Posts made by il-volpe

Anyway, @SixRegrets -- does that make enough sense, and are you still interested?

@tek Hehe, well, I sure as hell didn't want to play there when I read their app rules etc. I couldn't really know how many unique IPs they got even back when I was always looking at MUstats about it. Maybe it's a bigger handful than it seems, but even if it's four or five people, more power to them if it's fun.

“With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.” -- Hunter S. Thompson

@mietze Yep. I do recall. And all the games were WoD, Pern, just social, or furry-and-social.

And a lot of people remember this as the golden age of the hobby or summat, 'cause there were hundreds of connects to Masquerade at any one time.

@Enoch said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@il-volpe Do not take this as an insult, my guy, but if the hobby came down to twenty GoB-like games, I would consider it way past dead. Nothing against anyone who enjoyed it, but just because you can keep it open forever, it doesn't mean it is what anyone would consider a healthy game.

GoB certainly did have its period of being dead and continuing to be up for the use of a handful of die-hards were still maybe sometimes playing a little but mostly socialized OOC.

However, prior to that GoB had about two years of RP-on-demand at all hours and 60-some different regular players. It was a healthy game and not tiny and had a respectable run in that state.

You may be thinking of Blood of Dragons, which is still open and, as far as I can tell, populated by fewer than ten regular players and seldom has any scenes going, and as far as I know, has been just that way since it opened in 2006.

@faraday said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

That really has nothing whatsoever to do with FS3 though. A GM would have to manually apply modifiers or limit what abilities you could roll or whatever.

I swear I do understand the distinctions between Ares, FS3, and FS3's combat engine, but for the life of me I can't seem to talk as if I do.

@Enoch said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

You only need to go to the Hog Pit to see Arx is the only real representative of the hobby, at least for now

Hahahaha.

GoB went on happily with barely a peep heard about it here.

The games that were talked about on the old WORA and SWORA and now in the Hog Pit are probably not representative of the hobby. To get consistently talked about here, the game must not only be big enough that multiple readers here are playing it, it must also be bad enough that multiple readers here want to bitch about it and hear the bitching of others. But a game does not have to include multiple pit-crew members to be big enough to provide RP on demand, and it doesn't have to be bad enough for people to want to bitch about it every week to be, uh, good enough to play. Though obviously the larger the group of players the more likely it is that somebody'll have a gripe.

Just so. What I want is a generic point tracker that does not have any effect on the combat engine. I feel like I've said this several times now.

I can't imagine how one could code it to work within the combat engine and still be usable for a broad variety of things. It strikes me as easy to have the command to spend points say, "You have spent seven spoon-bending points in one scene, you must now pose dying of a nosebleed," or whatever you please, but quite awkward to code a set of customizable pools that act on the combat engine, in customizable ways ranging from having overspending kill you in one game's case or pool-type's case, while in another you can't overspend, you just run out and all it means is you've got to wait for another fire-belch to build up and in a third you need hugs before you can do another Care Bear Stare.

Yes, I know luck is a plug-in now. The scenes bit is new to me, but anyway, the point is, I'd like a setting so the pool can be refreshed by RPing, as luck is, AND/OR at a settable rate of time.

@SixRegrets Just manually spent.

Luck is linked to cookies, so you'd add a bit to the cookie code so you also refresh your magic-pool by RPing. This seems appropriate enough and might be kinda great.

It also seems like a potential disaster, so having it easy to switch it to 'you get one every N hours' would be a good idea.

Nope, not different players having different rates, but different pools. I just want the one, but I can see designing a game that used a handful.

Staff should be able to add/subtract points. Also a setting where that's the only way to get them seems likely to be wanted somewhere, sometime.

Re: Spending too much. Besides a warning to the room and to the channel, nothing.

@SixRegrets Oh. Cool. Wow, thanks. Lemme know what you think:

What I want is for FS3 sheets to have a points pool to represent magical 'juice'. The way luck works is fine so I was gonna copy the code for that and the cookies and rename stuff and mess it up and scour the documentation and eventually bug Faraday asking what I did wrong, which is my usual approach to stuff like this.

What would be a lot better would be a proper plug-in that let you add some spendable pools of settable sizes and settable refresh rates/mechanisms to FS3 to represent whatever a game builder wants. Sanity points, werecritter shifts, how may spoons you can bend with your mind before dying of a nosebleed, how much resistance to the toxic effects of the mind drug.

What would also be nice for 'Magicians' would be to have it warn people if they spend too much at once.

Anybody care to help me out with some (I think) simple code for Ares?

What @bear_necessities says.

You've got some enthusiastic responses. Players'll come.

@mietze Same. My uncle, the one who was 'Dr. Earnhardt' in Far Cry 3 some years ago, and an aunt last fucking week.

For a moment I thought Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death wouldn't be too much of a disaster, because Trump will no doubt attempt to a install beauty pageant judge and it will no doubt take him four months to understand the difference between judges of law and judges of chili cook-offs.

But then I checked, and the constitution does not name any required qualifications for supreme court judges.

@GangOfDolls said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

The timeline of the show, which in a lot of ways gets into a lot of details the books didn't have time to get into, is actually much more compact. It's happening over an ~18ish months turnaround,

It's not really relevant, but in the final season, when Penny and Plum accidentally time-travel, they state that it's 2020, and that Quentin's welters award is from 2016.

I think the writers fucked up, though.

@faraday I am not sure what could be built-in to represent magic when magic ranges from slicing somebody in two from a distance to making a marble come alive.

GoB never really had trouble with using the combat system in a half-assed way -- to resolve hits but usually not to resolve damage. 'The Magicians' seems even less likely to really need it.

@bear_necessities What's nailed down (but not in any practical way) is that the geographical setting is NYC, with grid representing bits of Brooklyn with its hedge safe house, and bits of Manhattan with another one, with oscillating rival/ally relationships between the two. And Brakebills. While hedges couldn't go to Brakebills easily, students and faculty and alumni can all use both city and school.

You are right about the wide spread, but I want that. And about the cliquiness risk, which is pretty big for any MU and made worse when you set stuff that encourages and enables characters avoiding one another.

BUT I set a lot of store on letting people play what they want if it doesn't roger the game-world. So it goes like, "Hmm, you might have a hard time finding meaningful RP as a talking, teleporting, cigarette-loving bunny, but hey, roll with it so long as you don't come bitching at people if it doesn't work out," and I'll credit the player with either wanting to give finding meaningful RP as a bunny a try regardless of the challenges, or with getting a giggle out of just repeatedly posing plopping into the room with their wiggly nose and saying "Eat my ass," and either enjoying it or finding something else to do.

The hedges and the after-Brakebills stuff is more interesting in the show and books, but I get the impression more people want to play Brakebills than don't. Also, it has a massive advantage in that student characters can be drop-in builds. You've already pretty much got 'late teen to mid-twenties, was a 'gifted' child, probably has a trauma, magic.' It's quick to get from there to playable, especially if it's my game because I'll let you rework your sheet during your first couple of weeks, and let you have many alts if you want, and do not give one fuck if you abandon the character, and prioritize approval speed.

@Derp said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

How? FS3 doesn't handle magic at all.

How not? I need to hammer out the details but as far as I can tell, rolling attribute Personal Magicalness + action skill Spellcasting tells you if it worked, and a bunch of different other skills tell if it's within your power, without them you fail without a roll.

@bear_necessities A major part, but not necessarily the major part. A solid quarter of the people I've seen express enthusiasm to play want to play hedges, and while I hate to split the player base, it'd be a disservice to the source materials and those players not to let them. So it'll have some New York City magical community goings-on, and graduating won't be the end of a PC.

@GangOfDolls I don't think the show and the books tell the same story. I figure the show makes a better game and aim for something like the show but with more of the book's imagery; e.g. Brakebills is almost entirely housed in a single sprawling mansion that has some rooms that are bigger on the inside; it does not look like the University of British Columbia.

I had not considered having any of the timelines from the source materials apply, even if they do overlap with the game's timeline. That seems like running a module for players who just watched a different group play the module.

@Coin Yeah, I feel the same. I don't know if the MUSH player base as a whole agrees, though, and if a major part of setting is a school from which you graduate, people may want time to go faster so it's conceivable to ICly complete the program within the MU's lifespan.

@Misadventure -- FS3, with a lot of odd prerequisites.

@bear_necessities said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

If you're looking for a way to get rid of the canon characters (which I would highly recommend), there's already a convenient plot device to do that without having to go back in time.

Yeah, no canon characters. I don't find it necessary to do anything to explain why they're not present, though. "I don't like canon characters so it's an alternate-reality to the source material even though it's the same place and time" strikes me as perfectly adequate.

Keep in mind that if I ever complete enough to open it, it'll be a Gashlycrumb production, and I happily let a lot of 'theme' rulings hang until it's actually relevant to the game and make the rule to suit the players involved. So a bunch of other questions that might seem like they need to be resolved really don't.

I was just toying with the historical idea, and/or with having a sort of double-grid where the students have, say, set up a semi-permanent time portal so they can go party for hours in 1968 and return three minutes after they left.

I think the contemporary setting folks have good points. The question that leaves is how much so -- setting it five years in the past strikes me as more flexible (doesn't ask for a 1:1 rl:mu time ratio) than setting it at now-now. Though the show was set in the near-future relative to filming so the last season is set in 2020 but with different disasters, and I don't think this wants doing anything about either.

@SixRegrets I keep not completing the build for one, yeah.