Best posts made by il-volpe

@misterboring Oh, that happens. What I had in mind is stuff like,

I say, "Please do not attempt to get my attention by touching me. Unexpected touches are not only startling but often literally painful."

"They don't bother me," says co-worker, and continues to put her hand on my shoulder at random times when I'm staring down a microscope.

Repeat until I quit.

I say, "The noise that kettle makes is like somebody tattooing "no ragerts" on my cerebral cortex. Please use the other one."

"I don't hear it."

"That's not really relevant. Anyway, I bought you this other one. Please use it instead."

Person continues to use the old one until I steal it and give it to the Sally Anne.

@tinuviel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

@wizz Oh, yeah, I'm operating in the fantasy world where players care about story over victory. It's never going to happen and players are going to fuck up perfectly good games every time.

Naw. It happens all the time. Thing is, they care about their story, not their role as a bit part in yours. There's a significant difference between "wanting to win" and "wanting to roll."

Heh. Some people have 4.0. It's hardly unheard of. You can probably do it if that's what you want. If you don't manage it, well, it won't kill you, but wtf, it's not impossible and it won't kill you to try for it either.

@horrorhound said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

I, personally, loathe the Super Friend routine

I, too, loathe the Super Friend Routine, but I define that as, "When people whinge that other people's cross-faction RP exists without any fine red paste."

Probably cross-faction relationships are common tropes in the source materials.

Also, let people play with other people.

@macha "Fine Needle Aspirate Biopsy" -- sounds like they need to use the ultrasound to see what they're doing to get the needle into a mass near or in his bladder. They take an empty syringe, stick the needle in the mass and pull back on the plunger, then spray the little bit of stuff they pulled out onto a microscope slide, stain it, look for cancer.

It sounds like the mass needs to come out regardless, and that'll be painfully expensive, but don't let your heart break yet; them pibble-types are lumpy bois and get a lot of dumb 'benign' tumors that aren't a problem unless they're in an inconvenient spot, like pressing on the bladder and making it hard to pee or something.

<Sympathetic internet gesture, like a hug but without the potential creepy>

Witch-Kings / Witch-Queens. Family has nothing to do with it, you rule if you can cast Edward's Sparkling Testicles, or you rule if you can keep your hand in this Box of Pain longer than anybody else, or, etc.

@misadventure This is a very useful image for social media:

@greenflashlight Also, once you've stabbed a lot of people, you're just a little scratched up after you get stabbed a few times yourself BUT if you let yourself heal up naturally it takes just as long to go from a little scratched up to fine as it took to go from near dead to fine before you did so much stabbing...

@ghost I am pretty sure the BoD people never tried to get GRRM to do anything, they just imply that his approval of their MU means he disapproves of all others.

Anne McCaffery C&Ding at Pern MUSHes was a thing once. Neil Gaiman responded to a 'Sandman' game by playing it.

ETA: As I understand it, McCaffery's trouble was that she thought that the existence of a free online Pern computer game would devalue the IP license for a Pern video game. When she figured out that MUSHes and video games are not much alike she stopped but became precious about people not RPing in her favourite Pern locations, which was her prerogative I suppose.

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

— Frank O’Hara

@derp

The tailor who is just a tailor, ill-suited to dungeon diving, isn't the character I'm talkin' about.

Just pretend they're remotely similar. It didn't take massive mental gymnastics to include Garak. It took Bashir taking an interest in him, and 'The Wire'. Garak didn't make somebody figure out how to get him from dressing-room to dungeon, it was built-in. It took other PCs getting past 'tailor' and GMs reading the bit in his bg about the implant in his head and letting that hit the screen. This is probably equivalent to what @faraday said about working with staff to craft an appropriate storyline.

ETA: I may be confused and you're meaning apps for plain, simple tailors and you know there's nothin' more to them, because you read the apps. Rather than being a player and coming across a tailor PC.

"I knelt beside a stream which was manifesting on a polished wooden floor in an apartment above Central Park. A feathered shield was fastened to my left forearm. A feathered helmet was lowered on my head. I was invested with a duty to protect the orphan and the widow. This made me feel so good I climbed on Alexandra's double bed and wept in a general way for the fate of men. Then I followed her into the bathroom. She appeared to turn gold. She stood before me as huge as the guardian of the harbour. How had I ever thought of mastering her? With a hand of chrome and an immense Gauloise cigarette she suggested that I give up and worship her, which I did for ten years. Thus began the obscene silence of my career as a lady's man."

-- Leonard Cohen

@Arkandel said:

having a persistent 'visitable' world seems like a complete waste to me. Streets in particular,

I get a lot of imagination milage out of a grid. Where's this, relative to that, in the game world? What's in between? What's the neighborhood like? I dislike non-traditional grids that don't reflect the geography of the game world. I still prefer a +meet if I am on my way to RP, and exploring the non-traditional grid is less fun, and offers less information.

@Ghost Lindaaaaa Antonsson did try to take legal action about being on the 'Tasteless Descs' section of WORA.

I don't think she, or Elio, have actually done anything to shut down other 'A Song of Ice and Fire' MUs, besides say that their having GRRM's explicit permission means that he doesn't want anyone else doing it, and that he cares enough to object.

Lindaaa says racist stuff on twitter and only white characters are allowed on her game. The twitting has been noticed in GRRM fandom and rightly condemned for years.

@surreality

• Are they people asking to play an LOTR elf on a Game of Thrones game? (Heard about it, didn't see it personally. Have seen someone come to a WoD game and ask to play a Strix, though, that was... special.)

It was not exactly an LOTR elf. It was desc'd like an elf, and had a background of a player-invented-House (not allowed on GoB) with very elf-y characteristics, and wanted to use of some stats that reflect Game of Thronesy magic powers to represent different, elf-y powers. This player was indeed irate at the rejection, and at my remarking that the core of the problem was not the invented House, but the fact that the character was an elf. Though I imagine I might have enduced him to waste more of his time if I hadn't said it. He just wanted to play an elf, and also wanted to play with friends who were there and probably would have stretched for elfishness in some other way if I hadn't accidentally pissed him off and caused him to leave the game cursing my assholery.

There was also a princess of Normandy at one point, but that player didn't seem to take it amiss to be told that this was not a viable concept.

I think the normal chain of events for this is when someone comes along with 'Former Olympic Gold Medalist, Leader of Underground Crime Syndicate, World Explorer and Treasure Hunter, and also a Wizard,' type concepts and you're trying to explain that yeah, okay, you kinda-sorta-maybe CAN spread the points that way and have it conceivable that a person with that sheet could pull that off if they stayed lucky, but this just isn't Buckaroo Banzai MUSH so it just won't do.

Businesses or similar who've got the notion that their logo will do in place of a written name. I cannot Google 'unparsable symbol, a steeply rising curve, slanted and with a couple of little twiddly-doopers on top' and have your organization come up. It's also really hard to pronounce. Further, if I'm looking for, for example 'The Flying J' and see said symbol, there are pretty good odds I'm gonna miss the turn into your place before I realize that's what it's supposed to mean. And that's an easy one, since it actually follows old-timey cattle brand rules.

Do your damnedest to eradicate the notion that the game is a bloody 'service' at all. Hopefully you are doing it because it's your damn hobby, sir, which includes the boring bits to make it work out, but still isn't a job. You're sure not being paid, and I hope you're not doing it because MUers are a sad charity case who need your saintly volunteer efforts to bring much-needed entertainment to their tragic lives.

People will still assume you owe them a service, since that's not only a traditional model for MUSHes but also how it usually goes if a place is open to the public. But those ones develop selective illiteracy when you say that allowing or even encouraging people to pop in and play a game doesn't make you obliged to make it the game they want (at all, much less all the time) so they're just one of the boring bits of your hobby.

As Into The Garden Elizabeth Ran
by A. E. Housman

As into the garden Elizabeth ran,
Pursued by the just indignation of Ann,
she trod on an object that lay in her road,
She trod on an object that looked like a toad.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because
A toad was the actual object it was;
And after supporting Elizabeth's tread
It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.

Elizabeth, leaving her footprint behind,
Continued her flight on the wings of the wind,
And Ann in her anger was heard to arrive
At the toad that was not any longer alive.

She was heard to arrive, for the firmament rang
With the sound of a scream and the noise of a bang,
As her breath on the breezes she broadly bestowed
And fainted away on Elizabeth's toad.

Elizabeth, saved by the soul of her boot,
Escaped her insensible sister's pursuit;
And if ever hereafter she irritates Ann,
She will tread on a toad if she possibly can.

@Thenomain said in Fanbase entitlement:

Prediction: This thread will be about how entitlement is bad and specific examples about how people have acted in an entitled manner. No debate about if entitlement is bad will take place.

Well, yeah. In US culture, at least, people talk about 'entitlement' as if it being bad is part of the meaning of the word. I recall my ex throwing it around during our divorce as if my 'entitlement' in believing that I not only got to keep half of the savings and shit that we had accumulated together but also all of my furniture and household crap that I had from before was not a literal fact, but me being rapacious and wrong.

In the context of games and fandom the discussion should probably just be about reasonable expectations. Obviously we're not entitled to artists' works. Yet, while George R. R. Martin is not your bitch, it's also a reasonable expectation to figure a big-name professional writer will produce a novel every year or two; the publishing industry expects it too. (Though considering Martin's history, maybe it's not reasonable to expect that of him.) If I invite you to dinner and give you nothing but a saltine smeared with a small amount of rancid butter, I have not denied you an entitlement, but I have violated your reasonable expectation of a decent meal, and I am being a dick. When artists grossly jump the shark on a series, it's probably dickish. When MU-runners shut new players out of the game or treat them with brazen hostility or deny their characters agency, it's dickish, even though nobody's entitled to a satisfying MU.