Raising this from the dead to see if someone can help me. I converted to Potato to finally see all the pretty 256 colors, but for some reason the client takes double carriage returns - %R%R in other words - and ignores them completely. I don't have "ignore empty lines" checked.
@Clarity said in What do you play most?:
@Arkandel said in What do you play most?:
To be entirely honest here I have been playing the most what most people have been playing the most.
WoD for me was a derived preference. I like well populated, active games, and those have historically been the ones to match the description.
I'm an off peak player so I kind of need to gravitate towards games that are well populated just out of necessity, as they tend to be the ones that are more likely to have people around in my time zone. So the code base used isn't usually one selected out of preference.
In saying that, I tend to prefer fantasy, historical, or modern fantasy previously. Though I'd love to play a good sci fi, or post apoc.
I feel your pain. 
As another off-peak player who just loathes WoD, there's basically nowhere to play.
@Trundlebot said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:
I mean about half the population was also literally actual slaves, no one really wants to play the life of the "average" person in the Roman Empire.
I do! But I'm some sort of masochist who thoroughly enjoys playing characters limited by themselves and by their circumstances, and I enjoy downward rather than upward mobility in my characters' stories, just because I think it's more interesting these days.
Winding up as the biggest badass on the block is just...not interesting anymore.
@Ghost said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:
The last game set in a Roman Empire era/setting had a shitload of rape, forced character pregnancies, and when you mention that game's name on this forum, people flee, close doors, lock windows, and speak in bad English things like "yooo musss go now. Yooo go back home. You stay away. Isss Vam-peeeer."
I put it at a 65-75% chance that if another Roman Empire setting game opens, plenty of people who enjoyed Firan will show up to roleplay some of the same, theme-enforced misogyny.
They also had copious amounts of female leaders, female generals, female rank-and-file soldiers...
Not to defend Firan (because it was horrible in many, many ways), but it was even more progressive and equitable than a game trying to hew close to Roman-era realism would have any justification for being.
Trying to create a realistic Imperial Rome game and removing the structural sexism of the era would be like creating a game set in '60s Mississippi but having a big statement on your login screen saying that racism doesn't exist and everything's integrated.
@lordbelh said in Fanbase entitlement:
@Coin said in Fanbase entitlement:
I disagree entirely. I spend more dedicated time watching TV or reading than I do RPing at this point. Also, my choosing to invest in something does not, actually, entitle me to anything regarding that thing, regardless of how much I choose to invest.
On a Mu, players are participants, not passive consumers. That makes the difference. The stories set in the game are written by the players by and large.
While I agree with you, and definitely loathe the trend of fans rending their garments on social media over a piece of media that doesn't suit their exact preferences, I wonder if we're short-changing the amount of agency they have in the age of Twitter and Facebook. If you can rally enough like-minded way-too-passionate people to your cause on social media, you can at least pretend to represent a lot of potential money to content creators, and in that sense a mob of angry fans may just be another layer of interfering "I get a say!" like a production company or a publisher.
So is this thing still alive? I've popped on as a guest a couple of times and never seen more than five or so people on. Which kind of sucks, since I'm suddenly in the mood for something medieval-ish/fantasy-based.
Coo. That actually kind of sounds like what I'm looking for, because at this point I still have no idea what one actually does on WoD games. You'd think I would, hanging out here, but the impression I've gotten is that it's mostly, "I'm a vampire, and also I work at the bait shop."
Is it a good game for people who haven't played much or any WoD?
You can find good RP on Second Life, but it's kind of a "the juice isn't worth the squeeze," thing, because there is a LOT of squeeze. There are a ton of roleplay sims, most of them pretty bad, and there isn't an easy way to even track them down.
The other issue is that you'll have to spend some money (or learn to make all sorts of stuff) if you want to be taken seriously by most other roleplayers. Mesh body replacements for the default avatar are pretty much the expected standard for women now, along with mesh clothes and mesh heads, and that alone costs about $40. Guys seem to be able to get away with not putting in as much effort with their appearance, because there are far fewer of them and thus they're swamped with RP regardless.
The other problem is that most of the RP sims that are based on actual RPGs (D&D, WoD, Shadowrun, etc.) seem to go bust pretty fast.
With all of that said, I still pop on pretty regularly to RP with the one decent group I've found.
@Jennkryst said:
The fact that every gear-ish book from SR1 and SR2 had 'consumer review' sections where people gave feedback to anyone buying stuff, and the existence of the Dumpshock Forum prove that social media was a thing. Not as big a thing as Jackpoint became, but still a thing. Wireless matrix may not have existed in SR1, but I'm like 90% sure it was there for SR2 in it's expanded Matrix rulebook, and I am 100% positive that it was there for SR3. The rules may have been shitty (detection penalties, program size limits, speed reduction)... but they were there.
As for the paranoia and dystopia, it's arguable we are already there, but we're either as blind as the wageslaves are, or (more likely) we see what's happening, but we're either too lazy or terrified to actively do anything about it.
I guess it depends on how you define social media. I'm thinking more of stuff like Facebook and Instagram. Sure, the SR supplementals had the comments from users, but Shadowland and its successor Jackpoint are purely BBSes, which doesn't seem terribly in keeping with the times. They're social media, but I don't think they're really what we think of when we use that term today.
I'm also at a loss as to where the SR3 rules for wireless Matrix would be, because I've never seen them. You can connect to the Matrix via satellite, and there are rules for that, but I don't believe wifi-type Matrix connection exists until SR4.
@Thenomain said:
Absolutely not, because that's not where we are, but you can easily update CP2020 into the modern climate, so why not ShadowRun? We are paranoid, these days. We are paranoid as fuck. Apple unlock your phone because think of the children are we paranoid! We're just not paranoid about corporate control, as the US Chamber of Commerce has announced a lawsuit against Seattle trying to allow unionization of Uber drivers.
Right! It's a different kind of paranoia. I don't know why, but it doesn't feel very Shadowrun to me. Possibly just because I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s. Without the 80s-style paranoia, it just doesn't seem like Shadowrun.
Are you saying that CP2020 is not an old, established game system?
Noooooo, I'm just saying that I think updating 3rd Edition Shadowrun for wireless, social media, etc. would require way more work than it's worth, and wouldn't work all that well even if you did it.
That the latest rules sets are not thematically cyberpunk, that I can get behind, but let's also admit that the whole concept of cyberpunk is very 80s. Gibson's writings have moved on while playing to the strong social noir that made cyberpunk to begin with. I played a point and click adventure called "Void & Null" that captures the mood without having to be cyberpunk.
We can near future sci-if noir, if we wanted. Let's do it.
Cyberpunk's very 80s, absolutely. And it's totally possible to move on from it and still keep a lot of what makes Shadowrun Shadowrun, but despite that it doesn't feel very Shadowrunny. I don't know how to describe it beyond that, and it's probably just me - I do like 4th and 5th edition, from what I've seen of them, but they feel very, very different in tone and setting. Maybe it's all just nostalgia.
@Thenomain said:
We are more mega corporate than anytime before in history, it's just not something we feel we can, or need, to do anything about. A radio piece I heard from a pop culture analyst had superhero movies and now tv as popular because we feel that we have no control over impossible situations, mostly terrorism and rising control of our every day lives.
Sure, we absolutely are. But the lack of paranoia about it is what makes the difference, because Shadowrun's all about the paranoia. It's not a game that would get made in today's climate, I don't think.
I find the conclusion that you can't put in wireless or social networking into ShadowRun to be kind of strange, because Cyberpunk2020 is ready for it right now, and CP2020 has a heavy dose of world building too. (Five corporation books, four cybernetics books, etc.)
That wasn't really the conclusion, though.
So why do people flip their lid at idea of updating the game world?
I don't think most people do. I think the people that flip their lid flip it at 4th Edition's change to "WOD-style" dice mechanics, and thus don't want to play 4th. If you're not playing 4th or 5th, you're stuck with non-wireless 3rd/2nd/1st and all its clunky, 80s-era predictions of future tech. You could theoretically put wireless, social media, etc. into all of those, but you're basically having to write a lot of new rules for an old, established game system at that point, and I've never seen that work really well.
Aside from the dice mechanics thing, 4th and 5th don't feel as "cyberpunky". The writing of 1st/2nd/3rd editions just have an 80s feel to them that I can't describe but know when I see. I like that, personally, but it does feel dated and incongruous with where technology has actually advanced to. Being set seventy years in the future becomes a lot less plausible when people can't get on the internet stand-in without finding a physical jackpoint or setting up a satellite interface. But going with the recent editions of the game that aren't completely unaware of the technological advancements of the 90s/00s/10s loses out on the 80s cyberpunk vibe that I think attracted people to the game in the first place.
You can't have one with the other, basically.
The basic problem with Shadowrun (probably the only tabletop RPG I actually like!) is that it's just so inherently 80s. Attempts to update it to account for the massive leaps forward in technology since it was first written make it lose a lot of its charm and "big megacorps gonna get us!" feel, but NOT updating it, or sticking to previous editions, just feels downright loony for a setting that's supposedly in the future. A future without wireless Internet or social media? Nuh uh.
I think I've seen a quote where someone said that Shadowrun feels hyper-futuristic and fifteen years out of date at the same time, and I think that sums it up nicely. But it's my first and only love so I can never really get too down about it.
@mietze Nope, wasn't James. I've actually forgotten the name of his staffbit, but this would have been 96/97.
My middle school boyfriend was staff on Shadowrun: Seattle, back in the days when 'ethernet' was novel. (I don't think the other staff knew they had a 13 year-old running their decker sphere, which is kind of funny in retrospect.) He eventually convinced me to make a character on the game, and to his credit, never used his staffbit to help me out. I was hooked on the creative writing aspect of it, and I purple-prosed my way around the game, being all achingly beautiful and unfathomably deadly, until college. Now I just bum around various games lamenting that everywhere with a population is WoD.
@SG Darn. Thanks for the update, though.
If anyone knows how to get in touch with him, I'd appreciate the effort to do so.
If you're Oz, or if you know him, I'm looking to get in touch with him!