Best posts made by surreality

I like original sci-fi. I had an idea for one I love, but I just cannot do in depth tech questions. They give me a blazing migraine faster than a white background web page filled with flashing bright cyan and yellow text. I could probably provide as much info as you'd get from your average TV show or movie about how things work without stressing it, but that doesn't tend to be enough for players drawn to the tech aspects of the game, so I've more or less tabled it forever and ever and ever, amen.

It's been a fantastic weekend for fantasy series between Carnival Row and Dark Crystal.

We're usually lucky to get one thing like this in a year, let alone two in a weekend. Spoiled as hell now.

@apos Except... no. Not even slightly.

That's the model you're extrapolating this advice from, and you've gone so far as to make a lot of incorrect assumptions in the process about why people do or don't do things to the extent that it's starting to become offensive and obnoxious.

You're also making the assumption that the game's intent is to be top-down with staff-led plots, which also is not a given as many games strive to empower players with information their characters do not have in order to enable them to run plots and storylines for themselves.

The above is actually the norm for non-OT games based on existing systems, in which players have vast amounts of information about the way things work than their characters do.

Look, @faraday and I have had a huge argument about this before re: 'what is essential and what's too much and what's too little in a sci-fi setting' and we're still both agreeing wholeheartedly that your suggested approach is not appropriate to this circumstance. That should definitely be telling you something.

What you're describing about 'you have to be able to effectively manage your time' is definitely true; too much of the rest relies on a lot of underlying assumptions that are steering you more than just a little bit wrong in terms of your ultimate conclusions. (Proper time management an essential for any staffer or creator, whether they're running plots or not.)

@Taika said in The Descent MUX:

Remember the nightmare Reno had when they had to rip out homebrew wolf and put in real wolf?

...I could write a dissertation on this. Please don't make me. I'm wordy enough as it is. But I could write a dissertation on this. It is for everyone's benefit that I beg and plead that no one makes me explain because it would be one.

Trust @Taika and me also when I say: no truer words have ever been uttered.

@rnmissionrun Oh, definitely.

I think that's the thing, though -- it needs to be written down in the first place. Then, all you have to do from there is point to a link with the answers. Then, if someone still has questions, their questions will (ideally, if they bothered to read it, and not everyone does) they will be more specific and much, much easier and faster to answer.

Anybody doing anything OT who isn't either writing everything down where everyone can get to it (in an open setup) or where fellow staff can refer to it as needed (in games with secrets, which almost all do in some respect or another) is making way more work for themselves than necessary.

@eye8urcake Empathy hug sent, if welcome, 'cause... nnnnngh, yeah.

@GangOfDolls said in The 100: The Mush:

The art of magnificent assholery is poorly understood and the players who are taking it too far, who think they're building an air of mystery that's meant to intice us to come back and peel away more of the onion? They are often creating a bar so high that not even the people that can sing the high note in the Star Spangled Banner can get over it. And the reality is -- no one with a little self-respect for the way they want to spend their limited free time to play in a game after a certain point is going to enjoy bashing their head into the same wall over and over and over again just to flatter your mean as fuck with no apparent upside PC.

This needs to be bronzed. Bronzed and quoted in every CG room or newsfile or cg-help wiki page going forward until the end of fucking time.

No, seriously, I may want to steal this some day for exactly this purpose. May I? Will attribute however is desired if so.

@apos What @faraday and I keep trying to tell you, though, is that the audience for an OT sci-fi game pretty much demands that, and will not even consider play without it.

You can say 'tell them no' and insist that it's the only way you'll get the game done, but it will then fail for one of the following reasons:

1. You get stuck in the trap of filling in all the gaps you left and have the same problem of not being able to do anything else when people do show up, and when you tell them 'no, that's not important,' they additionally get offended and leave because it was important to them.

2. There's not enough information for the target audience to show up to participate in the first place, so no one ever shows up and you have all the time in the world to twiddle your fingers watching the tumbleweeds blow.

That's the problem.

Let's admit it, that one's extra funny because all the seemingly flaky scatterbrained stuff makes it seem like we'd just be THE WORST EVER in an actual crisis.

And yet no.

Like, somehow I managed to be the person freaking out the least while almost dying a few years back. I mean... how was I the only one with their shit together under those circumstances?

@Ganymede said in Kushiel's Debut:

Let's pull out some undisputed facts: 2-year plot; limited seats "at the table"; game-wide effect. I hope you can see why other long-term players might be miffed at being excluded.

This is what I'm looking at as the 'lesson' to take away from this thread. (Not saying 'y'all need to learn a thing', I'm saying this is what I'm going to keep in mind after reading about what went down here for myself.)

Mostly, if something has broad interest and impact, create space for more involvement.

I am not super familiar with the setting, but I would think there could have been something like 'oh, each X gets 2-4 representatives' rather than one only, perhaps, and it is a small enough change conceptually that probably would have gone a long way to preventing this from becoming an issue. That, or 'each only one needs X support people around them for special tasks X, Y, and Z also'. Something. There's always going to be something.

Is that a nightmare hassle to organize and arrange? Well, yeah, a lot more than getting five people together is. But if you have a two-year time frame to wrangle that it, sooner or later there's gonna be a window that will allow for it.

@apos You're welcome to keep having that opinion, but you're not going to convince me to join you on that hill. After 20+ years of watching such games come and go, and hearing precisely the same thing from everyone else who has watched such games come and go, with you as the sole exception?

Sorry, but no.

This 'story rich' vs. 'data available' thing is also not an either-or prospect... at all, and no one is suggesting anything on the level of '30+ years of fiction's worth of exposition' like Star Trek.

You keep setting up all of these strawmen and they aren't helping make your point in the least beyond the 'you have a limited amount of time like everybody else and you must use it wisely' which is complete 'duh' territory to anybody who has ever even played on a game, let alone staffed on one, or tried to create one, especially create one from scratch.

@Coin said in Kushiel's Debut:

@Pondscum said in Kushiel's Debut:

I think all we really need is to close ALL GAMES and make one giant melting pot game so we lords and ladies lovers can go smack the fuck out of those WoD and Westeros bitches.

It's all fun and games until people from Shang show up.

What are you even talking about? That is already more or less the best description of Shang on the forum to date.

@ganymede said in Vampire Requiem 2nd Edition Bloodlines Question:

What a lot of 1E games lack is focus or direction for their bloodlines. It's not enough to just be flavor; if bloodlines are to be meaningful, they have to be acknowledged and affixed within the setting somehow. So, in my opinion, game designers need to pay heed to what they want to do with the bloodlines, and not be afraid to reject requests to add more.

This, times several thousand. Though not WoD, just going through the skills listing for a project over this weekend has been a nightmare -- there's a lot of them that are meaningful in a larger world, but in the setting I picked (for a reason, dammit)? No. So they aren't going in.

I added this line to a file earlier tonight, and sleep dep inspired or not, it's staying:

Things being developed by an entire team of dedicated researchers in a mysterious secret lair in Japan with billions in funding behind them or similar experimental weirdness you found on youtube and dialed up past eleven are not even going to be considered no matter how many links you send to show how plausible it is that you cobbled one together in your root cellar; don't even ask.

^ Do not be afraid to do the same. You will have to at some point. It is easier to get it out of the way up front.

@Thenomain I kinda see this as the same thing. Some themes are more narrowly defined than others; this is a pretty narrowly-defined one.

I mean, arguably, someone could create a game set in an all girls Catholic boarding school in the 1950s, allowing players to only play students -- in which case 'no male PCs' would be in effect. I don't imagine a game like that will ever come about, but it definitely would fit the 'the theme is narrow enough to be exclusionary by default' in ways I can't really get angry about or feel put out by.

It could be argued that it's thematically exclusionary, but I think (and I think this is agreement here) that's something of a diminishment of what 'exclusionary' really means.

Generally, I do recall a lot of grousing in the late 90s/early 00s re: "OMG why are all the straight chars from my favorite comic suddenly gay when I log into a comics game?" Which, if a game is advertising itself as true to canon, is a legit complaint, as it would be a legit complaint if someone made a canon gay character straight. (Not so shockingly, back thenabouts, I somehow doubt people groused as much about the latter as they did the former.)

So I do see where that statement comes from, partly because if I recall correctly, I've seen ads for this game on MUDconnector/etc. going back a very long time. So while this may not be so much the case now (I dunno, I don't do comics games), I would not doubt for a second that it was the environment of the time in which the game was originally made.

That it was happening often enough for there to be all the grousing in the first place also suggests there's definitely an audience for it. If that's the case, hell... making a game exclusively dedicated to that is, IMHO, pretty laudable. It gives the people looking for this specific versatility a safe space to explore it, and spares the people who hate it when people do that the grief. I mean I just cannot remotely see this as a bad thing.

@arkandel Because there's more or less one enforced reaction to "I have stabbed you," if the roll to stab succeeds.

Think of how many different ways, "I cast a love spell on you!" ends if the roll to cast the spell succeeds, and how many examples there are in fiction of this going in very different directions than the caster intended.

None of that is new news.

The goals are different, and they're different stages, in a sense. Stabbing is one stage: stab, there is damage done. Love spell causing love is one stage. If the caster was content with the amount of interpretation that's left up to -- from slavish devotion to happy sex toy to possessive stalker -- that would also be a one stage goal. But that's not what people are typically trying to accomplish; they want it in the specific form they want and only that.

This is roughly on par with insisting that because you succeeded on your roll to stab that you now get to pick where the damage happened (without ever having to call a shot or take a penalty to hit or higher difficulty or whatever) and simultaneously sliced through the character's belt so their pants fell off and they mooned the crowd.

This is a not insignificant problem.

@Rinel In my case, I suspect any lingering bits have to do with 'the more someone nags me to do something, the more I want to avoid doing it'.

To me, that just feels like a normal human response, but apparently it is not.