Posts made by peasoupling

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.

@meg said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

@tnp said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

@meg said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

Ok but like, who wants to go all in on building a dragon breeding code with me for my game idea.

Anyone?

One day, I will do it. Because a dragon breeding minigame sounds fun as shit. And by one day, you guys know what I mean.

So everyone can have a gold of their own?

no, obviously the color would depend on the genes of the parents. if you breed a black and a white dragon, you're going to get a grey dragon. breeding works that way, right.

I want a tuxedo dragon, tho.

@too-old-for-this said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

But since you mentioned it. HorrorMUX is a retread of Lovecraft, they're the same game by the same people.

It's a pretty different horror game by the same people, though? As in, I had a blast on Lovecraft for a while, but Horror MUX really isn't for me at all.

I can't believe I went to all the trouble of writing a two-line post and had a tiny fraction of my mental real estate occupied thinking of character concepts for a day and a half, nearly two. And also, I fretted about nudging someone to maybe play there or do characters together or something, for a whole 15 minutes on account of anxiety. Shame on staff.

I mean, if this post had been up and people had been hyping it for more than 3 WHOLE DAYS, some of the tut-tutting might actually make sense, but really?

I will be playing a totally useless disaster. Just because her dreams draw her to a small town doesn't mean she has any marketable small town skills, after all! Hopefully people need terrible employees.

I don't understand what's going on with AP selling and buying a lot of the time. I see what it's supposed to represent, but it ends up like a medieval gig economy and just way too abstract. I sold it a couple of times, but it was accompanied by RP, like, yeah, Leta is actually helping out at the clothing shop. Otherwise, what is she selling, even? A lot of transactions just don't seem to make sense if you stop to think about what AP is.

A recent study that's going around predictably shows that women in NYC spend a few hundred dollars more than men, per year, on public transportation. Guess why.

You can look into other studies on things like the social and professional costs of avoiding sexual assault and harassment. Or just listen. Women know already. You are not conveying any new information. You are not helping. Given that society is already steeped in the idea that it's women's fault to get themselves in risky situations, that statement is, at best, the equivalent of "I told you so".

Kale is fine, for example, braised, or in stews. As in the cuisines of people who have been eating kale forever, not because it's healthy. It's fine.

Generic City, 2018, is a racist, sexist, etc, setting too.

Even when the assumption is that RL events are happening in game, people tend to focus on pop culture, what movies are playing and what songs are hits and whether the kids are dabbing their memes, rather than politics and world news. There are local politics, but they tend to be incredibly generic. So while it's harder to ignore that sort of thing in a historical setting, it's really a matter of degree.

But even though the setting is all those things, it's not ahistorical for people to exist who rise above the prejudices of their time to some extent, and you could limit what sort of raging bigoted jerks PCs are, at least. But I do think you'd need to draw hard lines on what's allowable and what isn't, and do the same for NPCs and plots in general. Some people will think you've gone too far, some people will think you haven't gone far enough, but you're never going to be able to please everyone.

@tinuviel Let people retain agency, and let that have consequences. Give them options on how to react besides full acquiescence and shrugging it off? I know it's easier said than done, but there's all kinds of options, conditions, etc, that could be used.

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

@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

How is it unfair? Isabella and Anders were established characters. Saying it's unfair is like saying, "It's unfair to compare a Jean-Luc Picard on ST:TNG to a theoretical series where he's not commanding a starship, and is now played by Morgan Freeman as an alcoholic gambler and the reason for these changes is he contracted the Klingon Gene-Changing Flu." Whether or not I'm talking about the change in Isabella or the change in Anders is an exercise I leave up to the reader.

I'm really just talking about Isabella. I don't think there's enough there in DAO to talk about things like nuance comparatively, I guess.

I don't disagree on Anders. Merrill also has very little to do with DAO Merrill. I'm just not that bothered by it in the grand scheme of things. I still think DA2 is a great game in spite of everything.

@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

Then the place should've been more than five rooms large.

It would have been nice. It would also have been nice if they weren't all copy-pasted. But the vast trackless wastes of DA:I and DA:I In Space would have been worse, I think.

Peebee was a more interesting Isabella. Hell, Isabella in DA:O was more interesting, more nuanced, and she was just an NPC in Bioware's nod to putting a brothel in all of their fantasy games. Don't even get me started on how they absolutely ruined Anders. (Incidentally: They absolutely ruined Anders.)

I guess? I don't agree with everything, but I can see how someone would think that. I mean, I think the DA:O Isabella comparison is unfair, but other than that... sure, if you feel that way!

@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

Like DA2, I didn’t feel that ME:A was about anything. It’s story was stronger than DA2’s, but that’s like saying this sheet of paper is stronger than a used toilet wipe.

DA2 works as an exploration of character and place rather than plot. I mean, it's super janky and terrible in a lot of ways, but also great, precisely because it doesn't really do a conventional gamey plot.

Plot is overrated anyway.

@derp said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

@thenomain said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

It only starts to work when you apply the guilt onto the character's foundational personality (where The Wyrd's psychoactive nature taps into), which seems to me to be a silly act of an RPG reducing player agency over their character.

No, it works when you take into account that it's in their very magical nature to do this.

...

In this specific case, you are playing a person who has had their agency taken away in order to fill some sort of meta-tropey-idea-thing. I cannot stress this enough -- if agency is your thing, changeling is not the game for you. You're gonna have a bad time of it. Or you're just gonna ignore the rest of the theme anyway.

We can fight about the limits of player agency all we want, but at the end of the day, changeling is still the most flexible system by far, so.

I do think there is a difference between 'your nature was magically altered so you now have these particular feelings in accordance to what that nature IS' and 'your nature was magically altered and now you feel guilty about it'.

@tyche said in New Vampire Release:

But the most bizarre was their apology and assurance that they've removed the word "trigger" from the rules. As in "this triggers beast mode" or "this discipline triggers this effect". Apparently the word "trigger" triggers people who are triggered or something. It left me wondering whether it's even in their best interest to be playing in the World of Darkness.

That was not about random uses of the word "trigger", it was in response to concerns (warranted or not) about one use of the word in its idiotic reactionary troll sense.

@roz Sorry. I've kinda been putting it off for months now.

Sad update, womp womp.

Looking into new things but I'll wait until I'm not this busy!

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.

+bbread 1/17 (Changeling Cap)

"My goal is a cap of ~25 until I can get an Admin/STs to relieve some of the stress of all this fantastic magic."

+bbread 1/18 (Mage Cap)

"What that means is that we are past what should be feasible to provide everyone the level of experience I'd like to, and until I can fill out the ranks of Staff, I can accept no more mage applications."