Best posts made by Ominous

@lotherio

I don't recall much planetary destruction in 12th and 15th century Northern Italy, but I must say that your version of historical events is probably way more metal.

@jinshei said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

As well as that, a lot of recent effort in the UK has gone into devaluing experts and education that provides people with basic critical thinking skills. Liberal arts etc, for example (as @ominous says). Even in my field, the push from the external forces is towards task-based skills rather than critical thinking (which might be a good thing in nurses, yanno?).

We can't have the meat-based assembly line robots thinking for themselves. They might realize they're just a stopgap until the plastic and metal robots are able to take their place.

Then again, my two best friends are professors of anatomy and their students, who are almost all trying to get into nursing, are for the most part complete idiots. If we set the bar for nursing students to "able to think critically," our nursing shortage is going to get a lot fucking worse than it already is real fucking quick. We just don't value education much anymore if we ever did. Kids blow off learning in school then they get to college and college drops their standards, because failing half of your students is equal to losing half of your paying customers. Accreditation is a joke, because universities will just switch to a different accreditation agency. The only things you can rely on really are standardized tests and we're doing our best to eliminate those too for equity reasons.

@lotherio said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Not to be rude but I think this is the issue I keep seeing in your responses. You keep speaking in absolutes. Modern moral/tech just can't be done, its boring. Most RPG settings are about keeping secrets. Literally, there are plenty that are PvE with open info (no OOC masques).

There are plenty of other games out there. Sure plenty of games where its kept a secret, but plenty of other games too. Its coming off argumentative. Most games are not WoD where you can't talk about whether or not your some supernatural being.

@littlelizard

It looks like Adventure Time met My Little Pony with Hexus from Ferngully doing a cameo as the badguy.

The thread is called "MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't)" not "Let's Argue About BaRP." Time to keep this thread from getting completely derailed.

Esoterrorists, the SCP universe, and Unknown Armies meet the Mouseguard RPG and Symbaroum. PCs belong to a Jedi-like order of mage-knights who go around escorting merchants, investigating mystical happenings, slaying monsters both mundane and arcane, and rooting out evil cultist plots. The investigative skills in the GUMSHOE system that Esoterrorists uses would have to be changed to reflect the less advanced technology levels, but I think Symbaroum's mastery system would combine well with it.

The problem with this idea is that it would be very storyteller intensive. All of the missions would require someone running them.

@ganymede

I used to be quite impressed with your resume, but now I am reconsidering whether you should have the privilege of touching lemons. Are you dating the Bill of Rights? How many judge's gavels have you stolen? Has any of your clients gone to jail town?

@lotherio

I refer to Mouseguard RPG both for the design of its order - a group of mice knights who go around doing Jedi type things - and for its feel - insignificant people trying to survive in a giant, merciless world. You can get the same feeling with zombies, apocalyptic scenarios, and Cthulhu-esque settings, but zombies has the problems of needing zombies, which I have always found boring and are now thankfully overdone so other people finally agree; apocalyptic scenarios go too far, feeling hopeless and bleak; and Cthulhu needs big unknowable gods and weird horror, when the natural world can be dangerous and horrifying enough to bring the feeling of insignificant humans heroically holding back the enormous forces of the world.

@jinshei

Probably a ghost.

This is another issue I feel my roster idea helps address, since there is less personal investment in any one character. Losing a character is less a personal loss and more a communal loss.

One solution could be creating some sort of mechanic or mechanics to both incentivize antagonism (so as to avoid antagonists who are afraid to be bad so as not to cause problems with their social circle) and limit antagonism (in order to avoid the issue of a bad guy nuking someone because they sneezed too loudly).

Maybe have a baddie deck of cards that says what they're allowed to do and every week they draw a card or two. They have to play a card that matches a bad deed whenever they do they deed. They have a maximum hand size of say 5 or 7. If they would draw a card above their maximum hand size two weeks in a row, they either have turned over a new leaf and given up their evil ways or died from a brain aneurysm from all the pent up evil they wanted to do but we're frustrated in actually doing. Then it's up to staff to regulate the badness by setting the number of cards in the deck and what kind of cards in the deck. A deck of only attempt to murder someone cards is going to have a very murderous baddie.

So all this Rust stuff lead me to read about Midnight Rider and the death of a crewmember in it's failed production. We only hear about this stuff when it really goes wrong, so it makes me wonder just how common unsafe practices are in filming. How often do production companies shrug and go "The amount we will have to pay out in a lawsuit on the off-chance that things go wrong is the cost of doing business?"

@arkandel

We're all Hipsters at our core. "I was into X before it was cool." "I knew about Vampires before anyone else did."

@derp

That was a while ago. I was shocked at those two accidents being not even a decade apart. However, @Too-Old-For-This has pointed out that apparently it's freaking common, so nevermind.

@insomniac7809 said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."

Oh absolutely. Cyberpunk is essentialism feudalism in the future with the focus of the story being on the everyman rather than the "peerage."

@greenflashlight

Right, but my question is "Is this business as usual, and normally production companies get away with it, because most of the time nothing bad happens. When something bad does happen, they pay the settlements and continue with the bad behavior, taking it in stride as the cost of doing business?"

@too-old-for-this

Fucking yes. Every time someone says Friends or Seinfeld was the best sitcom of the '90s, I reply "You apparently have never seen Wings."

@littlelizard

I'm a fan of OwlKitty. The Indiana Jones one is great.

@ganymede said in FFG L5R:

@ominous

I hear you. But it is not so easy to cut them out. So you have to have a robust, enforceable system. And if you don’t, you are killing the setting.

It’s baked in. That’s my point, if I had one.

That's my point as well. Dismissing the social systems in L5R is missing a massive part of the setting. As it is based on an amalgam of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian cultures, though predominantly Japanese, etiquette, customs, social niceties, and the subtle meaning of minor actions are all very important things. Sometimes more so than combat, magic, or subterfuge skills. This is a game with a Tea Ceremony skill for goodness sake. An entire skill devoted to performing a tea ceremony, because it's of such import to the culture of the setting.

So, yeah, if you're going to eject social mechanics from L5R, you are clearly doing a disservice to the setting.

I actually have the same thoughts on the original Ghostbusters as @GreenFlashlight. I never saw Peter and Ray as credible scientists. In fact, I usually forget that they're supposed to be scientists, considering how they are portrayed. Only Egon comes across as an actual, competent scientist. Epic Rap Battles skewered them pretty good.

@reason

@reason

I have not read the Shadowlands book, but I am guessing it's something akin to Mousegard and other settings of that sort - a group of warriors trying to maintain peace and life while beset by an implacable other encroaching from the borders with the occasional infighting and cult. Assuming that is correct, I have said for a while that that would be a bomb-ass setting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/r61d7c/dont_touch_anything/