Posts made by il-volpe

@Thenomain said:

but Night Vale's primary interaction with its audience is pretty damn surreal.

That's what I was saying. I should have said "a primary character" and not "the." If the audience is a character in the performance, the show is a surrealist work. Listening to the show is a surreal experience. If and when something happens like Cecil addresses "you" and means "you" the real listener and not just the imaginary Night Vale residents, the show steps into being a surrealist work rather than a magical realist one.

@Thenomain said:

@il-volpe said:

[..] magical realism [..]

I looked this one up and I have to say that it's kind of a dumb term.

Also, a splash of surrealism? Do not look too deeply into the dog park.

The term itself?

The below is not really relevant unless you, like me, get all happy about granular taxonomies. I do rabbit on.

The idea, eh. Surrealism addresses issues about cognition, how the subconscious informs ones perceptions, blurred lines between dream and reality, sanity and madness, that sort of thing. Magical realism addresses how culture informs our perceptions about what is uncanny and what is mundane.

Welcome to Night Vale is a work of surrealism if you consider yourself, the listener, to be the primary character -- are you dreaming this radio broadcast, WTF? But few of the other characters (so far as I know, I've not listened to every episode) appear to find themselves to be living in a distorted reality or to find any of the weird stuff that happens to be outside of the realms of the canny and cult. There's only Carlos, and he doesn't take it that hard either.

It's magical realism, though thus far I've never seen any review or commentary about it where the writer uses the term.

Yep.

@Bargle said:

for example (might be "within theme" for history but still the kind of thing some players might not be comfy with).

Yeah. A lot of people show up at GoB really keen to play Targaryens, but few of them are keen to marry their siblings and cousins.

I've gotta say, ugh, Fantasy WoD? I so strongly wish for more things that are not WoD.

Curious: What is it about GoT (which is in so many ways genericly fantasy-ish) that so many folks who want a fantasy game dislike? Are you looking for more high-fantasy magic-and-elf-PCs stuff, or?

@EmmahSue

Do you mind if I lift your every-player-is-an-ST post and mod it a touch to stick it on my game's wiki/newsfiles stuff?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g20_8-TPyTQ

True to the base theme, yep. Situations where no matter what players do, they cannot change a course of events, never never never, in spite of the fact that the characters are creatures that could, conceivably, change events, that's not cool.

eg, I am running something set in San Francisco in 1906. The PCs cannot stop the earthquake from happening, because they are humans with the powers of humans in 1906 and it's just an earthquake, they can't even predict it. Okay. Same setting, but now I say that the earthquake is caused by the Eldrich Powers the PCs are fighting. They are superheroes, and can fight Eldrich Powers. I can set them up so that really, stopping the EPs is beyond them, but it is not okay for me to say hard-stop never-never-never.

My take.

Player agency is paramount. To deny it takes away the element that I consider vital to making the game a fiction-generating game rather than a collaborative fiction project. If you're laying out plot-points and forcing characters to reach them, then you are not doing the work of a game-master. You've made the outline for a novel/short story and are then, like Tom Sawyer getting those kids to whitewash the fence, conning other people into doing part of the work for you.

I have had fun getting together with people I RP with and deciding story outlines for events that were in our characters' personal histories, and then RPing them as flashbacks, but this was not the whole game. Nor was it the disingenuous act of a GM pretending that it's a game where I get to decide what my character does while actually refusing to allow me to have said character do what he wants.

So, timelines. Okay, if somebody showed up on GoB and wrote a character who had killing the king as a goal, I'd tell them, naw, we're really trying not to break the canon timeline. If somebody approved suddenly expressed the desire to kill the king, I would say, huh? Why? Like almost all 'canon' characters, and any who were more than a mentioned name, the king is an NPC who isn't present, and odds of any PC developing a real motivation to bump him off via IC events is pretty slim. I'm not gonna let somebody break the world just 'cause they feel like fucking with the world. But if I, or player GMs (whose plots I oversee and am thus responsible for the consequences of) lay down a line of events that leads a PC's personal story into a situation where said PC is gonna try to kill the king, it's my frickin' responsibility as a game-master to give that PC a fair shake at it. The little axiom goes, "Don't say no, determine difficulty." And by funder, if that player comes up with a really clever plan and rolls well, he can bloody well succeed and then. O my god the game will be on an alternate timeline. Though actually, yes, I wouldn't treat that the same as I do most other PC actions, where the difficulty I determine actually gives the players good odds of success, and the plan has to be, not necessarily clever, just not terribly bad. (Feels challenging, but you're likely to succeed, vs. actually bloody hard to pull off.)

Actually, @Balerion, I've seen and played plenty of games that kept to a real world or imaginary world timeline and yet still allowed the PCs full agency. It does rather require that the GMs assume that not every interesting or important thing that ever happened in the world is included in the timeline you're following, though.

Edit: Oops, I missed the bit with Bal talking about skirmishes, castle-sackings, etc, and thought he meant that 'go to war' etc that Bobotron mentioned was stuff that could not happen. This post is totally not relevant.

@Bobotron @BigDaddyAmin

I can't speak to its activity aside from the MUDstats numbers. When people who've come from there talk about it (You may talk about 'Blood of Dragons' on 'Game of Bones' though I do try to discourage bash-sessions about it unless you're doing so in private or on the channel that's reserved for being rude) the usual word goes that they either cannot get a scene, or the RP is repetitive nobles-having-huffs-at-other-nobles + tourneys, or that the player in question has been verbally abused by the staff there and cannot stand it any more.

Go to war, investigate magic, breed dragons, slay rogue dragons...

GoB is 1:1 in a time period that's kinda blank, but all of that is stuff we've done, or had people try with varying degrees of success, and a fair bit of fun. (Though the wars are mere skirmishes, and players do keep trying to tame the wild dragon just by yelling at it, which doesn't work, with comical results.)

@Alzie I think the confusion about BoD staff claiming that other games are not allowed to exist is because when Nymeria goes off on a rabid public howling spree about other games and how they are evil and bad and hurt her butt more than it has ever been hurt before, and are illegal and should be sued and she'd be in the right to do it, she actually means, "Hrmph, I wish people wouldn't do that," and when GRRM says, "Hrumph, I wish people would do that differently," he means that they are evil and bad and hurt his butt, etc.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

It doesn't seem to stop other people from creating Westerosi themed MU*s. Hell, now I want to make one just to spite you.

Do eeeeet.

@Alzie said:

He says, as if GRRM is trolling the internet for his hate forums.

Yep. One funny bit there is that I don't troll nor mock GRRM on "Is Winter Coming," and basically just check it from time to time because and maybe post because there's a link to my game in my sig. If I comment about GRRM, I'm usually actually pretty much defending the guy, though quietly, as it's hardly the place to argue his merits.

The other funny bit is that that forum is, aside from the bits that are just boring bitching about how GRRM is a slow writer (which is annoying of him, yeah, but it's hardly news) actually more dedicated to trolling and mocking Nymeria, and complaining about what a blight upon the fandom she is. "Is Winter Coming" wouldn't exist without her.

And gosh, how cute of you, @Balerion, to be checking out what online communities I have accounts in.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

But if you guys were a little less draconian you probably wouldn't have the competition to begin with.

Thing is, it's just not a competition. You don't see WoD MU* staff having ragefits that a new WoD game has opened. Okay, from time to time somebody quits game X to make a new game and tries to drag all their friends along, and there are hurt feelings, but when there's no personal connection? MUs are generally friendly-ish to one another. Hell, I tell people that BoD exists, and is almost certainly (having never played there, I cannot say I'm completely sure) more accurate to the theme, because its owners are more privy to details of the world and more interested in sticking strictly to the timeline. and it is definitely more controlled. It's not a contest because they're different. They're run differently, by different people. A person might even (OMG) play several different MUs in the same theme and enjoy them all. It seems to me that attacking other games is a way to try to keep players while not having suit them beyond having a theme they want and being the only game in town.

@Balerion

Endorse? Well, actually, in spite of having had a bit on SL for years, I didn't know there were aSOIaF sims on there 'til I read something about them on Nymeria's blog, reviewing the, uh, poor quality of the role-play on them as I recall, but I may be in error about that. Play-by-posts, as far as I know you (plural) just ignore them. In contrast to decrying other MUSHes and shaming and occasionally attempting to intimidate their players. Which is indeed annoying.

I stand corrected re: division of labour.

I'm curious. It's interesting to hear about such an agreement, I've never heard of a truly official one.

I'm pretty sure BoD's one isn't a legal document, just a between-people agreement, as are all the other author-MU* developer agreements I've ever heard about. (Except maybe that really weird one between Anne McCaffery and PernMUSH way back when, when she told them they could continue to exist as long as they took Benden Weyr and Ruatha Hold off the game?) So yeah, probably it does belong in another thread.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Have you... ever played on a MU* that uses TT books for their rules? You still need to have the core books for whatever you're playing. Its not like the books are loaded wholesale into the MU*, I'm not even sure if that would be possible.

Loading the books into the MU* would be totally possible, but that is a serious copyright violation.

So yeah, players must buy them. More or less. Actually, it's pretty darn easy to play a WoD game without the books, though you are doing pretty much what you do at a table-top game; asking a chum to look up a rule or two for you. Anomaly TrekMUX used the Last Unicorn Games Star Trek systems and hardly anybody had the books, yet we got by.

I'd guess that in this case, actually any IaF MUSH or other talky-typey-non-graphicsy RPG is the purview of Green Ronin games' license, and I know for fact that they give no fucks that IaF MUSHes and play-by-post forum games exist and don't even use their ruleset.

@BetterJudgment

Honestly, I think it's quite possibly a mistake to suppose that Elio García is responsible for much of the hijinks, and it's also quite likely true that he's done the better part of the skilled and useful stuff for the fandom. Grapeviney-hinty-shit there.