Best posts made by lordbelh

I remember that I used to have issues with providing (or receiving) too much RL private information. It was born out of a general desire to keep my real life and my online world compartmentalized, having seen early some bad examples of people who'd lost all perspective. With time I stopped being too worried about it, though. Which is not to say I tend to be awfully forthcoming, but I don't shut down conversations about these things anymore, either.

1. I don't really care. My e-mail address does contain half my name, sort of. (Its written backwards and missing one part.)

2. I'm indifferent to people knowing my social statuses, too.

3. I can count the number of times I've shared a picture of myself on one hand. I don't think I've ever asked for someone else's picture. I've only video chatted with one person that I met through RP, and only a couple of times at that. I've never met anyone in person from RP (though I also live off the beaten path as far as RPer hot-spots go). I do voice-chat sometimes, though.

4. People can have my e-mail address if they need it.

5. I don't care if people know who I am on games. I listed my alts a while back on MSB, though I haven't updated that in a while (I haven't been RPing for a goodly long while now for various reasons). Admittedly I haven't always lived up to my own standards on behavior in the past, and it is an easy temptation to simply shed your old skin and try on a fresh and new one. But ultimately I prefer to just own it, good or bad. Not to say that reason to wish privacy is why everybody (or a majority, or many at all) might want privacy of alts, but that's where I get my occasional temptations. Mind, I do often like starting a game as an unknown - its harder to grab scenes or become involved in rp, but it also offers opportunities to break old patterns and forge some fresh new stories and learn some new perspectives. But I never really try to pretend to not be me, so much as avoid announcing it loud at the start.

Anyway, tldr; eh.

Personally I like the idea of going into debt, and then solving that debt through favors. One vote for in the Major Council, or something or the other. I mean, it sucks failing, but everybody is going to fail at some point right? And it gives you a reason to interact with the other Houses if you're willing to do that.

Failing at the very beginning of course isn't ideal, since you have nothing banked to pay with, and the whole favor system isn't really in effect any. But as a long term incentive I like it.

@Ghost said in Good TV:

Just want to say that these shows are my shows right now, and they're awesome:

• Brooklyn Nine-Nine
• Orville
• Deadly Class
• The Magicians
• True Detective

Watch this stuff.

The Magicians has consistently been one of my favorite shows since its inception. I haven't looked at season 3 of True Detective, as season 2 was shit. Or not shit, just a disappointment.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a masterpiece of comedy, right next to The Good Place as my favorite comedy shows.

I think Amazon's Counterpart should get some love.

@tragedyjones I was thinking about it, but the lack of information they have in their wiki/in-game, made me wonder if it was worth trying. Its difficult to get a grasp of what kind of game they're making, when the themes it offers are so bare bones.

I'm sorta with @Sunny in that, while I'm very much in favor of someone telling me their limits, because I don't want to be an asshole wrecking ball, I also don't really want to hear someone tell me OOCly what kinks they want fulfilled either.

@mietze If someone is in a public room, I'll join if I feel like it. I guess I'm from your culture; if anyone wants a private scene its on them to go to a private location to have it. If a public scene becomes a private scene, take it into a temproom at that point. Its okay if they forgot, but then its still on them to politely explain it and then depart. I find it pretty rude to claim ownership of public hangouts by excluding others. That's not how it's supposed to work.

I've only come across the sort of situation you describe once, and I was pretty blunt about what I thought it.

ETA: I feel I should add that I don't think just because I drop into a public scene, they are required to interact with me on my terms. Perhaps they're at a table and its pretty clear they're talking low voices and they don't want anything to do with my character. I can chalk that up to bad timing, make a post or two, then disappear.

It was expected you have a cellphone when I was like 13 or so, though Scandinavia is fairly high tech I guess.

I always liked to read. I started out with classics, like Verne, Dumas, Scott's. At some point - I think I was 13 or so - a friend of mine lent me Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Only the first 2 books were translated into my native language, and that just wasn't nearly good enough, so I picked up the english version. It was pretty tough at first, but by the time I got to the third book I didn't even notice I was reading in english. After that I started devouring all the fantasy and science fiction literature I could get my hands on.

I didn't live much of a nerd life at the time, though. I kept my bookishness to my self, reading in private and not discussing any of it with many people. Liking to read meant being a nerd, and fuck that. I was all about athletics (handball; big where I'm from, soccer, martial arts, skiing and snowboarding in the winter; which meant from october to april basically.) My parents encouraged me to be outdoorsy. I hanged out with my friends doing stupid things, and trying to get with the pretty girls, petty crimes. I also spent a lot of time fishing, which I still love to do.

Anyway, we moved when I was 17. Soon after, when I didn't know anyone where I was at, I got ill. Was stuck to my bed for a year, wasting away into little more than a skeleton, and getting pretty depressed about it all. I was chatting on msn with a friend from back home, and then she had to go, and I noticed there were lots of chat rooms to troll through. What was weirder was that some of them were called Inns, or Kingdom this or Kingdom that, and people were pretending to be this character or that character. Its not that I didn't know what RP was; I'd heard about DnD; some of the kids at my old school had talked about it from time to time. But I'd been pretty dismissive of the whole thing.

Anyway, I was pretty desperate to get out of my present life, so I gave it a try. It stuck. When MSN's RP scene died, I moved on to IRC games, then finally someone suggested MUs. While sometimes it goes years between my RPing, I always come back to it. Its no longer a coping mechanism of a lonely kid, though. Its just a nice hobby.

Anyway, I'm proudly nerdish these days.

@Ganymede said:

I'm not a dullard; I know you need people to do that. I do it all the time. But I will admit that I get disenfranchised when I see others outpace my PC who do little but mill about socially getting XP.

I never assumed you were.

But by the way Eldritch is designed it strikes me that they won't outpace you with XP by just doing social fluff stuff unless said social stuff is geared towards their goals. By being less active yet more focused on goals and plot/character development (as GMC sees it, anyway) you would easily keep up. If you don't, Eldritch is still giving you flat XP until you reach some 100XP. Which is a lot, which is, in fact, more than enough to 'max' out your character in at least one area. From playing on Reno and having a character with 100+ XP, I can tell you that you don't need more.

Which means the game does keep "you" in mind, but also keeps in mind that a lot of people thrive on having incentives. Should RP be its own reward? Yes, to a point, but that doesn't invalidate giving additional rewards.

You feel disenfranchised when you don't think you can catch up. That's fine and natural. Being super active, doing tons of shit, and then seeing someone who never does anything be your equal, can also lead to dissatisfaction, and that seems pretty fine and natural, too. The trick is to find a balance. I can't say if Eldritch has hit a sweet spot, but I like it a hellova lot better than The Reach's catchup mechanic. I also think it's an improvement on Reno (even if I'd like the XP gain lowered a bit).

I also don't think The Reach's catchup mechanic is what keeps limit-hours people there. I think inertia affects people with limited hours a lot more, and they're slower to really shift their attentions to anything new because they have less time to spread around and invest in the 'new'. This may be wrong, but it's how I think when work crunch is cutting my availability down. I'm a lot less likely to invest my effort until a game is 'proven' to have things going for it in those periods.

My grandma came down with home made pie. It was good.

Quite often if you're feeling unwanted, you probably are. Or if not directly unwanted, at least not highly (or as highly as you would have liked) valued right at this moment.

This isn't the end of the world. Don't take it personal. Not everybody likes everybody else equally.

I think it is Staff's responsibility to leave plot and story accessible for everybody, but beyond that its the player who has to give enough to the game to be wanted in return. If you can't get into one group, try another. If one character fails, perhaps try another. Change it up so that you have something to contribute.

If you want people to invest in your enjoyment, you have to invest in theirs.

If you don't have the time, you have to have quality, or being friendly, or being funny, or whatever.

And even if you're perfect, sometimes RP becomes a zero-sum game, in which case a particular player can only phase you in if he or she phases someone else out, because there's only so many scenes they can fit into their schedule, and that's not about you so much as them.

If you set your expectations to Popular Culture Historical (as imagined by tv, moveies and pulp fiction) I think you're fine. If you try to be authentic as opposed to mere plausible, you're going to go mad. It'll also be a very tiny game. Further more you should pick both a setting and a time that is familiar.

Classic Greece? Sure, if you're cool with Xena and Hercules being as much of an inspiration as anything you cook up.
Rome? Sure, but we're talking Gladiator here.
Western European Dark Ages? Sure.
Renaissance Italy? Can totally work
Victorian London? Go for it.
American Wild West? Sure.
Constantinople? Eh (and that goes for both Byzantine and Ottoman)
Pre-Columbus Aztecs? Eh.
Mughal India? Eh
Feudal Japan? Eh.
Warring States China? Eh.

The key principle is familiarity, if not with the details then how pop culture has portrayed it. Go off the beaten track and people have to do more and more research, coupled with the fact that the more niche the more dedicated the detail-oriented freaks you've attracted will be. The kind that will hate the bastardization of their favorite era.

So Vikings is back.

@AmishRakeFight I think the problem most games come across with PvP is that they lack mechanics for alternate conflict resolution, let alone incentives for them. On RfK there were both, which is why I think it worked so well. You had boons as a way of settling matters and backing off, or by way of making a loss or a win mean something, and proxies in the form of actual territories/influences you could attack instead of blowing the person up. Then you had further incentives to avoid killing anyone because it was against City law. Vampires being vampires (with all manner of ways to ferret out a secret), and players being players (mostly incapable of keeping secrets, IC or OOC), if you did do a PK you'd probably lose the character.

Sandboxes are ruled by combat thugs because inevitably all conflict boils down to a question of if you can PK the other, and the only consequences come from the possibility of some buddies seeking revenge.

@Admiral said in The 100: The Mush:

Anyone who tells you that a game about teenagers isn't run by a specific clique is a liar.

I guess I'm a liar, then. I've played on games about teenagers that weren't run by specific cliques.

So, Westworld. Loved the pilot. Hoping for more good things as it progresses.

I will say that the 1-12 setup of stats was one of the things I liked about fs3. Even if half of that range was fluff, and some games were uber restrictive on what you could have, it was a nice change-up from the 1-5 WoD style.

I'm with @Kestrel, I had fun on this game. It wasn't perfect, but I really didn't get the sense that Staff was out to play with just themselves and their friends. I did think that it'd be better if one of the staffers didn't play quite such a leader style character, but on the other hand every time someone else pushed for a different direction it seemed to me he was more than willing to let them. It was less a question of take all the spotlight than just anyone push the story.

Anyway, @Kestrel, you were fun. See if I don't come across you elsewhere. Currently the only place I'm playing is Arx, and its still in development.

@Kanye-Qwest Same. A pity. I did like to see who was doing the downvotes.

FS3 has always struck me as a system where you might be able to round out your character a little with XP, you were never really meant to become an expert at something through experience alone. You app in with a character who is an expert, or you don't. Your inept teenage kid isn't 6 months from now going to be a master at everything, as has become somewhat of a norm in all the WoD games floating around. I liked that. It gives the games a different feel. Sure, its way more point-effective to min-max the system, but that's the case for any system with exponential costs.