Best posts made by Packrat

So I am trying this game and it seems pretty great so far, obviously no Big Plot happening but whilst the Firan-isms are weird the quality of RP is high while the overall setting and direction look good.

Cakes! It is my leaving presentation thing at work tomorrow and so I made some for my team. Not the most exciting cakes but they worked unlike the experimental batch at the weekend.

The dice system they are using on Arx seems interesting, it is not documented but they did explain it on channel at one point.

Attributes are 1 to 5, Skills are 1 to 6. When you roll, you roll a number of 1d10 equal to Attribute + Skill +1, with 10's exploding infinitely (Roll a 10, roll another 1d10 and add, etc).

You then keep Skill+1 of these dice, the ones that rolled the highest results, combining them for your final result.

Skill levels are thus huge and by far the most important part but natural talent does help, especially when it comes to getting consistent results at low skill levels.

@RnMissionRun An accurate assessment. The unfortunately side effect was that they smell absolutely delicious out of the oven but I cannot eat them until tomorrow.

I did do a fair bit of work on a Fading Suns game, with maps, writeups, etc for the local setting, but although there was plenty of interest in playing on such a game there was no real interest in helping with staffing one. A lot of it was very deliberately in a different style to the previous games with things probably closer to turn of the century Russian Empire rather than outright medieval, a lot more technology and a larger scale plus distinctly more 'Space', rather than everything being outright medieval and entirely local.

If anyone is interested then I would be happy to try to dig up said files and send them over, or collaborate.

@Quinn My little brother has some kind of weird mutation where his teeth have Super Enamel, they look... Weird, almost like marble or something with flecks of extra bright white through them. As a kid his milk teeth never failed and remained completely healthy as his adult ones tried to grow through, requiring him to have 14 teeth taken out in one day then braces to stop his mouth turning into some kind of pointy apocalypse.

But apparently he could now, if he wanted, never brush his teeth whilst devouring sugar every day and probably not have a cavity until he was seventy, according to our family dentist at the time he has over twice as much enamel thickness as is normal.

@Roz

I need more recruits to properly swarm!

@Doozer See, I am flying there from the UK on Saturday and was assured that I should stock up on sunscreen in advance. False advertising!

@Pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Want to put yourself on the front lines of the battle when you're not married and don't even have the hope of a legitimate heir?

To be fair this one is already dealt with in game from what I have seen, placing yourself on the front lines of the battle seems to have a fairly reasonable chance of getting you killed, then you are dead. Though it could well be that it involves combat checks meaning the existing super badasses are very unlikely to ever fall victim to this with newbies being reaped like grass before the scythe.

@Auspice I am in the UK here so indoor/outdoor cats are very much the norm with keeping them inside all of the time largely considered to be cruel, along with being lucky enough to live in quiet suburbia so there is maybe one car every ten minutes down my road.

So most of the time they are free to head out and do cat stuff in my garden or those of my immediate neighbors (they are girls and so do not roam very far). Both houses alongside mine are owned by people who like cats and feed them treats for that matter, I know the braver of my two spent portions of last summer approaching barbecues then demanding and receiving a tribute of sausages.

On a different note, huge props to the player of the character who mailed Cristoph an alacarite weapon for the tournament prize, that seems to have gotten people an awful lot more excited over competing!

Plus that is a way cooler story/way to get an alacarite weapon than 'I ground out economic tasks for a few months'.

@AeriaNyx said in Favorite Youtubers?:

Cream Heroes - One of my cats watches this show intently. It is bizarre. She legit watches it. I love it. Plus my god, Lulu. Don't forget the subtitles unless you speak Korean.

Apparently this channel has been stolen from the woman who makes the videos by some jackass company who also tried to bully her into giving up her cats to them (?), or some similar drama. They are super cute though and she set up her own channel where the revenue actually goes to the creator.
Kittisaurus

Also Coco is obviously the cutest of the cats.

@surreality said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:

@Ominous ...and yet there's something so campyfun about that it would probably make a cool beer and pretzels fun game, which I absolutely cringe to admit.

I'm kicking a historical thing around. I am hoping for 'TV grade' reality for one of the sources as an ideal, which is still timey-wimey at best and still... television grade. I will still be happy to settle for 'A Knight's Tale' grade, because... ultimately, it's a MUX, and that's probably the most realistic guesstimate of where it will end up anyway.

A Knight's Tale is actually a fairly high bar to aim for given that, so far as I can tell, they did do the research for that film then deliberately went with the bits they thought were cool or evoked the right themes rather than actual historical accuracy.

That is one of the (several) things I am severely jealous of my little brother for. Him and his wife (mostly his wife) own their business and so he just takes his dog to work with him. As a result this is not a dog who is used to ever being away from his people, he just hangs with his family all day every day.

@saosmash said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Packrat Oh, well. That's probably my fault, then, since I wrote the original one based on my vague understanding of where Artshall was supposed to be. >.> Sorry!

Nah, I think staff just reconsidered and moved Artshall further away so that it was not directly between Sanctum and the other Valardin duchy. Now it is on the Lyceum border which is actually pretty cool and adds extra impetus to the Laurent alliance with Fidante.

Personally I dropped out of university thanks to a car crash, tried to go back when a little older and dropped out again thanks to major depression (which went un diagnosed), then did random shit jobs for a couple of years before only starting on my current career at 25.

Now I have the thrill and excitement of being a middle manager for a 'Blue Chip' company whilst still in my early thirties, despite not having a degree or indeed any professional qualifications. A degree is definitely not required but it does let you start a few rungs higher up the ladder and also opens the possibility of 'Graduate Recruitment Schemes' which are hard to get into but can launch people right into positions of minor importance and fast track them if it works.

The big thing seems to be to get work experience in an in demand field then be willing to move to take advantage of new jobs, along with interviewing well, spending money on a properly fitted suit is essential! You do not even have to be good at your job if you can talk the talk and come across well in interviews, I know one person who is a horrible human being with no integrity and minimal knowledge who talked herself into a senior role in another company before she could be sacked, then jumped ship into consulting after a few years and now earns more than most doctors.

Case in point, Star Crusade, which launched with serious issues hanging over from previous games, no systems in place, no wiki, etc, just a grid and some cool theme write ups on the website. It did not even have coded character generation.

The game then exploded, before imploding, but the interest absolutely is there. Even with such a bare bones set up the game was hitting 50+ average separate players connected during peak times within 2-3 months of opening.

On which note I do have some maps/theme stuff written up for a Fading Suns MUSH and also a paid up MUSHPark server, so if anyone is serious about wanting to run such a game I am happy to help and also keep the lights on.

Racism does not have to mean somebody shouting the N word, all of those keyboard warriors can still manifest prejudice without saying anything and almost certainly do if they are eager to spill bile online.

Think how differently the same person is treated if they are say, dressed like a homeless person or dressed in a smart suit, that makes a genuine difference to quality of life and access to services or employment. Race has a similar impact when dealing with racists regardless of it they are open about it.

I do not know, I mean the 'there was no character generation' thing was fairly horrific. Staff hand statted characters, there was no standard system for this meaning it varied wildly on 1) Which staffer, 2) Their current mood 3) A completely obscure combination of how much the player hyped their character's abilities in their background coupled with their age and even their description. Certain staffers adamantly refused any efforts to 'balance' this! They wanted some characters to be utterly pointless whilst others were huge badasses. 4) This took fucking forever and meant staff were not doing anything else, also burnt out.

I think the key thing there is that, from the perspective of a not 100% inner circle but on staff and connected to what was going on person, everyone was being fucked by Paulus and Lextius. I mean literally everyone, every single strategically involved player complained about how they were being shafted but other people were getting an easy ride.

I am pretty confident that this is true because at a certain point I got fed up, quit staff, then a month or two later tried making a new character without rejoining staff. I pitched said character to perfectly fit what staff wanted, played to all of Paulus' preferences, spent significant effort merging actual middle eastern history and some other stuff he digs with in depth Fading Suns lore, etc. I still ended up feeling totally fucked over and biased against despite probably having more favoritism than anyone else in the history of ever.

Edit: To expand on that, after quitting staff I came back and made Fadila (sp?), who was a combination of Fading Suns Joan of Arc combined with a really in depth and complex fusion of the 7th century Sunni/Shia Islam split and the write up of Pyre, the Avesti homeworld, in the Church supplement. She was probably the best researched and well realized MU* character I have ever made with an exact fusion of RL history and in theme stuff that worked best for most of the remaining people who were running the game, she was even being fucked with the Javkovians behind the scenes to better appeal to Paulus. She got handed frankly bad ass as hell stats, a significant army, etc. I know that plenty of people complained about how much she did get.

I still ended up feeling totally screwed with and biased against thanks to just how tremendously terrible the whole strategic/warfare management was.

Further Edit:

A big issue with the warfare was a fixation on decisive battles combined with not actually making them decisive. Given that the idea was to model things on medieval conflict it would have worked far better to make such battles rare (why would the enemy face you if they feel they are outnumbered?), instead concentrating on raids, skirmishes, etc. Couple that with making fortifications actually something that holds out and requires a siege for both NPCs and PCs, instead of the bad guys being able to instantly seize or raid them whilst PCs require horrified mass slaughter assaults that break armies.

Then run that stuff, let PCs be decisive in engagements of 30 vs 50 people which are happening every other day, when somebody brings 2000 people vs 3000 people, that should be a big deal! (assuming those are whole armies). Whomever wins should make dramatic gains, but why was the person with only 2000 soldiers actually fighting?