@ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Jesus Christ, who are you cooking for, the Gronkowskis?
"3 growing teens"
I still remember this once, the High School marching band was at a restaurant after a game, and the father of one of the girls I was sitting with offered to cover the bill for the whole table.
You could hear him get the bill, but anyone offering eight high schoolers as much free food as they can order deserves what they get.
@Thenomain said in Consent in Gaming:
What, people sometimes play games to portray special snowflakes? Gasp! It's like people see cool things in media and want to enact those!
Yeah, the thing is, tho...
If Gregory House always makes everything all about him, that's not a problem. House is already about House. It's right in the name.
MU*s are collaborative fiction works where the authors are also kinda actors and also we're the audience. Structures have to be different.
And while everyone should want to be cool... there's that joke about how an RP group playing Firefly would be five Rivers and maybe a Jayne. Follow your RP bliss, but like, if everyone's the quirky outsider nobody is...
@Wretched As well as hippies (nomads)
I find this extra funny because that's canonically p much Inigo's plan to find him.
(Like, literally walking around Europe asking if anyone knows any six-fingered noblemen.)
Breathe is a verb.
Breath is a noun.
A literal clone is obvs incest. It's just like an identical twin that happens to be chronologically younger.
It's masturbation if you're, like, using Space to be in two places at once.
If we're talking, like, magical timeline duplicates... now, that's a question that gets into the teleporter paradox. If I go into a machine, Scotty vaporizes me, and then I come back together on the other side, am I still me? If yes, what if he saves the data and pops out another of me? If no, that implies either I stop existing when my component atoms are replaced--which happens every few years--or when my consciousness stops functioning--which implies I did die during my appendectomy (or, rather, he died, I started existing when the anaesthesia wore off.) Do "I", in a discrete sense, actually exist, or am I just a collection of processes that shuffle around in the same general vicinity for a few decades, and if so, isn't a second identical bundle of processes just "more" of me?
These sorts of philosophical questions of existence and identity are probably beyond the scope of a TS thread, beyond the fact that it's still pretty hot whatever the answer.
@shincashay said in Calaveras MUSH:
With that chick with the horrible accent. Jesus.
I mean she literally got rid of the accent in the first non-pilot episode.
But then for some reason they used a clip of her saying "moy-AHH-me" in the into sequence for years.
@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
And if you don't get a 3.5 average monthly review you're placed on probation.
Shiiiiiit, 3.5 nothing. Everywhere I've worked with those stupid fucking surveys, anything less than a 5 is considered a 0.
I can only assume some coked-out MBA douchebag who's never set foot in a retail establishment (or possibly a space alien from planet Zog who's never seen a hoo-man in the flesh, given some of the marketing materials corporate keeps sending) figures that every customer should be 'highly satisfied' every time or the plebes aren't doing their job.
@surreality Yeah, I don't disagree with anything above.
One or more "seriously, knock it off" conversations are perfectly reasonable with people who are generally good actors but are stepping out of line, absolutely. (I also don't, necessarily, share some other posters' reservations about sharing them publicly, or at least being forthright about them. "X behavior is not acceptable, and Y member has been made aware of it" is generally a good look for an admin, in my experience.)
I also think short-term bans can be useful, both for "we are serious about this" and "take a bit of time off to get your head straight" value.
@Macha said in Superstitions:
@Wretched This is me with Gladiator. I have never, ever made it through that movie. I've passed out, gotten sick, had the power go out, and gotten into a fight with the guy I was watching it with, so I left.
'Gladiator' is the name of his sled.
@Pandora said in Punishments in MU*:
@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:
That is a reasonable way to look at it, but it's not one that I share. If someone suffers public shame as a result of being banned, so be it; however, I know a handful of people who have been banned which I do not considered to be either shamed or besmirched by the act. Sometimes, a ban comes down because a player simply cannot work with staff for one reason or another.
I find this curious. If a player simply cannot work with staff, why are they banned? Have they actually done something wrong? If not, a ban seems silly and excessive. If so - well, then that's the shameful thing they've done, and why banning them is still textbook public shaming.
Unless of course there's some sort of example of a situation in which someone is banned, having done something legitimately deserving of a ban, but no one thinks any less of them as a player/staffer as a result. But I do not think this is possible, as a banning smacks very much of 'Leave and never come back!' as opposed to 'Sorry it didn't work out, maybe one day!'
You'll never be able to keep people from interpreting it how they will, but I think people would overall be happier if they didn't take "you're no longer welcome in my pretendy sandbox" as a condemnation of their fundamental worth as a person.
There's a big internet out there. Not every part of it is a good fit for everyone.
@Jeshin said in Punishments in MU*:
Mob mentality whitelist/blacklisting is probably not a good thing for a hobby wherein there is enough drama to keep a forum running 24/7.
That is every hobby. Model train enthusiasts... man, you don't even know.
@Thenomain said in RL Anger:
the spire was under restoration.
This is the main hope that I have that this was an accident. I hope that restoration company has good insurance.
I don't know how you'd even begin to do a cost assessment for "accidentally burned down Notre Dame du Paris."
@Kestrel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
like giving your Jewish character a hunchback and a hooked nose and making them a diabolical banker with gold telekinesis powers,
Ooh! Or a diabolical Israeli banker vampire with designs on undermining foreign nations on this site as part of their game pitch!
(Pepperidge Farm remembers.)
@Ganymede said in Dead Celebrities 2019:
Not to unnecessarily politicize, but the fact that a few French oligarchs came out to fund the project but no American capitalists came out to donate to fix these relatively small churches is telling about the state of culture and religion in the United States.
It's really hard to compare the response when one of the churches in question is also a national heritage museum/historical site/national landmark/UNESCO world heritage site.
@arkandel Yeah, I'm not super familiar with WoT (just never got into it), so grain of salt as far as all this goes.
The first thing you bring up, well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Players getting around restrictions by trying to find edge cases and loopholes is as old as RPG gaming. The three ways around it are players who are willing to buy in to the spirit of the rules, arbitrators who are willing to shut down attempts to bypass them, or rules that explicitly disallow that sort of shenaniganary. (On a MU*, the first is basically impossible, just because most don't have enough of a screening process to enforce that sort of things.)
The second comes down to the "interesting choices" thing I keep going on about. Why, as a player, would I pick "not-wizard" over "wizard"? How is "not-wizard" something other than "the PCs who are wizards can do whatever you can, but also they are wizards and can get up to wizard shit."
If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.
Also, yeah, more or less everything that @Pyrephox said. Novels don't need to worry about balance because it's by design that someone is just cooler and hotter and better than everyone else, that's why they get to be the protagonist. Even TTRPGs can be fine focusing on two to six of the specialist snowflakes in the world. When you get to 20+ players, things start to shift.
So asking about WoT specifically (with, again, stressing that I'm not overly familiar with the setting), I might well start by saying something like "you can't buy combat skills if you're a Channeler, maybe there are in-universe ways that someone could have but your PCs didn't." A little harsh, but sometimes you need to be. And/or maybe saying that magic can only be used in a scene with a runner, where the pitchfork mobs present a real threat. Or maybe a more FATE-style narrative system that doesn't bother with the physics simulator aspects. Something where in-universe the wizard can throw up walls of fire while the warrior has a knife, but mechanically they're rolling more or less the same "Overcome Obstacle" dice.
"Well, we're past the return date. But I could give you store credit."
"Isn't there something you could do for me?"
"Weeeell... I could give you store credit for non-returnable merchandise instead of telling you to suck on a tailpipe?"
@kanye-qwest said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
especially when systems throw in a lot of skills that everyone should have to some extent, like Athletics, Persuasion, Awareness, Driving, etc.
Wait, why should everyone have these, though? People don't all have these skills. Like driving I get, imo you should be able to be fine driving a car baseline but maybe you aren't a stunt driver or a getaway driver or a street racer unless you invest in that skill.
I mean, that's one of the big questions about "so what do these skills on my sheet mean."
Does Athletics 0 mean "rando with a desk job" or "gets winded walking from the couch to the fridge"?
Does Persuasion 0 mean "baseline conversationalist" or "tongue-tied off-putting weirdo"?
Does Drive 0 mean "can't drift" or "can't drive"?
Does Awareness 0 mean "takes a couple minutes to find Waldo" or https://youtu.be/mqQ8Y9Sjp7o?t=1m ?
i just want a First Law adaptation is that so much to ask
@deadculture They don't talk about removing harm. That's really hammered on in O'Brien's whole speech to Winston. Trying to compare "if you criticise the government they torture you until you'll believe 1+1=3" with "if you want to call women cunts I'd rather you do it somewhere else" is either disingenuous or rather missing some key points.
Of course, the real point of 1984 is a socialist writing a sci-fi criticism of Stalin.
@insomniac7809 said in Good TV:
Also, the writers were aware of the issues with fridging in the comics, which was one of the reasons for the big twist
Which twist? I haven't read the comics and don't plan to.
***=NSFW content/big ol' spoiler***