Best posts made by Roz

Like, holy shit, did you even look at the conversation wherein the other party was continually extending the conversation?

I will say a few things. They are not meant to be ONE WAY IS CORRECT AND YOU OTHERS ARE WRONG, but I think they're valuable considerations as to why people would consider developing tools such as this.

1. Having tools like this indicates overall to the playerbase that consideration of player comfort is a priority on the game. Yes, obviously there are a lot of ways to indicate this, including firm policy and whatnot, but I'd actually say that a game basically going, "We care enough about helping people to work together to make sure everyone's comfortable and enjoying their time to actually invest some time coding to facilitate that," could be very reassuring and set up a pretty strong foundation for a game's attitude towards the subject. Especially because there have been plenty of games over the years where this attitude is not the case.

2. RP Prefs or whatever seem to me to have value in that they help people avoid -- or at least minimize -- having to deal with the abrupt sensation of being confronted with something you really, really don't want to be. It's very different being able to have an easy tool to make someone go, "Oh, sure, I'll steer clear of X topic around this person," then have X topic come up and have the other person throw down the red flag as it were. (Or, if it's possible, sometimes there are topics that people would just like warning leading up to them and then they're fine. That's also a thing.) I think RP Prefs accomplishes something similar but also different than in-the-moment communication.

3. I myself have a bad habit of getting frustrated when other players don't find it as easy as I do to broach things OOCly. Yeah, I do think there's a sort of fundamental point when you have to be like, "You need to be able to discuss things OOCly sometimes, adult to adult." But I think it's discounting how giving people tools can help make it easier to start that conversation and open it up. Again, this is as much about setting up expectations for how a game intends to address OOC considerations overall as anything else.

We've just wrapped our first big plot, which makes now a great time to join up!

It's been a rough winter in Mutant Town. Months spent trying to dodge a branch of the mutant-heavy Russian mafia intent on staking out territory in New York ended quite literally in flames - but not before several mutants in the NYPD's Mutant Affairs department lost their jobs after a public outting and any number of Mutant Town residents got caught up in the turf war.

Then a blizzard left most of Mutant Town without power for days.

Spring approaches, though, and surely things will start looking up. With the mafia locked up or chased back underground, business is picking back up for the newly-established X-Factor Solutions, which promises to solve problems big or small. Employees are starting to see real money, and sometimes the jobs are even more interesting than unloading boxes or playing courier.

Of course, sometimes 'interesting' isn't a good thing.

X-Factor is a second-generation X-Men movieverse game with a cyberpunk feel. We are a single faction roleplay-focused game with a friendly atmosphere and a playerbase that loves to hang out and chat. We use Faraday's FS3 system for chargen and combat.

@auspice said in General Video Game Thread:

I think there are two big reasons it had bugs and it all comes down to 'people are shitty'.

CDPR employees were receiving death threats, regularly, after the game was delayed. Lots of them. Some of them with very specific details of home addresses and the like.

I imagine their management was very afraid to delay a second time. I forgive the bugs on that alone.

I get there's been a huge amount of CDPR apologism from gamers because of a belief that they're somehow an ethical step above other video game companies, but "we had to put you through shitty crunch conditions for months for your own safety" is definitely a take.

I totally just make maps on Google Draw. Then I make little smileys or stars for the players so they can indicate their positions. Totally changed my GMing to have a reference.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@faraday And your character can /try/ to be a cool dude in the face of intimidation, but if he fails, it's just bad playing to refuse to play the failure honestly.

Personally, I think the 'agency' argument is always a little disingenuous. If you have a character in a system that has rules about social interactions, then by making that character, you've agreed to play by those rules. You have made a character knowing those rules existed, and have chosen to play a character knowing how conflicts are resolved.

Deciding that a subset of those rules shouldn't apply to you because you don't like how it plays out in this situation is every bit as mature as a guy who flips the chessboard when he starts to lose, no matter what kind of 'but my creativity!' artiste arguments it gets dressed up in.

I don't think there's really a need to characterize @faraday that way. She's stated that she just doesn't like playing with systems with a strong coded social component, not that she wants to play in them but ignore the social skills. Certainly she's built FS3 as a system that's not really designed to explore social combat, because it's not her thing.

Like, I absolutely know that straight female fetishization of male queerness is a thing, but do you realize that there are also queer female players wanting to play queer female characters? Like. Holy shit. Lesbians are a thing.

@selira said in Final Fantasy:

i'm down with discussing other FF's too.

except that eight is trash. i will not be taking questions.

get the FUCK out of here 8 is fucking amazing

I am so super bummed that she rostered out of nowhere. Would like to at least know what happened, if I did anything, etc.

When SWTOR came out, my friends and I actually had a guild and also a MU* for RPing it. (Because let's face it, MMO RP is kind of -- well, not nearly as great or easy or convenient.) We eventually dropped off, but it was definitely fun while it lasted.

I've explained my MU* hobby to a very small number of friends, mostly because it IS kind of difficult to get/explain. It helps when they already have experience with tabletop or something like that.

My therapist knows a whole lot about it now. It's alternately hilarious and frustrating the amount of background setup I have to give him just so I can talk about the actual emotional parts that's relevant to the therapy session.

@TNP said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

Reusing so many maps was just outright lazy.

Or desperately necessary because they were being rushed through production by EA and forced to produce a finished product much earlier than they wanted to.

Hello I am on Spirit Lake!

@Pyrephox said in The Metaplot:

• Oriented towards shaping the future, not uncovering/discovering the past. Metaplots about 'uncovering the past' inevitably, in my experience, depress player interest. Because the past is always filled with larger than life characters who did AMAZING AND COOL THINGS...that current PCs are (perceived) to never, ever be able to do. Uncovering the past is reading someone else's story - what tends to get players excited is the chance to write their own story.

I think you can get a lot of interest in discovering the past if it's directly related to shaping the future and PC stories.

Whoa hey, replies! Hi guys!

So Megatron's trial hasn't happened, no. We're set right at the start of the MTMTE timeline and have diverged into our own AU from launch. If Megatron's trial happens, it'll be way down the line, and who knows if it will. We think the best way to deal with continuing canon is to pick a point of divergence and then run with it. We'll reserve the right to take inspiration from later stuff, obviously, but we won't be beholden to it.

What we DID do is try to develop a divergence that would allow for more Cons on board. Soundwave is kind of an idealist hippie in IDW canon, and of course utterly loyal to Megatron (in EVERY canon), so what we've done is had him join the Lost Light crew with a contingent of Decepticons, partly to help with the search for the Knights of Cybetrtron to save the planet and stuff, partly to also search for Megatron, who by canon is totally AWOL/possibly dead at the moment. We wanted to allow for a greater diversity of characters to an already great crew.

And Overlord is -- well. He's the same place he was in the comics.

The Cons are definitely in a weird place, though, even before Megatron's trial. Obviously sticking Autobots and Decepticons on a ship together with a commonish cause is a recipe for a lot of tension.

As for the TS question -- no, we're pretty much of the opinion that the canon has firmly suggested Cybertronians are asexual romantics. (WIth potential for asexual aromantics, probably, but certainly plenty have romantic relationships.)

I feel bad now for my joke. I'M ALEKSEI AND BERENICE. It's the least secret thing ever.

@Arkandel said in How much plot do people want?:

@Lisse24 I think that does belong in this thread anyhow. How much plot do you want before you're overwhelmed by clues/followups, for example? I knew people on Arx as well who just couldn't keep up.

There's a definite reaction where people think they need to be keeping up with any and all plot threads just because of the presence of those threads where they can see. It all becomes a lot more manageable when you internally say "Okay but I'm only going to actually pay attention to X and Y and let other people play with A and B."

@Darinelle Oh, sorry, I meant to say that @mail clears out for everyone EXCEPT WHEN PUFFIN PICKS UP AN ALT because Tehom hates you.

@apos said in FCs on Comic MUs:

@roz said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I mean, sure, obviously that's a thing that commonly happens. That's also just called bad staffing. You do need good staffing to make any sort of system like this work. There's no "this system will totally work even with lazy or conflict-averse staffers."

I think it's a little contrary to what I was trying to get at originally. While you're right, you can definitely design things systematically that makes it way way way way easier or harder. Like I would rather start from the point of, 'Well, a lot of staff are conflict-averse. What system is least bad with those people?'

Generally, you'd want to design something with the least amount of decision making, with systems that resemble what choices would be made by someone fair minded. Like if every top tier FC had a set limit for how long someone could possess the character before it had to go up for grabs, and then the metric for deciding who got it next was automatically determined based on how you quantified who made me the most rp for the widest spectrum of people among. I mean sure, any of those things can be weighted unfairly too, but frankly even in systems that have really terrible weights there tends to be way less hostility because it's a little bit emotionless and detached.

Sure. My post wasn't to discount the value of having clear, stated guidelines. It's just that I don't think @saosmash's point of "well you need to enforce rules about character squatting" is so easily dismissed with "well staffers don't like doing that." You build systems that can be best utilized by a good staff. If you have bad staffers, the problem is that you have bad staffers. I get really frustrated whenever someone turns a discussion about best practices for system and policy into "I was on a game with that policy but the staffer was terrible and did XYZ." Bad staffers are bad, and we should totally discuss bad staffing, but it's a different conversation.

Policy requires enforcement. If you don't enforce policy, you're staffing badly. That doesn't mean the policy is bad.

@MarsGrad oh shit sorry.

@MarsGrad said in Nicholaus @ Arx:

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

Do you know him?

I love following a connection through multiple storylines and then deciding to do something that's possibly stupidly dangerous but that will probably be wildly rewarding storywise even when the GM mentions how extra preparation might be a good idea and how, oh yeah, staff was just talking about me poking at that thing, and now I'm convinced they're all plotting my death.