Best posts made by Roz

@Bossi said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Noodle-McDoodle Thrax culture is very much about keeping Thralls and being better than everyone else, which makes people see them as the typical 'bad guys'. It even says in the description that people love to hate them.

It's not so much an excuse or a desire to play an asshole character. That seems like stereotyping. Every game needs conflict, we can't all be nice to each other. We don't play Thrax's because we want to be assholes and get away with it. Also saying we're on par with demons/those serving demons is a bit extreme, we're not looking to hurt people. Hardcore Thraxians just see themselves as the shit, and are stuck in their ways.

I feel like you should maybe reread what @Noodle-McDoodle wrote. Her point was more that we have a lot of outside external evils serving as the bad guys of the game (including some PCs aligned with those various evil factions), not that Thrax is at all on par with demons or their servants. The game doesn't require an overt "bad guy" Great House to create conflict because we have a ton of other antagonists already set up. She also didn't say that all Thrax players are looking for the Asshole Excuse, but rather that factions set up with overt stuff like Thrax that's meant to be "thematically bad" tends to attract players who get a bit too into the whole thing as an excuse to be a jerk. Is that everyone in Thrax? No, not at all! Have there definitely been players like that? Yeah.

I can understand both sides as far as wanting to keep/wanting to get rid of thralldom (and male primogeniture). But I do think the idea that Thrax will somehow lose all defining characteristics if these two things were to eventually become abolished is kind of short-sighted. Like, do you really think the entirety of Thraxian culture is wrapped up in those two things? I don't. Those are two big loud items, but even with the Lyceum down there, Thrax will always remain the foremost naval power, Thrax will continue to have an interesting and slightly brutal interpretation of Mangata, etc., etc.

Also, the idea that if Thrax didn't have thralldom and male primogeniture that we would lose game conflict is also incorrect, because there is tons of conflict not about these two things.

@Sparks I'm sorry, you are too nice and reasonable and not prone to raging enough.

@surreality Yeah. Although that project was never about, like. Marking problem players. Not for YOUR record, since you remember, but for everyone else's edification. The idea was to have players opt-in to listing whatever alts they wanted to. Basically like a database of MSB playlists in a way. But -- better.

@Sparks dug deep for KKJ, that one wasn't even ever licensed in America. (Well, the manga was, but not the anime.) I had a shelf of fansubs for it.

There's a way to use the system that doesn't tell the other player what you wrote. Just for the record. I use the switch on occasion.

@Pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@DeadEmpire I think you're referring to stat costs, and it's a base cost of 100, not 1000.

No, she's talking about Level 6 skills, which have a base cost of 1000xp.

@kitteh I don't deny that there's either an existing or seriously impending possible issue with XP bloat. I just think it's helpful to try and talk about things accurately. Which is why I also corrected things like saying that people are getting almost 200xp per week now, when the reality is that the top earners are getting in the 30s. It's a big difference. Like, I just think that if people want to talk about the actual problem, we want to be talking about the actual state of it. (No, people aren't getting 200xp a week, no, people aren't at the point of buying legendary skills as far as I can tell/estimate. The fact that some people might have the idea of saving for them is very different. You can be saving for something that's a year away, and it also means that meanwhile they're not spending their XP on other things.)

I have a PC who's been around since early December. He's at like 142% XP tax. That means it takes him literally 2 1/2 times as much XP to raise a skill than it does a newbie. He absolutely, totally has an advantage to someone super fresh to the grid, sure, because he's been around and I've had time to buy skills. But the XP tax is actually pretty expensive.