Best posts made by peasoupling

I feel like the problem, sometimes, is that people are logged in to the same server, but playing different games. Some people's views on what the game is about are so alien to me that I admit it takes me some effort to see it from their angle.

I will say that, when considering making a new character, I would much rather play something at the barony level rather than anything fancier. Sadly, the baronies tend to be pretty much devoid of players.

The problem is that if you eliminate baronies and the like, you avoid player dispersion, but at the cost of wiping out an entire sort of character background. Then again, no one actually stays poor, but for a few glorious weeks you could RP being concerned about pig herders and your one good horse looking a little under the weather.

Or when your character stops hitting the gym and decides to take up crafts.macrame instead. Or is hit by a bus. I can think of a lot of simply IC reasons for characters to change without necessarily growing XP-wise.

Fallout, but run by someone who doesn't make me back away slowly when I see her interact with players on the Public channel?

I like to remind myself, when tempted to engage, that trolling has been adopted as a core Republican value.

Felicia can kill a man with a single pull of the trigger. Any man. Any time. Felicia can't just talk a faithful monk into joining an orgy for the glory of Satan, regardless of how amazing her eyes are (they change color) or her mastery of body language. Does she have a few months to plot his downfall, causing him to question his faith and everything he believed in? In that case... maybe.

Killing someone is a lot easier, as it should be.

Also, the vast majority of my character's personality and beliefs aren't on her sheet. They are inside my head. How does the system interact with that, if not by way of invoking player agency to some extent?

If my character gets shot, they get shot. If they are fed false information, then they are fooled. But if they get talked into doing something in a way that is incompatible with my understanding of how the character thinks and feels, that's a problem. I try to be flexible, I'll bend even for the sake of OOC convenience, but I can only bend so far. Past a certain point, if the character is doing things I can't make sense of, that contradict everything I envisioned them as being, I'm done. They're no longer my character and they're no longer playable. I also don't play rosters, so those are safe!

@Jaded said in Good or New Movies Review:

Which leaves me thinking, "It's a kaiju movie. Fuck the humans."

It worked for The Shape of Water so you may be onto something, but the logistics concern me.

I think some of it does go back to the difference between "if this was rare, it's not historically accurate" and "if this was possible, it's historically accurate".

Of course most people in a medieval setting (depending on the setting) were probably peasants who never left their village. And women were generally under pretty heavy restrictions regarding what they could and couldn't do. And a lot of people who went on adventures died of exotic intestinal diseases.

You can have two very different games based on the exact same setting and, even, the exact same vision of the setting, if on one game, that's all you can play, and on the other game, those are the NPCs.

@Groth said in Separating Art From Artist:

I think my primary concern with various deplatforming / shaming strategies is that they don't appear to be particularly effective.

They do result in funny videos of Nazis crying because they can't reach a big enough audience to keep their grift going, so that's a plus.

A lot of Great Literary Classics are basically fanfiction. I mean, the Divine Comedy is self-insert fanfic, of all things.

That said, I sometimes enjoy other people's weird alternate universe takes on things, but I don't really tend to make up my own.

That said, a lot of MU*s are coffeeshop AUs anyway.

@Pyrephox said in Where to play?:

I'm enjoying Gray Harbor. It's active, modern horror/fantasy that isn't WoD and has a laid back, semi-sandbox style. There's metaplot and plot to get involved in, but you can also just do your own thing, including supernatural things, without trouble. People are nice, staff seem sane, and I've had fun.

It IS in beta, so don't get too attached to stuff as the system undergoes some tweaks and expansions as things get shaken out in play.

Website

I'd second this. I haven't gotten really, really into things because I've been busy lately (and my character is a bit lacking hooks, but mostly the busy thing, because the other thing is totally workable), but it's been fun so far.

It's kind of like TS, really. It helps if you can keep track of where your body parts are at any given time, but the nitty gritty of what your pronated hands are doing is not as interesting as what it reveals about your character and how your character reacts to things. Sometimes details matter and are fun to pose out, often it's more a matter of describing your character's mood and overall f*****ng style.

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I found a canister, killed a bunch of cannibal raiders aided by drunks with grenades and proposed to a girl, who didn't want to get married until after we killed all the cannibals. Then I asked her about adopting dogs.

She laughs again and says "Yes, yes we are! We're going to adopt all the puppies!" You both laugh and embrace.

The next day you find yourself in front of a large group of people who have come to watch you adopt a puppy.

I feel like this cannot be improved upon, so I am going to call it "the good ending" and start a new game.

@Jennkryst said in TS - Danger zone:

Sample: The dwarf before you should not be naked, nor should her pubic hair be that color. But she is. And it is.

If this is someone's description, I approve, but also, a more suspenseful version:

The dwarf behind you should not be naked, nor should her pubic hair be that color. But she is. And it is.

So far, I have Troll seamstress who actually sews! But... busy.

@Cheesegrater said in General Video Game Thread:

@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

I don't have to worry about ID theft on MUSHes, generally-speaking.

On the other hand, my copy of Stellaris has never asked me if I had to get naked during my school physical.

There are mods for that.

The first things that come to mind are Western and Fallout, but I repeat myself. Because I feel like Fallout is at its best when it kinda feels like a western.

Fallout, or something Fallout-ish.

I am bad at pacing and I am bad at plot. So I kind of just run scenes, if I'm being honest. You're in the bank, and it gets robbed, what do you do? A riot is on the verge of breaking out, what do you do? You've been hired to hijack a truck full of meat, what do you do?

I have some ideas for what's likely to happen, obstacles, moral dilemmas, etc, and I try to figure out how players may react to things, so I have some foreshadowing for complications likely to result from those paths. But if players just go off the rails or back out of the plot, or are just so overpowered that any realistic challenge for the scenario I set up is trivial, I just try to make it interesting in some way.

I'm not really providing the roller coaster highs and lows of a well thought-out plot with memorable villains and raised stakes and things like that, but I know my limits. I'm not trying to compete with those, I'm trying to offer an entertaining alternative to coffeeshop RP.

Unless a game has a really, really focused theme and a system built around it, that's likely going to happen. And if there is, it needs to be pretty explicit: "This is the type of story we want to run, and we are only taking characters that make sense for it."

I like slice of life RP, social RP (this includes all the TS all the time), and character exploration in any given setting. That's my jam, regardless of everything else. Adventure, politics, etc, are all great and necessary, but if I don't have some kind of investment in the character, which is provided by the quiet social stuff, I just probably won't care that much. So at least I feel like there should be room for that, or I just won't play.

However, I am fine with the staff-driven plotty adventure stuff being very focused, and with staff asking players to work with them to enforce the themes they'd like to explore.