Best posts made by Lithium

@firepuff And the Knights of the Old Republic era is so /big/ that even the 'big names' are only a small blip of time during it.

I think a John Wick game would be cool. Lots of different systems you can use, I just really love the world they have been building for it.

@alexrocker Anyone who goes to Dark Sun should know the theme is brutal.

That doesn't mean people should be OOC dicks.

Which is reinforced by just the /manner/ in which things were addressed here, for example: fee fees.

That is insulting, it's reducing someone's feelings to the level of baby talk, which is nonsense. Which indicates that the person writing it? Doesn't actually care what others think or feel about the subject and shows a complete lack of respect.

I love Dark Sun, it is by far my favorite setting, but just because someone doesn't know something OOCly, something they would most definitely know ICly does not mean they should be abused etc.

It's not inclusive.

It promotes a culture of abuse and ostracism on an OOC level.

It keeps the game from growing as quick as it could. There are a number of awesome RP'ers who just literally do not have the time or inclination to deal with OOC abuse like that.

I want to apologize for vaporware games. I really hoped I could get some of them coded up and finished, and sometimes I did finish the code, but, I couldn't find the support in order to actually /run/ the game and had no desire to try and be the solo staff of the game.

I know there was some interest in a few of my projects, but work has really eaten me lately (I am gone from my house for at least 11 hours a day these days) which leaves me little time to do much of anything, let alone try to run a game.

Maybe when I retire in 13+ years or so... if the hobby is still a thing...

But I really am sorry.

I think part of the problem here is people have tied iconic FC's with 'running plots' when really it should just be 'generates RP' and 'is involved with others'.

The bar is not very high, yet how many times do we see <insert FC here> just off having sexy times somewhere?

@Kanye-Qwest said in Dream Chasers MUSH (JRPG/Anime):

Yeah, seems like a fairly smart thing to say in a game about animu, where literally 98% of characters are very young teens.

That is a blanket statement that may or may not apply. There is a large chunk of anime that is about adults or have major adult characters.

Take Macross. Sure, the main characters are /usually/ late teens, but literally /every other character/ (except for the token child character) are adults.

Now there are anime's where the focus is entirely on teenagers, sure, but a blanket anti-TS ban?

Never seen that work. Never really seen it be enforceable without staffers spending all their time dark spying on couples in their private rooms too.

IMHO that's an utter waste of staff time when they could be out running stuff for the players rather than trying to enforce a silly rule.

@faraday Actually FF magic is one of the few magic systems (in general) where FS3 could be done with it, if you just turned magic/materia into /weapons/ and /attacks/ it would work fine honestly. The setting for magic in FF is both simplistic, and at times powerful, but there's no reason you couldn't for the most part use FS3 for it. There are very few buffs/debuffs other than Shell/Shield/Regeneration/Gravity/Demi. If you had your FS3 set to have /armor/ then you could even use half of those. The biggest buffs that wouldn't make a lot of sense for it would be haste/slow.

There's also the whole comment of: This rule will not be enforced.

Then why have the rule at all?

Also not only that, but if you're going to have a rule /stand by it/. /Defend it/. /Own it/.

Caving under the first sign of any sort of pressure is... not a good sign.

@arkandel @apos I personally run into situations where people are making light of heroin addiction, when I have known people who have had it ruin their lives and/or kill them.

It's just one of those things where I know I am ultra sensitive about it. I can understand others being ultra sensitive about other things that have happened, either isms, or obia's, or whatever /but/ that doesn't mean the onus is on the game to do something about that. It's on me/others to know when we need to step back.

If I knew a place served only beer and I hate beer (totally hate beer, side rant), I wouldn't go there to partake of what they offered, especially if I knew it was beer in the first place, and then demand that they serve mixed drinks instead of beer.

I loved huttball in SWToR. Some of the best PvP I'd had in ages. Once you had people who knew how to pass the ball and use the game grid... was so much fun.

@thenomain Martians.

I mean really, have you /seen/ what J'onn J'onnz can /do/?

@insomnia Clearly my life path is failing me. I must learn to code a silly app p2w so I can make 750K a /day/.

I still stand by the belief that Leadership should be NPC's until a PC who has shown they can lead groups, even if it's just their coven/pack, and generate RP for others steps up and is able to ICly claim it. By that point they've proven that they are a good person for the game and will be a benefit rather than a detriment.

Otherwise...

This whole thing with staff not wanting to do stuff... that is hurting the hobby bad. We can't rely on PrP's and PC's to drive everything, because then they become focused on themselves, and the 'us' vs 'them' mentality becomes PC vs PC rather than continuing the games story.

Which is fine, I guess, for games that want that but to me the best games have active staff that are promoting an overarching story and theme that is part and parcel to the setting.

I liked the movie well enough, but, the plot holes were kind of garingly huge.

***=Plot Hole Spoilers***

@arkandel What I am saying, is that Mage, as a sphere, tends to call to those players that you are calling 'bad' because it is, without a fucking doubt, the most powerful sphere in WoD.

Lots of people say Geist or Beast is more powerful, but really... no.

When you have /that much power disparity/ in a game with a wide swath of users you /must/ account for the so called 'bad players' that you are saying ruin things.

The easiest way to account for them, is to remove their tools to be bad.

Why? Because to not remove it, means your staff will be effectively stuck policing just the bads.

ALL THE TIME.

Mage.

Breaks.

Multisphere.

Games.

Older books, but, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny are definitely worth a read.

The Thomas Covenant series by Steven R. Donaldson is good too (and one of the many sources that Robert Jordan swiped idea sfrom)

The Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony is good (I expect most to have read the Incarnations of Immortality series by the same author at this point).

@firepuff said in The trappings of posing:

I think one thing that bothers me are people who pose second-person. Your character isn’t interacting with me the player, your character is interacting with my character.

This isn’t a deal breaker nor repulsive, but don’t be alarmed when I keep my side third-person.

The only time second person posing works (kinda) is if it's a one on one scene and both individuals are of the same gender. Then it can (sometimes) get rid of some confusion.

@Misadventure I was tired of defending myself from the 'proofers' and I know it is the wrong thing to do but I'd missed a couple of days and I got the sense that anyone I'd try to convince would simply disbelieve me and that the story I would tell wouldn't matter. The people who are going to see this as a problem, would see it as a problem already and those who wouldn't, wouldn't be convinced by me or anything I said. They maybe would only be convinced when it happened to someone they knew personally. They hide behind the shield of the internet, or maybe they are simply... assholes, jerks, trolls, or whatever.

My sister was raped when she was 14 by her boyfriend and two of his friends. It was a party. She wasn't drunk. She was't under the influence of any drugs but the police did not press charges, they wouldn't even sign off on presuming to open a case file on it because my sister had gotten in trouble for shop lifting alcohol in the past an so she was just a 'Problem Child' and it was her testimony against theirs. We were let without recourse, not even having money for a civil suit because we were poor and no lawyer would take he case pro-bono.

Where is the evidence for my sister to 'prove' that she was raped? Where is the evidence to prove that they gave her STD's that lead to cervical cancer? There isn't any, because it is her word against theirs and the cops in that situation were absolutely worthless, worse than worthless. They shamed her and worse we were threatened with possible defamation suits if we did try to press things.

Is that always going to happen? No it's not, but it does sort of make it impossible to provide this 'proof' that is so necessary to some in order to believe us.

Obviously, when a few years later I was assaulted... the cops did nothing then, there was no police report about sexual assault, just as there was no police report about my Sister's attack.

This is the problem with a burden of 'proof' to even /believe/ that these things happen. It's the same kind of thing that happened to other 'minorities' (Of which I am one of, which didn't help I am sure) during the Civil Rights movement and afterwards, even continuing today.

That these things happen shouldn't need to be proved, just as we are not expecting everyone or anyone to white knight for us but to simply realize that this /shit/ happens /every god damned day/ and that in order to combat it is going to require a change in the social zeitgeist is only the first step.

This is why people who demand proof, or are 'rationally skeptic' are part of the problem. It is the unwillingness to believe another human being that makes it even hard to stand up anymore. It's why so many of us keep our fucking heads down, and just deal because all to often to do otherwise isn't going to help us, it's going to make it worse and that is only reinforced by the 'proofers'.

It isn't us vs them. It's about a conscious shift in human nature.

If you've never seen it happen to someone around you, then so be it, that you would act if it did, that's good on you. Nobody (at least not myself) is saying that you are a horrible individual.

It's when that idea that just because you've never seen it means that it doesn't happen... that's when it's a problem, and makes me so very angry.

So maybe my saying someone is being 'part of the problem' is inflamatory, maybe I'm not the most eloquent speaker, or writer, or whatnot. This isn't a story from one of my books, I'm not editing myself for prose or to attempt to be a literary giant right now, but it doesn't change that to me... deniers, proofers, are all part of the problem that faces us every day. They are the people that /allow/ stuff like this to continue happening by shaming those who stand up, by demanding something that cannot be provided at times instead of just having basic empathy.

I am also part of the problem, because I put my head down to much, rather than dealing with people like @Tyche because my day is rough enough sometimes, and my confronting them... isn't going to change them. It takes more than me.

That's why this is such a huge issue. It's bigger than any one person, it's an everyone problem but first people have to be willing to admit there's a problem.

I'm done with this topic here because I'm done revisiting horrible trauma from my past because of internet fucktards.

These are a wide variety of things, from hacking e-mails, websites, taking over facebook threads, to ddos attacks and swatting.

We hear about it happening (especially the swatting and ddos attacks) when it ends up in bloodshed, violence, or affects thousands of people at a time but, we don't hear about it happening as much anymore.

The cynic in me is thinking that's because it's not 'news' anymore, it's not 'worthy' of being written/spoken about unless it ends in violence or happens to a sufficiently popular person (read: Celebrity) that people actually care about.

I don't think these attacks come from a desire to 'win' I think it comes from something more primal, anger, shame, and lack of ability.

People want to win, they don't /like/ to lose, it's hardwired into us to try our best but we only validate the winners. It's rare the individual who can step back and actually /enjoy/ a game they just /lost/. It does happen, sure, like if I am playing Warhammer 40K, or BattleTech, or even D&D I can enjoy even when I lose. If I am playing with friends, I can even enjoy losing on a game like Overwatch.

However internet culture is amazingly toxic due to anonymity and audience, and that makes winning even /more/ important, and turns up emotional responses to twelve.

But... does that really apply to MU*'s? Our anger and such tends to take a lot longer to build up to the point of ostracism. We are a lot more tolerant than most online gamers (see league of legends and dota for extreme examples) probably due to the media in which we use, text is slow, it's patient, it gives us time to think and respond.

Curious as to people's thoughts.

@Thenomain I have said why it is offensive, you are just choosing to disbelieve /why/ that would be offensive to someone else.

It's clear we don't see eye to eye on this because you accuse me of calling a disbeliever the same as an abuser which I never did. I said Tyche was a /part/ of the problem. It's reading comprehension 101. You can be a part of something without being the driving force behind it.

For example: Not all skinheads are racist, but some skinheads are racist to the extreme. When approaching the problem of racism amongst skinheads, by jumping to the point that not /all/ skinheads are racist then the point of the problem, racism amongst skinheads, is being redirected in a direction that is not conducive to addressing the problem at hand.

It's the same thing by going with the 'Not /all/ men' defense.

Firstly, I never said all men did this thing. So by doing that it is a deflection and misdirection to try and turn the fault onto the speaker by making them seem erroneous. Second, it refuses to address the actual issue, turning the topic of conversation /away/ from the problem that needs to be discussed and addressed so that it can be lessened. Third, as @Tyche did by immediately jumping to rapes and such the topic is /again/ changed to only a small fragment.

People will be horrible to one another. It is human nature. All around the world it is happening to women, men, young and old there is no reason to try and use that as a focal point when addessing the topic as a whole. Just because one thing will likely never be snuffed out completely, doesn't mean we should do /nothing/ about the other parts of the problem. It's a bait and switch tactic to try and force discourse away from the subject matter that /can/ and /should/ be discussed.

This doesn't belittle rape victims by talking about sexual harassment as a whole, nor does it demean rape victims to /also/ want to try and fix /other things wrong with the society we live in/.

Already it seems like you (@Thenomain ) are in an us vs them mentality, which is /exactly/ what the 'Not All Men' comment creates, it tries to paint it into an attack on all men, and it is most definitely /not/. Reading through the thread here even those of us who have been abused in the worst ways are not trying to paint /all/ men in a negative light.

If knowing that someone is intentionally attempting to derail, sidetrack, turn a conversation against you isn't offensive... then fuck Theno... I don't now what else to tell you.

This /shouldn't/ be a conversation that is hostile, but certain individuals surely do their best to do that.