Posts made by lordbelh

@ShelBeast said:

@lordbelh I need to finish the last season, but man, I'm stoked.

I liked last season, and I liked the start of this one!

So Vikings is back.

@Gingerlily said:

If any of you care, Vinyl was decent. Didn't need a 2 hour pilot, that was too much, but I am optimistic for the regular 1 hour format. Music! Arguments! People playing awkward versions of Robert Plant!

IF you're still positive 3 episodes from now, I'll give it a try.

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.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I just never really bought the Fake Serial Killer plotline.

I sort of missed the use of forums when I started mushing. I was playing on IRC on a game that used both wikis and forums. The OOC part of the forum made for the best way to discuss mechanics, rules, possible game changes. But the best part was the IC section, which was basically a Praxis run IC forum server, counted as Elysium (it was a vtm game), and it could get both hilarious and nasty and petty.

@Gingerlily said:

It's just me isn't it

Kinda sorta. I don't know, it just hasn't stood out as something I absolutely need to watch. If it comes out and gets great reviews, I might dip my toes into it, though.

Also, The Wire was the best. And yes, the last season was the worst.

Speaking of The Wire makers, I always felt I was the only person in the world who watched Treme.

I was surprised at liking the Vampire Diaries once I got past a couple of episodes. I don't remember exactly the season I stopped watching, but it kind of just wore out. For a while it was fun, though. I never did move onto the Originals.

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.

@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.

@Alzie said:

an Imperium only game where the antagonism is from the different factions within the imperium.

I would go with this. It both provides room for PVP scheming, and lets you take some of the steam out by throwing occasional mutual enemies into the fray.

@Sonder said:

Pilar - Wolfblooded/Warden/Mortal

I remember having a couple of amusing scenes with this character with my mortal cop, Faolan o'Rourke. I only had the one TR character, of often limited activity.

@Alzie I'd play a 40K game. For da Emprah!

@ThatGuyThere I have always felt that NPCs make excellent tools for setting and enforcing theme. Even if they're only in the background and occasionally give advise, they can balance out the more 'out there' concepts.

Anyway, RfK really did a great job in creating a PvP vampire setting. I miss something like it, because there's nothing else similar that I know of.

@faraday said:

Likewise, several games seemed to be okay with the idea of restricting levels 1-3 (because they felt it sucked too much) and 9-12 (because they thought it was too overpowering). So instead of a 1-12 rating system, you ended up with a 4-8 rating system... not really what was intended.

This always annoyed me, though I suspect the same mindset will be there in 1-5 as well.

@mietze said:

I don't believe that to mean that these people who don't RP out best practices of parenting, consent, behavior in response to stress or frustration, ect are by the fact of doing so adding to the atmosphere that causes such things to happen RL.

Moreover, once you start limiting yourself to best behavior, you must have a definitive canon of what that is. Those most eager to set those standards tend to be the ones you absolutely least want to.

What is a healthy enough D/s relationship? (Though I have no part in that RL subculture, I bet you like in every other subculture there are plenty of different Absolute Truths and finger pointing at Doing It Wrong.) Is that gay character unrealistically TOO gay? Your character is black, why does she speak white? Are you trying to white-wash black culture? Or the flip side, are you doing unacceptable cultural appropriation and inauthentic stereotyping by trying to mimic a cultural lingo not your own? (I've seen seen high horse derision of 'stupid and wrong stereotype' delivered against someone portraying his own fucking culture.)

Yeah, there are obvious Wrongs, but I'd rather have a few idiot concepts and wrong-play than elevating anyone to moral arbitrators of rightness of play.

Where this discussion has gone reminds me of when Tyler the Creator was banned from entering the UK because of the material of some of his rap lyrics. No doubt the content of said lyrics are downright disturbing, but that was the point. He was doing the whole thing from alter-ego perspectives. Still, the argument ran that the lyrics fostered hatred and glorified violence.

Anyway, to quote his response:

What about the people who will make music in the next five years? Are they gonna get banned? Why don’t they ban authors? Writers who write these mystery books about people getting raped and sabotaged and murdered and brainwashed – why don’t they ban them? There are rallies of neo-Nazis in parts of England. And then you’re telling me I can’t come there because of some bullshit song, but you got motherfuckers with swastikas rallying down the street actually promoting hate?

(note: bolded by me, and also a notable irony is that the rules that allowed the ban were meant to stop terrorists.)

Anyway. I will RP out the most twisted and vile things imaginable, but I do so in the understanding that this is fiction, and I hold myself no more morally accountable for it than I would the creators of Se7en (incidentally one of my favorite movies).

10 pull-ups here I come. I could do you once upon a time in my distant athletic youth, and I'm slowly closing back in. At 7 right now, so that's just 3 more to go.

@Arkandel said:

more cliche than I like

A lot more. I had some hopes it could be a new 100 revelation, pretty young people non withstanding. I was disappointed, though. The druid and the roamer chick were the only two characters I liked, and just my luck that most of the focus was on the others.

I have no idea if there's an imbalance or not. I can't say I've noticed or thought about it before, and I don't really go around thinking of people as either dominant or submissive. Isn't it as much about situations as inclination? I might be wrong, I don't know. Now that I'm actively looking back to see if there is any imbalance, I just can't come up with an answer, which in itself suggests any conclusion is unlikely to be too definitive.