Posts made by il-volpe

Would you play it in the forties?
In '72 and wear short-short shorties?
Nineteen-twenties swapping charms for liquors?
Beatnik mage in winklepickers?

For thirty frickin' years my father has 'owned' and moderated a listserv about entomology.

A few weeks ago somebody posted a link to a petition to change the name of the Linnaean Games, a sort of entomology trivia contest, because some people are troubled by the racist aspects of Linnaeus' original taxonomy concerning humans.

So some assholes responded about racism not existing, Linnaeus being right about human subspecies to begin with, and please somebody protect our statues.

And some other assholes responded to that by complaining, instead of to the list moderators, to the university that hosts it. And /they/ responded by shutting down the list entirely and removing the offending thread from the archive. All without giving my dad a minute to take care of it.

@Derp

I think it ought not be the case -- what you said about show characters seldom advancing in rank.

Trek MUs have, as far as I know, generally been focused on the militaristic bit, with rules for rank advancement set in, and often set in wartime.

Statless games may be pretty rare, but I think that has less to do with a burning need for advancement, and more because we've come to realize that the playground version of cops and robbers ("I got you!" "No you didn't!") doesn't work too great on internet games with strangers.

Sometimes it does, which is weird, but hey.

I just like a dice system because it's more fun for me.

I think one could run any type of game sheet and diceless, but I'm not sure you'd want to even with the most agreeable group of players.

@Sunny said in Why no Star Trek games?:

@Paradox said in Why no Star Trek games?:

We can lie to ourselves and say it's about RP, but it really isn't. WE all want /something/ for our time.

I really don't think this is true.

Hmm. It's true, but not necessarily the way Paradox says.

If you make character advancement quite separate from RP-votes and such, people will still keep score with interest and enthusiasm. Especially if you let them see who earned the most this week, and total, etc.

We've been conditioned to love accumulating points. The points don't need to be redeemable for anything.

No newcomer on Game of Bones ever apped a PoC character without first asking me if a Black or Asian character would be approved. I figured that it was because Blood of Dragons does not allow them and it was a GoT/Medieval-fantasy MU problem, but I guess I'm unsurprised to hear they 'break theme' elsewhere.

My answer to it was to dump a shitload of medieval-costumed PoC on the 'suggested character pics' page. I don't know if this had an effect. In the context of MUs, I don't think representation among the PCs is of much interest, the more important thing is to avoid being a shithole where players have to deal with bigotry at playtime.

Edited to add that by 'players' I mean to include players who are people of colour, women, LGBTQA, and disabled, all of whom you ought to assume to be present.

Does anyone remember and still care about David Brin Upliftverse?

We will use Ares, almost certainly with FS3. Anybody who wants to do some development and RP-master stuff, give a poke.

I have joined four different tabletop games over the last five years, with long periods in between while I search for another, and I've left two because of bigots.

@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:

It's always easier to use a system that is basically interpreting dice according to a set of rules. (Note: I think this is a perfectly fine and even awesome way to run an FS3 game, I've done it with mutations).

I think one must do it this way to have it flexible enough to represent the source material well enough to deserve the name.

You want to be able to wing it, as in the 'Under Pressure' video clip. But magic is heavily academic and takes shitloads of practice and study.

My undeveloped thought is to say that any spell has both a difficulty and a charge requirement -- use FS3's Luck points for this but I'll have to figure out how to tweak it so you can raise your max with XP, if casting as a group everybody contributes some. If you blow all your charge at once and it's more than X points, you become a niffin. If you run out of charge blowing it a little bit at a time, you just pass out. Material components that are destroyed in the process of casting reduce the charge. Somatic/ritual components (usually "Popper" hand-movements in the source material) reduce difficulty, but you have to be able to perform them properly, so you have a Poppers skill that you don't roll to cast, but is a prerequisite. Spell requires you to chant in Scythian, you need that language at the appropriate level. Geometry for yer complex sigils. That sort of thing. So in the video clip, Quentin casts a simple mind effect to make everybody know the lyrics to "Under Pressure" and hear the tune. The group performance makes the spell that follows a group-cast, so nobody has to spend too much charge, and the group performance also serves as a high-value ritual (lots of people, coordinated with a fairly high level of precision) so with the diff lowered and everybody giving charge, they can pull it off without anyone being too badly weakened. Though everybody has to have at least a couple of points in a music skill or they can't carry the tune and it won't work.

@derp - That scene's a favourite of mine. I think that nobody but Penny's in the right discipline to do it if you can only off-the-cuff in your own discipline, though?

@Aria - I have some ideas to make FS3 do the magic. Last time I talked about it here it got pretty blasted, but I don't think its as bad as all that, and it would allow what you and Derp are getting at.

Yep, this is the place for a laundry-list. To help me fill in the gaps in what I've got in mind, or find out that what I've got in mind isn't what's wanted (so far, not so.)

@aria I will use FS3, 'cause I can't code for crap and it's easy to customize enough to work, or so I believe.

People who are interested in such a game, what would you wish it to include/exclude?

@aria If you* have suggestions for theme elements etc I want to hear them. (No guarantee I'll do anything with them, but I've a lot of gaps to fill.)

*or others

So, any principles or guidelines for naming a MU?

Suggestions for a 'The Magicians' themed one's name?

Probably GRRM won't respond to attempts to contact him. Green Ronin essentially said 'huh, whatever," and let me post an advert for GoB on their forums.

Martin has gone sane about fanfic:

"I am opposed to fan fiction, but people can do whatever they want for their own personal amusement, so long as they don't send it to me."
-- George R. R. Martin, Mar. 28th, 2014

http://grrm.livejournal.com/362384.html?thread=18879632#t18879632

There's really no evidence that Martin thinks MUs are fanfic. He's said that he /wanted/ them made for his IPs. Lindaaaaaa's claim that she and Elio are the only people in the world that GRRM thinks are good enough to GM a GoT/ASoIaF MU is really obviously specious. Also, it really seems as if GRRM doesn't like her any more than the rest of us do. So in some old interview with GRRM he mentions that he's had people ask about making MUs (before the show came along, when he enjoyed having fans) and he's referred them to Blood of Dragons, but I fancy if you replied to that, "Yeah, I know, but nobody I want to play with or GM wants to play with or be GMed by Lindaaa," you'd get an okay because he's a gamer himself. If you could get his attention, which doesn't seem likely.

I advise you to just go for it. It's a case where it's a lot easier, faster, and more fun to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.

A lot of people were disappointed that GoB didn't really use Green Ronin's system, and it might be that using it will be a draw. I fear that most GoT fans have GoT burnout, though.

I didn't allow players to invent their own houses, because there are hundreds of them in the source material and keeping track of them is a huge pain. As far as I can tell, the big challenge of a GoT game (that's not something that comes up in other MUs) is keeping track of who is related to who and how, and not letting a single or small group of players cockblock the rest world from playing their favourite house.

@botulism
:reads website.

This looks awesome.

How many people think this is a 'Locke and Key' game?

@tnp said in 'The Magicians' mechanics with FS3:

Gods, I hate FATE. But I'd prefer it over FS3. I don't hate FS3 at all but I think it encourages combat more than RP. That's not a fault of the system but the ones playing it.

Wot ones playing it? BSG players?

@faraday said in 'The Magicians' mechanics with FS3:

It depends on how you define dino. Any game that's been constantly doling out XP ...

That's exactly how it worked out, yep. People still look at others sheets and have a yawp about it, though, and certain characters are utterly crushing at certain skills that the setting makes especially desirable.

The matter of skill breadth matches how magic is represented in the source materials -- there are times when Q's ability to do magic relies on the fact that he's good at calculus, other times where he's got problems because he doesn't know a certain language.

FS3 stands for Faraday's Simple Skill System. I add an 'edition' after it for subsequent versions. The one everybody's used to is FS3 Second Edition. Ares uses FS3 Third Edition.

Ha! You've told me that before, but for some reason I've kept right on thinking it was 'Faraday System 3'. There was a comprehensive exam in being thick and I forgot to bring a pencil.