Posts made by HelloRaptor

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.

@Misadventure

Does anything work on unknown alts?

I believe @Surreality is wishing there was a function that would let you, say, +watch/avoid (or whatever) Joe, and the game would not only hide you from Joe but determine who else Joe plays by IP and hide you from their +watch as well, but in such a way that didn't actually tell you who else Joe is.

Unfortunately IP matching is often really imprecise with the way people use multiple means of connecting, these days. Cell phones, tablets, home computers, work laptops, etc. That's not even getting into people who share IP addresses, even temporarily, whether because they live with or are visiting someone RL or just both happen to be at the same convention and using the same computer room or library or... well, so on and so forth.

@Thenomain said:

@HelloRaptor said:

@Thenomain
+finger is +finger. Renaming shit almost never ends well.

Neither does mis-attributing quotes, mister.

Oh, whups. That was @Cobaltasaurus and @Rook, I guess. Sorry about that.

@Rook
&afinger runs whatever you put in it. Want it to pemit something to you? It will. Want it to pemit something to the person fingering you? It will. Want it to pemit a poke to the code wiz reminding them to disable afinger? Sure. Want it to check your mail? Okay. It is, 99% of the time, used primarily to notify the person being +fingered that someone is doing so, and who exactly has done so.

My query is more why any of this is necessary, or even useful? As others have remarked, if I'm typing +finger to check out some basic IC/OOC information out about you or your character (depending on what's displayed by +finger), why do you need to be notified? You keep talking about facilitating shit, but unless I've actually gone out of my way to page you, all it's facilitating is an awkward situation where my attempt to query basic public information has you trying to engage me.

It'd be like if whenever somebody looked at you you walked up to them and were like "Hi! You were just looking at me. Is there a reason you were looking at me? I know you looked at me. Why were you looking at me?", which would get really weird really fast.

I'm leaving out the fuckers who use it to pemit messages to people who +finger them, because there's a special circle of hell for that shit, shared only with the people who complain that someone is +finger-spamming them by looking at their +finger too much and thus triggering their self-imposed &afinger. Fuck both of those people.

Speaking of people who can fuck right off:

@Luna

As for the unread mail? All it makes me do is delete all my mail, unread. It becomes something that people poke at you about and it's irritating. Lol October has over 100 unread mail! Check your mail! Why you no read your mail?!

Because fuck yall that's why.

I sincerely hope you get a computer virus that not only burns out your computer but clings to your digital footprint and keeps you from ever MU*ing again.

Because fuck people who have hundreds of unread mail and get pissy with people wondering wtf.

@Thenomain
+finger is +finger. Renaming shit almost never ends well. Remember the threads about why more games didn't use MUFF or whatever it was called? People got actively turned off by unfamiliar command names and syntax even when others kept pointing out it'd do the same shit. We had @mail and then +mail, and then everybody just aliased +mail back to @mail.

Many of us type commands by rote by now. If you made it +info, people would just set commands to alias it back to +finger. Which I guess means there's no reason not to, I just don't see much of a point.

I have really never understood what &afinger would be used for other than playing in to paranoia, or irritating people. Assuming the latter is excised somehow, it still leaves the former.

It'd be like someone asking for a feature where they got an email notification from the wiki with the names of everyone who looked at their wiki page, or something. What the fuck? o.O

Is it ever used for something besides notification, and if not, why do people want it?

Well there you go.

I poked through GMC and WW2nd and couldn't find it either. I am tempted to lulz in the general direction of certain folks, if it's nowhere to be found.

All seems pretty cool.

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of having to know all the ins and outs of the character's mind before I've played him. Some of the template specific ones are really irritating if you're making a brand new member of whatever, too.

Remember, kids, all opinions are created equal!

Yeah, I don't really find them difficult to track. Just kind of nonsensical at times. Condition X is resolved when you do X*-1, but Condition Y is resolved when you double down for Y*2, while traumatic Condition Z is bzzzt sorry only throwing away XP or...suffering further trauma which might just give you another Condition will resolve it? Meh.

Though 'having them listed on your wiki' does sort of enshrine the idea that making up your own, which from what I read is actually the actual intent of conditions with the book just listing some examples, is something to avoid.

I've got hardware acceleration enabled, and it looks fine.

I just wish Integrity gain and loss were tied into Conditions and Breaking Points somehow, rather than XP. Same with Willpower, to a lesser extent. At least if you're missing WP dots it's probably because you traded them to get something else, so the xp you're spending still represents something concrete.

@Arkandel
To clarify, I'm not talking about how their implementation with XP, just their implementation in general. You're obsessed until... you're not? Some conditions are resolved when you're faced with the reality of that condition being bad for you, others are resolved when you just... do more of that same thing? Some can only be resolved by gain or loss of Integrity (see above) or an exceptional success on a breaking point (doable with MU* xp levels, but in general lolz), etc.

@Rook said:

I didn't think that anyone liked nWoD anyway, from what I gather reading posts here. Okay, I stand corrected, thank you. It's been years since I've played WoD.

@Arkandel is right, though it has more to do with the settings than the systems. nWoD is what happened when people forgot how to have fun but still insisted on playing games.

Unrelated to the life's blood thing, I don't really like Conditions. I find them more or less a huge hodge podge of often unrelated rules that can't decide if they're fluff or system, which vary wildly in severity, involve often contradictory ideas of what constitutes resolution, and too many of them play into one of the worst relics of the older system which is the XP abyss that is Integrity.

I can see the seed of a good idea, but every time I find myself wanting to play with them I just sort of balk at how shit they collectively are in implementation.

@Arkandel
Of your three statements there I'd agree with the first, disagree with the second, and don't really feel the third weighs in on the idea one way or another. You might as well say that since human nature so often reflects the idea that power corrupts, people willing to staff aren't an important part of keeping things going.

Maybe I'm just put off by your terminology. Generally referring to something as the life's blood of a thing refers to what it needs to survive, and it seems like the people who do spend hours a day on a game are far more frequently what facilitates that survival. They, more often than not, are the ones who get involved with the most people and as a result even aside from whatever intentions they might have, they connect disparate groups and make organic connections between them that frequently don't form up on their own.

People on the same schedule, whether due to time zone or work shifts or combinations of the same, often have to play with people on at the same time with a frequency that makes connecting with someone in a wildly different subset difficult at best, and groups of disconnected players without threads to connect them tends to make for dissatisfaction over time. A player and their characters whose login times bridge those gaps is, to my observations, a pretty vital part of things even if your third point is true (as it often is).

More than just roleplaying though, those are also the people who tend to do much of the organizational work, keeping factions not only connected (within and without) but doing the legwork to help flesh out the stage where everyone else is playing. People who can only spend an hour or two a night aren't generally the ones getting all the work done that facilitates other people finding everything in its place when it comes time to play.

Like I said earlier, though, I think this is just me being pedantic about the turn of phrase. To my mind, whatever their faults, the people who can and do spend hours and hours a day online are very often the life's blood of a game in that they are what makes it possible for the game to survive. I disagree pretty strongly with your second point above, I think I mentioned, because my experience is wildly the opposite. People with that kind of time not only do stick around, they frequently get more invested in one or more characters than most others (which again leads to your third point, which is fair even if not relevant).

More to the point, most of the people I know who fit the 'live on the game' description will continue to keep a game alive well past the point when others think it should have died. They are literally the survival of the game, and I tend to see the short-term folks as the ones who burn out more often than not, or who rotate through characters like it's nothing, or wander off into RL for months without warning. They're also the people who, when things slow down or a game's population starts to thin, jump ship first to find a new game rather than sticking with it to give it a chance.

That said, I'd agree that the majority of folks who roleplay an hour or two here or there when they can, are entirely necessary for a game to prosper. A MU* would be a pretty bare and scraggly tree without its leaves, but it wouldn't necessarily be dead. I've yet to see a game where the hours-a-day crowd bailed that didn't shrivel up and die shortly afterwards.

It may not be healthy to be that invested, it may cause a number of issues between entitlement and just issues, and it's entirely easy to point to numerous problems created by people who are that invested, but in terms of a persistent world MU* made up entirely of interconnected parts, they are also absolutely vital to a MU*'s survival.

@Arkandel

A MU*'s lifeblood is in its casual players who log on a few times a week to have a scene, not those few who practically live there.

You keep saying this. I don't really agree or disagree, I'm just curious why you keep asserting it as if it's obviously true. It certainly seems like something you'd like to be true, but I'm not sure what you're basing the statement on.

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.

@Cobaltasaurus

I have, I just got thrown off by

a little bit prettier (according to my standards at least)

Given what I've seen on games in terms of what people do with ansi to their personal displays, or worse the colors used for borders and stuff (I basically can't see any of the purple stuff on SHH because of my background color, which is itself probably a strange choice of shades to many people), a horrified part of me could totally believe someone might have some whacked out reason for changing the color of all the and, to, for, etc.

Then it segued into the green and I was like O____O

What in god's name is all the semi-random ansi? O.O