Best posts made by Lithium

@Thenomain Pretty much. ShadowRun always seemed to me to be like modern civilization, then ramped up to the extremes in every way imaginable for better /and/ for worse. Then throw in magic, supernatural, fantasy races, and cyberware, true virtual reality, and mash it all together in this glorious conglomeration that can be played in a lot of different ways.

That it has all those elements means it can be ran any which way you want. Low magic, low tech. High magic, high tech. Or any combination thereof.

@surreality As a Killer archetype, I agree with this completely. If you won't let me /build/ stuff or /change/ stuff or do /anything/ that makes me feel like I have an impact on a game, then what else is there left to do? I hadn't thought of that in that way, I am not a rampant pk'er but I definitely do not have any qualms about it. I try to handle it ICly and via the nature of the character/splat, but I do not feel that Death ends stories, it only alters the participation. The story continues.

I do not however, tend to understand how assholish people can be on games though. It just boggles my mind when someone sets out to /fuck up/ everyone else's fun.

The cynicism and grit of Shadow Run depends entirely upon what type of character you want to play and what the theme of the game being ran is.

Play a bunch of gang bangers with low resources and then try to survive in the Redmond Barrens or most any other sprawl for example and you'll see how grit and grimdark ShadowRun can be.

Many 'Runners are already a stage above the darkest it can get, but they can fall. If they end up screwing up the run and not paid then are hunted by two corporations and have nowhere to go except into the sprawl and crawl into a hole, try and not die... yeah it can get pretty bad.

To me Magic is just another type of 'Tech' in ShadowRun. Yeah it's rare, but so are Panther Assault Cannons. Supernatural threats, bounties, and metacritter guard dogs are all just part of what makes ShadowRun what it is, but it doesn't necessarilly make things more pleasant overall.

So part of this really @Thenomain you have to /decide/ what you want the overarching theme for /your/ ShadowRun to be, and then to make it that.

Because as it's written, ShadowRun can be practically /anything/.

I don't tend to write 'plots' out, I don't trust myself to be able to think up /everything/ that people might do to plan for it ahead of time.

So I start with an idea, I give the players one start point and then I cut them loose and fly by the seat of my pants.

Most of my plot characters are developed as characters, so they respond to the actions of the characters and do their thing while the PC's do their thing.

It hardly ever goes the direction I thought it might go to begin with, but it's a lot of fun for me and my players.

@Ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Totally serious, but does anyone want to try a plant-based diet with me?

Truth: I just saw the documentary "What the Health?" on Netflix. My partner and I saw a similar documentary last year, and her current medical (sort of) school is run by Seventh-Day Adventists. We want to try a plant-based diet now -- vegan -- despite the fact that I'm allergic to nuts and legumes.

Anyone have any recipes, if they are already doing this? Share some successes?

Trying to do vegan while being allergic to nuts is a good way to fuck yourself over due to lack of protein.

Just saying.

@arkandel I like justifications for anything out of the ordinary. I also like the idea that all characters should not be experts at everything.

The current trend of give everyone tons of xp is to me, homogenizing. Nobody is special if everyone is.

If I have a character who is of a specific type, and they should be good at this one thing, it's ok to not be awesome at /everything/ else. It adds to character personality and strengthens the 'group' ideal.

If everyone fights as well as the Rahu/Ahroun, then they lose a lot of what makes them special.

The problem is we see these huge character sheets, and power creep gets involved, and then you need to have uber big bads to challenge the group because everyone is capable of taking on regular stuff.

3 /should/ be a perfectly acceptable skill level for a professional soldier with experience...

Limits are great for creative outlet because it helps characters find their niche and what makes them special.

@Taika There's some decent tutorial logs to get you started on: http://www.mushcode.com/ but the biggest thing for me was just reading through the help on all the various functions but those can get you going.

After that, look at other code, once you know what the functions and replacement bits mean it makes more sense.

@faraday said in Creative Outlets:

@surreality said in Creative Outlets:

I actually agree with you about this completely. And per the way WoD is written, it should be like that.

A professional rolling 5 dice (3 skill + 2 stat) gets at least one success about 83% of the time. So if you rolled a "few dozen times" and literally never got a single success then please never take that char to Vegas because your luck is astonishingly abnormally bad

Arguably though 83% is low for a competent professional doing "their thing" under routine circumstances. But that's an artifact of the nWoD dice in particular. SR4 and FS3 have different percentages.

A competent professional should be able to get by without rolling dice to begin with, every 4 dice is 1 success in a non-stressful/high pressure situation. So 5 dice should get them through the average work day. Now take a professionally skilled person (3 skill) with good aptitude (3 attribute) and a specailization (1 more dice) and you're up to 7. 7 dice should get at least 1-2 successes on most rolls, above 90% of the time. In general.

When you factor in equipment bonuses it gets even better (Because a professional should have professional grade equipment) for +2 dice or so, which puts you at 8 or 9 dice which should be 2 successes for rote/mundane stuff.

This segue's into the creative outlet part to me, because what a character is, and isn't, good at should be part of the creative process, but there is a very real fear in a lot of games that we're going to make a character, and then be useless cuz of sheet optimization, or twinkery.

Binary is still code and still in use every day

@Auspice Take a look at the Dresden Files, I think with a little conversion, FATE and the magic system there might actually be a /very/ good fit for The Magicians.

I know there's a lot of hate against FATE but... sometimes, you need a round peg for a round hole

@Ashen-Shugar said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Lithium said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Thenomain Note: Roll20 has a CLI as well as buttons. Almost anything you can make a button for you can also input as a command. Especially when it comes to rolling dice but it's not /only/ a CLI.

This again though, is not only a change in code base, it's also a change in programs, gui, etc.

It's also one of the things I said would need to be done before there could be an entire UX overhaul. A complete change in code base.

Not... necessarily.

The issue is people are looking too far up at the 'big picture' and not toward the middle of the conceptual design.

Will it be nice to have a GUI interface to a mush? Absolutely.
How about a web page interface with the mush? Absolutely.

Will this require a top down rewrite to make happen? Not... necessarily.

It will take thinking outside the box and finding a way to do external tags to and from the mush to send async data to and from a mush to an outside application.

Can this be done? Absolutely. A lot of applications do this already, and they're nothing more than an extensive TCP/IP engine, so why can't mushes?

The answer. Of course they can. It just takes coding to wrap the feature set around this. Then once the feature set is done, hand it off for others to interface to it who have a bigger understanding of GUI, or html tools, or what have you.

I know my limitations.

I mostly code in MUX, I am self taught and have no formal code training at all.

I work within the tools of that platform, because it's what I know. My limitations are much sharper than yours, Groths, Theno's, Faradays, and who knows how many others.

So within my tools, I code as best I can. The answer for me is to code commands that are readily accessible and easily explained.

Even the tools you just explained adding to Rhost are not something within the realms of many code bases and thus, beyond my purview. To me that practically /is/ a top down re-write because it's languages and skills I don't have.

So I admit to being wrong about certain aspects of my posts, but to my perception that is still the truth. That is my reality because I am not a psychocoder, nor versed in multiple languages.

I love Werewolf 2e, but like most WoD I think it works best in a vacuum, so I am down with Vampire only, even if it's not a sphere I tend to enjoy much.

2E Werewolf only though? Hell yes.

@the-sands The problem here is /we/ as people are convinced to do stuff we wouldn't want to do /all the time/. We get manipulated, it doesn't change who we are, doesn't change our concept. The idea that nobody can be manipulated is just obtuse.

@bobotron I think it's the fact that people don't really care about how someone poses a punch, and then rolls dice, to get the effect, but people seem to care /fucking mightily/ about how a social thing is posed and how it conveys to dice.

So in essence, Dice are Dice, they convey what the pose cannot, so why is there such resistance to social dice?

Now it's a race. Now I have to finish my big trouble game.

Zobi will be pleased.

@cobaltasaurus You are welcome Enjoy!

@thenomain Easy to understand rules for conflict resolution, or at least something that people can point at and go: Rules say this.

And the Rule is the Rule.

A system where the player character isn't designed to be the protagonist, but just another cog in the machine.

In some ways I think it is like the whole KISS principle: Keep It Simple Sweetie.

Or the other side of the coin: A system where everyone /can/ be the hero.