Best posts made by Jennkryst

I am late to the discussion, but fear not! I have suitably horrific comments to add involving everyone's favorite topic: TS.

Losing social combat and following it up with TS (FTB, I am not a HUGE monster (I mean, unless both parties are into rape play, which is weird and as oxymoronic as the idea of consensual rape sounds, I'm not one to judge)) is as great a gift as the time that football jock in high school lied about his date putting out that one time.

YOU can change the narrative!

Maybe they curled into a fetal ball afterwords? Maybe they cried the whole time and called you mommy. Maybe they could only get it up after you put peanut butter on their nipples.

And if you have a high enough subterfuge pool, people will believe you! Put your Investigate dice to good use, find OTHER PCs who have similarly been social-fu'd into actions, and now you have others to corroborate your story. RealTruth, even if it is a dirty lie.

The idea of everyone having perfect agency is absurd. You will only have perfect agency when you play by yourself. The second you add other players to the mix, anything goes. We often say things like 'no, I didn't mean it that way, text doesn't convey intent well' because the default tone we give people somehow magically lands in sarcasm.

So I propose we extend this to social interaction.

If 'movie logic' is good enough for shooting... good enough for first aid/doctoring... good enough for driving, or mechanics, or literally anything else? Well by God, it's good enough for socializing.

How many movies have you watched where... Bond picks someone up with the cheesiest one-liner you've ever heard? Luke Cage asks if folks want coffee. Just stare at a person and go 'No, don't fall for that'... but they do?

I GIVE TO YOU SOCIAL COMBAT.

True, there is body language and tone inflection and all other manner of variables. But how can I pose body language to you when 'No writing a novel in your poses, go dialogue go!', or how can I attempt to interpret YOUR body language and respond when I get 'Bob laughs. "Words words words," he says, before drinking some more whiskey. "Words speak time more here."' and nothing else?

I was slightly sad to see Kishi Kaisei go, even with my limited RP and connections there. It's a tricksy setting to mesh into.

@tinuviel Jotta know the conversation that man has with Jod, trying to talk about how pronunciation works.

This game has me in a 'need a good shadowrun MU' mood something FIERCE.

@deadculture said in Eliminating social stats:

@Gingerlily Having stats does not automatically make you good at using them. The way I see it, stats are a potential. You can either waste your potential or use it well.

Correct. Your stats do, in fact, represent potential.

However.

It is the number of success* from your subsequent +roll that represents, er, successful execution of said potential.

*Edit to add: /threshold of success/whatever your game's success metric is.

I will list all of the things, because why not? At least, all of the things I've played. I've sat in chargen with other characters for ages but never got around to doing anything. See: HM

Active (for varying degrees of 'active')
City of Hope Salimah, Natalya, XP Mule #10372
Exalted: Tales of the Dreaming Sea Viridian Serdio
Fallcoast Deborah Wagner, Juliette Skinner
Fallen World Pluto, Cassandra
Shadowrun: Denver - Deborah

I list the active ones based on the ones I currently log into and sit around/do nothing on/occasionally throw myself into scenes when the mood hits.

Inactive
Star Wars: Age of Alliances - Lynn Rathan, Bana Cynis, Jipp Kunno, Vosa'niru
Star Wars: Old Republic - I forget the name, but it was a prototype droid sent out on his own so he could install upgrades the corporation would never think to add on their own
HM - Many people who never made it beyond chargen
NYC - (Clarifying which NYC, it was the one where Mages caused 9/11. With a spell. And mortals just hallucinated planes. Then staff changed their mind and made it a different building, because they couldn't figure out why this offended people.) Felicia, Pyrrha, Yvette
The Reach - Danica (both the mortal and the vampire-ghost-bloodline-thing), Jean (Reed Werewolf with an unnatural Duck obsession)
Exalted: Fire and Glass - Arsinoe, Heavenly Pomegranite, CynisViridian
Exalted: Where Rivers Meet - Arsinoe, Grayle
Exalted: Gunstar - Hotaru
SerenityMU - Genevieve
KishiKaisei - Setsuna

In case it's not obvious, my RP preferences are all over the map.

@Rinel Get me magic space boats on Arx, and then maybe.

@Auspice said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

[...] The Expanse[...]

EEEEEECLIPSSSSSSSSE PHAAAAAAASE

ALL I'M SAYING IS, with the Battletech Clan expansion, there is a new... shall we say, more narrative version of the Mechwarrior RPG. Go forth, be a space L&L game, and instead of riding into battle on a horse, go in a giant stompy robot.

@Rinel

Altered Carbon, as a major inspiration for Eclipse Phase, has re-ignited THE ITCH.

TANGENTIALLY RELATED...

Exalted has the same compounding XP issue that oWoD had... so, WORSE than 1e nWoD, even. And it's been long enough since I looked at the 3e chart, I forget if they fixed the 'solars spend less xp on everything, in addition to just being better than everyone else' or not. So there's room for fixing things.

... my preferred method is starting everyone at 1 or 0, and giving them a pile of XP to raise things, but that is me.

Unrelated to plot or story or anything else, I am going on record that the soundtrack to part one slaps harder than anything written by Hans Zimmer has any right to. I am >< close to putting the leitmotif from Paul's Dream as my alarm ringtone, and would have done it already if I didn't think I would get stabbed by my roommate over my phone just SCRRAMING every morning.

The shitposting group has more gas in it's tank than I thought.

In general, insofar as I have seen (ymmv), Multi-Sphere games have taken the approach of just going 'BOOK STANDARD SETTING' and going from there with a variety of sandboxes for folks to play in. This allows people to create a character with the same information they have had for 10 years and don't need to read new information about.

Single-Sphere games, not having only one or two staff per sphere (let alone sphere-specific theme staff) who might have to coordinate things, have had the luxury of going 'here are setting-specific modifications to X, Y, and Z'. The drawback is that in exchange for this new variation of a setting to explore with RP, folks have to put in some effort to learn it.

For real, how many times have you seen some say (or said yourself) 'New game? This will give me the chance to play that (bloodline/lodge/legacy/whatever) character I have been working on'... not knowing if said (bloodline/lodge/legacy/whatever) is even allowed. The presumption that it will just be a repeat of the same game with a fresh coat of paint is strong.

So the core rulebooks may be their own games that don't mesh well. But. A Sanctified Vampire doesn't really mesh well with a Crone, either, until you give them a reason to.

Enter the Storyteller, who writes up, like... an alliance between the Arrows and the various militant branches of different Covenants. Perhaps the Prince has codified that one example in the book into law... to be granted domain or space for a haven, you must ally with whatever Wolfpack is nearby, because the Prince was Wolfblooded before getting Embraced, and still believes blood is thicker than water. Plus, you can help manage their shit while they guard your haven during the day.

Just... random ideas, you know. We talk a lot about how the game wasn't designed to be played as what is essentially a 24/7 LARP mechanically or XP-wise, but overlook how it also wasn't designed to be taken as the end-all be-all setting omnibus that a Storyteller isn't allowed to alter.

Edit because spelling is hard.

I would do quasi-rosters on WoD. Which is 'here are a bunch of pre-baked character hooks. You need X, Y, and Z minimums to reflect these things here, but aside form that, go nuts!' to save on 'I am new and know nobody in town' issues. I have no time for writing your personality, and once you grab that roster person with those hooks, THAT CHARACTER IS YOURS. And we write a new person to go on the roster next.

Or something like that. Kinda. Maybe.

I regret not replying to this sooner, because this is one of my mini-crusades.

Someone mentioned some number of pages and/or days ago about how dice are abstractions. I will further this. Just as everyone does not mention weaver stance and breathing whatsit for their gun fights, people also don't mention, like... body language clues, or facial ticks, or tone of voice.

You know... that whole... 'communication is only 30% verbal' thing (which I'm probably wrong on the 30% figure).

Like, I personally don't know about the whole body language, glance to the left and you're lying methodology. Even if I did, the other player would have to drop hints in their pose. However. Nobody wants to wait 30 minutes while I google psychology and body language things to do this in my poses.

Going back father, there is the whole... mix up self with character mindset. We should maybe develop the mindset that we are not our characters. We are watching characters do things. We can influence, like a choose your own adventure, but ultimately the dice/system dictate things.

I would also like to discuss policy limits of things. But that is it's own post I have been meaning to write but have been lazy about. SOON.

@silverfox said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

I am sure it's not okay but I wouldn't mind playing in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive world.... swoons

ALL of the Cosmere, or bust!

@Alamias said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

@Ghost

Knowing is 50%, yeah, but 25% is red lasers, and 25% is blue lasers.

Dean Stockwell, RIP