It depends. Hard or hell, depending on whether I think my mechanics are likely to be up for it. I don't want to just breeze through the game.
Posts made by lordbelh
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RE: Difficulty of single-player computer games
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
A while ago I played on a chat site called oasiz. It had a forum. At first it was lightly moderated and, while it had plenty of drama and petty bullshit, it was also lively. They decided to go the heavily moderated route instead, enforcing their definition of polite and orderly discourse. It died soon enough afterwards.
There's a certain personality type that loves to mother discussions to death if you give them an ounce of authority to do so.
I guess I'll take a lively discussion with the occasional nasty over an orderly forum with empowered and zealous moderators who who want to enforce the nice.
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
@Meg If you could find the parts you felt were hateful, I'd like to reread them. I vaguely recall the passage, but I remember in a different light. Perhaps my memory is wrong and colored by more recent interactions with her, though.
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
@Shlappy said in MSB: The meta-discussion:
Still - if there is a hate mob in the MUSH community, you will find it here. And that's...disconcerting.
Perhaps I just don't see it (I don't), but if you could be specific then that'd be useful. I'm not saying that there isn't petty and bitter shit thrown around on MSB (there certainly is), but generally people who just spew hate tend to be called on it. They're checked and challenged more than supported.
There in lies much of its strength. Because these things are said anyway, they are thought, are whispered and bandied around. They're screamed and spewed out across skype and other private arenas.
There are some loud voices here, and there are some very unkind voices here, but I don't think there is a whole lot of communal hate.
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:
...And then by 2000 A.D. people started drawing penises on everything.
Please! The ancients were doing it, too. I've seen 2000 year old grafitti!
Eta: Drawing dicks is timeless.
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RE: Fear and Loathing
I haven't played on the game, but the Guest Star system doesn't sound like a terrible idea to me. There seems to be enough checks on the ways it could be abused, that it probably isn't going to be as long as those checks are enforced.
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RE: MSB: The meta-discussion
Coming late to the party:
I think what MUsoapbox does is offer a sense of community, and a places to air both thoughts and grievances that are sometimes legitimate and sometimes not. But in general its a net positive to the community. I know people who will deride it, but they still read a lot of it, and reference it.
I use it less than I used to, partly because I feel a lot of the discussions are recycled. There's only so many times you can chew on the same issues before they've lost all flavor and texture. I would've loved it if more people used it, and it had a wider field of opinions and viewpoints.
I don't think its as much of an echo chamber as some people would say. I disagree with too many people here on too many things, including people whose opinions I'll still respect even if I think they're full of bullshit on occasion. People will argue back and forth, and if some new posters feel they're getting piled on I think its often because the old crowd have seen and cut through their (new to them, old to others) arguments so many times that it becomes almost by rote.
But if its not an echo chamber, then its still limited by its prevalence of WoD leaning players.
I only saw a bit of Wora before it ended. I thought it too was a net positive, but I didn't like it very much.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@Bobotron RfK had a lot of staff time sinks, though; a sprawling metaplot: the (admittedly great, but seriously time consuming) way they handled beats. The influence system itself might theoretically have been limited by Down Time hours, but it didn't take very long for a character to have so much Down Time that it no longer really mattered. It was all scaled for a small game with relatively low powered characters, not 100+ characters, some of whom had thousand + beats. If I were to make a game, or advise someone who was making a game, with a political angle, it would be to take inspiration from RfK, but not copy the mechanics.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
Part of PC Antagonism done right is acknowledging to yourself that you're playing an antagonist, and when you're doing it. In the scheme of a MU, these are not necessarily the evil and bad characters (though it can be), they're as often the white knight hero. The thing is that every PC is also the protagonist of their own story, so which hat you're wearing at any one time often changes. Even the most antagonistic character is often in a situation in which they're not the antagonist in the exchange.
If you're playing a concept in which other PCs are the obstacle that you're set upon overcoming, you're the agitator in that scenario. Say the Carthian crusading for equal ghoul rights in Vampire society. Similarly if you're playing a concept in which you set yourself up to be an obstacle to be overcome.
While some games might have a very easy delineation of protagonist/antagonist, say if you're in a Harry Potter game and you're playing on Voldemort's side, or if you're in a superhero game and by default one side are righteous and the other side isn't, on most games out there its probably a mistake to get into thinking that this character is the antagonist that you are now entitled to overcome.
From which is born @mietze 's white knight syndrome mention, which is as (if not more) pervasive than the behavior blind cliche antagonist who can't accept losing. From an OOC perspective it may be easy to discern an objective good guy/bad guy dynamic, but unless everybody agrees that the story and game is about the good guys winning, from the game's perspective, exactly who's in the right or wrong is usually more complex.
Ultimately a lot of it comes down to respect, and whether it works out or not generally in my experience comes down to whether the players involved are willing to put themselves into the other side's shoes.
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RE: Great TV
@Coin Its the series finale, wrapping up after 4 seasons. Also sets the stage for a sequel if they want to do the whole Treasure Island.
Its hard to think I almost stopped watching the show halfway through the first season. I'm glad I didn't!
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RE: Magicians Game
A good way to add the thematic risk of magic is to allow 'pushing past your boundaries', ie, trying to cast magic that you're only so-so familiar with. But at higher difficulties (or perhaps adding power to your spell), and where if you fail you've accepted the consequence by trying. This gets around the really terrible mechanic of random dice destroying your character when she's trying to light a candle, while still allowing a sense of danger and risk if you really want to go the extra mile.
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RE: Great TV
So how about the end of Black Sails?
I thoroughly enjoyed it. All the stories seemed to come together, a mix of the unexpected and the expected, for a really satisfying conclusion.
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RE: MU Things I Love
Thanks for the shoutout, @Ganymede. I still think our Starwars crew had some real potential for fun times.
I've generally found that in this hobby most people are pretty okay. There's the occasional shitty player/staffer, but by and large most aren't. In fact they'll stretch themselves pretty far to make shit fun for you if they feel you're trying to do the same for them.
And what I really love is that feeling you get when you've come across a random new person and the roleplay is amazing. I don't have to play with them all the time, and sometimes the follow up will only be from afar as circumstance IC/OOC dictates it, but just learning that there's yet another gem out there never fails to give me a thrill.
It feeds my belief that there'll always be another story to explore.
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RE: Where's your RP at?
I like the risk of death. I want it to be an option, because if it isn't an option, then that greatly influences decisions. But PC death shouldn't be capricious and come out of nowhere. In my mind they should either come from:
A) Other PCs, in which case its a case of two player agencies clashing together. These kinds of deaths rarely happen on games I play, because most people don't actually want to kill off your character.
B) Those special big moment scenes in which everything is on the line, and you're choosing (and there should always be an option not to choose, but with a cost to that as well) to risk everything. And more, if you fail in your endeavor and you lose your character's life, Staff still ensures it had impact and meaning. I'll give an example:
I played on a Vampire: the Masquerade game on irc a while ago. The Sabbat were invading. The Sheriff wanted to use mortals to hit them during the day, then surgical strikes to hit them right after dusk, while the Seneschal wanted to pull out of half the city and hunker down for help. We went with the Sheriff's plan while the Seneschal and her allies burrowed down and sent out the bat signal to the Camarilla leaders.
It went well for a while, then it didn't go so well, and in one scene half the strike team got wiped, the rest fleeing a burning inferno.
Now it was technically a failure, and our PCs stayed dead, but the way the STs wrote that story going forward was that the Sabbat, finding the resistance so damn tough, decided to move on to the next target instead of continuing to expend resources on our city. Those who had died thus didn't feel their character deaths had no ultimate meaning, weren't just there to impress upon us the danger of actually getting into the thick of it yourself, or for the ST to feel ultra hardcore. Those who survived got consummate rewards.
As for the Seneschal and her allies, they weren't dismissed either. The Camarilla leaders did answer with extra resources and a couple of nasty agents while everybody licked their wounds, and those safe places they'd created to bunker down in became useful down the line.
PCs shouldn't be the ones who get sucked out the air vent by a bad dice roll. The NPC next to them should. Random sparring sessions shouldn't cause character death from exploding dice. They shouldn't randomly die in childbirth (again, the NPC next door can do that if you really want that realism in your game.) If you're making characters roll to see if they'll live or die as an Storyteller, it should always be in those big moments when they're doing things that matter. Really matter, and if they die its on the Storyteller to make sure that amounts to a Main Character death has impact and meaning for the story.
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RE: Where's your RP at?
@Arkandel This is my impression as well. People will play on dynamic games with lots of ups and downs, if you're upfront about it and show them that losing can still mean winning down the road. But few people like investing in a character only to have them gone. With the loss of a character comes loss of that character's network and story.
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RE: Where's your RP at?
@Astrid I'd probably play that too. Or at the very least I'd give it a go and see how it went.
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RE: Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story
@Arkandel I didn't find it terrible. Just terribly unfamiliar. It largely requires a lot of use of the skills. Make them really important, rather than just the combat, which seems to be its bread and butter focus.
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RE: Politics etc.
@Ganymede RfK 2.0 was run by people who, frankly, were incompetent. No offense to them, either. I figure they tried their best. But they didn't have the skills to staff a political game.
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RE: Politics etc.
@Ganymede I don't generally think intelligence has much to do with it. People will conform to the culture of the game. Smart people make terrible choices all the time.
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RE: Politics etc.
@surreality I think most PVP on most games become a question of just pure pride, because you don't have to think of the larger implications. They're just sandboxes. The only real resolution comes with the pure nuclear option, since there's no meaningful exchange short of that. You talk shit and stew in your cliques, and then it boils over until you go nuclear. You don't walk through all the stages that should come first, because they don't exist.