Good news everyone!
This July was the hottest month in recorded history.
No wait, that's not good news.
I could have sworn it was July 1936. For the US that is. But they keep changing the data though.
The 1936 heat wave lost its spot (highest average monthly temperature across the continental USA) in July 2012. Your information appears to be seven years out of date.
Ultimately, in an online space, "ban" is the only actual power the admins have--or, well, can ethically employ. Temporarily or permanently removing a member's ability to participate.
Things like verbal warnings have exactly as much weight as the recipient chooses to give them. "Rehabilitation" even more so.
@Arkandel But he's backed up by Tucker Carloson's propaganda rag citing a blogger. A climate blogger.
There's no point in adhering slavishly to canon if you're RPing. The whole point is doing something other than the source material.
At the same time, if your character is not recognizable as their canonical version, you should probably just make an OC.
At the same time, Liv is awesome.
If we're talking about a comic book RP, you're probably not doing any worse by the character than at least one actual professional author who was paid actual money to write them under the actual imprint. If you do too bad a job, you can always blame skrulls/LMDs/eight-dimensional imps.
@Ghost said in How to pronounce FYI?:
I got somethin' for his punk ass
(That Sublime lyric always feels off)
Off how? It's the world's most mellow anthem to fantasizing about physically abusing your ex-girlfriend and murdering her new beau.
@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Playing a character on a MU is not writing a character in a story. At least not as far as I'm concerned. It is embodying a character through word and action in a real-time interaction with other people.
I don't really see that as being different? MU* storytelling will be a bit... fast and loose, obviously, compared to a written work that undergoes revision and editing, but ultimately the same sort of thing.
A good story invites us to identify with the characters "on-screen" to at least some degree, and the creator (by necessity) is the one who embodies them in their creation.
...but this is a bit off-topic, I guess
I've agreed to take shifts this week at another location.
I'm fairly sure the people who chose this site as a retail location and set up the off-site storage did so as some form of elaborate prank.
@HelloProject I've mentioned this before on the site, but I know one black online RPG player who only plays white because of the time a white dude saw her PB and paged her about how glad he was that there was another "street" character for his kung-fu crack-smoking gangster lesbian to play with.
The PC was a lawyer.
@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Also the previous of my double posts, you ADHD folks like me, read it, its... just read it.
That does seem like an interesting topic. But it's 16 pages long and I'm kinda doing a thing right now.
I'm gonna leave the tab open. I'll read it in a bit.
I'll read all of my open tabs. They look interesting. I'll get to them all.
I feel like Duskwall (the Blades in the Dark setting) could make an awesome MU*, even though BitD is probably one of the systems least workable in an MU* format.
@arkandel Yeah. Even with a TT game, playing with friends, playing with coworkers, and playing at a convention are all going to be really different sorts of experiences and expectations.
But all of them allow for a good bit more in-person communication and specificity than a MU* can. Not that a MU* doesn't need to take player comfort or consideration seriously, just that it can't have the same degree of "everyone gets to make these decisions" that a TT game does. It has to be a certain degree of "this is what we're doing, feel free to hop on."
Not that this is entirely absent in TT. "I don't want to play in a game where secondary school aged teenagers are sexualized, hurt, or killed" is a perfectly reasonable line to have, but someone who does that and tries to play Monsterhearts really only has themselves to blame.
@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
However outside of that example I'd urge us to consider more common scenarios in current MU*. For example in comic book games are people not choosing to play Robin/Hawkeye as opposed to Superboy/Thor? In Star Wars games are other types of characters than Jedi or Sith popular and successful as archetypes?
My thought is, basically, that the big question of balance is just having an answer to "why would someone not choose this."
Someone clever once defined games as "a series of interesting choices." Generally speaking, "do I take the objectively better option or the objectively worse option" isn't a very interesting choice. And yeah, if being magic is just flat-out better than not being magic, a whole lot of people are going to be magic.
It's not universally true, so you do get people, say, playing mortals in WoD games, because they want to play through the process of learning about the supernatural, or they think it's fun to play someone at a major handicap, or they want to RP being magically enslaved to a hot vampire of their sexual preference (no judgment), or whatever. Even so, most players are going to play supers, so a given mortal in the game is likely to wind up having their best friend, their significant other, and their boss all be supernatural horrors by random chance even if they aren't keyed in to the secret whatnots.
Social consequences for magic, too, are kinda hard to enforce, because no matter how common that sort of prejudice is supposed to be in-setting, most people (reasonably!) don't want their avatars in the setting to be shitheads in that sort of way. The opprobrium of the hypothetical background NPCs isn't really going to be meaningfully felt by the players, unless they're in an actual staffed scene. (Which might be a limiter right there--no magic use except in staffed scenes, PRPs, or the like, where throwing around magic can have appropriate consequences enforced?)
Another thing is that, in terms of RPG mechanics, it might make a difference whether PCs are mechanically balanced even if they aren't narratively balanced. Talking about superheroes specifically, my favorite of the genre (Masks) uses the same mechanical spread the PC whose whole deal is that they're too powerful to feel safe with themselves and the PC who's really good at karate. The goal/scene resolution is equal between the two, even if narratively one of them is using cosmic elemental powers that could level city blocks and the other one is hitting problems with a stick. The Buffy RPG gave the Slayer mechanical superpowers, but gave the Zanders luck and narrative control mechanics to balance things out. This can work really well, but it might require a lot more of the structured TTRPG environment than the more freeform MU* set-up.
@arkandel Legit questions!
In the case of Star Wars games, I think that's actually been something a lot of SW properties have tried to work on. The simplest, usually, has been to either make it explicit that the protagonists of the property are Jedi, or make no one Jedi. A few, like one of the really early Star Wars MMOs (maybe the first?) went by blocking off Jedi as an option except through a long and convoluted process of unlocking the class.
Otherwise, mechanically, the go-to has usually been to try and roughly balance the "mundane" skills with force powers, whether that's in point-buy or level systems. And with SW, none of the force powers we see are that overpowered compared to "dude with gun" or "hotshot pilot."
On top of that, being a Jedi comes bundled up with the whole quasi-monastic obligate good guy thing, unless you want to turn into a strutting vaudevillain (which might not be playable in the system). So that is a choice, there: do you want to move stuff with your mind, or do you want to get to be a seedy gunfighter with a heart of gold?
And then, for all that, I do know people who basically felt pressured into turning their non-force-user PCs into Jedi in MU*s because, essentially, that's where all the good shit was, plot- and RP-wise. Even in the interquel period, you tend to get a lot of Jedi running around, where "remnants of a vanquished order driven to hiding under the relentless threat of pursuit and extermination by all the powers of the galaxy" and "literally anything else" wind up with rough parity.
More generally, though, and also as far as superhero stuff goes: I think that a major part of it, as applies to RP, comes down to using more narrative or freeform than what I called "physics simulator" mechanics upthread. When the whiz-bang powers come with quantifiable mechanics on a sheet, providing options that the wizards get and the warriors don't, you actually are hindering yourself by not getting wizard powers. When the power levels are all narrative, and either you're setting it up by group consensus or "roll Forceful to Overcome Obstacle" or whatever, everyone has the same... I dunno... "meta-narrative(?)" involvement in the outcome, even if in the narrative Thor is slugging it out with the whole CGI army while Natasha is running the goober to the skybeam to shut it down or whatever.
Hah. No, nothing so weird or severe. Stuff like "Hey this guy is a former metal musician like me and I love talking music and wrestling with them BUUUUUUT..."
Treat them like Drug Friends.
Hang out. Have fun. Don't trust them with anything or stand the first round.
Never forget that your Drug Friends are assholes. If they weren't they'd just be friends.
@Arkandel I'd put this above a 'peeve.'
But... yeah. An American journalist gets murdered, but we're still buds with the Saudis because "they pay cash."
I don't care that you're hung over.
I don't care that you have homework.
I don't care about your relationship drama.
I don't care about Nicki Minaj.
Put your phones away and do your jobs.
These fucking twenty-year-olds are killing me.
