Best posts made by Roz

I'm really enjoying the season but WHY does the show insist on trying to get me to find Tormund's behavior towards Brienne endearing or comedic???

I think people can and do behave super differently online vs in-person. Maybe they, like your friend, just don't think of online as "real." Maybe they just like the freedom that the internet affords them from consequences for being an asshole.

But I do think that treating online as if it's a free-for-all where you don't need to worry about your behavior is, in and of itself, asshole behavior.

@Seraphim73 The writing might have faltered, but damn. All the other departments sure did NOT flag. It's still a fucking beautifully produced show, right to the very end.

@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:

PS: SORRY @Roz I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU TOTALLY CUT OFF YOUR OWN ARM AND IT WAS BADASS.

To be fair, @Tez tried to remove my arm first before I insisted on doing it myself.

As for what made me chill with losing an arm: because it was a sci-fi setting and I knew I could get a cool robot arm or something so that the PC's combat utility wouldn't be nerfed and also I got lots of great angst out of him really not liking the robot arm.

Also because his PB was Sebastian Stan so, like -- Bucky.

@Killer-Klown said in Game of Thrones:

So, yeah. I've been considering a few things - some of which have already been mentioned:
***=Stuff and things and whatnot***

click to show

2- Arya. Arya's ending was not great, but at least it felt more earned than Brans. After Ned's death, she became somewhat rootless and bounced from thing to thing; first in Essos, then Westeros. She started with a list, ammended that list, then eventually just dropped that list. She's a character in progress, so her moving on made more sense than not.

***thar be spoilers ofc***

@carex I am confused at your statements mostly because I feel like the games you describe as not existing are -- all of the games I've played in the past several years.

I have many and varied Thoughts about this, and was actually just discussing it with some friends.

Moore is certainly right about many things. Art is not a democracy. It is dumb and stupid to expect anyone to remake the last season of Game of Thrones just because you hated it. Artists are there to serve the story and the characters. It is impossible to make something that will please all the fans, and that shouldn't be the goal.

THAT SAID. I do think that shows set themselves up and establish expectations. They tell the viewers what kind of show they are. Battlestar Galactica and LOST are two pretty infamous examples of shows that built their popularity in large part on the idea of intricate mystery. This was baked into their DNA. It was set up purposefully by the writers to get people invested in what was going to happen. For the people who hated their finale episodes, part of the reason for the reaction was the feeling that they had been asked to invest in the show based on a certain premise, and then that premise seemed to be largely set aside for the ending. The writers decided, in the end, that most of these mysteries didn't matter. They weren't the important core of the show. Which is, obviously, their right! But I don't care for the sense of "it was silly of you to invest so much into the answers of these mysteries that we built as the centerpiece of the series." If you want to leave your plot pieces open for flexibility, which I understand, it is probably better to not do that in a show that is built on mystery and mystique. Like, if that is your style of writing, it is just...probably a bad fit for those particular pieces.

But if you're unhappy with a piece of art, you can write out your feelings on the internet, you can write fanfiction (which I think is a hugely awesome thing as a part of transformative fandom and can be an incredibly healthy and creative way for fans to show appreciation), and you can -- you know, say you hated it. You can even take it apart for a think piece! No, you can't reasonably demand anyone to remake it. You definitely can't send anything that even smells of being abusive to the creators. You react to the art, and then you move on.

I am not super impressed with some of the sentiment I get from Moore. But I think the overall answer is somewhere in the middle.

If you want to convert non-MU* players into MU* players you have to make it a gamewide priority. Like, staff overall has to decide that this is a Thing The Game Is Doing and make a particular effort at it. Write up helpfiles meant to help educate people brand new to MU*s, be conscious of common jargon and try to record translation for newcomers, set the example on channels, etc. It's far from impossible, it's just that our cultural habits are, as has been said, unwelcoming. You can absolutely change it, and there are games that are successful in being welcoming to people new to the medium. But the thing that those games have in common is that they've made a particular push to be.

Eh, Wolverine's shortness was pretty wrapped up in how he was read in the comics for years. People were peeved about Jackman's height when he was cast, but it was forgiven pretty readily with the first movie when his acting proved his suitability.

@lotherio said in What is your turning point?:

@wildbaboons said in What is your turning point?:

Unless all I want to do is BarRp then scheduled RP is a must.

The topic deserves its own thread maybe, schedule vs unscheduled. Not sure how I feel about it said this way, it almost sounds like its assuming all non-scheduled RP is BarRp. I don't schedule and I usually go for some story, something is or has happened to interact with/to for me. Similar to @Auspice, there needs to be some story for me. This is like if I said the inverse, I need un-scheduled RP because if I wanted to plan out my RP, I might as well just write the book? Not saying scheduled RP is planned, just that sounded like lumping all 'improv' or 'random' or 'unscheduled' rp into random, and pointless social only.

See, my read on it was that it's hard to get RP with the people you want sometimes unless you schedule it. Busy lives, and all that.

People with good intentions will respond decently to "That's not cool" and not do it again. It's pretty simple.

@carex You are incredibly wrong about how people would react to this and you're ignoring the many people talking about how off-put they would be if they were a player on a game with this as policy.

@ominous said in Arx: @clues:

@bananerz Apparently you weren't around for the first three months or so of clues when people had diarrhea of the mouth when it came to clues. Every scene had someone who was offering every single clue they had. I ended up with like 100 over the course of this time. Staff ended up putting an AP cost to it, which cut down on the sharing, but there was a brief bit of unhappiness at the cost being added.

I think you mean MASSIVE WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH jfc I remember those reactions still

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

Stumptown. It's pretty good! And who the hell knew Maria Hill/the chick from How I Met Your Mother could act?

???? Everyone who watched HIMYM and the Marvel movies and shows she was in???

WELL. After hearing a bit more about what my apology was about -- good lord, the shit some people will make up.

I have sometimes wondered over the past couple years about what felt like a disproportionate level of hostility from you, Surr, in the "man I don't even know, I can't say peep without her crashing down" sort of way. The reality certainly explains a lot. As far as I personally am concerned, whoever it was that told you the bullshit is the real bad actor that any of my anger would be directed at. While we scrap and fight in MSB, I don't feel personally harmed by the situation. (It's pretty obvious that I can TAKE CARE OF MYSELF in MSB fights.) I do appreciate the apology, however, and I feel in a situation to accept it. I'm sure we will live to scrap again.

(Whoever is making up dumb and gross bullshit stuff can GFY or whatever tho.)

Upvote is for sympathy. I'm really sorry.

@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@roz

Knowing the math backend of a system is like knowing odds in poker. The odds for poker have been known for awhile now. There are books discussing it. There are a lot more books discussing poker strategy and human behaviour at the table and manipulating it. Knowing the most efficient means of engaging with a system is beneficial for everyone.

Again, as I said in my post, I wasn't saying that people shouldn't dig into the (publicly-accessible) math if that's what makes them happy, or that they shouldn't share their findings if people ask for them. But, like, it was barely an hour ago that people were kind of saying, "Listen, I don't actually want to know all this mathematical detail because I'm not necessarily trying to be the most efficient." I'm saying that you shouldn't center these discussions on mathematical efficiency because a lot of players don't play that way. Yes, I do think the system should adjust to reward healthy ways of engaging in it, but I actually think you figure that out more by talking about how people experience and engage with the system. Like, I think @Apos's posts saying "there are more efficient ways of doing this, like XYZ, but people haven't been doing that, which is curious!" are helpful, because they're not so much centered on figuring out the efficiency as much as looking at how people engage with it.

And I think there are instances of ~EFFICIENCY~ being brought to bear in a way that actually reduces fun for other players. And, as @mietze said, encourages a mindset of "if I'm not engaging at peak efficiency with the systems, then I might as well not engage at all."

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

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

I don't mind some aspects of the cancel culture. I do dislike this immense effort to preemptively not possibly do anything that can be taken as offensive, though, regardless of intent.

Case in point was a potential plot for a new Star Trek movie (... for some reason that's on my newsfeed a lot lately) where a virus was killing large parts of the galactic population, which was nixed due to Covid-19.

We can't make movies about pandemics now? Would someone think they were too pro-virus?

This has nothing to do with cancel culture at all, IMO.

It probably has less to do with that and more to do with not wanting to grind people down with a plot about something they are actually going through at the moment.

I didn't want to see a movie about someone losing their loved one to cancer when I lost my grampa to cancer, for example; many MUs don't include COVID-19 in their modern, contemporary settings because escapism is about escaping reality.

Yeah, I think this is pure business. "People aren't gonna wanna watch a movie about a pandemic during the midst of COVID-19, so let's do something else, because what we are doing is making a movie to sell and make money."

Pandemic stories aren't cancelled. They're just not good business right now. Or people are predicting they aren't, at least.

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

When I lay out the math for a system, it's not with the intention of telling anyone they're playing the game wrong, it's with the intent of allowing them to make informed decisions and provide the foundation I make conclusions from. If someone doesn't want to know how the systems work, then a systems discussion thread is probably not the best thread for them to be in, maybe we can make a no-spoilers version of the thread for people who don't want to know, or maybe I should start putting the math behind spoiler tags.

I think that's a bit unnecessary (and also kind of condescending). And, again, kind of missing the point I was trying to make. People aren't being spoiled by math, and I don't think they need to be PROTECTED FROM IT or something. You don't need to put your stuff behind NSFW TAGS. Or, like, a single link.

Again, my point is that when people are coming into a discussion from the perspective of someone who is interested in using systems but who has some gut feelings about how they play out and how that makes them more or less likely to use a given system, drowning them with the mathematical proof that their feelings are wrong -- doesn't usually help. Pointing out that there have been recent revisions to the system can surely be relevant. People's gut reactions to systems are indeed often not accurate to the numbers, because no system survives first contact with players. Sometimes those gut reactions are inaccurate enough to say "sorry, can't help there," because sometimes people have unreasonable expectations about what they should get out of something. (Those sorts of feelings you especially can't math away.) But, frankly, throwing math equations around is a good way to get a fair number of people to skip over text. (Pax's guide she's been drafting for the magic system deals with this in an interesting way: for each section that she goes through the system from a usability standpoint, she has a mini-section at the end detailing the math involved. At the start of the guide it basically says "I'll include the math at the end of each section for people who are definitely gonna want to dig through it, so please skip over if you don't care about that stuff."