fucking teeth pulled while filling out forms in triplicate, like virtually every nmage sphere ever. >____________<

So no matter which way you skin it, it still looks like the comments section of a buzzfeed article. Or youtube. Pick your poison, really. Hopefully we'll get back to looking like an actual forum eventually.

I realize that's just my personal aesthetics, but adding an extra click just to get to edit is just objectively bad design.

It's not @Glitch's design, though, I realize. Far as I know he's just updating us to the latest version of the software, but whoever's developing it... meh.

@Thenomain
I dunno, I liked owod Paradox. Paradox flaws, weird shit happening, etc. It wasn't some abyssal nightmare come to devour your soul blah blah blah so fucking serious. It was "So you think you're better than everybody else? HAW HAW SUCKER!", writ small or large, the very ideal of being punished for hubris.

Plus I got to do stuff like pushing a ritual to try and create a theoretical artificial Node construct to the point where if I'd fucked up on the final roll I'd have generated like 50 points of Paradox or something. Enough to obliterate me, my house, probably most of my block, and create a Paradox Storm over most of the city.

I didn't fuck up the last roll (barely), but I sat there staring at my screen with my finger hovering over Enter for probably five minutes or so because of the tension. And even so, pulling it off punished me something fierce, and only through a loophole did I avoid like 5 levels of permanent damage. Crazy, fun times.

Once again, motherfucking kids and motherfucking parents who can't or won't keep them in check. Letting your kid flail about in his seat at the movie theater, kicking his legs around while sitting hunched back in his chair so they're flailing about at head level, is goddamn retarded. If you can't stop something like that, get the fuck out. And if you're not going to get the fuck out, die in a goddamn fire if you give me or anybody else attitude when we point it out to the ushers and they ask you to get the fuck out themselves.

Jesus. If I'd done some shit like that my mother would have dragged me out and not let me back into a theater till I was old enough to drive myself home. >_<

From Mage 2.0: Supporting Cast

Any inherent magical power, be it a minor or major template, or even just a single Merit representing something about the character herself, also makes that character a Sleepwalker.

Fucking set out in a way nobody can fucking weasel out of. Fuck every single person ever who contributed to the ridiculous 'Wolfblooded can't be Sleepwalkers.' or immortals or any of the other weird corner cases who somehow counted as Sleepers yet couldn't take the Sleepwalker merit. Fuuuuuuuuuuuck all of you. >_<

Edit for also:

Some Proximi are born spontaneously, but most come from long family lines of magical heritage called Dynasties, protected, nurtured, and employed by one of the Orders.

Hopefully the bolded bit will get more emphasis and elaboration. The nWoD SL book that covered Proximi in more depth indicated that spontaneous Proximi were totally a thing, but places only ever wanted to allow Dynasties, boo.

We're just going to tabletop it using the rules from Fantasy Flight's take on the Star Wars RPG, which is pretty awesome, and use Force powers for biotics and some tech stuff.

@Glitch said:

The Forums went down for a bit. A rogue plugin was at fault. It is entirely @Coin's fault. May be some residual effects with logging in, but should be fine shortly.

LRN2DND. Rogues are supposed to disarm traps, not set them off.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

It's possible @HelloRaptor, that the child had some sort of special need that might have made it difficult for the parent to contain that sort of behavior. If so I'm not really going to stand behind a "don't bring them to the movie theatre" attitude. Parents of special-needs children often get stuck at home, isolated, and very little help because their "problem children" receive responses like "you need to get your child in line" or "that child just needs to be whooped".

Of course we want to be considerate of everyone, so if that were the case she probably should have found a spot to sit where they wouldn't have bothered anyone else (too much). Such as in the last row, or at one of the outside rows, etc.

Yeah, this was third row back, just off center. On the opening weekend. And there sure as fuck were seats open towards the back. And it's a theater where you pick your seats out when you buy tickets, so it was about as deliberate a positioning as you can get. All of which adds up to me being okay with being the monster who tells the prents with the special needs kid to gtfo, I guess.

That's assuming that's even what it was, and given how many parents I've seen just let their kids do whatever they want (up to and including just running around in the aisles between the seats all across the theater) it's just as likely that they're just assholes.

@Ganymede

if the kid was kicking somebody in the head,

To clarify, I didn't mean kicking people IN the head, just that the way they were slumped down (head low, hips forward) they were kicking their feet around at head level, which put them right in line of sight or peripheral vision. The rows are far enough apart in this particular theater that nobody's head was really in danger, except maybe their parents. But a lot of thrashing motion in front of you (or out of the corner of your eye) while you're trying to watch a movie is just aggravating as fuck and not at all cool to just let go on for nearly half an hour, on and off.

@Bennie said:

There is something inherently wrong (imo) with how fluid IC and OOC are for some folks.

I treat everything like an actual table, at a convention. I wouldn't take my clothes off there and shag in front of 500 geeks-like-me, so why would I do it on a game? What I do with my character, is just that, something the character is doing.

I'm not really sure which angle you're trying to take here. If it's to poke fun at folks who think people only TS while naked and fapping, more power to you, I guess?

I think a lot could be helped if people could just admit when they're twisted-up OOC and no longer really playing the game. I'm certainly not looking down my nose at people that meet online and go off to get married or make kidlets or buy a house together, or whatever, or shag at cons with irregular frequency as their thing. But come on. We're supposed to be logging in to play a game. It's not friggin' Match.com.

How is this any different from people who tabletop together for years and go off to get married or make kidlets or buy a house together or whatever, or just shag at cons with irregular frequency as their thing? Because looking at most of the tabletop groups I've seen who have played for the better part of a decade, various degrees of all of those things have happened.

MU*ing is a social experience. For a lot of people it's just as social as a tabletop group, and over long periods of time it's almost inevitable that OOC relationships form, outside of corner case robots like @Ganymede.

If all that big ramble was to say that people should keep the IC relationships IC and the OOC relationships OOC and not confuse the one with the other, then yes, absolutely.

@Ganymede said:

@Misadventure

Even I did not understand what, if anything, you were getting at.

Same, though I find this to be the case pretty frequently with @Misadventure.

That's not meant as an insult, just an awkward observation. Sometimes it feels like a normal question has been put through a translation tool from English to something else, then again across a few others, then back to English and so while the words might seem relevant at a glance the sentences themselves no longer parse in context with what's being talked about.

@Ganymede
Shit, sorry. I'm on so little sleep right now. Not sure how I did that.

My only issue is the minmaxers are the 21 year old heart surgeons with Medicine 5.

Yeah, where would anybody get the idea to play something like that?

For a doze of so-called 'reality', we could note that the youngest doctor in the Guinness Book of World Records (practicing doctor who did surgery on your eyeballs) was seventeen.

I think I can give a pass to somebody playing a 21 year old heart surgeon. I might ask what took him the extra four years, but I guess hearts are more delicate than eyes. >.>

Seems like pointless nonsense. There are a number of positions on any given game that don't require direct access to staff by players. Coders, job monkeys, etc. And as has been noted, even those who do directly interact with players (sphere staff, mostly) can be on to do staff things without interruption. On-and-working is not the same as on-and-accessible, and an off duty flag doesn't really preclude getting pages, even if it's just folks peeking in to see if you're really off duty or if you just forgot to set yourself otherwise, and then you're either ignoring them or wasting time explaining, or whatever.

If staffers whose duties do require they be accessible to players to some degree are using the dark flag to avoid doing so, that's a problem with those staffers, not the dark flag or folks who use it. Trying to use code to fix a symptom as if it'll fix the problem is poor form.