Best posts made by somasatori

Humble Store's got a Make Your Own Bundle with 2K/Firaxis games going on right now. If you haven't gotten Civ V or Beyond Earth yet, or any of the Borderlands games, now's the time.

This post kinda reminds me of that Strongbad email about Trevor the Vampire.

"I spent only one day here-"

stake through the heart.

@Kanye-Qwest

I kinda want to ask you to do a map for a table-top game I'm in now. That map is gorgeous, KQ.

It wasn't me! cue stupid fucking song

There would also be dogs short enough that the wouldn't be able to peer above the knees.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

@Bobotron said in +Ye Olde WoD Psych Up:

@GangOfDolls
I know the people at Modern Nights were super-friendly when I was discussing an Assamite Sorcerer I'm thinking about apping [...]

They were super nice about my Ravnos Antitribu pack priest. Staff's been nothing but cool with me there.

@Kanye-Qwest

Oh! That's right! Well, that's just poor planning on his part, then.

If anyone needs a wiki for a game they're setting up and they already have a domain name, but don't want to pay hosting fees, I'm willing to let a couple folks piggy-back off my server. I've got about 20 gb of data socked away for my webserver, of which I'm using very little (mostly for my portfolio page as a web dev). Hit me up with a PM if you want me to set up Mediawiki for you. All you need is the domain name, and we can just point it at a subdomain on my server. I think I would be able to safely host about 4 wikis without hitting the space cap, so long as people don't throw a bunch of pictures up there. Good thing about Mediawiki is that if you decide to get space of your own after the initial push in getting your game up and running is that you can transfer the files and database file elsewhere.

Anyhow! Just letting y'all know it's available.

I could probably even do some minor CSS adjustments for folks, so long as it's not utterly ridiculous & time consuming.

@SilentHills Hey not a problem! I know how it can be. There are so many times that the days run rough and it feels like you have absolutely no one who will listen to you vent. Especially these days, what with the plague.

The ACT Deck is pretty cool, I do have to admit that my focus is in forensic psychology with a secondary focus in trauma, so I have relatively little training in handling depression directly. However! One of my professors set up my previous cohort into groups with a few ACT cards that we went over with one another. It's meant to be a tool to help you recontextualize a lot of ideas that you may have issues with - very much like your guided journals. Another thing that's helpful in ACT (and Emotionally Focused Therapy) are the idea of values.

Here's an example: http://www.motivationalinterviewing.org/sites/default/files/valuescardsort_0.pdf

So, the way this works is you select 20 values out of the list, then break those down to 15, then take five more out, then take two more out, then three more until you have five core value statements with which you strongly associate. I think I read in another post that you're a psych minor, so you might go over this in your classes. Anyhow, once you get down to those five values, write one sentence as to why it's important to you. Definitely try to write more if you can, but it's not important if you can't write more than a sentence. The important thing is to critically address why a specific value is important to you.

We're moving, so I've packed up my cards, but we've got to repack, so I shall try to find them.

@Kumakun I would be down to do beta testing! My schedule is a little weird, but I can be on nights. I love love love Cyberpunk RED and was a big fan of 2020.

I agree with @Ganymede about rules lite. Neon City is good, The Sprawl is good (though trying to adapt a powered by the apocalypse game to MU* sounds a bit painful, plus it's an old PBTA game, and it's definitely showing its age).

Newer players who aren't familiar with the source material may only be familiar with the more streamlined attribute/skill system in the video game, so that could be a benefit when doing systems work. You could even go Ares with it, modifying stats to fit the core Cyberpunk ones, then just use the proprietary system with AresMUSH.

Another option would be CY_BORG, which is a cyberpunk version of MORK BORG.

I don't think I would suggest Sprawlrunners or CBR+PNK, as those are a bit too light on the rules - and the latter is designed more for the "one last run and then I retire" kind of character.

Really excited for more cyberpunk stuff! I need reasons to procrastinate on dissertation!

@Coin said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

If you can't buy in to the system you're playing, then why are you playing that game? Because there's nothing else around? Lame.

WoD is often the only game in town if you want a specific experience, so regardless of your views on the system, you more or less have to buy into it in order to play the sort of stories you want (I suppose you could play freeform on Shang or whatever, but that comes with its own problems and you don't have a larger community playing the same genre you are).

PbtA games should probably be small ones, not the hulking behemoths so many people seem to want their games to be.

In hindsight, and also being one of the people who were extremely focused on player-base sizes, I think the sprawling, massive games that people often want their games to be is due to the community's shared idea of what a successful game is. Even at its most bloated and kind of purposeless stage, I still was very proud that The Reach had amassed such a large following because it directly meant that it was successful. Personally, I feel like Darkwater was probably more successful than The Reach ever had been, given the caliber of the game Darkwater was, the attention and detail put into it, and how Cobalt & crew (including me I guess) wanted to get one specific thing right rather than a used car lot full of character types for mass appeal. I can't say that TR ever approached the same level of quality that DW did.

The attribution of "health" to game's size is unique to the online format, and certainly important for ensuring the game is consistently accessible, which is a sign of success - after all, you want your players in Europe and Asia to have people around when they have time to log in, given how frequently the MU* community caters to the Western hemisphere (and global north, but that's a digression from this). That said, there aren't a lot of ways to prevent bloat that feel fair. In the past, at least in the WoD community, slots were used to figure out how many supernatural PCs a character could have; however, a player was often able to have as many Mortal/+ PCs they wanted. If one were to simply shut off chargen entirely for a prolonged period there would be significant acrimony and you'd likely see a dip in interest as players looking to bring friends dropped off, and other people protested "authoritarian" admins.

@Coin and @Arkandel, you've probably thought of this more than me: what do you think is a good way to balance player investment, new player growth, etc. without it getting out of hand?

@Duntada

Thank you for saying so! And yeah, my own recovery was due to my wife. I did the same thing you described, actually, subbing out one substance for another by winding up an alcoholic. The five years was for complete sobriety altogether. She's still got quite a long road to travel, and - at least in my experience - it's not something that seems to really be completed. Anyway, thank you for the kind words.

@Ominous

Ah, yeah! I read this for a organizational theory class and it was great. Super weird pick for an org theory class, but seriously a good addition to my normally extremely far left catalog of economic theory books.

Edit: Also, as a former Florida resident, I notice and respect your use of Publix as an example.

@mietze said in RL Anger:

Also to be clear: this person is not an ex. We met when I was 12, at a week long summer camp, and he was 17. I exchanged 2 or 3 letters with him--and then had no contact written or otherwise for..30 years.

Honestly, that is creepy as fuck. Both that a 17 year old would exchange letters with a 12 year old, and that he would come back as a 47 year old trying to find the now-older 12 year old he wanted to bang in his later teen years. I'm sorry you had to go through that.

I don't have much ATM, but I hope that helps!

My only craft skill is carpentry. I do kind of want to try it while I'm RPing, considering the above suggestion re: knitting between poses.

<OOC> Sorry for the delay, I was sanding a chair.

@Macha said in Random As...:

I guess for me, I miss writing with someone else that can throw something in to work around, and I don't get that when it's just me.

This is the reason I'm trying to get back into the hobby a little bit. I absolutely have no time to MU* in a substantial way, but I have very few creative outlets that like... creative writing. The writing I do now is very dry and technical, so the MU* scene is attractive for that purpose. I've been sort of playing Silent Heaven when I can, and I made a character on Liberation (though I haven't had a scene yet), and it's started to scratch that itch, but I feel like I'm leaning too heavily into my nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s.

@Derp is correct. You'd want to either remove the room's parent or re-parent the room to some other template. I'm pretty sure this requires wiz-level access, or just specific build @powers. So, generally it's not open to players.

I suppose you could write code that forces a new description on the room (no clue how you'd do that, personally, but yeah @Cobaltasaurus would know for certain), but if you're building a grid and want to have separate room templates for different locations (say you have a regular grid and then a secret grid that's all magical and shit) you'd create two room parents and then @parent them accordingly. That'd be the cleanest way to do that.

@Catsmeow said:

@2mspris

You are so old! Before online training? Tell me of your old days, were there dinosaurs?
I kid, I probably beat you at being old.

You'll probably hate me for this, but I can't remember not having internet. It was dial-up, but I think I was seven or eight when AOL/Prodigy/etc. were making the rounds. Not that I really did anything on the internet at that age, mind. And thankfully, now that I'm thirty, I can talk down to the successive generation about how we didn't have all this instagrammys and facebooks and you had to walk uphill both ways in the snow (in southern Georgia?) to like a friend's post.

It's very much an early access game, but if people are into "working class" space stories about people trying to get by in a dystopian late capitalist space hell, I highly suggest checking out Ostranauts. It's set in the same universe as NEO Scavenger, and is in a pretty good state. The character creation is based around adventures prior to the start of the game (reminds me of Traveler a little bit) and your primary goal is to keep up the mortgage on your ship by doing odd jobs and scrapping ships around Ganymede, where you start out. It's sort a tech-noir space futurism thing.

The devs just put out a new update that includes a way to sell ships that you've found and rebuilt. All ship designs are skeletal frameworks and you can build whatever you want on top of them!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1022980/Ostranauts/