Best posts made by HelloRaptor

Newest ERB for those who haven't caught it yet:

Western vs Eastern Philosophers

Nietzsche, Socrates, and Voltaire vs Laozi, Sun Tzu, and Confucius.

And if you missed the one before that, and you shouldn't have, it was Robocop vs The Terminator.

@Arkandel

I pity @Corruption on SHH already having gotten just a glimpse of Changeling players snarling at each other, and that game hasn't even been opened for more than what, a month?

News at 11, Changeling sphere has devolved into vicious drama and nastiness on an OOC level within a month or so of the game opening.

"We were shocked to hear of this.", said every MU* to ever host Changeling, old or new, dripping so much sarcasm that towels were required.

@Roz said:

pick up color palette, hand to Zack Snyder I think you dropped this

It's probably hard to juggle both that and his giant armfuls of money. A guy only has so many hands.

A perfectly valid Lost concept is someone who knowingly traded away seven years of life to be a Fae companion in exchange for some sort of miracle and considers it a worthy bargain, or someone who had a great time with their Keeper...but has now been abandoned because their Keeper was bored of them, and is realizing that they can't go back to the world as they knew it, and aren't willing to make that bargain again, knowing that the Fae can never return their feelings. Even someone who cold-bloodedly made a bargain with the Fae for knowledge, /knowing/ it would change them. There are more stories than kidnap victim, and more horrors than the durance!

Really? That's not at all what I got from the Changeling books, though it's admittedly been a while since I read them. Outside of being a Loyalist, I was unaware there was any mention of your time with your Keeper being limited because that's all you agreed to. As for the rest, the fact is that Keepers are presented as supernatural rapists, whatever form they take, and playing a character whose perspective is that they had a great time with their rapist until it got bored with them isn't going to go over well with the other Lost.

If there's Changelings presented as you're describing them in the books, I feel marginally less hostile towards the game, I suppose.

@VulgarKitten said:

@HelloRaptor said:

@VulgarKitten said:

One more: the fact that cuddleup.com exists. I wonder how legit this is!

I suppose I love that my skin didn't actually crawl completely off my body and down a drain somewhere to hide at checking out that URL.

I love that I don't remember my dreams, because they will be haunted.

You don't love a good cuddle?!

From a semi-random stranger? NNNnnnnno.

Except that's essentially the problem. Recognizable bad guys are a good thing to have, they're a shared foil for disparate groups who are all supposed to be part of the same examination. Sure you're X and this other guy is Y, and Y is totally fucking trash who are total losers, but at least they're not Z. You can both agree that Z is goddamn terrible and on some level you're going to have to temper your rivalry with an awareness of the threat Z presents.

I don't really agree with being able to play Z, whatever it is, because insert every argument about PC antagonist factions, but what all of owod shared was that they all had Z. And it wasn't generally some half-assed phantom threat which very rarely materialized in any concrete fashion (Seers of the Throne) or was so nebulous it might as well be meaningless (like whoever the fuck the pseudo-antagonists in Vampire are now). Werewolf comes close with The Pure, but even that is really pretty lackluster since they're basically just angry assholes and bullies.

Honestly, bullies sums up most of the nwod 'antagonists'. Just petty assholes who like to kick sand in your face because fuck you they can if they want.

As @Admiral mentioned, you can come up with antagonists for any given group if you want, but it lacks setting integration and the weight of meaning. It's the same with D&D, you can spin a story for your players about a race of <whatever custom shit you cooked up> who live in terrible places and bring terrible things with them when they encroach upon the world, but it's never going to have quite the same impact as Mind Flayers, Drow, etc, because those things have weight that's been baked into most of the settings in a way your custom shit just isn't.

@Ganymede can call it a lack of creativity all she wants, but that's like saying that people who prefer RPGs with rules to freeform shared storytelling exercises lack imagination, a vast oversimplification at best and just trolling nonsense at worst.

@spasticgoat said:

@Arkandel Because WW is fucking stupid when it comes to their naming convention. They mix Greek, Latin, and French words up into a single lexicon, because the game designed for Americans to play tragic-goth trenchcoat holders needs shit like that.

And nobody in America gives a fuck since our language is like Jack the Ripper to all you foreign whore-languages.

We do however give a fuck when they don't stick to <Creature Type>: The <Thing About Creature Type>. Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, Mage: The Awakening, Promethean: The Created. Even Changeling: The Lost.

But no, Geist has to be ass backwards, because fuck Geist.

@Ganymede

they role-play more like fantasy-escapists

As opposed to everyone else, who role-play more like...

Ahahaha, no, I can't even.

@Shebakoby said:

@HelloRaptor Denis Leary keeps telling everyone, "'If you quit smoking, you can live an extra 10 years, you can live an extra 20 years.' I've got news for you folks, it's the ones at the END! It's the wheelchair, adult diaper, kidney dialysis f'ken years, you can have those years, we don't want em!"

I had a relative that smoked like a chimney. He died at age 38 (heart attack). I had another relative that smoked like a chimney. Died at age 65 (cause unknown, thought to be stroke.). Then there's other smokers that live to nearly 100. It's no guarantee one way or the other.

In 2001 they concluded a 50 year study in England that showed that fully fifty percent of smokers die from smoking related illnesses, and of those (smoking-related deaths only), over fifty percent died before the age of 50. My father's been smoking since he was a teenager and he's 60 or so now, but anecdotal evidence is not the best kind of evidence.

'Do what you want, we all die anyway so it doesn't matter.' remains bad advice.

I've known a handful of people to pull this off over the years. One has played on TR as two different characters (though which two have changed over the years) pretty much from its inception. Those who haven't (to my knowledge) been caught tend to accomplish it through a few rules:

• Keep OOC player interaction down to a minimum.
• Avoid OOC drama at all costs.
• Don't violate actual alt rules, aside from the basics of having them. i.e. none in the same 'sphere', no cross-pollination of relationships or activity between characters, etc.
• Never be staff.
• Never play Feature characters.
• Keep logins/logouts between characters at least an hour apart.

They use proxies and the like, always in the same time zones but never in the same state (or whatever). All in all they've always been pretty much the picture of harmless, which is why I never reported the one I knew about on TR.

@Roz said:

I do think that ME3 is the best of that trilogy because for me it was a near-perfect game until the last twenty minutes.

Yeah. I only ranked 2 over 3 because of that last bit.

@Thenomain
No amount of trolling turns 'least favorite of these awesome things' into 'the crappy one'.

I found the easiest way to get through the initial post was to pretend I was hearing it read in the same tone and manner that Steven Wright uses to tell jokes.

Seriously, though, there's only so far 'mildly constructive' can go when you're positing such outrageous things. There are certainly design flaws in nwod, and in Werewolf 2.0, but what you're describing are not design flaws. You're just saying you wanted a game about something completely different than what this game is, and presenting ways to gut the one game to create the one you like. Which is fine for what it is, but it's not 'addressing design flaws'.

"I've found several design flaws in this bike! My wide and worldly experience shows me that people fall down on bikes way too much, so here are some hacks to make bikes work like they should. First, we'll have TWO tires in the front and back instead of just one. This offers stability, so people will be less likely to fall over. Then..."

Cool, bro, but it's pretty clear you didn't want a bike to begin with, and whatever it is you do want bears very little resemblance to the product other people are interested in when they think of bikes.

You're absolutely correct that there's nothing really about the Shadow in the core World of Darkness book. You're also correct that you could strip down werewolves to Fangs & Gangs which seems to be more or less what you feel the 'essential werewolf experience' is. Which again, is cool, because core wod is meant to be modular. You could absolutely strip Vampire down to fit any number of modern fiction stories. You could pick apart Vampire until you were just playing Dracula, really.

But that wouldn't be Vampire: The Requiem (or Masquerade), and you clearly don't want to be playing Werewolf: The Forsaken (or Apocalypse). If you'd just owned up to that to begin with, saying "I don't like Forsaken, but I love werewolves, so here's how I'd use some existing mechanics to create a werewolf game about being werewolves more how they're presented in movies and television, for playing in a wod-style setting that doesn't use Forsaken." or some variation of the same, you'd have probably gotten the constructive feedback you were presumably looking for.

To harp on the Shadow thing again, it's integral to the game because it's integral to the game. The duality of spirit and flesh, the lore and history, the very basis for why the Forsaken are as they are, is all fundamental to Werewolf: The Forsaken. The same is true of Tribes and Auspices, not just their form but their function. You can say 'you're a rahu because you act like a rahu not because it's what you are', but you could also say 'werewolves aren't born they're created by werewolf bites'. That would fit with a lot of modern fiction too, right? But it wouldn't be Werewolf: The Forsaken.

If somebody posted in the constructive forum that they felt Twilight was the definitive modern vampire fiction, ergo vampires being damaged by sunlight is a design flaw and here's a hack to fix it so people can play Vampire: The Requiem the way it should be played (and why not, since I bet way less than 1 in 4 players or staff ever have sunlight act as any appreciable threat, and just run 99.9999% of their scenes as if it's nighttime anyway), it's entirely likely they'd get mocked and ridiculed instead of getting constructive criticism or feedback.

You want American Werewolf in London? More power to you. Tribes, Auspices, the Shadow, etc, those aren't design flaws, those are setting elements of Werewolf: The Forsaken.

And before you trot out more lame rose-tinted-glasses arguments, I don't even like Werewolf. I criticize it almost as much as I do Vampire, but it at least fits into the wider wod cosmology for me. What you're designing just seems more like a werewolf-centric spinoff of The Vampire Diaries. Oh no we're monsters and shapeshifting hurts and...did we mention we're monsters? Cool.

Also stop harping on the Native American angle, you're starting to sound kind of racist through sheer repetition.

MILDLY CONSTRUCTIVE STUFF:

I do like the idea about a pack and the size of the territory it can claim having an impact on essence generated, but I'd still tie it to Loci (which can, have been, and should be awesome features). It would be pretty awesome if a werewolf pack's claim on a loci had a beneficial effect on that loci as a nexus between the material and spirit world, without requiring or inspiring the usual traumadrama.

@The-Tree-of-Woe

At the very least the 'Secrets of Power' stuff (Never Deal With A Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully, and Find Your Own Truth), though I'd tack on Never Trust An Elf.

That'll get you pretty well immersed in Shadowrun, though most of the tech stuff is way out of date by this point.

Also the Cleric Quintet.

So Beast is basically Otherkin: You Were Right All Along, then? Hrm. >_<

@SG and @Derp

Lock Bash Mod

This mod allows players and followers to "bash" or "force" open most locked chests and doors. This is the real deal, the character will actually attack the object and it will be destroyed with rubble and all (this was clearly a feature cut from the final game).

I was wrong about there being a 'Knock' type spell, it just uses magic to try and force them open. There is a mod to add spells to do it with more finesse, but they're actual mods rather than re-enabling shit that was already there but disabled.

If you want the additional Open Lock spells mod, it can be found here.

I sort of agree with @Cirno.

@Arkandel

I don't see why that makes them morons if it makes them uncomfortable for any reason.

I don't care if anyone wants to TS or doesn't, but every time somebody makes a snide "I'm here to role play, not to TS." comment I want to just stab them in the neck.

@thebird
It is free, yeah, and other than a few minor glitches it's been fine. I know peopel tend to disregard the error numbers that come up in windows when things go wrong, because for a long time most of them always seemed to come up with answers too generic to be helpful, but I def suggest having a second way to access the internet and looking them up if something happens, before you get too frustrated. For instance, as I think I mentioned, I forgot to disable antivirus when doing an in-place upgrade and when it failed, the error message came back to that exactly. Which... I guess I wish they'd just say that in the error message, but meh.

For those with less than legal versions, or who have WinXP but and want to upgrade but can't afford it: Basically all of our machines are pirated, even the ones we originally bought Windows for, and so far it's worked fine in both the SLIC insertion method for win7 (i.e. duplicating what a prefab company does to mass install windows with a generic key matching a bios table) which isn't really distinguishable from a legit copy anyway, as well as AutoKMS license activation where a scheduled task checks a remote server for authentication every so often, resetting the license each time (except in this place the remote computer is just redirected to your own and always provides authorization). As long as you're not on an Enterprise copy and it can verify that you're authentic in the moment, it'll switch you over to a 100% legit Win10 license.

So far the only big stumbling block I've hit in terms of games, @Thenomain, is that Zuma's Revenge (old ass game, so...) won't load fullscreen without being supersized off the edges of the screen. I think I ran into this on win8.1 when I first got it, but can't remember what I did to fix it.

So far all my list of (mostly steam) games confirmed working is:

Assassin's Creed (3 and 4)
Bastion
Bioshock Infinite
Black Mesa
Borderlands
Borderlands 2
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequal
Defiance
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut
Diablo 3
Dishonored
Divinity: Original Sin
DLC Quest
Dragon Age (All)
Far Cry 3
Final Fantasy (7, 8, 13, 13-2)
Firefall
Half-Life 2
Hitman: Absolution
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (1 and 2)
Just Cause 2
Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning
The Last Remnant
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers (Original, 2012, 2015)
Mass Effect (All)
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Neverwinter
Orcs Must Die (1 and 2)
Path of Exile
Planetary Annihilation
Poker Night at the Inventory (1 and 2)
Portal (1 and 2)
Saints Row (3 and 4)
Shadowrun Returns
Shadowrun Dragonfall - Director's Cut
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
Sniper: Ghost Warrior (1 and 2)
Spec Ops: The Line
The Stanley Parable
Starbound
StarForge
Strike Suit Zero - Director's Cut
Team Fortress 2
Thief
Tomb Raider (2013
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist
Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine
Warhammer 40,000 Soulstorm

That was some exhausting shit to check out. My Bejeweled is having the same issue as the Zuma's Revenge, so I think it might be something with my video drivers and old ass Popcap games never meant to run on a 1920x1200 monitor in the first place, rather than something about Win10 in particular.

@Arkandel

I know Mages have the kinkiest sex, but are any of them worried about the Abyss during it? No. It should at least be part of the game-play, like it is any other time.

...seriously?

People do shit without worrying about the consequences all the time, in-game and out of it. That is a thing that people do, and frequently.

Also, it's pretty easy to do most magic in ways that the Abyss isn't really a pressing concern. I could get hit by a car, but I still go outside walking, even along stretches with shitty sidewalk coverage. I don't really give it much thought aside from keeping an awareness of my surroundings. I certainly don't worry about it.

@Corruption

There are just too many survivors of such trauma in the hobby to make this kind of RP worthwhile overall.

Rape isn't special in that regard. It's not different than a lot of things that get roleplayed. This has come up before, but rape isn't special, people have suffered all manner of traumatic experiences in their lives. Often life altering ones, resulting in all manner of PTSD or other after effects. Would you like to tell someone who was beaten so badly by their parents or spouse that they ended up in the hospital, that rape rp should get its own special category of consideration because 'it's different' than them being confronted with people around them RPing through a child abuse (or whatever else) story?

The list of terrible things that have happened to people is long and incredibly vile, but WoD has never made any bones about the fact that it does (sorry Sunny) cover all manner of vile story elements, up to, including, and surpassing rape. Do we really need to go over depicted uses of mental domination powers, physical abuse, torture, kidnapping and sexual sadism that have appeared in WoD books over the years? Because we've had this conversation before, and the list is incredibly long and detailed.

As someone who grew up as both a subject of abuse and a witness to far worse as a child, there is some shit I will absolutely not roleplay through, and will take steps to extricate myself if confronted with it, even if it means taking a break for a week or two from a game while my character is conveniently out of town or in a coma after a bad fall or whatever else. But that's on me. I used to be exactly the sort of person who demanded that nobody so much as roleplay certain things around me, up to and including quitting a game or no longer talking to a friend who didn't sympathize as much as I thought she should, and it's one of the few things I'm actually ashamed of when I look back on things.

My experiences and hangups don't excuse telling other people what they can't roleplay, and I generally find the idea that other people think theirs do to be anywhere from unfortunate to unsettling. I find the idea that rape gets its own special treatment where other deep traumas suffered by a significant portion of our population do not, to be at least moderately outrageous.

@Coin said:

@Wizz said:

@HelloRaptor said:

@Coin said:

@HelloRaptor said:

@Cobaltasaurus

Eyeballs are a squick factor for me. I cannot deal with eyeball mutilation.

The Strain is made almost entirely of squick factor, and eyeballs do figure, so... yeah. You do not want. >_>

I it though.

It's so bad, but I keep watching. I even made a Requiem Devotion for vampires who want DAT TUNG.

You shut your mouth, there is nothing bad about The Strain.

I'm about halfway through Season 1 and it is FANTASTIC. I missed scary vampires.

That's the thing though: they aren't really scary. The show fails to be actually scary.

It's more like Resident Evil style zombies, sort of.

On the subject of Lucifer, it features D.B Woodside as an antagonistic angel, and if you don't know who that is, it's this suave motherfucker right here:

I'm not really into dudes, but damn he's pretty.