Best posts made by Killer Klown

Does it count if you just end up descing all your MU characters with outfits that you own/wear RL?
Or is that more the character cosplaying as me?

For the most part, once you're registered you're registered - unless, as was mentioned, you don't vote for an extended period of time. You also need to update/re-register if you move, but that's a bit more finicky.
The way American voting works is kind of weird; on the smaller scale, a vote is a vote and whoever gets the most cookies wins. As you move higher and higher along the political food chain, though, individual votes become more and more akin to suggestions rather than a direct influence - and rather than being a flaw in the system, that's actually the way the system was designed. It's why you see these cases where a president gets elected because he carried the electoral votes despite losing out on the popular count - each state has a set number of Electoral votes which are supposed to align with what the popular numbers say (Though they don't always have to, and individual states further complicate things by their own rules - such as some states saying that whichever candidate wins the popular election gets all the electorate votes; and others having rules to split the votes based on percentages). The system basically dates back to a time before telephones, electricity, or the ability to count higher than ten without taking your shoes off - so the short answer is there's no sensical short answer as to why it's that way, beyond no one having proposed a workable replacement that everyone can accept yet.

EDIT Forgot to mention; to further complicate the soup, the final result between electoral and popular numbers per state do not always make sense, since electoral votes are based on population but many states follow the 'all or nothing' method when tallying. So, for example, you could have California with a population of about 40 million and 55 electoral votes - which is far and away the most due to it being the most populated state; conversely, because Alaska (The physically largest state) only has a population of about 750k it gets 3. There's no exact figure as to when a state 'levels up' as it were, but it's generally calculated by the number of representatives in Congress (2+1/~700k people or so, give or take). In states that follow all or nothing, the minority party vote effectively does not count once a winner is decided - so in the example of California, if it were a close race between Party A and B where A received 21 million and B received 19 million votes, the electoral (55 points) would go to A - which is why members of Party B begin to feel disenfranchised. Conversely, if one large state like California is compared with, say, even half a dozen smaller states (like New England, where the normal number of Electors runs from 3-6 per state), you could have a single state outweighing the vote of an entire region of the country. The other side of the coin, and what we've seen in some recent elections, is that - because the minority votes do get counted into the popular votes even though it's only the Electoral that counts, you could get a large state like California contributing millions to the losing side, even though they provided the important votes to the Electoral. As a theoretical example, if you put California up against Florida and New York (29 Electors each, ~20 million residents per) and each one had a sort of even split in voters; California 21A/19B, Fl and NY 11B/9A for the other side, you would end up with totals of 55 Electorals to A, 58 total for B - meaning a win for B. The popular vote, in this case, bears this out with a ratio of 37A:41B. If the split was not so even, however, say California 35A/5B vs FL and NY 15B/5A, the Electoral would remain the same, but the popular would result in 45Mil for A, vs 35Mil for B - despite B having won the election. That's an extreme example, of course; but it's only a small sampling of states and the splits are more likely to be broad than close in general. I mostly am trying to illustrate that the greater a divide in votes go, the more and more the electoral votes diverge from what the people actually vote for.

(I'm not picking on California, I'm just using it because it throws the most weight around in the current system by far - I think the next highest number of Electors comes in on Texas, with 38; nor am I defending the way things are - rather, pointing out the flaws in it). For relevance, this is why it's important for them to keep track of where people live and maintain the registration lists - it's not just about the votes, it's also about determining how many Electors your state gets.

@Grindle True enough; there's also the angle that Mandalore the First led his people on their exodus in a … very vague timeframe <somewhere between 24000 and 7000 BBY was the best I've ever seen on it>; so there's every possibility that one or more of the ships lost their way and just ended up there at some point.

@arkandel At least Mage 2e did a lot to cut down on the 'best of everything' mechanics; but still, the amount of work necessary to implement and run a Mage sphere would probably equal all the other supers they've got going combined, so I can understand why folks don't want to push into it.

I think there's also a bit of an ivory tower mentality there too. People haven't really had to deal with large scale outbreaks or widespread tragedies in any real sense; and as time passes and it fades from consciousness they start imagining that it can't be as bad as people say it was, or that it just won't happen - and forget the fact that the reason it's not happening is because of the measures previous generations took to prevent it from happening.

Nice. That's something that I really appreciated in some of the newer offerings - that they adopted the EU ideas that Jedi weren't the only force using organizations in the Galaxy; just the 'officially sanctioned' one. Personally, I always liked the idea behind the Miralukans and their structure based around the fact that force sensitivity was natural to them as a species rather than something that had to be learned.

@tinuviel That's true. Hubris should be a thing and Magic, at least for most Orders, shouldn't be the go-to for answering everything (I could go on and on about how much of the Adamantine Arrow theme is ignored in favor of 'Combat-Mages-R-Us', but that's something else again). However, Wisdom in Mage is tantamount to useless - it's by far the most pointless of moralities, and you can pretty much afford to drop it to three before really having to worry about anything. Combined with Paradox being pretty soft-touch (better in 2e, but that's not saying much), while there might be rules there are no real consequences for breaking them.

Edit - this sort of caddycorners into what @GangOfDolls said above, as well. Most of what you listed as needing limitation can be solved by reduction of massive xp <I don't advocate having a cutoff, but I do advocate having people earn what they have rather than just let it trickle in> and actually enforcing rules as written
1 - Paths. I'm less inclined to see these limited because, frankly, it's one of those things that players don't really have a choice about in-character. It's based on personality and outlook, so restricting paths also means you're restricting how people play their concepts. A better idea in my mind would be to make the Orders as selective as they're supposed to be in the books. Guardians just don't take everyone, Arrows have some of the most stringent requirements to join of any group - Mage or otherwise - out there, and so forth.
2 - Arcana are naturally capped by your Gnosis, both in how many you have and how high they can go. This is further adjusted by your Path, as that will always dictate your highest Arcana. Limiting Xp limits your Gnosis; or if you're spending on Gnosis, you don't have as much to spend on Arcana. It's not a cutoff, but it does slow progression.
3 - Legacies in 2e are kind of ... odd. Then again, all tertiary qualities are kind of odd and unfinished-feeling. I've had a couple of CoD mages, and I've never had much inspiration towards a legacy (They also seem to do far less than they used to in 1e - in 1e you seriously hampered yourself if you didn't take one. In 2e, it doesn't seem to matter)
4 - I'll just say hella yes on this last one. That 'exceptions exist' clause they tried to push into things was one of the worst design ideas ever. It really mattered more in 1e Legacies; some favored a path or order, some favored one or the other - but there were reasons for it. If you wanted to play one of those Legacies, play something of that path or order. It's not as if you don't have the option. Then again, in 2e - as I mentioned above - Legacies are just weird so it might not even matter as far as that's concerned.

They introduced something a while back where it would sync to your phone (Google in my case, dunno how/if it works on iOS); so you'd get credit for the meters even if you don't have the Pokemon app open. Saves a lot of battery life.

Yeah, the ideas of 'dark' and 'light' were more nebulous - the Force was the Force. As I recall, the Sith empire grew out of the Hundred Years of Darkness, where some Jedi refused the mandate to practice only 'Light' side methods, split off and took over Korriban - but that's, like, 15000 years in the future at this point.

@gangofdolls True. Losing Paradigm was one of my biggest problems in nWoD; just because there's something that says you can do something doesn't mean you would IC. At least 2e emphasizes the usefulness of rotes in that they're not just ways to use alternate dice pools - but rather provide tangible mechanical benefits, so people are more likely to focus on specific spells rather than falling back to spontaneously casting everything.

@Derp said in Wildly Out of Context:

@Killer-Klown said in Wildly Out of Context:

Said to me, rather than something I said.
"No, it's not a sex toy. It's my sister."

I really want to know the context behind this one, lol.

Hee. Ok. So. We're hanging out on our usual Friday Night shenanigans. Friend of mine has his phone on silent, but it's the kind of phone that vibrates in a rhythm similiar to whatever ring tone he had it set to. He gets a call, and the phone starts to ... pulse, amplified by the fact that it's sitting on the table. I called out 'Hey, someone lose their vibrator?" To which his response was... the above.

@Rinel That's pretty much Changeling in a nutshell. It's about surviving physical and emotional trauma, slavery and objectification, and the whole nine yards. It's not even accurate to call it dehumanization because the creatures that are perpetrating the abuse are not human themselves - and they never deny that the character is human; rather they simply see that all humans should be treated that way.

@derp Yeah, but that's not just for Mage. They seemed to take a different track in the entirety of nWoD with regards to antagonism. In oWoD there were defined 'good' and 'bad' guys, and they were pretty diametrically opposed - like Camarilla and Sabbat, or Gaians vs the Wyrm, or what have you. In nWoD they sort of tiered it out; you have the PCs, then you have another group that's like the PCs but of a different ideology <The Pure, or Seers> then you have a third group that's more or less guano loco <Bale Hounds, Scelesti> which tend to work in the service of some bigger, badder inhuman evil <Acamoth and such>. On paper it's a better, more layered idea - but the presentation was lacking. The idea of conflict and war was burned into the older versions from the getgo. You knew your Werewolf hated the Wyrm, you knew the Camarilla and Sabbat were in a state of conflict spanning centuries. It was a constant, present threat. In the new system, though, it's all left kind of vague due to the way the books are structured. The main guide focuses just on the players, and eventually you might get some information on the other groups out there - but by that point people have already cemented what they want their canon to be.

Holy Moses. Yeah, I had a Singer - but tended to get far more rp on my Cuttertech <Evan> and Medic <Elrick>

@Arkandel I think Zagg used to make one for those, but it might be discontinued. The peripheral market has been so saturated over the last few years that no product stays in production for too long.
See if this one does anything for you, though; I haven't used it myself but it's modular enough to adjust for different sizes (Even if the idea of having a touchpad with a touchscreen seems kind of ... redundant)
https://www.amazon.com/Cooper-TOUCHPAD-Executive-Compatible-Bluetooth/dp/B017HHPV48

I don't know that there's any hard and fast rule for this since everything's pretty fluid - and some of the ones I can think of might actually seem contradictory. For example, it's important to keep in mind who you have playing in the scene. If you have a bunch of combat monkeys, a social or investigative scene probably won't be very enjoyable. At the same time, it's important to not make the scene overly reliant on a specific skillset. If everyone automatically 'won', there'd be no point in gming it. Likewise, if there is only one person in the group with a sufficient level of skill and they drop the ball for whatever reason <miss the roll, don't show up for the scene, etc>, it could derail the entire thing.

Flexibility, really, is the key factor. Have a decided start point and an ideal end point; but understand that things might not always start when and where you want them to, that players will invariably take the smallest detail you mention and assume it's going to be something major, and they will find some unusual method of solving the problem that you didn't account for. Above all else, don't steal victory from the players. Make it hard, make it challenging, make it something that normal methods wouldn't be able to solve - but if the players come up with something, prepare sufficiently, or otherwise have an answer for everything that you throw at them; let them have it. For that, always have a backup plan. The villain that you had intended to be the main bad guy and escape, but that the players inconveniently killed off, was in fact just a pawn for some extradimensional horror that won't be revealed until a couple of sessions later <when you've had time to come up with it>. The massive plot they foiled did, in fact, save the day and win the battle; but it left a power void in the criminal underworld that another group was all too eager to step in and fill once the PC's turned their attention away, etc.

I think that, more than anything else, is something I rate as extremely important - sometimes the players will win. Sometimes they will dominate the enemy <especially if it's a long-standing or high powered game. Power levels are relative, after all>; never let them feel that their efforts are wasted or ineffective - if they fail, they fail forward (Stealing a term from Wrath and Glory); but if they succeed, they succeed forward too. The individual scene is less important than what comes next, what's waiting in the wings, or what challenge awaits.

@cobaltasaurus

Heh. Now if you really wanted to go all Star Trek for something like that:

“Oh, interesting, what happens when you apply heat to it?”

“Oh, I’ll try that!”

(Crash. Crunch. Woooble)

"... Uh. Sir. I think I just blew out the phase distortion conduit."

"You... what? How long will it take to fix?"

"Ahem. Engineering is saying eighteen hours... I'll get that test run as soon as it's up."

@Auspice True, but I also have drunk mojitos in December, because my booze habits are not subject to the Empires edicts.

@Seraphim73 True, though I don't think anyone wants to lose either. The statement applies just as much to GM characters as it does PC's; and while the GM does have a story to tell, they also need to keep in mind that they're dealing with real live players - and they need to plan for the fact that the players won't stick to a script and may, in fact, outsmart or outfight the bad guy du jour.
More than failure, though, what I (and a number of folks who have talked to me over the years regarding scenes where this was a factor) find more egregious is the sense of wasting our time. This isn't the same as failure or not accomplishing something; but rather a point where you end the scene in no different a position than where you began. Most often this seems to happen when the big foozle is either somehow untouchable despite everything the players try, or has some equally mysterious trap door to escape at the last minute that the players had no way of detecting or stopping; but there are other non-combat related instances that I've seen it come up, too. Failure might irk people in the immediate sense, but getting a feeling that you're inconsequential or that the GM has a story to tell and will tell it regardless of what the players do or where the dice lead usually means people will just stop showing up for scenes. In my experience, most scenes (especially in things like Mage or Werewolf) involve a lot of time and effort beyond the few hours devoted to the scene itself. People do a lot of pre-planning and preparation; be it setting up spells, acquiring/creating items, researching the area or target, or what have you. That can span days, or even weeks, before the scene itself happens - and having all of that lead up to nothing leaves the players with both a sense of failure and that none of it really mattered; which does tend to get frustrating.
This goes back to what I was saying up there about 'failing forward' (A term I first saw used in WH40k: Wrath and Glory - which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite underdog games and is one of the best RPG representations of the settings I've seen), where everything is focused not on success or failure, but on advancing the plot; and it applies to both the GM and the players. If the players succeed, the GM needs to have a contingency in play that can continue their story without removing the feeling of success that the players might have. Even if they fail in the overall goal, though, the players still do need to get a sense of some kind of accomplishment; and it's up to the GM to work unexpected actions on the players part into the plot without removing the sense that the players can actually affect the world around them.
As an example, something that happens fairly often in WoD games - a murder plot. Scenario is that there's been a lot of ritual-style killings around town; bodies flayed, arcane or obscene symbols drawn in blood, the whole nine yards. To break it down in WoD terms, the individual sessions would be players investigating these murders, piecing together clues, building a profile. The GM's job here is to dangle enough carrots for them to keep up the investigation, while not letting them have the whole fruit basket in a single session.
From there the Chapter ends with them finding out who the killer is, where they lair and - if supernatural - what their habits and vulnerabilities might be. They close in, engage and fight the guy. Fight could go one of two ways; the dice are not with them or they didn't take everything in to account and the foozle whomps them. They take some losses but, if they're smart, manage to pull back and extricate. Even by losing, though, they've found out some valuable information on the foozle - more about his capabilities, or that their initial assessment of what he was was wrong, or maybe someone recognized something in their lair that led to a different line of investigating.
On the other hand, they could win.
And if they win, yaay. They won. However, when they loot the corpse they discover that the foozle kept a scrapbook, and in that book are newspaper clippings of similar murders going back hundreds of years - and some more recent ones that happened in other locations at exactly the same time that the ones the players had been investigating. Or maybe a few days after the fight, a player catches a news report that the killings are still going on. Maybe the foozle can be in multiple places at once. Maybe he's back from the dead. Or, maybe, he's part of a larger cult; or just a patsy for a greater evil. Maybe that foozle was completely inconsequential and the real killer is still out there. Either way, the players might have succeeded in their stated goal (kill foozle), but ultimately the scene failed in it's objective (stop the murders); while still allowing a way forward to further chapters to find out about and, ultimately, confront whoever/whatever's really in charge.

Losing the fight still allowed the players to accomplish something; while winning it didn't put an end to the killings, even though the players preparation and dice paid off.

@tinuviel said in Ganymede's Playlist:

@aerianyx Aaand now I have to go watch Izzard again. Thanks.

This is also the bi-monthly reminder for all to download and install Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

@tinuviel Given that Jeanette/Therese Voerman are now not only canon for the lore in Vampire 5th, but also a freaking faction-type-thing you can gain status and stuff with...
I see that happening a lot more.