Best posts made by Ominous

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

What else is there?

Pretending that all this writing is helping you prepare for that best-selling doorstopper series that's going to set you for life a la George R. R. Martin?

How about we settle on "It's a real purty stone, and I'm jealous."

@Goblin
It depends on how well-known the relationship was. If they were public and open about being lovers, other characters are going to know that and could possibly bring it up in RP. If it was on the secret dalliance, then you could get away with never mentioning it.

https://youtu.be/46zrey2IAak?t=50

I'm the opposite on that one. Whenever someone is sending me piecemeal messages, pinging me with each one, I start to get angry. Just. Frickin'. Write. A. Complete. Thought!

See what I did there?

@Coin

Was it a quality TS pose? If so, be sure to offer praise where praise is due. Don't let the budding erotic writers flounder because they think no one likes their work.

@Grayson said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

"I can see that the database is already built and operational, but everything I want I can get with that spreadsheet that you send out and Power BI, so I don't see why we need a database at all."

Response: "I will no longer be sending out the spreadsheet, and you will need to create one yourself from the same source. That source would be the database you don't think we need."

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

...then I would proceed to destroy all canon.

Hello, Mr. Lucas. We see you there.

@SinCerely

I shall soon be joining you as cross-country mover. I am not looking forward to it, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without the help of my friends and family, which has been quite heartening.

@misadventure

I am going to disagree with this idea. First hand experience on that Arx off-shoot Elf game taught me that doesn't work. I took a character that was at the highest echelon of his faction, which was the ruling council of that faction. Other factions had different rulership types - of note, two of the neighboring factions were autocracies of sorts. Those two factions were gobbling up territory and the our faction was puttering around with each council member doing their own thing, instead of unifying the resources of the whole faction to compete. I kept pushing for meeting with the other heads to discuss things and get organized but I would only hear crickets back. I am of the opinion that they took top of the pyramid positions because they wanted the shiny title only.

Also, Firan was government by council. Boy was that fun.

Anyways, I agree with most everyone else. Roster turnover, abuses of power, shiny title syndrome, etc. means players are shit and can't be trusted with all the power. Top position should be an NPC for stability and oversight and seconds in command, King's Council, viziers, powers behind the throne, etc. can be held by players.

@JinShei

Hopefully it was out of passion, and he exited stage right doing something he loved.

Pfffft. I'm truly old school. I was angry when modern Windows OS started requiring the Telnet client be enabled rather than defaulting to being enabled.

Discussion of Ohio places has summoned me.

@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

This is a wealthy suburb. With purportedly educated people. Who just want to ask irrelevant question after irrelevant question about a very basic principle of property ownership.

JFC, these motherfuckers are too damn stupid to live.

I mean, here. Live here.

Honest.

I will do you one better. I am the sole Code Enforcement officer for South Santa Barbara County. When the rich fucks in Montecito complain about their neighbors building a shed or trimming a hedge too much, I am the one who gets to knock on Oprah Winfrey or Prince Harry's door to perform a site inspection. I even had one guy hire an attorney to file his complaint (a form that consists mainly of address of violation, description of violation, violator's name, your contact info) and the complaint came as a 30+ page packet with things labelled Exhibit A through P.

@arkandel

Thank you. I'd rather not derail the thread with a redundant discussion of something that's already being hashed out elsewhere.

To address the other half of your first post, simply put this thread is focused less on game mechanics and more on setting. Fluff not crunch.

@cobaltasaurus

D'awww!

Boop his little snoot and give him a good scratch behind the ears for me!

If you don't want to roll social contests or have some other mechanics that social characters have exclusive proficiency at interacting with, then stop making a "social sphere" or courtier characters a thing in MUs. It's like saying "Mages are a thing!" then providing no mechanics for using magic.

Get yourself an empty soda can (I usually use one of the smaller kinds), then stick like five or six pennies in it and tape the opening up well. Shake firmly once when the pupper is misbehaving. The pupper will immediately stop and probably be quite startled and unhappy. For some reason that noise really bothers dogs.

Most people use a shake can to train a dog not to bark, but it worked to curb other behaviors as well for my dog.

@ganymede said in FFG L5R:

@ominous

Courtiers are quite literally one-third of the entire game. You can't just write them out.

Then create and support mechanics for them to do things that non-courtier characters can't. If you're not going to do that, cut them from the MU. It's a simple binary choice. No one wants to play a useless character. Well, almost no one. I dabble in useless idiots.

@faraday said in FFG L5R:

Cue the social combat holy war. Or just copy paste from the countless other times we've gone round and round and round on this.

No. No, social combat holy war here. I'm not saying you must have social combat on all MU*s. I am saying that, IF you make a social archetype available, you MUST supply a means to make that archetype viable in relation to other archetypes.

I run an old-school D&D game. There are no social rolls and there are no bards or other classes that fit the courtier archetype. The only "social rolls" that exist in that game are morale checks for monsters and hirelings, a charisma check when someone tries to hire hirelings to see if the hireling will work for the offered pay, and rolling to try to haggle a merchant, which is essentially the same as hiring hirelings. Everything else is played out. You want to bluff the guard that you are totally invited to the party even though you have no invitation in hand? You, as the player, need to tell me what your character says and does and I, as the GM, will decide if it's believable. I might roll some dice if I decide that it's questionable whether or not your words and actions are on the edge of being good enough.

However, if the group were to suddenly jump to new-school D&D or L5R, we'd be playing with the social rules from those games, because those games have characters that fill a social role, and I don't want to tell one of my players "Sucks that you picked a bard and dumped a bunch of points into bluff and diplomacy. I'm never going to ask you to roll those skills."

EDIT: And it doesn't have to be a social combat system or anything like that. For other games with courtier players, I have suggested stealing ideas from board games. Have different overarching influence groups like "The Peerage," "The Underworld," "The Merchants," "The Peasants" or whatever, and players can put skill points into those categories. Every week or month or whatever, the player is awarded a number of cubes (remember, we're stealing from board games) for those groups based on their skill. The cubes can be traded with other players, but there could be another social skill that determines a maximum number of cubes a player can hold without excess cubes being discarded at a slow rate, say 1 cube a day or something, until the number of cubes is under the maximum "hand size." Cubes can then be used to pay for attempts to influence the NPCs of each group. Want the third estate to support your idea of guillotines and suddenly shorter nobles? Bid your cubes and make some rolls to see if you make headway or lack-of-headway in that particular case.

@ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

This is for the vote only. All the work has been done. This is just the ol' public hearing and vote bullshit and I just so love people talking about property values as if I or anyone else who practices in real property law give a shit what you think about your property values.

I am so tired of hearing people file complaints about their neighbor doing something and how "We normally don't do this. We really don't care. We don't want this to become a big deal. We're only just letting you know. BUT OUR PROPERTY VALUES!" Their neighbor could be a Cthulhu cultist sacrificing children to dark gods on a nightly basis and they wouldn't care as long as it was in the muffled basement so when they sell their house the value isn't affected.