Posts made by Sammi

@VulgarKitten I try to assume the best of people. The other option is to assume the worst, and you never hear about happy misanthropes.

@Ganymede said:

@VulgarKitten said:

Thank you for your brilliant observation and critique about how to fix my mental issues, and for your dismissive, superior attitude.

The converse: if you don't believe that my advice will help fix your issues, then please avoid telling me as I'm conditioned to suggest solutions when people bring problems.

+1

@VulgarKitten There are a great many people for whom the logical response to being presented with a problem is to attempt to think of a solution. As one of them, I personally think there's something very wrong with anyone who doesn't try to fix problems. Anxiety and panic attacks share a problem with chronic pain and other mundane-seeming conditions that aren't scary like schizophrenia or amnesia, in that they seem mundane. Everybody experiences some form of these things, even if there's no pathology present. To the layperson who doesn't have a chronic condition, "anxiety" is what they feel before having to speak to a group of people, or when they think they left their keys in the restaurant. It's a defect of how we talk about these conditions, and yes, you do need to clarify for people who don't know the state of your mental health when a condition isn't as fleeting as what they're used to. They will try to empathize with you, and that means thinking back to the last time they felt anxious. If they don't have chronic anxiety, they probably got over it by putting on some MJ and rocking out without caring about people staring. They're going to try to be helpful and suggest ways for you to alleviate your suffering, and you need to be clear in communicating that there isn't anything they can do for you. They aren't being dismissive or superior (most of the time). They're trying to be empathic and they're failing because what you're experiencing is something they do not understand.

High Scale characters should have a major advantage, but Scion was mostly a Legend-measuring contest. If you got a single point of Legend, and the corresponding Epic Attribute dot, you would hands-down win any fight against someone with lower stats unless you got monumentally unlucky. We shall see what Scion rules come out, but with how the Scale reads right now, any Demigod will have a fair chance against any other Demigod, and multiple Demigods (three to six, depending) would have a decent chance against a God. That fits my sense of fair play much better than the original Scion power scale.

@Thenomain said:

@Sammi, you have no idea how little I missed our talks.

I'll still meticulously document every rules point I bring up, just for you. Srsly, though, semantics is huge. Without words having common meanings, and us being able to talk about the manner in which we communicate, our evolution as a species would have dead-ended before the invention of writing. And that is how I justify my nit-pickery.

Getting jumped on not once but twice that I'm not using this correctly without anything else to say?

Something else to say: You were talking about how you couldn't think of any concepts that would fit the new Seemings, but Vera would have made a fantastic 2nd Ed Ogre.

@Thenomain said:

Also, someone recently pointed out to me that physical appearance and Arcadia escape agency are permanently linked, which means if you want to be a bully you have to look like an Ogre. Neh.

Logic fail. Not all changelings who are bullies escaped Arcadia by replacing their hearts with stone and beating their way out. All changelings who escaped by replacing their hearts with stone, etc. are Ogres.

Okay, so the increasing power for each level is there, but it doesn't increase all that much and there's a distinct separation between the mechanical effects and collateral damage to the scenery (including mooks). I like it.

@Derp There are multiple angles from which to approach this.

1. Changelings are messed up. If there's a changeling and an unidentified person in a scene, and only one of them has emotional issues, it's almost certainly the confirmed changeling.
2. Examining the grammar. In this case, the male pronoun has been used to refer to the Ogre previously in the same paragraph. We have the introduction of an ex-boyfriend, then a reference to the Ogre, then more pronouns. When there are two individuals with the same pronoun in a narration, you refer back to the previous direct reference. In this case, the "he" follows "an Ogre".
3. Look at the sentences following that. "Bringing up those dead parents again won’t do it. However, pointing out that he’s broken his fist in a fight about the honor of his dead mother, that’s a new break." First, it would be absurdly crippling, not to mention unthemely, for the fightingest of the Seemings to get broken up about other people being physically injured. It does make sense if the curse is about needing to remain stoic, because breaking your hand is a point of weakness. Second, how does this sentence make sense if it's the ex-boyfriend whose parents died? That would be going into pretty deep characterization for a character who is essentially a throwaway (used here to indicate that the Ogre's emotional issues are getting in the way of his love life). The "he" is still coming after "an Ogre" as the most recent direct reference.

@Derp said:

@Ganymede said:

@Derp said:

That's just begging for everyone playing Changeling: The Trauma Victim to drive every Ogre around them into a dark spiral.

I thought that was the point of it, actually. I can see how being around the abused only feeds into the cycle of abuse further, or causes the victims to lose a sense of how the world is supposed to work.

Maybe. But to the levels that it's usually taken on MU's? The poor orphaned battered sex slave that was kidnapped by the fae and then came out to find that all the things she loved and held on to are gone and everyone hates her and she lives on the streets, etc, etc, etc. There could be a new sob story every ten minutes, and there are tons of people around that love to talk about how they've got it worse than everyone else.

That would make ogres impossible to play, in an online environment. TT, sure, you're around a limited group that isn't bellyaching all the time, but on a MU?

I think you're misunderstanding the curse. Ogres insist that they don't feel pain and they don't show it off much. Iron Stamina is probably super-common. They have Clarity breaking points when their own pain is presented to them (or to their friends) in a way that they can't deny. They're the abuse victims who keep themselves safe by showing no weakness, because they have learned that any crack in their armor is just ammunition for those who want to hurt them. Like the ex-boyfriend in the example, who probably just means that the Ogre should come to terms with his parents' deaths before trying out relationships with living people. From the Ogre's perspective, it's a personal failing to be that hung up on someone who has died, and having that weakness brought up in conversation is terrifying.

@FiranSurvivor said:

Now its starting to sound like Harry Potter but with tits, swords, and monsters.... Hm.

10/10 would play.

@Autumn said:

But then, if I viewed his abilities as making for a galaxy-shaking juggernaut, I'd probably feel the same way you do. To me the abilities in and of themselves don't seem all that impressive. C'est la guerre!

There's more to a character than his mind-powers. At the end of RotJ, Luke can essentially command an armada, without having to mind trick anybody. If there were a whole bunch of Skywalkers, they could command the New Republic fleet, quash the Imperial Remnant, assume control of Nar Shaddaa, and set up Skywalker-governed regions on the Outer Rim all at the same time as they're rebuilding the Jedi Academy. That's the sort of setting-rewriting silliness I'm afraid of if everyone gets to be a full-powered Witcher or Sorceress.

Paranoia aside, I don't see why anyone needs to be able to enslave dragons or rain down fire to destroy entire armies. There are plenty of smaller awesome things for people to do, and unless you're playing a game like Exalted or Scion (where things get even bigger), having that level of shenanigans in play makes weaker awesomeness feel less awesome. You jump the shark and then nothing short of shark-jumping is ever good enough.

@Autumn said:

Luke is a telekinetic master swordsman with unreliable precognitive and telepathic powers; if there were suddenly fifty or a hundred people who fit that description, the Star Wars universe wouldn't change all that much.

How many such people did it take to destroy the Republic and erect the Empire? Mostly two, with supporting help from three or four others (and that's being generous and calling Greivous a person). Fifty Skywalkers? Nevermind rebuilding the Jedi Academy. They would have a galaxy to conquer.

The problems with allowing Luke Skywalker as a PC (which, historically speaking, several Star Wars MU* have done)

Poor decisions have been made. See also: The Reach's Mage sphere.

Saying that I don't think settings where the viewpoint characters are far above the power level PCs are permitted to achieve are the best choices for MU* is not the same thing as saying I don't think they could be fun to play in. And some settings where PCs can be as powerful as the viewpoint would probably make for terrible games.

That's most video games. And books. And movies. And RPG settings that get novels set in them (hello, Drizzt and Elminster). Really, any setting that nerds get passionate enough about to want to play in.

@Autumn People who aren't Luke Skywalker are important to Episodes IV - VI, but canonically Luke goes from a nobody to being the most powerful human in the known galaxy. He duels and defeats the previous most powerful human in the known galaxy, and the final reunion with his father only makes him a better Jedi. When the credits roll on Return of the Jedi, Luke is extremely powerful. Nobody in a Star Wars MU* ever gets to be Luke because that would just be silly.

Likewise, Dandelion, Zoltan, Iorveth, Vernon Roche, Ves, Shani, Henselt, Siegfried of Denesle and numerous others are all very meaningful to the plot of the games. But they can't fight armies, dragons, or the King of the Wild Hunt alone. They most certainly can't teleport, enslave dragons, or call down massive fiery cataclysms. I think the setting is hugely rich and would be tremendous fun to play in, but not so much with shenanigans that would make The Reach's Mage sphere jealous. Instead of teleportation, give people surprise mobility. Instead of dragon-control, they can have animal familiars. Nobody needs more than one fireball at a time.

@Autumn The problem with the Witchers and the Sorceresses is that they're epic level characters. If all player characters start at that level, you're basically playing Exalted in a setting not designed for that. If PCs are split between normal people and Witchers/Sorceresses, there won't be any normal people left after a little while. If PCs start low and get to the level of Geralt and Triss, there will be a silly rate of power growth and a massive power disparity between dinosaurs and new PCs. All three of those possibilities are terrible.

It would be much simpler to say, "It's a couple hundred years in the future, and the glorious works of magic performed in the age of the Lodge of Sorceresses have been lost to the ages. Many have tried to recover artifacts or tomes from this era in search of the power once wielded by the likes of Sabrina Glevissig and Philippa Eilhart, but more progress has been made by forward-looking young mages and witches innovating new methods to compensate for their lack of raw prowess."

@Bargle said:

Though if full-blown Sorceresses are allowed, full Witchers probably could be too.

Allowing Triss and Yennifer would be just as bad as allowing Geralt. They're so epically powerful that it would be difficult to determine what they can't do.

@FiranSurvivor said:

Everyone wants to be a Jedi (Funny thing is I never liked Star Wars for Jedi, I always wanted to be a pilot)

I always wanted to either be a scoundrel (Lando before he got wealthy) or a Force adept. But yeah, that's exactly the thing. In spite of "everyone" wanting to be a Jedi, there are a lot of us who don't. The non-Jedi-players make things more interesting for the Jedi, because it's less fun if everybody is a Jedi, but if Jedi are just good at everything, then there's no payout for playing anything but a Jedi.

Exactly. That sort of premise would make Witcher squads more of a necessity (we see some teamwork in the games, but mostly it's Geralt 1v1ing the world), and would make talented "mundanes" like Dandelion, Roche, and Shani be able to make themselves useful without feeling crowded out.

Given the near-destruction of the Witchers, perhaps a future exists where a new order can achieve only some of the miracles of the old (lower power level, more reason for PCs to work in groups and with non-Witchers than you would have if you had a bunch of Geralts running around).

I think the core issue with a Witcher game is the same as any setting where you have an order of godlike warriors. Everybody will want to play as the Jedi Grey Wardens Witchers unless the non-Witcher options are equally interesting.

@Eerie With this, you can keep track of him because he'll always have his cell phone attached to his wrist.

@HelloRaptor It definitely follows the same roll mechanics as Scion (Attribute + Skill vs variable Difficulty, more successes = more epic), but with the addition of a pair of "fate point" pools (one split among the PCs, one used by all NPCs). Attributes are essentially nWoD attributes, but renamed. Skills are largely rewritten, and there will be "skill tricks" like in Mirrors.