Best posts made by insomniac7809

@surreality Kinda works, I guess. There's plenty of TV shows with magical or sci-fi shit going on, but... can't say I have a better idea.

@Derp I think(?) the admins here delete the posts of a particular repeatedly-banned individual, since he keeps circumventing the ban and coming back.

Clearing his history on the site seems like a good way to discourage him from coming back and picking up where he left off.

@lithium Oh, no, I do get that. But loyalty to off-brand Uggs thdrew me for a loop.

@Auspice said in Recommendations: Neo-noir book theme.:

authors do get hung up on certain words/terms it is true.

So it goes.

People have mentioned Apocalypse World, but no mention so far of the first(?) PbtA game:

Monster Hearts
A supernatural teenage romance RPG about the messy lives of teenage monsters. I love this game.

Also have a few super-short pay what you want games like

Let The Bodies Hit the Floor
Where the players are a group of parasitic mind-controlling worms. When you try to act, you flip a coin; heads are good, tails mark the counter. The first four are manageable ("nothing wrong with me"), the next four are worse ("something's got to give"), and then the bodies hit the floor.

Barbarians of Academia
The PCs are barbarians from the sunken continent of Lemuria, cast through time and space to modern-day US, employed as professors of Lemurian Studies. The Dean is holding a party, and at the end of the night, only one of the barbarians... can receive tenure.

DIE
A tie-in to Kieron Gillen's comic book of the same name. The PCs are players in a role-playing campaign. They're sucked into the world of the game, and need to escape home... or, y'know, not.

I get the argument for open sheets, and I can understand where people are coming from.

I just do not like them Sam I Am. If that's the way the game is played it's not a dealbreaker for me, if there's something else that the game has to offer. But that's my preference.

Frankly, I really like the way Arx handles it. To whit: everything you have OOC access to, you either have found out or can find out IC. I don't like having to keep what I IC know from what I OOC know separate beyond what I have to and I really don't like trying to second-guess whether my PC could have figured out what I already know to be the case OOC. I don't like e-peen wagging about whose stats are most badass but I really don't like the answer to "can I take 'em" to be visible if there's any PVP going on at all.

Just my take.

@insomniac7809 said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

FUCKING STOP TRYING TO CALL OUT HUNG OVER.

We all know why you feel shitty and we don't care. You're a grown man and you know when you work. Either calm the fuck down with work night drinking or suck it the fuck up.

Follow up:

So you've put in your two weeks', but you'll let us know if you can work shifts after the posted date?

Man, you are just adorable.

Buhbye now.

@Auspice said in Favorite/Most Memorable Childhood Books:

Tobias was my first fictional crush.
Didn't matter he was a hawk.

Oh, incidentally: Marco talking about Jake in the "introduce everyone at the start of the book" reads really differently to me now than they did back in the day.

"Rachel is a girl who is pretty. Ax is an alien, who can morph into a human; the girls say he is good-looking when he does but I am a guy so I have no way of knowing. Jake is my best friend; he has a strong jaw and the sort of presence that always makes him seem bigger than he is and somehow makes you sure that the decisions he's making are the right ones. I'd never tell him this, but I trust him absolutely and there is nothing I wouldn't do for him. Cassie was also there."

Like, this could be an accidental inverse of r/menwritingwomen but I think it might be on purpose.

@Joyeuse said in Fringe/Weird RPGs:

@Tyche Yup! I own a physical copy of it. It's a delightful read.

Love is real.

Lessee, what else... I have Little Fears, a seriously disturbing horror game. The PCs are children menaced by the denizens of Closetland that want to drag them away. It's kind of a weird mash-up of the childish (you can fight off the monsters with the plastic ray gun!) and the really, really adult (thinly-veiled, or not at all veiled, references to abduction and abuse). The second edition ("Nightmare Edition") tones this down. It's a really well-written game I'm not sure I'd ever play, even if I found a group.

Cat: a Little Game About Little Heroes, by John Wick. You are a cat. The monsters are coming for your person. They can't see the monsters, but you can. (What did you think the cat was freaking out over?)

Kagematsu, a really short, structured samurai RPG. One person is playing the titular ronan, the rest of the players are village women trying to convince him to stop his wandering and defend them from the inevitable doom that threatens their village.

Sorcerer: probably the best-known RPG I'd still comfortably count as "fringe." The players are sorcerers who get power from bound demons. It comes at a price.

So you're looking for shoes for your camp/hike vacation to the Amazon. Very cool! Not our specialty, but some solid hiking footwear here.

Oh, none of them? You're looking...

...you're looking for a cute heel to go hiking in the Amazon rainforest.

...am I on Candid Camera? Are you fucking with me right now?

You're not, are you. You are literally living out an Arrested Development bit. Holy shit.

@Auspice said in MSB Peeves:

@insomniac7809 said in MSB Peeves:

@Thenomain said in MSB Peeves:

I do not understand why people get up in arms about pop/soda/Coke. Except that "Coke" is a proper noun and should not be used as a collective noun.

Now excuse me, my allergies are making me sneeze my head off. Hand me some kleenex while I google a remedy.

Someone who says "pop" sounds like they're going to meet that cute boy/girl from third period at a diner to split a banana sundae in 1956.

Calling it "coke" is dumb because I need to clarify if I actually mean a coke or if I mean something else to get the kind of soda I want. That doesn't apply to "Kleenex" because the only people who have ever or will ever give a shit if their tissues are Kleenex-brand are employed at Kleenex's marketing department, and it doesn't apply to googling things because a) it's a verb, no one calls Bing "a google" and b) obviously I am using Google.

lemme bing that

You should see if Microsoft is still paying people to use that phrase.

@Auspice Right? It's a really simple core experience, but there's so many things to work out and learn that it keeps on being more to explore. There are almost no games I'd accept this little of a tutorial in...

Honestly, it seems to be just about everything I hate in video game design (aside from microtransactions) but I still love it to a possibly unhealthy extent.

(Through my day, in the idleness of the work week, I find my thoughts drifting to evocative writing, subtle world-building, and the constant running of timers. While I cruise MSB for shitposts, its tantalizing icon beckons me, almost inexorably. Just a hint, a touch, to see if my next Dream action might yield the next step of my progression...)

@pandora said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

This is why everyone should shut the fuck up and let me be an asshole.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Unless I beat your ass with a book. Words do not hurt unless you have been conditioned to let them. This is why children say the darnedest things but then they're taught shame disguised as couth. And while I appreciate the thought and intent behind censorship of all the bad-wrong words, I firmly believe it is doing more harm than good, feeding into this false sense of being entitled to niceness, then causing people to fall apart when that expectation is inevitably shattered. People are way too anxious, stressed, and socially stunted today, I posit it has something to do with the utterly impossible social expectations of never ever saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time because someone's feelings might get hurt, coupled with the fact that hurting someone's feelings has been made into the world's greatest evil act, so even accidentally sticking your foot in it makes you a Bad Person.

Stahp it.

So people can say mean things because they have the right to say mean things, but the people who say those people should stop saying mean things should stop saying the people who say mean things should stop saying mean things?

@macha said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

@sixregrets

This made me think of visiting my boyfriend at State College, PA (yeeears ago) and it was an Eagles game day - the drunk frat boys screaming E - A- G- E- S - EAGLES EAGLES EAGLES.

And every time they were out on their balcony screaming and misspelling it, I couldn't stop laughing.

That sounds right, and also Eagles games are penny ante shit compared to Penn State games in that town. WE ARE!

@rucket said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

to booing Santa

ONE FUCKING TIME

@Ganymede said in Thirtsy Sword Lesbians wins some ENies:

@Misadventure

I have no idea what this game is about, but it sounds pretty cool.

I mean, the title says it all, doesn't it?

More seriously, it's a PbtA game about high-adventure PCs where flirting and crushing on your allies and enemies is as central to the mechanics as hitting people with swords. She-Ra is definitely one of the influences it draws from.

Also it has "Nature Witch" and "Spooky Witch" as separate character archetypes which amuses me.

Aside from "the game wraps," "the game death spirals," and "just not feeling it"...

Staff dramaz is a big one. People who lord over their online rp domain and surround themselves with kissass sycophants is way more common than I would have thought in the realm of chat rooms where grown-ass people pretend to be samurai and vampires who have sex with each other. (The LordElf effect.)

Player drama, about the same. I mean, there's the odd person I can't stand on an OOC level, but when the RP dries up because I'm subjected to a smear campaign because my PC ruffled someone's feathers? Can't be bothered.

Excessive staff inactivity. I can entertain myself for a long time, but when nothing can be done that would contextualize endless coffee shop RP? It eventually gets old. (Still bitter over when the biggest player-driven effort I've seen, on any game, collapsed because the sub-sphere staffer went radio silent, and the general sphere staffer was declaring it not his problem. We didn't even need scenes run! Just someone to fill out the goddamn paperwork!)

Complete unrestrained freedom. Maybe it's a weird complaint to have, but if the setting is a small town, and it contains nine nightclubs, thirteen of the richest people in the USA, and has had seven unrelated incursions by extradimensional horrors in the last month and a half, I just can't buy into it enough to give a shit.

Activity cycles. This is on me, but my hours are awful. I work on swing shifts when I'm employed, and I didn't pick up my user tag out of a hat. Plenty of times I've given up on games just because the player base and I were on different enough hours that I couldn't find the RP there.

Any of the above in doses that wouldn't have been dealbreakers to me, but were driving off friends or RP partners of mine to the point that I didn't have my partner base.

Retail whining:

"I want to return this item." Cool. Do you have the recipt?
"Yes!" Okay, no, that's a packing slip. A recipt is something else. This piece of paper says nothing except that we sent you that item.
"Why can't you use this?" Because it has no information about method of payment or cost at time of purchase. But that's fine, I can look up the purchase by email.
No, of course you wouldn't give an email address when we asked you. Okay, let me see if I can dig up this purchase by name or ZIP...
"I have the credit card!" Of course you want me to have access to your credit card but not your email. For our customers' securiry, I can't access credit card information at store level.
"Target can look up purchases with the credit card!" And Target couldn't keep that shit from getting hacked, and we're no goddamn Target. We barely keep the registers working.
"Why is this so difficult!" Because you didn't keep the recipt or give us any information that would make this easy. I'm gonna need to call the people who can look this up with what wr have-
"Give it back! This is ridiculous!" True 'nuff.

Okay, I was going to directly quote @surreality responding to me, but the thread's moved on and it would be just chopped up anyway, so instead I'm posting a few thoughts.

-I don't think there are limits to what art should explore, if done in a considered and respectful fashion by someone who earns that trust. (If it's badly handled, the creators can and often do catch flack for it.)

-I think RP, with people I trust to be sensitive and thoughtful, should have no fewer restrictions put in place.

-I think a MU* environment, for several of the same reasons I love the MU* environment (fast, loose, messy collaborative storytelling with complete strangers) is an absolutely terrible setting to foster the sort of sensitivity and trust that it takes to bring the sort of real-world hate and slurs into the fiction.

-I think that banning in-character slurs is a reasonable restriction to foster player comfort and inclusivity, in the same way many MU*s ban in-character rape. Yes, it happens in real life; no we do not want to deal with it.

(-I don't think "son of a bitch" or "motherfucker" are in any way equitable with racial or homophobic slurs in this context.)

-I think that talking about how aspects of real-world discrimination resembles aspects of fantastical racism ignores that most of the complaints are in the vein of "hate speech against groups I'm a member of is disruptive to my fun time."

-I think that, say, a cowboy MU* is less likely to be a thoughtful expression of American race relations in the 1870s and more an excuse for people to pretend to be awesome gunslingers in cowboy outfits, and setting a "you must be this white/male/straight to be awesome" bar is not a good look for inclusivity in the hobby.

-I think that, while some degree of historical accuracy is a concern, the activities of one in-character month in our hypothetical cowboy MU* have a good chance of overshadowing the collected lifetime achievements of any real western gunfighter, and I also think that people would object if TS in the cowboy MU was required to focus on a cowboy's saddle sores, BO, and dickcheese, historically accurate or not. I think allowances can be made.

-I think that, with what I see across the hobby of the people arguing that it's beneficial to use slurs in-character versus the people who express discomfort toward their use in-scene, it starts to feel like a bunch of us white straight folk talking about how real we keep it while alienating minority players from the hobby.

That's just my thoughts.

"So the thing about that one... I mean... it's just not, kinda. I think. Y'know?"

NO I FUCKING DO NOT KNOW, USE YOUR WORDS

My group app planning has a three stages:

1. Talk in OOC with the other players about how our characters relate and know each other. I try to keep this more toward the factual details than interpersonal dynamic, which again I try to detail in play.

2. Mention the characters in the app, and go in toward CG at the same time.

3. Make plans for what I'll do with the PC when the other players flake on me. If this doesn't happen, sacrifice an unblemished heifer in thanks.