Posts made by insomniac7809

@Macha And because he's... Kanye, it's not gonna be easy for anyone around him to be the "you need to take your meds" "this sounds like a Manic Episode idea, maybe dial it back and think it through" person in his life.

@Wretched XP-based creation or flat XP costs both help with that; that is one of my favorite little changes in ChroD.

Put simply, if you don't want people to minmax at chargen, don't make a system that punishes people for not minmaxing at chargen.

@faraday said in Water finds a crack:

Personally I don't really care if you want to start out with expert in piloting and gunnery, as long as you have minimal points spread around the other skills your character should have according to the theme. (for instance, my BSG games required all military personnel to have minimal dots in things like first aid and athletics because that's part of basic training).
But some players do mind. Some players hate that they feel like they have to bend the system to be competitive. Some players feel gipped if they try to make a more balanced character while someone else min-maxxed. Or "messed up" their point/xp spends in a sub-optimal way.
So even numbers-light, co-op PVE games are still subject to the issues described in the article.

I've said before in other threads, and it keeps being true so I'll keep saying it: "good" is only "good" relative to something else. If my sheet says "good" but I'm in a six-player scene with three "great" and two "peerless," "good" sucks.

Even if the great unwashed masses of nameless, faceless NPCs in my position have it ranked as only "average," that doesn't carry a lot of weight to play experience unless they're present in scenes to be compared to.

I do think the point made above is generally on point. Here are two of my "favorite" "optimize the fun away" traps:

*Flat CG costs, multiplicative XP purchases!

Hm, I want to play a learned socialite who's a peerless swordfighter, but I don't have the build points. I'll make a bookish conversationalist who's a competent swordfighter and build up from there.

You know, if you make an illiterate with the social appeal of peat moss who's a peerless swordfighter, you can knock off a third of the XP cost and get where you want to be so much faster.

...you are objectively correct and I hate it.

*Background/fluff skills drawing from the same pool as relevant character stats!
Shadowrun was doing this at least thirty years ago, guys. Fun background skills being suboptimal compared to making my PC with no hobbies outside of Learning the Way of the Sword/Gun isn't cool. (There's also the emergent issue where scenes always lead to a fight, so the people who put their points in social or clever stuff always wind up being stuck trying to survive while the combat wombats get to shine.)

oh my God there was a version of Brain Stew by Green Day with Godzilla roars inserted I've been doubting myself for years

@Wretched As well as hippies (nomads)

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

Both genders are guilty and Hollywood (and authors and game developers and....) takes advantage of it. They throw in a white bread, boring ass protagonist you can pretend is actually yourself being the big damn hero who gets the guy/girl and people sink into the escapism like a warm bath.

Yeah, no, I get that. It's a thing, it's fundamentally fine. I wouldn't be saying this if Sam was just a non-character for audience identification. I don't take issue with protagonists who are aggressively awful, either.

My point is that Sam is both: he's a garbage person who I'm supposed to be using as my stand-in. If someone holds up Sam Witwicky to me and says "here, this is you!", I can safely say that person hates me.

(And @HorrorHound don't be mean to Keannu. He's not much one for... intense emotion in his film, but he does his thing.)

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

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

If you ever wonder just how much contempt Hollywood producers hold for their consumer base, consider: they used Sam Witwicky as the audience identification character.

At that time in our nation's history, Sam Witwicky was perfect audience identification character.

"He's sexist, dumb, helpless, self-entitled, and a bully. Michael Bay really gets me."

If you ever wonder just how much contempt Hollywood producers hold for their consumer base, consider: they used Sam Witwicky as the audience identification character.

@L-B-Heuschkel I don't doubt there's a lot of white supremacist deliberate push there, but I think a part of it is just down to visual media (film, especially) casting costume drama and period pieces as entirely white.

Pop culture perception is influenced by pop culture presentation (even as we all absolutely deny that this is the case), so the assumption settles in that Europe didn't have diversity until the 70s. Challenges to this perception are assumed to be agenda-driven, which can even cause filmmakers to consciously cast white to meet audience expectations, further cementing the impression.

@GreenFlashlight said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

man it would be cool if someone made an ATLA movie!

I'm only about halfway through the first season so far, but I gotta say, I feel like this property is brilliant as a series and wouldn't quite work as a movie.

It just gets better from there! But

***=Tangent, Also Shitty Movie Trauma***

@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@insomniac7809 said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@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.)

I beg your pardon?

Were you not here for that?

So yeah, it's been a couple years, but one of our recurring trolls put up an advertisement for a Discord V:tR game he wanted to run. One of his sample characters was, uh, what I described above plus also it was his Nosferatu example character.

People pointed out how ridiculously anti-Semitic it was, he doubled down, fights, bannings, a meltdown from a poster who tried to join his game, yadda yadda. It was a thing.

EDIT:
@Kestrel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

EDIT: sry @insomniac7809 ninja'd u like the sneaky jew i am

@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.)

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

ETA: The best interpretation of the binding of Isaac that I ever heard came from a reform rabbi who told me that it wasn't God testing Abraham but Abraham testing God. She said there's a tradition of thought that held that Abraham had no intention of killing Isaac and was bluffing to see if God would stop him and thereby be worthy of worship. I have no idea whether or not such a tradition exists but it is excellent regardless.

I heard another, that G-d was testing Abraham and Abraham failed, which is why G-d doesn't speak directly to Abraham ever again after that.

@Rinel BEGAT

@Wretched Which is great, until I need to explain to someone else why talking about their pet has got me thinking of a 1989 horror film I saw in 2008.

@Pacha said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

there are plenty that specifically mention heterosexual relationships

FWIW, a good bit of that is specifically in terms of heterosexual spouses, which theme-wise doesn't restrict a player's decision about their sexuality.

That is, a married character could well be gay but in a political marriage for the sake of the family.

@Ominous That would be fairly interesting.

There is already some stuff you can see on a roster game. "Women over 30," for instance, tend to get picked up roughly every never.

@Kestrel the_miracle_alligator really went all-in by taking Hildegard's instrumental tracks and covering Pumped Up Kicks in Anglo-Saxon.

Eall þá óþer cild mid findġum soccum
Sċulon betera rinnen fram minum earhum
Eall þá óþer cild mid findġum soccum
Sċulon betera rinnen, cwicra þon mín boga

@Auspice The left one.

No but pick an eye and look at it.