Posts made by Lithium

@Ganymede This is a fallacy.

Nobody lives in an emotional vacuum. Not even people who pretend to be robots.

Every single interaction we have with other human beings is colored by our perception of it and we make snap judgements.

I'm not saying it's good, I'm just saying it /is/.

It's one of the dark sides of human nature and it applies to how we value opinions as much as anything else.

The simple fact that someone like Trump seems to have won the Republican nomination is part of the support for what I said.

People reacted emotionally to what he said and therefor his opinion mattered more than the other candidates so they voted for him.

For whatever reason, their perception of him, was better than the other possible candidates.

I'm not trying to turn this into a Politics thread, just using it support my opinion on opinions.

We can /try/ to not weigh opinions based on our feelings but that's a lot harder than it seems, and I'm willing to say that I believe most people can't do it. Not really. See Trump.

@WTFE It's food assistance for pregnant women and young mothers to help try and ensure that they get at least some decent food so they can live healthily.

So this just happened as I am at work as I type this. It's not really retail but my night job is as a cashier at an airport parking lot. So a lady comes in and she pulls so far away from the booth that I sit in that I /cannot/ reach her parking ticket while leaning out the window because she is using her /right fucking hand/ while driving, and she won't switch the ticket to the left hand so she isn't reaching across her whole body to try and hand me this thing.

So I ask her to use her left hand and she refuses. I get out of the booth, walk around, go to take the ticket and she refuses to let go. I almost had to rip it out of her hand. I walk back into the booth and run the ticket. She does the SAME FUCKING THING with her credit card. So when she refuses to let go of her credit card I return to my booth and just sit there.

I've got all night really.

Finally she asks why I won't take her credit card and I am like: Because you didn't let go of it.

So she pulls out some cash, finally uses her left hand, and then refuses to let go until after my fingers have slipped off the money and it hits the ground, wind blowing it all over the place.

So I have to collect the fucking money and by this time there's 7 cars behind her now watching me do this. Finally things get taken care of and the next car comes through with this cute girl driving and she asks:

Want me to run her off the road for you?

I so desperately wanted to say yes.

Part of the problem is the perception of the player I think.

Elves in SR aren't all Tolkeneized(sp) and whatnot in general. One of the most vocal elf npc's is a drug addict junkie rigger with cyberware in her head to control vehicles. She's not magic, she's not high society, far from it.

Part of the big things about metahumans is that it takes racism to a different level. It's less about skin color and more about actual race for the most part (There will always be bigotry though). Orcs and trolls get a bad rap, dwarves get made fun of but for the most part nobody really hasa problem with except for the human extremists, elves are pretty and so are generally more acceptable to humans, but orcs, trolls, and dwarves still can give them a hard time, and like all aspects of humanity there are people in every race who hate the other races.

For example: The Ancients is thousands of elves, stretched over north america, who are a bad ass biker gang. They aren't your typical tolkein based elves.

There are a few, like Harlequin, Erron the Scribe, and a few others who stretch back to Earthdawn who would fit the tolkein mold, to an extent (Harlequin definitely doesn't) but you can safely remove those elves and not break the game imho.

When I think of ShadowRun elf I think of Dodger the Decker, Turbo Bunny the Rigger, Netcat the Technomancer etc. I don't think of Glorfindel.

Maybe that's just me tho.

@Ganymede What I mean is that all opinions are weighed according to personal beliefs. Just because someone wrote a book on something doesn't mean it gives that opinion weight to /everyone/.

If I don't agree with the book, then that opinion has no weight to me.

It's a simple matter of perception. If I like a person then I am probably going to place more weight on their opinion than if I do not. Where as someone who has a different belief or different like, is probably going to put a different weight on that opinion.

In a vacuum however, all opinions have the same weight.

Any additional weight is added on by the individual.

As for what sort of society we live in, all I have to say is this: Politics shows just what crazy things people put weight on for them.

@Thenomain

I give up. You're bound and determined to read what I wrote negatively.

Have fun with that.

To everyone else who decided to discuss the topic, thanks.

@Coin That's not what I said at all.

I can't fathom how you got that from what I wrote. Seriously.

I said /IF/ you're afraid of your opinion being judged, don't voice it.

That's the only time I ever even made /any/ allusions to not voicing an opinion at all.

What I /SAID/ was that all opinions have the same propensity of equal weight regardless of who says them. It's an opinion, it is not a fact. Therefor people will judge the opinion based on their standards, that's all anyone can do.

I sometimes wonder about this place.

@Thenomain said in Where have all the crunchy games gone?:

@Lithium

So your question isn't "where have all the crunchy games gone", but "I'm looking for a crunchy game to play, help me find one". It's never fun trying to give someone an honest answer to their question and their reply is, "No, not good enough."

Read the rest of the post. It's more than just crunchy. I also mentioned how aging games are a problem, and a broken system is a broken system.

It's never fun when someone doesn't read the whole post or just picks and chooses what they respond to.

@Thenomain Tenebrae is Pathfinder and is so nervous about optimization that they literally bitch if you have optimized stats (And god forbid an optimized sorcerer), M&M is broken (Feats break the PL scale for tanky characters and Affliction is rather badly done imho), WoD is fairly crunchy but the subject matter is so overdone. I'd love to see WoD rules used for like a sci-fi game instead of supernatural.

Crunch is things like Hero System, Anima, Eclipse Phase, Mutant Chronicles, ShadowRun and Earthdawn.

There are games that use crunchy systems, but, they are almost all using easily abusable systems (M&M, Pathfinder) or are suffering entropy to a massive scale (Like ATS, ChampionsMUSH, Etc)

On the game I am working on, I have a series of rooms that are instructions to help ease people in. There are two ways out of the intro room when you make a character, the first is to use the proper code to bypass the new player room listed in the help files. The second is to go through the new player experience so to speak which will teach how to MU*.

It's not perfect, but I think it's the only reasonable way to go about it.

There used to be games that had whole tests at the end of their new player experience so you couldn't even make a character unless you studied the games theme.

I'm pretty anal when it comes to details, but not that anal.

Everything is very rules light anymore it seems, which is fine, but I want a little more meat and potatoes in my game system than Faraday's system or FATE or (god forbid) pure consent could possibly give.

I get that a lot of people want to tell stories, but, a crunchy system doesn't stop you from telling stories, it /helps/ you tell stories because you have the rules for whatever situation might be at hand (in theory) where as rules light systems are so much GM fiat you don't have a common ground to stand on.

Maybe it's just a sign of the times, but we need new games with crunchy systems. We can't rely on these ancient games with all their drama and dinosaurs to really supply a fair and unbiased game for new people.

This is why ARX and Rogue One interest me so much I think, they have a system I can learn and make what I want to make with a system that isn't pretty much playing rock paper scissors and the effect being completely derived by the GM.

Reading a book doesn't make anyones opinion any more or less valid than anyone else's.

All opinions are worth exactly as much as anyone is willing to give them worth.

All opinions matter more, or less, than someone else's depending on who is hearing the opinion and who is saying the opinion.

Just have your opinion.

There is zero need for justification.

Your opinion will be judged on a person by person basis, possibly with up or down votes or replies.

If you're afraid of your opinion being judged, don't voice it.

@Fantom I like specializations because no, not all bows are the same, just like not all guns are the same. Trying to use say a double barrel shotgun compred to an m4 carbine is a totally different beast.

Sure there are some similarities such as: Point and pull trigger, but, it also depends on how much time you want people to take to be good at stuff.

For other skills I think they are absolutely useful, re: Piloting example. As a person with their CDL in big trucks I can promise you knowing how to drive a car well isn't going to translate. In fact it'll probably screw you up even worse.

When I was learning to drive with a trailer once I got comfortable with the truck I then had to re-learn to /not/ drive it like a car or I'd be slamming my trailer into things left and right.

I can only imagine that flying a Y-Wing is going to be totally different than an A-Wing or X-Wing and being good at one of those is probably not going to carry over identically.

Does there need to be 100's of specializations? I don't know, that's up to you. Do they make sense in some places? Absolutely... in my opinion.

Just like there's a world of difference between firing a rifle than a pistol with any accuracy.

@GirlCalledBlu There was about a half dozen WoT MUD's back when I played them. There was a kind of quiet war going on between them as to which was the best, some still had original DIKU areas and such in them and others were full blown. I might have played Moment but I don't really recall. The one I played a lot of was Mirrors

@GirlCalledBlu It's a lot easier if you first find MUD's honestly because chargen is for the most part automated. That's how I got my start, I found a Wheel of Time MUD and played that, then found an RP MUD and then found MU*'s and left mud's behind.

Today though with video games being what they are we're kinda like HAM radio fanatics in the world of cellphones.

@GirlCalledBlu I don't think random 'new' people are really finding MU*'s at all. They have zero real exposure to them and no way to really know about them now.

Back before MMO's really took off like Ultima Online and EQ the online gaming community consisted mostly of chatrooms on AOL, IRC, and stuff like that until someone found a MU*. Usually it was through word of mouth, friends, etc that got someone into the hobby. Sometimes it was through searching for webpages on a book series, or game, or whatever that brought up a MU*.

In this day and age though there's really not a /lot/ of new blood, and those we do get are probably gained from us bringing a few new people in now and again.

Basically if I am flinging shit in the hog pit it's just because I want others to know what happened or my opinion on something with no holds barred.

I don't know that I've ever really 'shamed' someone for their actions on a game, but, if I did I wouldn't do it to shame them so much as:

WARNING WILL ROBINSON!

So might it be considered shaming someone? Sure. My intention however is to warn others that shit was done, it went down, it smacked into the rotating blades, etc.

As for Shaming not working? Well that depends entirely on who is shaming, and how, as well as the targets personality.

When I was a kid my mom could smash me flat without even touching me because I didn't want her to be angry with me, I was emotionally invested in what she thought, so shame /worked/ there.

Shame doesn't work if the party being shamed doesn't give a rats ass though and in this medium, the fact that they /did/ something shame worthy means they don't give a rats ass...

So I don't shame, I warn.

@Ominous IIRC the Martin, Fiona, Samson scene was good, except I had to deal with one guy who wanted to beat the shit out of Martin for no good reason at all. Then get uppity and vanish... but yeah without the person I was going to play the game with, tacked onto everything else... I lost interest fast.

@everyoneelse:

I don't think the game itself is bad, I don't even think the majority of the players are bad or antagonistic.

I think the antagonistic assholes are to dominant, and to involved in things, that it chases away people who are there to play in a post apocalyptic environment that don't generally want to be dealing with angst ridden assholes.

Not the game for me. That's fine. Not going to whine about it but I'm equally not going to say that everything is fucking sunshine and roses either.

On this forum especially people should be able to handle some criticism and rough reviews.

@Thenomain Absolutely cool. Was just trying to point out that ShadowRun can be so many different things to different people that you either need to leave it all in to try and retain the 'feel' to everyone, or you need to limit the scope yourself so the game works for you.

I didn't mean any disrespect, trying to be helpful

I'd like to see your take on such a game Theno.

@il-volpe God I have seen /so fucking many/ small towns that had dozens or hundreds of vampires, werewolves, changeling and everything else it boggles the mind how the population has survived at all. The sheer amount of vitae needed for the vampires alone would have depopulated the town but lo...