Posts made by Lithium

@Misadventure said:

San Diego is boring.

Only as boring as you make it. It's a huge city, on a coast, near a border with another country. The political and social elements alone have tons of potential.

To be fair, the choices in ME1 were rather... meh, Liara was the only option I could really get behind. The marines were just... well one was a whiny bitch about his abilities, and the other was only for male characters (I tried that, but noo, especially when she was spouting poetry I was like, Augh... and people wonder why the blue alien girl got all the action).

ME2 was better, Thane, OMG Thane was great I loved how they ended his story and his voice, just... yeah anyways, enough off topic for now!

@Thenomain said:

I can't be arsed to finish Witcher 1. I'm trying, but it's so very, very eh. Yet in spite of how dated it is, I could go back and re-play Mass Effect right now, ugly weapon management and all.

Also, in Witcher I feel compelled to get the complete set of collectable cards for fucking. (So much eyerolling. So much.)

Meh meh meh meh meh. Okay, enough complaining about Witcher.

I'm right there with you on this one. I could (and have) replayed ME1 and ME2 many times, but I can't get through the Witcher 1 for whatever reason. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten the extended edition on GOG.

Though ME1 is... kind of annoying because I will eventually want to play ME2, and then ME3, and ME3 is great, but I have to stop it before the last 20 minutes every game.

If you can't hold a territory, then it is not your territory.

So if you get in a dispute over a piece of land then you need to hold it. The thing about territory is it's more than just holding it, as Uratha you also have to do your duty /to/ the territory, you have to guard it not only from possible Uratha who want your territory, but you also have to make sure it doesn't get spiritually screwed over too.

As to what makes territory valuable besides a Locus? I imagine it being a pleasant place to live would matter, or at least fit your characters idea of what is cool and awesome. What is valuable to a biker gang is going to be different in value to a political club going to college.

One man's trash is another's treasure for example.

As for the oath of the moon, mistakes do happen, but they are violations, and there are ways to bind a werewolf that don't involve killing them using spirits and rites for example. So if someone or some pack gets to murderous, you deal with it.

I want to see Washington DC. That would be awesome. Chicago might be cool too. San Diego or Tajiti would be neat also.

@FiranSurvivor said:

@Lithium said:

@FiranSurvivor said:

When ever you completely misconstrue and strawman the shit out of my arguments I almost feel obliged to respond. Frankly seeing your over the top and ultra-defensive responses is bringing the troll out in me.

I don't think you have any fucking idea what misconstrue or strawman really means.

Taking an argument and twisting it so you can argue against an idea/position that was never held in the first place?

If I was actually doing that sure, but I wasn't.

@FiranSurvivor said:

I'm going to harp on this (though I don't really see it as harping... more like repping) but I don't see a difference between a storyteller actively being on a scene and GMing (adding another person to the list of people to coordinate times with and also making them THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON) and that same storyteller crafting a run that can be automated to a degree (the game spits out poses, options, necessary rolls, tracks all that with fail/succeed states and branching paths) so that a group could run it without them needing to be there. Staff could also check a submitted log to make sure the group of runners actually posed and didn't just diddle themselves.

Yes it does remove the possibility of something crazy outside of the box like waiting in the noodle hut next store until the CEO of the MegaCorp who is addicted to General Tsang's Crazy Noodles (info that you acquired outside the current scene) comes in and you ply him with delicious noodles for information... but sacrifices can be made to help a world seem more alive.

At the same time such a system doesn't necessarily kill the idea of a live GMed run. Just another option.

There is no way to automate a system to take into account all the actions that a group of players will want to do. You are forcing them into a railroad that tells the story you want it to tell, or just kills the party if they fail. The level of coding you are talking about is INSANE, because there is no way to account for even the abilities or gear of a single team in question, what prepwork they do, or don't do, plus the time it'd take to even input all the data for the individual poses, which couldn't even respond to player stimuli and would just be glorified setting poses.

I'm not twisting anything. I'm not turning anything into a strawman. I'm not misconstruing anything. You're just fixated on this broken idea, and I am done with you, and it. It's off topic, start your own thread not related to my game. It's not constructive here.

@FiranSurvivor said:

When ever you completely misconstrue and strawman the shit out of my arguments I almost feel obliged to respond. Frankly seeing your over the top and ultra-defensive responses is bringing the troll out in me.

I don't think you have any fucking idea what misconstrue or strawman really means.

Here we go again.

The more I see the same old crap over and over the more I want to shelve the whole thing.

I'm not going to automate runs.

I will explain why, for the last time:

Automation does not work when there is any objective other than 'kill this mobile npc'. That's all there is. Kill this object. Whether you are using combat skills, whether you are using social skills, magic, decking to kill mobile IC, whatever, all you're doing is rolling dice and playing with code.

It's not interactive.

There is no outside the box approach.

There is only combat pools.

Talk about boring!

Stop bringing it up in this thread, it's not on topic, it never will be, make your own god forsaken thread about trying to turna MUX into a MUD.

EDIT: Also, no matter HOW many lines of supposed 'poses' that I could try to automate, it'd still be repetition at it's worst. Oh look another random run, well we know what these npc's stats are! This will be a cake walk. Ok now this is going to happen next!

The greatest part about TableTop and about MU*'ing (to me) is /not knowing what is going to happen next/. Most video games don't have any real replayability without a billion billion lines of code. I am not coding ShadowRun version of Skyrim into a MUX. Just not happening. Quit asking for it.

I would love a low magic fantasy setting, but, I'd prefer Conan over Game of Thrones...

@tragedyjones said:

@Lithium - Doesn't SR5 literally have a random shadowrun generator chart in the back?

There is, but as we all know a ShadowRun needs more than an outline. In ShadowRun especially we don't know how the players are going to approach a particular run. Most of the time the Johnson is going to say: Get me this from there, with some caveats but /how/ they go about doing that is up to the runners and if they are smart they will play to their strengths. If they aren't, they'll just see everything as a nail and they're the hammer.

It's a neat little thing for the beginnings of a plot idea sure, be useful for PrP's if you want to come up with something without much overall thought to it. It'd be an easy thing to code up to display in the player nexus for people to derp around with for possible prp ideas.

Player Ran Plots (PrP's) will be welcomed and allowed. I am putting a system together to give people inspiration for PrP's that help promote the ongoing story arc of the game. For example:

Corp A wants ___ from Corp B. They are willing to finance a run for it. Someone can claim that run, run it, and the people who run it and those who participated get cool adventure and rewards. Rewards will be higher rep/notoriety gains, and a higher monetary/rewards cap, plus the first chance at new contacts added to the contacts list possibly. After the run is completed, I can make new events for the fallout from that, as corporations and people adjust to the changes.

That doesn't take away from PrP's, but it means I can put out stuff to give people /direction/ for PrP's which I think is extremely powerful in the MU* environment. It also rewards people for going beyond the milkrun for my buddies PrP circles or whatnot.

As for backgrounds I plan to reward a well written background.

There will also be archetype character creation which is generally a fill in the blanks bullet point thing to help give your character personality and life beyond the archetype.

The primary lifepath creation will handle backgrounds very simply as a lifepath is chosen, players are required to put in the most significant (To the character) event that occurred during that time just to get them to think about their character beyond what their dice say without requiring a novella or the like.

@Misadventure

Good Question.

I haven't picked a city yet, I am still coding base systems and such, doing a lot of data entry as well. If anything I am leaning more towards Boston than San Francisco because in 2050, the Japanese occupation of San Francisco was harsh as hell and metahumans would have a very rough time of it.

I've also considered New Orleans but, there's not a lot of big corporations based down there so not exactly a hotbed for ShadowRuns. Boston is looking like it might end up being the setting but I haven't committed yet as I'm not at the stage where I /have/ to commit to a location yet.

@Reason Yep I've read that, and also about the Foundation, and resonance realms, it's pretty weird stuff to be sure.

Yeah I have all the books, and there's a lot of the matrix rules that are going to have to be changed simply because I am yanking out Technomancers wholesale. I also have thoughts on changing matrix rules to be more in line with regular rules. Sleeze allowing stealth rolls in the matrix, program ratings being equipment dice or in the case of offensive programs, different types of weapons, so that the matrix is more streamlined and easy to grasp.

@FiranSurvivor said:

@Lithium said:

@FiranSurvivor Maybe I did, but I am very vehemently against the idea. MUSH's are about cooperative play, and not about solo adventure. That is the realm of MUD's, in my eyes.

Ok and what about the other 90% of my idea that was literally all about cooperative play...?

I guess you missed the part where I said that forcing character connections is a silly idea. You can't force people to be connected, if they don't want to they simply won't RP it. There's no way you can guarantee people will have compatible times, styles, and personalities, to make connections like that viable. At worst, it would make people actively annoyed, or make them bitch, or make them stop logging in.

If you want to be connected to other people's PC's? Talk to them about it. Connections in ShadowRun are generally NPC's that are used/abused and sometimes use/abuse you. They aren't PC's. While you can have connection to a PC, it doesn't mean you get to have a loyalty rating with them because you bought it in chargen. That is unenforceable and I wouldn't even try it.

Connections with PC's are easy, most people want RP, and want to know people. They will readily agree to RP for the /lamest/ reasons ever, just to have RP, especially if it's someone new. They will invent whole reams of data to explain why their street samurai is out shopping for fabric at a farmer's market (Because they need it for a specific disguise to pass through a gangs territory hopefully unmolested) in order to have fun. At least some will.

But /forcing/ someone to RP or be connected without their say in specific ways to someone they may (or do) not know? Not going to happen.

I'm not putting any barriers in place to being connected to other PC's, but I am certainly not going to force them to be connected to random person #6 who wants to know a street samurai. That's up to them. It is their story and their character, not yours, not mine, and for all these reasons (and more) I won't do anything of the sort.

EDIT: As for communication tools, I want to know how many more coded tools we need than RP channels in plot rooms and timestops, pages, bboards, and regular channels, @mail, and +jobs. That's a lot of ways to communicate.

@Alzie said:

As far as I'm aware, SR5 didn't dramatically dumb down the rules, so there are still different rule sets for every archetype. You got your magic rules, then your astral rules, then your decking rules, then your combat rules, then your socialize rules, then your contact rules, then your buying shit rules. All of those rules then have sub-rules - usually about 6 or 7 - that you have to know. When I say it isn't easy, it's because I did ST for shadowrun, I ran runs on Denver and other Mu's. And I was one of the few people who could do decking, magic, astral, combat, tats and cybergear in the same PrP without blowing their brains out. Let's not pretend like Shadowrun is 'easy' to ST for. Anyone that has ever played Shadowrun knows it's not and they also know they learned their one section and stuck to it.

As to SR5, I have that book but never got around to reading it. It seemed infinitely smaller so maybe they really did cut back all those rules into a single, cohesive, easier to understand format. If so maybe it is now easy to ST for shadowrun. However, yes, I'm not used to SR5, I'm used to SR3 and SR4.

That's just ShadowRun having a lot of rules. ShadowRun /does/ have a lot of rules, but once you know them, it's no harder to /run a prp for/ than any other system.

While I agree that ShadowRun /rules/ can be harder to master, or even be really familiar with that's just a barrier for the game as a whole. Anyone who runs/ST's for /any/ game should know the rules.

Take oWoD for example, /so/ many people running plots for Weresplats didn't know that a Spirit's Rage was the Target Number to /damage/ them, and then they got to soak normally... which suddenly makes really powerful spirits quite trivial.

Running ShadowRun is in my opinion no harder than running any other game, you should know the rules for what your plot entails. As for SR5, yes, the rules are a LOT more homogenous now. Attribute + skill tends to be the core of it. It's a lot closer to WoD now in that respect.

@Alzie said:

@Lithium said:

Not that I would ever code something like that, that would make a person into a wizbit I still want to give a shout out in thanks for this. I checked all the code I ported in and am not vulnerable to it, but at least I will try and break my u() habit, which I usually type just because it's more universal. I'd use v() except I hate having functions and databases on the same objects as actual code. Guess I'm weird like that... so get() here I come. I suppose those two extra characters won't kill me

To be clear, get and u do completely different things. Sometimes u is necessary, sometimes get is necessary. If you're using U to get an attribute and nothing more then you should be using get/xget. If you actually need to run code stored in an attribute you still want U. As for v, it's a shortcut for get that grabs an attribute relative to the object that it's ran on.

I had forgotten about needing U to run functions on another object, as you need to evaluate them and not 'get' them when I wrote that bit. A good reminder though Thank you.

@Jeshin said:

Hey,

So I'm going to take... A week (think I can do this in a week) and re-read through this entire monster of a thread. I'll then brew on it for a week, so in 2 weeks time, I'll get back to you all with any significant changes we'll be making.

In the meantime though Crayon will continue business as usual with our weekly updates.

Talk to you in 2 weeks.

Couldn't people just go to your website, if they were inclined to, to find your updates?