Posts made by Seraphim73

@auspice I would absolutely play either the Athlete or the Thrill-seeker if I were to play, sorry. Lots of really, really stupid (and fun) ways to die.

I keep being tempted, because I've always been interested in episodic MU*ing, and Aliens rock, but totally no time at all.

I'm not associated with the game in any way, but based on the web portal, it's definitely Ares.

I don't know that Ares really has additional support for larger ships than FS3.2 had, although I certainly could have missed an update. I totally agree with @Testament that capital ships (and probably anything larger/more powerful than the Roci) is probably a bad idea--there's just too much power there to leave things too far up to chance. In my opinion, for something like The Expanse, battleships should be plot points, not on-screen rolls.

@cura said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

a character that relentlessly mashes the Paragon Interrupt option like Holden does

I love this description of Holden. It's perfect. And I'm sure there will be people who play White Knights on the game, since there are on every game.

@testament said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

I mean it's just more Amos appreciation which I can completely get behind.

Amos. Just, <3.

Totally interested. And I'm happy to help with stats if you'd like it--or, you know, the actual expert could do it (Fara). That's the kind of nerdiness that I love.Then it's time to work on my Martian Marine PC.

@kanye-qwest said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

@auspice dick is a gendered insult, but I have yet to see anyone politely ask others not to call them a dick because it's gendered and that's not cool and be laughed at. Wee little straw man, there.

I had actually been trying to use "dick" instead of any female-gendered insult because a little turnabout is fair play (even if an eye for an eye makes the world blind). I think I've come down to "asshole is better."

Nobody take that wrong, please.

@mietze said in Open Sheets?:

Would I want it on a huge impersonal ten alts for every player pvp disconnected/uninvolved staff game, no.

This is actually the type of game I would most want open sheets on. If Staff is uninvolved, you have no way of knowing if the player of the character your character is trying to kill is lying about their stats. Unless the game has open sheets, then you know for sure.

@Three-Eyed-Crow brought up another great reason for open sheets: Newbie directing. I love being able to say "check out the sheets of <three characters> who are also heavy-weapons Marines" (or whatever the role they're apping is). Not only can they see what stats all three have, but they can also see what sub-niches the three characters are filling, so they don't double up.

Heck, Ares even goes one better than this: you can see what every character in the game has in action skills with a single command. It's brilliant. So you want your character to be good but not great with a pistol? Check the levels of every other character in the game with pistols and find a happy medium. It also lets you know if Staff tends to allow near-maxed stats, or if they prefer to keep the range lower.

@Tinuviel I get annoyed by GMs rolling dice for me too (unless I've screwed up the command or can't figure it out, of course). Like, that's my fun, let me have it.

Another reason that I like open sheets (but not BGs/Details of Secrets/whatever) is that they can help bring characters together. Like, if you see another character with "Lacrosse" as a BG skill, you can work out that your characters maybe play in a rec league together (or have played against one another, if you don't want to assume more than acquaintanceship). ETA: Oh look, @faraday beat me to this point. I am not surprised.

To @Admiral and the others backing the "Surprise" view of why closed sheets are good, I get that. Totally do. Some of the best RP I've had has come when I and my character were surprised. I've just gotten used to having to be surprised by what other characters do rather than what they are. It loses something, I totally admit. I just think the trade-off is worth it. Y'all don't, and that's cool.

I would always come to a game I was working on with the default expectation of open sheets. Only then would I ask the design team if they thought we should hide sheet information, and I would ask a lot of pointed questions to find out why, because in my mind, there should be a really, really good reason to hide sheets (and "CvC is going to be prevalent" is not a good reason in my mind).

That being said, I agree with @faraday and others that this applies only to sheets. Don't get me wrong, it can be nice for a player ST to be able to read someone's BG to provide hooks, but I generally feel that "open sheets/closed BG and secrets" is the way to go.

Besides, even if the mild-mannered reporter is hiding a crime fighter (or a criminal), isn't it nice to know that so you can arrange RP with them about it?

@tnp said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

Think of it as hosts at a party setting out a buffet of chocolates but they and their friends eat all the caramels and nut clusters and leave only the icky raspberry cremes.

But I love those raspberry cremes, and I hate nut clusters.

@botulism Just thinking that if you only have fewer than 10 left, they may not be ones that people particularly want to play.

Will you be adding new archetypes? If so, will you wait until all of the Archetypes are claimed, or add them in before then?

Here's another option, since some folks are discussing them. For the first month of the game, only allow people to apply/play a single Secondary/Tertiary Tier character each. Then, when you have (hopefully) built up a playerbase, allow each person to app a single Primary Tier character in addition to their Secondary/Tertiary.

@faraday said in Plot session duration:

Take BSGU for example. Sure there's combat, that's a big part of the setting/show, but there were plenty of other avenues to explore.

I think that this is an extended example of the D&D problem. In most D&D books, there's about 2 pages on social skills, and then 250 on combat, so of course the players (in most games, of course, every group is different) gravitate toward combat. In FS3, there's this nifty keen automated combat system, but nothing for social/politics... so people who like using the system (oooh ooh, me me!) are going to gravitate toward combat.

It's not a problem, it's just players recognizing what the game designer has put effort/time into.

I wanted a name un-associated with my usual Internet Identity when I first joined WORA because I was embarrassed to be associated with you lot. So I snagged the name of the Cross Applied Technologies SpecOps group from Shadowrun and added two random numbers to the end of it.

To answer the original questions, I like a scene to run 3-6 hours, depending on how "big" the scene is. I don't mind spending 6 hours on a huge, metaplot-important scene -- I enjoy it even -- but a monster-of-the-week scene? I prefer 2-3 hours.

I also love handling prep-work before the scene. I've also started doing Flashbacks during scenes (the idea was stolen from the Leverage RPG). Each character gets a single flashback, which they can use at any time to have done something previously that has an impact on the scene currently. For example, if they run into a guard with a dog, one character may have previously snuck into the kennels and dosed the dogs with sleeping pills, causing the dog to either fall asleep on the spot or the GM to alter the last pose to have the guard patrolling alone, without their dog.

I agree with @mietze that a tight rein and active leadership by the scene-runner can make what would be a 4-5-hour plot into a 3-hour plot. I think that after a little practice with a system, a theme, and a playerbase, a scene-runner can get within a 10-20% estimation on time.

I don't want to break up the larger scene if I can help it, but if I have to, I want to break it up ICly as well as OOCly. Give an IC break where people can be shuffled into and out of the scene (a pause between offensives where squads get mixed and broken up again, etc).

I totally allow focus to shift away from characters whose players have to leave. Maybe they keep fighting NPCs, just off-screen, or maybe they fall back to do a rear-guard action, or whatever.

@arkandel said in Plot session duration:

2. I think if you're doing a combat in a non automated game, you can count on one hour per player. If you're throwing a plot twist at them, double it. FS3 throws these estimates out the window, because things go so smoothly, and you don't really have to wait on Slowey McBrokenfingers typing 1 wpm to keep things going.

That's a factor I hadn't considered. People in automated combat games with experience playing in non-automated games as well, how big a factor has this been for you?

Drives. Me. Insane. I've gotten so used to fast, smooth combat with FS3 that I almost choked (someone else) when I remembered how long scenes take with Saga Edition, for instance.

@surreality I've wanted to do this for a while. I actually was thinking of making it The TV Game, where the same general archetypes moved from show to show as plotlines wrapped up. Personal storylines could be continued (with minor tweaks), but the genre and setting would change every 5-8 months.

I was pondering a single system that would work for everything, something like Savage Worlds where the skills are highly generic (today's Wizard becomes tomorrow's Hacker, with Magic being the same as Computer somehow).

@ganymede said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

Yeah, like, on a space opera game with spaceships, robots, and lasers, I'd kick anyone bitching about anime PCs straight in the tail.

Right, or clearly sci-fi artwork on a fantasy game.

@arkandel said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

I used to use artwork for PBs. I was told that was weird.

I kind of like artwork so long as it fits the "style" of the game. And yes, that's incredibly subjective.

Like many others, I'm in favor of allowing respecs--with restrictions.

First of all, I would allow significant respecs within the first couple of weeks a character has been in existence, because we've all had that moment where we realized that we totally forgot Gunnery on our Viper pilot and somehow it slipped past Staff too (or more realistically, when we later see that someone has a Tactics background skill and our character has been described as tactically-inclined). So long as the skill(s) being lowered haven't been the focus of a scene on-grid or aren't the "core" of the character (definitions may vary, Staff's definition wins), I don't have any problems with them changing.

Secondly, I agree that if the system ever changes dramatically, respects in the areas that changed should be allowed (again, so long as they don't wildly change the character's core).

Thirdly, if it's a minor side-note on the character that's never come up (my character happens to be able to play the violin a little, but it's never been mentioned before) and the player wants to change that minor side-note to a different minor side-note (I'd like my character to be able to dance a little rather than play the violin), I've got no problem.

I don't think that major changes to character capabilities should be allowed (the character was a swordsman before, now they're a bowman? What? Or even worse, now they're a politician who can't fight at all?) unless they're triggered by something IC (possession, massive head trauma, I don't know... a creative player can usually find an excuse, but there should be one).

If one of these tweaks causes them to become slightly more mechanically powerful? Meh, don't care. If it changes them from a pushover in the system (which they were by choice rather than my lack of system knowledge) into a badass? Naw, I'd say that significantly changes their character... put in the time and spend XP to get there.

I also think that there should either be a limit to the number of times someone can respec, or a "cooldown" before they can do it again, and that cooldown should be relatively long (I like @Sunny's 6 months).