Best posts made by somasatori

@FirePuff
Hey, we sorta traded places, almost. I moved here from Oklahoma City about five years ago. I've wanted to move to Austin for a couple years now. One of these days.

You're right about the gaming industry here. It's mostly local indie folks that are making arthaus games; nothing at all like Bioware or anything. I used to live across the street from that Leftbank studio just before the Broadway Bridge, and when I would go out to smoke, I'd talk to a really nice couple that were talking about starting up an indie gaming company to reinvigorate the adventure game genre (like Monkey's Island and shit). This was pre-Telltale Games Walking Dead, so I don't know what happened with that.

That mentality does kinda get into you a bit, though. Like I've even come to start having a knee-jerk reaction if someone with California plates pulls in front of me, like FUCKING CARPETBAGGERS, GO HOME. There's a really good exploration of that mentality in a book called Wiser (and the author was recently interviewed on the Daily Show) about how groupthink can affect your logic in certain situations.

@Luna -- Some of the things in Portlandia aren't too out of bounds. Obviously the mayor doesn't have random citizens helping him out with day-to-day business, but nuggets of truth. I dated this waitress over the summer (who was hardcore into indie music, had full sleeve tattoos and 2" gauged ears, naturally) who did have customers asking about how the animals were treated and whether they lived a good life.

There are a collection of RL peeves for me illustrated in the above. I hate the terms liberal or conservative (in reference to the book that I mentioned) because it's a limiting factor and drives an ideological wedge into your thought processes on how you react to things; I really hate it when people apparently try to make themselves feel better by eating "cruelty-free" food, because there's a good chance they'll eat it regardless and you don't know if someone's lying, plus dying isn't particularly humane; and I'm not a fan of artist collectives that charge an exorbitant fee for the sake of you living among them in a shitty loft.

@skew
Documentary films about the culture in Wellington.

I... I love you.

Best SimCity ever.

What about a Changeling game where a whole Freehold has to flee. Like, they're all members of this big Freehold in Sydney, Australia, and they have to jump ship because of these crazy Privateers and Loyalists coming in and killing a bunch of them there. But everyone's got some secret reason to leave Sydney anyway. But they all wind up on the same plane. Anyway, the pilot realizes they have to turn back and get off course, then the plane crash lands on an island of mysterious mystery, where there's a monster made out - stick with me here - smoke. And then there's all of this other insane stuff that goes on, like polar bears.

But then it just turns out that it was someone using Contracts of Dream while in the airplane and they all crashed and died at the end?

It could just be called Changeling: The

All you need are some good chemistry recipes and a zamboni and you're doin' fine.

But yes, I'd be fully down with playing on an original sci-fi game where all of the big damned heroes/Lords of the Universe are concerned about saving the station and fighting off the aliens while the players are mostly just regular dudes/ettes fixing the intercom, mopping the floors, occasionally beating a bug monster to death with said mop, and so on.

Cool things, apocalypse edition:

Learn what would happen in the event of a major meteor strike based on variables you select.

Google Map your city, pick a nuclear weapon, and see where the thermal radius reaches, pressure/airburst, and fallout would go.

Send zombies to your neighborhood and see how it'd play out (this is actually a game based on satellite imagery of a neighborhood.)

@Sunny
I've been waiting seven years to make this (relatively lame) joke!

It looks like we've got a motley crew of potential staffers ready to make Mop Crusade MUX between the three of us.

@Aria Good luck! I'm about to start on my PhD in clinical psychology myself. Hopefully the car alarm stopped enough to give you some peace!

@Kanye-Qwest said in The 100: The Mush:

[...] if it has moving parts entropy will eventually kill it [...]

True in the tech world, and true in how I live my life.

@Arkandel

You can't be told about how cool Exalted is; you have to be shown. </morpheus>

But seriously, the game's an eastern fantasy-based system that incorporates a lot of anime-like systems into a very rich and detailed world. All of the splats from WoD are there in some fashion if you squint a bit, and there's so much lore that it's one of the fullest games I've ever played. Plus, you get bonus dice for describing your actions in a cool way (stunt dice). The character types (Exalts) are all very different from one another with a lot of history built into them.

Redemption's a big theme for the Solar Exalted, who went crazy at the end of the First Age and started committing great depravities on humans and other Exalts alike. They were ousted by the Dragon-Blooded (Terrestrial Exalted) who seek to remain in power. I'm not sure about 3rd Ed, but in 2nd Ed, the leader of the Dragon-Blooded had just come back from the Yomi Hells and was basically made into an evil, evil creature.

Protecting creation is another big theme, since you've got the Deathlords and their Abyssal Exalted, and the Fair Folk on the edges of Creation in the Wyld. So you have to be a big damn hero and save the world, more or less. It's just fun, and doesn't have the grind that D&D does, nor the inherent WHY ME that WoD does.

If you're a fan of Philip K. Dick or speculative fiction at all, then you should check out the Amazon pilot for the small screen adaptation of The Man in the High Castle. This is personally my favorite PKD novel, and some of the elements of the story are different, but they don't detract from it at all.

It's free for right now while people are voting on it, but if it goes to full series production (fingers crossed), it'll be available through Amazon Prime.

It's right here: The Man in the High Castle.

@Bobotron

This sounds great. All of the thought you've put into the vampiric houses seems like it'd be a very well-crafted world. I really like the Roman style there. I'd definitely be interested in playing on a game like this. It sounds like it'd be rife with a mix of scheming, politicking, and so on, without having to deal with the systems already in place from nWoD. It'd be a nice change of pace. Keep on keepin' on, sir.

This was tried once, as Depraved Creations. Originally it was supposed to be an open cgen PvP-focused WoD game (it was billed as a "PK-fest"), but we all ended up becoming friendly with each other and there was a sept with Bastet, Garou, a werebear, and a couple Rokea. Also the Traditions started working together with the Technocracy.

Not saying it can't work, but you'd have to probably enforce the PK-required policy, otherwise everyone will ignore it and do their own thing.

Like any policy on a MU*, really.

@Miss-Demeanor Yeah, I don't quite understand that either. Basic hygiene seems like it should just be a thing everyone does. Maybe I'm just really anal about it, but I tend to shower multiple times a day, especially if I'm working out or something sweat-inducing. That's another thing that kind of bothers me, the people that go to the gym or go running and just smell like that awful human stench all day. It's not even BO, it's just that stale, stank skin smell.

I wound up caving and grabbed a character. Hopefully things will get less hectic fairly soon so I can do something with him. Corporate reporter!

@ThatOneDude said in PVP games/elements?:

@somasatori said in PVP games/elements?:

This was tried once, as Depraved Creations. Originally it was supposed to be an open cgen PvP-focused WoD game (it was billed as a "PK-fest"), but we all ended up becoming friendly with each other and there was a sept with Bastet, Garou, a werebear, and a couple Rokea. Also the Traditions started working together with the Technocracy.

Not saying it can't work, but you'd have to probably enforce the PK-required policy, otherwise everyone will ignore it and do their own thing.

Like any policy on a MU*, really.

Yeah but that's cool. I mean the idea of that element always being there...

Like I was laughing playing Division like a week ago. Myself and 2 friends go in the dark zone, we're fighting enemies and then in comes 2 other agents. Suddenly its a mexican stand off, we're taking position to make sure they don't attack us, they're doing the same and then we start killing badguys together. Then at some point one team member got caught in a cross fire and we went into full PK mode...

The point is the threat/or ability for someone to turn on anyone at anytime adds some extra umf that most mu's don't have. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah. That does make sense. It could potentially work, especially with an external adversarial group that's pushing at the players to fight them. There are several good systems that could work for this, all the way from D&D to CoD. If you did it as a D&D/Pathfinder game, you could make it so that dungeons and adventure are few and far between. Make it a relatively low-magic setting, where magic items are incredibly powerful and often storied and highly sought. If one group of adventurers catches wind of a +1 sword, it's a big deal and then word gets out, so you've got multiple adventuring companies trying to play king of the mountain for the item. This would more or less enforce itself, since D&D is definitely a game of He Who Has The Most Toys. Throw in some monsters to create the tension of "well, we have to work together to put down this Beholder," and then after the Beholder's dead, the fights break out over who gets the spoils.

CoD, you could do it as Geist-only, since Krewes can be generally antagonistic toward one another. Set it in a city or area where there's a large group of Sacrosanct that have taken up a lot of the city's resources and claim most of it for themselves, where initially Krewes might have to work together. But then they start to realize that Haunts and Cenotes are in short supply and one claims one, another claims it back, and there you go.

You could even do this with something like Exalted. Make a purely Dragon-Blooded game with the idea of the Wyld Hunt being around, so the players have some reason to try to work together at some points, but they're all trying to get their piece of the Creation pie, as it were. This way, you'd have one Circle of Dragon-Blooded fighting other Circles of Dragon-Blooded because they feel they're more worthy to receive, say, this particular Artifact that's been willed to members in either Circle, or the lands of their family, or whatever. Dragon-Blooded are incredibly political and will tend to kill each other if they can do it quietly instead of argue it out.

Alternately, you could probably even make a game similar to the Division, where you have a Dark Zone (or hell, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) and you'd have separate teams going in for their own reasons, and might end up in similar situations to the one you described. There are more than a few ways to cover that kind of thing.

Tension's the key there, though. Enforcing the tension that no one's really your ally unless you've specifically gotten them to join your crew (and even then, who knows), and everyone's kinda out for themselves, that'll create enough tension where the PCs shouldn't trust each other because they have no reason to trust each other. It'd be an interesting experiment.

@Duntada
It's important to be at your freshest when you're fighting against the widespread systematic abuse of power intrinsic to large governmental systems. No one seems to get this.

Edit to add: I'm too old to be an anarchist anymore. The best I can do now is flee into the woods, grow a beard, and become an existentialist.

The patent office required us to trademark it when we were making The Reach.