Posts made by Miss Demeanor

@faraday A lot of people have also been conflating 'I think there needs to be risk up to and including PC death' with 'OMG ONLY PC DEATH COUNTS AS RISK' or 'BUT POINTLESS CHARACTER DEATH IS MEAN!'. Its a post-apocalyptic world. Things will be deadly. If there is absolutely zero risk of death, then the post-apocalyptic theme starts to break down very quickly.

Without any risk of death... what is there to really fear in the ruins of your destroyed society? 'My stuff might get stolen... but its okay because I'll somehow get new stuff so I won't die of starvation' Where's the risk? Where is the ACTUAL risk? There isn't any. Because nothing will actually stop your character. Capture, torture, loss of gear... you will always prevail. There will always, in the end, be a happy ending. You don't actually have to scrabble to survive... because you just magically WILL. Whether your character knows that or not? YOU DO. And that WILL influence IC actions along the way.

Now suddenly you don't have to worry about low supplies, because magically there will always be just enough. Foraging for clean water and food? Not a concern. Those ghouls/zombies/raiders at your gates... feh, you will overcome. There's nothing to lose. Got kicked out of your base? You'll get handed another. There will be no heartrending losses along the way... because in this magical world... there is no death. And no, NPC death isn't going to phase anyone. You don't get attached to and form attachments to or relationships with NPC's. NPC's are the red shirts of the Star Trek world. The random, nameless dudes sacrificed to the PC Gods to make it SEEM like there's danger... when really there isn't.

@Alamias Maaaaaan, I was never so happy as I was when one of my vamps managed to piss Kaleb off. I can't recall if it was Sera or Ramona. But like... that was an ACCOMPLISHMENT, dammit. XD

@Sunny To be quite frank, you have been and continue to be very aggressive in jumping down the throats of people going 'but risk of character death isn't WRONG' by immediately squawking about 'pointless' character death. So if you don't like someone aggressively responding? Sorry, not sorry. And actually, this whole argument started because I dared to suggest that a post-apoc survival game with actual threat of character death would be fun, and that brought all the anti-PC-death people out of the woodwork to say just how horrible that would actually be.

@Ganymede Ah, my apologies then. Taken as serious inquiry... I would say the line depends a lot on the game system. Some offer more leeway than others.

@Sunny I'm saying the two are NOT mutually exclusive. Not wanting pointless character death is fine. Its when you (empirical) refuse to accept the pointless death that occurs that you (again, empirical) become the asshole.

@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Not accepting stupid character death based on your own decisions and dice rolls is very much saying 'no, I choose not to accept the rules as they are, I don't want to be done so I refuse to play the game by the rules'.

So, you'd be okay if, let's say, I played a Vampire Sheriff, and you played a neonate, and I think you looked at me funny, which you didn't, so I went and slaughter-killed you with some staff-granted relic that does +5A damage to vampires.

Right?

Given that none of that resulted from my own decisions and rolls, probably not. But nice try at misinterpretation! You may need to fix your learning curve software, 'bot.

@Sunny Not accepting stupid character death based on your own decisions and dice rolls is very much saying 'no, I choose not to accept the rules as they are, I don't want to be done so I refuse to play the game by the rules'. You are effectively invalidating everyone else that plays by the rules because you don't want to lose your character to a stray bullet, falling meteor, chunk of frozen shit from a passing airplane, whatever. Not every death will be super meaningful. And frankly, the random deaths that occur from the very rare super bad rolls just let people know 'hey, don't forget you are playing on a game where this shit can happen, WEIGH YOUR OPTIONS OR ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES'.

@Arkandel See, and I loved those rolls. Some of my favorite scenes came from one side or the other losing that roll and silly shit following. I had a character get TREED by a frenzying Gangrel in badger form. Still makes me laugh. But this is also why I tended to avoid Elysium as THE FIRST place a new character would show up. Because it provoked too many of the rolls all at once. I would generally meet people one or two at a time, and wait until I knew enough people that I could pop into Elysium and not immediately need to make a dozen rolls. And frankly... not using that mechanic felt like it was gypping the Gangrel out of their biggest weakness.

@surreality Eh. Consequence of using a dice-based system. I'm not going to complain if a roll fucks up my character. Its just part of the game. I've had characters that lasted months or years, I've had characters that didn't last past the first encounter. When you play the game, you make a tacit agreement to accept the consequences of the dice. Yes, it sucks... but you are now free to craft up a whole new character with a whole new story and find all new fun things to do. That is where I don't understand. Why get SO wrapped up in ONE character, that you can't stand to see them go?

Edit to add: @faraday I refer you to the above. You are putting no more time and effort into the character that got blown out of the airlock than the one that got to ride off into the sunset. Sometimes your favorite character dies. This is a fact. When your favorite character in a book series dies, do you stop reading the series? Or do you keep reading and find a new favorite character?

@Gilette See, I have gone through so many characters on so many games... and often end up dropping them from... boredom. Nothing happens. Nobody is willing to risk anything. Its boring. So I'll drop a character and find something else to hold my interest for a short while. Probably one of my favorite characters was Ramona on TR. She would do or say anything... didn't matter. She paid for it a few times, too. But she also ended up Keeper of the only Elysium in town for awhile. It was fun. Running around all one-armed like Paul Reubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Just as much fun as beating someone down. And if she had died (and she would have, eventually), it would have been a HILARIOUS and AWESOME moment that I would remember fondly for ages. Not even because I chose what happened to her, but because I threw her out there and let fate decide.

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game? Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

If the world is post-apoc, it really needs to have actual danger of death, dismemberment, getting your shit jacked, etc. or it just turns into sci-fi L&L. Like... a Fallout game? I would probably steal blatantly from New Vegas. Set up those factions in a place, pit them against each other, let people pick what side they want to be on and... RELEASE THE KRACKEN!

I looked at picking up that HUmble Bundle of comics, but honestly... the only draw for me was The Maxx. That got turned into one of the most awesome, late night, short-lived cartoons. It, along with Aeon Flux, The Head, and a few others, comprised MTV's late night The Oddities. Just a great lineup of oddball cartoons (most based on comics).

@Thenomain Love's Labor Lost... the actor you're thinking of is Matthew Lillard. Cereal Killer in Hackers, and yes, Shaggy in both live action Scooby Doo movies (til they rebooted and sent the kids back to high school).

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

As far as web-based MUing... so far as I know, there's no way to spawn anything into a web-based MU* window. Which means EVERYTHING will spawn directly into your main window. There's a reason I've only ever used two clients, and it took my external hd dying before I was willing to leave SimpleMU behind for Potato.

Spawn windows are the only thing that keep me sane in MUing, the ability to separate out my pages, ooc chatter, channels, etc. into separate tabs is invaluable. I willingly gave up the 256 ansi colors for years simply because SimpleMU still has, hands down, the simplest spawn window set up. I was able to get a decent 'how to' for setting them up on Potato, but it still doesn't address some of the issues I run into with pages. I don't care about log cleaning, that's relatively easy to do by hand. Keeping up with a big scene while people are nattering on in OOC, channels are active, and pages are getting tossed about? Priceless.

@Alamias Depends on what system you're looking for!

Kaleb! Good to see you crop up again!

@SG You're welcome! And I love that lil guy. Have him myself!

@SG Please please please have staffnames be the various stages of sci-fi monsters. Facehugger, Chestburster, Xenomorph, etc.

@SG I have but one burning question. WILL THERE BE FACEHUGGERS???

@Auspice Oh I had absolutely looked forward to AVP. Almost as much as I looked forward to Freddy v Jason. I was less disappointed with FVJ. That said... I would absolutely endorse a The Thing in space MU*. I own both The Thing and its prequel, AND the entire Alien series (including director's cut of the first.. and the Rifftrax of it)... so I'm utterly down for Sci-Fi/Horror In Space MU*.

@Auspice So... AVP? runs away very very fast

@Arkandel There was a post that went up about it on Fallcoast.