Best posts made by surreality

@Misadventure said in Forum Factions:

1993 I believe, at Cave Muck.

This makes me weirdly happy. Like it was the genesis point for homo sapiens imaginarious, or something along those lines.

@crusader Actually, while those examples are great for 'this is how this faction within WoD might look', the majority of those worlds do not ever imply that there are vampires of any other kind in them. Blade and Underworld are the big exceptions here. For all we know of most of those settings, that's the one kind of vampire out there -- not one kind of many.

There's a fairly good example of factions in Lumley's fiction, but none of that has made it to the big screen yet. (Someday, maybe!) It's what a fair bit of the notions of the Tzimisce from oWoD were drawn from, however, if I had to guess. (It's not a hard guess if you're familiar with the Necroscope series, which makes the Tzim look pretty tame by comparison at points.)

None of these -- barring Blade, oddly enough, as the closest -- has the broader scope suggestive of WoD vampire more broadly.

@Ghost ...that is weird, wild genius, and I want to know, too.

The Catspaw series by Joan D. Vinge. Futuristic, a little bit cyberpunk in places, very strange, but neat.

A world based on Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions.

Big Trouble in Little China. (Still hoping that project gets off the ground, @Lithium!)

The Haven TV series.

@Ghost There are a bunch of google collab things for Stability that are (relatively) self-explanatory, and if you don't mind slow and limited sizes, they can be fiddled with free or pretty steadily for $10/month for more reliable access.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jUwJ0owjigpG-9m6AI_wEStwimisUE17

^ That one is pretty solid.

(It says 'no NSFW filter' but don't assume that's because it's for porn-hounds; they set up a NSFW autodetect that is notoriously and often hilariously buggy. You'd see buildings, clouds, rocks all censored to much gnashing of teeth in the beta because the autodetect thought it might be a nipple.)

Another one I would think would be neat: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It would be hard as hell, but it could potentially be pretty neat for a smaller game.

Oh, shit. How I forgot this one I do not know: Vampire Hunter D. Deeply weird, surreal as hell, futuristic and strange and full of bizarre things, but with the nifty gothic vibe going on.

Nightbreed. ALL THE FUCK YES. (The weirdass homebrew system I've been working on was originally to make a game along these lines.)

Necroscope. On earth, off earth... either way would be badass, though off-earth would be pretty fucking epic.

...as a double-post addendum to that, there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default, where folks should feel comfortable writing things like this and really should not be objecting to them in the same way you wouldn't go into a strip club on a WoD game and bitch up a storm if someone was posing a strip tease.

There will be brothels on grid. It would be absurd to not have more sexually-charged if not outright NSFW content going on in the public areas of a brothel.

...am I going to need to put up warning labels on the exits for these? I am hoping not, but I will if I have to.

@kitteh said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@surreality It doesn't need to autosubmit, but for example something like what BSGU or some of the comic games have that can at least spit back out the scene without need for further cleaning. I'm aware you can do some of this in a client, but there's inevitably stuff it misses.

Something like that could definitely be looked into, yeah. I didn't know there were any that would do that; that could work.

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

there are some areas of the grid that WILL be labeled NC17 by default

It makes more sense, and I highly approve of this. I've played my share of brothel workers etc, and at locations like this it makes sense that you'll have some degree of public sexuality. I'm thinking of any scene at the brothel in Black Sails, for instance. There's basically never a shot that doesn't have a boob in it, and people may be in laps, but people probably aren't straight-up fucking on the tables... most of the time.

Pretty much that. I have, too. They're often a lot of fun.

There will be a brothel specializing in, uh, 'the unusual', so mermaid prostitutes ahoy, mateys. Seriously, if this wasn't on the grid within a week of open I would have been stunned anyway, but I think it'd do best as an NPC-run 'open to anyone' faction, per the examples from earlier in the thread. If somebody wants to take that on as their PC to run it under those terms that's doubly awesome.

It's actually fascinating how much NOT TS these characters do on a lot of games that people rarely suspect. It's their job. Do you spend all of your free time doing what you do for your job? NAWP. Sometimes when I want to make a character that doesn't RP TS often I'll go this route, for that very reason. (Edit: Because... most people offscreen most of their dayjob on games anyway.)

Idelle just might be my hero.

(Edit: Seriously, who one of my alts at least is will be zero mystery after that based on PB alone.)

@Packrat That's quite well put, really. I'd sum it up as something like 'they all want to be the lead from Da Vinci's Demons', though I'm not sure how many people have watched it. (It definitely went to those kinds of places, and often aspired to be clever-er-er-er-er-er than that, even.)

That's a good point, though: how do you reasonably place those limits without getting extreme?

How much leeway does someone really have to say: That could feasibly happen IC but we really don't want to take the game in that direction.

I don't think it's necessary to, say, uncreate bats just so people won't make gunpowder from guano (though if someone wants to do that, that's their call and I support their right and choice to make it), or perhaps more accurately, I do not feel it should not be necessary to go that far in order to be able to say: we really don't want to go in that direction with this game/do not want to drastically change the game world in the ways that idea would inevitably change it.

There's some real questions there, I think, and I'm somebody who loves the idea of people being able to add things to a world pretty freely. At what point does the 'little thing' someone wants to add change the game world, or the experience of the game, profoundly enough that it's just not the same game anybody was initially drawn to/initially wanted to play in/would still want to play in?

This is definitely one of the harder 'no's to articulate but it's possibly one of the most necessary ones, not as a control freak trip, but in order to keep the game people signed on to play, well, still the game people signed on to play.

@Seraphim73 There are aspects of this I like and some I don't, and I'll only really comment at all because I'm tinkering along similar lines, but from a different inspiration. (Aspirations in WoD. I don't think theirs is as ideal as it could be, either.)

The one thing that you can run into as a problem with this kind of system is that you have to be really careful when you set up those goals/aspirations/whatever you want to call them. If they're reliant at all on other things coming to pass, or other people, you can end up completely stalled out if <thing> gets endlessly delayed by something beyond your control, <person> you were supposed to do <thing> with ghosts on you, or <person> the goal was about quits/flakes/otherwise decides to chase pixies.

As a result, I like this as an avenue open for advancement, but I'm not keen on the idea of it being the only one, if that makes sense.

@Pandora said in X-Cards:

I invite anyone with a particularly hard-line trigger (not someone that knows someone with a trigger, first-hand experience only please) that is willing to discuss it here or privately, to explain to me why it'd be better for them to leave a scene-in-progress - thereby inviting speculation or requests for explanation at that time, than to avoid the matter from the start.

First, I don't disagree with you. Not even in the smallest way.

I have one 'do not ever, ever, ever go there' trigger for RP. It's obscure, but not super obscure, and it has come up.

I mention it when it does, and say I'm going to need to work around that one: I'm posing out, or they're reposing.

It's hit or miss if I mention it on a wiki or otherwise. On Shang, when I would RP there, I had it listed. On a not-for-smut-purposes game, I may or may not, unless smut or combat comes up, in which case I will pre-advise if things seem to be going in that direction.

The hard line? Choking/strangling. No. Just no. Sorry-not-sorry, no. (Not exactly a fringe kink, but definitely more fringe outside of kink to the extent that I've never had it come up or threaten to come up in 20+ years outside of that context.)

Some reasons I am, admittedly, sometimes reluctant to plaster this everywhere:

• Rarely relevant.

• Fairly specific; I have never actually seen anyone else in the hobby with this as a hard limit, therefore this could be making my characters known even if I don't wish to do so. I would not list this anywhere now because of the person who chases me around, for instance, as they are aware of it.

• All the motherfuckers who want to be 'an exception to prove it can be fun'. No, you jerk. NO. It is not going to be fun for me, full stop.

• All the people who feel they are entitled to the explanation of why, just because they see 'I do not want this happening to my character IC, period'. Why is not a secret: someone tried to strangle me to death in my teens and almost succeeded in killing me. That is automatically not fun. Do I care who knows this? Nope. That isn't the problem. It's not a secret. You know what I don't want, though? Someone's idle fucking curiosity derailing my day by asking me 'why?' like some doe-eyed child who never planned to bring it up in RP/a scene anyway, thus calling said incident to mind uninvited no less than it would have if it came up in a scene.

• People who assume it's the same as saying 'nothing bad can happen to my PC!' No, it's not. Not in the least. Stab them, behead them, explode them, turn them to stone, drop them off a cliff, shoot them, strap them to a cliff like Prometheus to have an angry bird eat their liver on the daily, whatever, just not that one thing. To others around my character? Whatevs.

So there are, actually, some reasons, and I understand them, even if I agree with the general premise here.

ETA: Obviously, there are also the shitlords who will see that and go out of their way to incorporate it in play, and attempt to force it into play repeatedly, to get their jollies by upsetting someone RL. The answer re: dealing with that sort is painfully obvious, however: if staff won't ban for that kind of RL-targeted aggro behavior, get the fuck off that game and burn the world setting in your client like a bridge to ne'er deign cross again.

@Ghost I'm going to have to give this whole premise a solid no.

It isn't that I don't see what you're getting at. I do.

The problem is that you're conflating things that are not the same. This is not apples to apples, it's more like apples to rabbit stew.

Yes, for the MU community, something designed for tabletop games among strangers at cons is not going to work without some sort of adaptation. This is not news. Why does everyone keep acting like this is news?

People discussing the ways this could reasonably apply to a MU setting are not talking about using whatever this specific system is, as written. People are discussing means of avoiding content that is legitimately problematic for players, not their characters, and tools or processes that may facilitate this, none of which are 'that system, precisely as written' at this point.

So maybe just leave that behind now; it's got a fork in it as originally written, and is done.

Top to bottom, WTF is happening here?

I'm still absorbing this, so will likely try to talk to you privately later.

That said: anybody who gets the sadly typical MSB urge to quibble about the form of an apology or whatever, I will quite happily textually slap upside the head with the equivalent a giant mallet studded with nails.

@bored said in Empire State Heroes Mush:

Comics are weird.

...and clearly not subject to encumbrance rules. It's... I am in gawping awe of that image.

Stuff I have noticed as a player, and from behind the scenes:

• The lack of XP/newbie vs. dino dynamics is not to be underestimated.

• Yes, I have totally made it a point to try to make people sniffle in death poses, and I am not the only one. (Sometimes, it's a pact!) This can be more fun than most folks probably think. (Also, proooooobably only @gryphter will understand why I am legit terrified at the amazing teamup hacking roll that literally just happened while I was typing this.)

• Bot is amazingly flexible, and runs with ideas. The specific setup of the game, structurally, allows for this very well. The willingness to do it is something to not ever underestimate as a fantastic part of the game.

@gryphter ...I dunno, I had to go sleep. (Not even kidding! I mean... )

mietze nails it, really. There are a lot of issues with it for this particular hobby.

I've actually done all three of those examples, and done quite well at each of them -- but I did pick them over M* every time, as I was M*ing through all of them. (There are current rather than former ones, too, but nnngh that's talking about work and nah.)

We deal with some horribly entitled people at art shows. One of those jobs in particular had a storm of entitled craziness in it. None of them hold a candle, sadly, to a lot of what I've seen in M*. I was able to weather things better than I might have otherwise in the especially troublesome one based on the M* experience, believe it or not.