Posts made by insomniac7809

They say "email with any questions."

The substance of my question is "are you joking, or just stupid?" I feel like I may need to workshop it a bit.

@Trix

Personally, I consider it a benchmark of my development as a gamer and a person when, after having an app restricted for reasons I felt were bad, I started saying "this doesn't seem to be a fit for me, I should look for fun elsewhere" rather than "they are WRONG and I am going to TAKE A STAND."

@Rinel If someone says "thews"--particularly if they're steely--you're reading Howard pastiche.

If anything is "eldritch," "squamous," or "cyclopean," you're reading Lovecraft pastiche.

If a hired crook is referred to as a "gunsel," you're reading Hammett pastiche, and almost certainly Hammett pastiche written by someone who doesn't bother cracking open a dictionary.

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

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

So it goes.

@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.

Since you linked me here...

So I'm not gonna dismiss the concept out of hand. The classes are crazy flavorful, and the concept has a good bit of appeal.

but

The game as designed, I think, doesn't lend itself especially well to the MU* format. The rules system is pretty clearly designed for more-or-less constant monitoring and arbitration from the Master, assigning difficulty, advantage, and disadvantage on a case by case basis.

The intended playstyle is also gonna have to be tossed out for a MU* format. The game as it exists is designed for a pretty straightforward narrative arc: the personas are dragged into Die, and they need to agree on whether they go or stay.

Making it into a MU* seems, to me, less like using the premise and rules and more like inventing a new game inspired by Gillen's RPG. Which could be a cool game!

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.

@Ganymede said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

@Auspice said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

I have absolutely seen (on here, even!) complaints about non-<minority> players trying to write said minority's experience.

But was the complaint, for example, "this non-queer player is portraying a queer PC" or is it "this player is making a caricature of a minority PC"? I think these are two different complaints.

I think @Tinuviel is more making the point that "non-queer player portraying a queer PC" is well and good, "non-queer player trying to focus their portrayal on the Queer Experience" is likely to be cack-handed and tone-deaf.

"Cliques" are a thing, sure. Part of that, as you mentioned, is that a lot of the MU*ers you'll find have been at this a while, and some people have a lot of history in the hobby.

Part of it's also going to be the general sense of impostor syndrome that's prevalent in online spaces. Everyone has a tendency to feel like everyone else is more 'keyed in' than they are.

@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.

@silverfox Look, if you need someone to drive me from A to B (and uber hasn't been invented yet), you might take a cab. You might take a taxi. But if you tell people you're calling a taximeter cabriolet you're gonna get funny looks.

I haven't seen Carnival Row, so I can't make a direct comparison, but China Meiville's The City & The City was a wonderful bit of hardboiled fiction in a fantastical setting. (There's a BBC adaptation, but I haven't actually seen that either.)

@Tinuviel on my lawn razzlefrazzle...

@mietze Okay, are they in the military, or is this some new slang from the Kids These Days I've missed so far?

@TiredEwok

"Guys, I'm never going to be the boss who tells you to 'act busy.' And if I ever said that 'if you have time to lean you have time to clean' thing I'm pretty sure I'd tear my own tongue out. If you need to take a breather and kick it in the stockroom for a few, go for it.

"But first of all, I am never going to apologize for telling you to get off your phones and do work when you are at work, if there is something that needs doing, no matter how much you sulk about it. And second, our job is commissioned sales.

"So yeah, I'm gonna be snatching up as many customers as I can. If you have an issue with that, get your ass out here and put the fucking effort in."