Posts made by Taika

When we get moved into the new house (ha ha ha ha ha ha sob ha) we'll be about a hundred feet from an 8,000sqft lot we own and have enough space in the garage to finally dig into doing some small scale meat raising for the family, with intent to use mostly us-raised meats (so we know it isn't cruel), and have a massive 8,000sqft garden for the rest of our stuff. So we know what goes into.

The plan is to go keto/clean food, to give it the old college try to get my autoimmune shit under control (RA, fibro, chronic fatigue).

If we had Impossible Burgers, we would give them a try, for sure, but depending on how the label reads for carbs and sugars, etc, they might not get beyond being tried or had as a healthy 'treat' here and there.

Live-action Land Before Time.

earperks Alas, I cannot really use you /now/, but sooon steeples fingers

Vamp, Wolf, Changeling, Mage, M/M+ (None of the templates from Hurt Locker).

As for open? I'm not sure, yet, on an ish. There's a lot of brain storming and world building going on, as well as the data entry stuff.

Does 'before the next round of Autumn Holidays' help?

The Lair code isn't Theno's. The original plots code I found in a MU* code archive with some googling.

The current version of it that we have? I don't care if other people want it. It's takes some fiddling, since it posts to bboards AND opens a +request.

Quick update on the progress of things.

Alts will be limited to two, to start. 1 per sphere. So no double dipping with a vampire AND a ghoul, or a wolf AND a Blooded.

A bunch of code is in and updated. +plots is amazing, now. And some other bits and bobs are in. (Thanks, Theno!)

Data entry is coming along now that I've finished rejiggering colors and such.

Families have been cut from 20 to 5.

A lot of what is ahead now is stuffing things into the wiki, desc'ing, and building the stories for families and mystery cults, figuring out Bloodlines, lodges, and legacies. Entitlements are so personal to a pc, I don't have plans for pre-fabbing any.

The to-do list is still a bit daunting, but progress is chugging along nicely.

I loved the IC Rumors rfk had on their wikis.

Okay, so how many?

Forcing people away from friends, or to play with people they don't want to. Or, sometimes, even pc's that clash (cause, let's face us. Some days we are just like: not you (generic 'you'), not today. Maybe next week. Then we can break noses and laugh it out ooc and hate each other ic.)

That's why I asked what was meant by forcing people to do the thing. I'm just not sure, as Arkandel said, a heavy handed approach would have the effect that's wanted.

We have 5 families set up per sphere. They haven't been set in stone, yet, and I need to add some more since Changeling is going in. They won't get a mechanical bonus, but being able to 'gen into a group /without/ a 'must play with if you don't fit' obligation would be really nice.

I hadn't thought about making them cross-sphere, but you bet a bunch of them will be, now. That's a great idea ^.^

Forcing how, @Admiral ?

I don't know if it helps, but I'm taking (sort of) a more single sphere approach to the game as a whole? Rather than 'X staff is only Y sphere', it's more 'staff is staff, and some staff just know more about Y splat, so ask them about those specifics'. I agree that a lot of times each sphere becomes it's own island, and I really want to work towards breaking that down some, so there's less isolation that regard.

The problem is that ST's are getting harder to find. And -good-, flexible, non-railroady ST's are harder. Not -here-, of course. But on games, they're like unicorns and pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

That's part of why ST'ing is so heavily incentivized on CoS.

Base xp: 1.4/week
ST a scene: +.4 for the scene, +2 for ST'ing it.
ST a scene from +plots? Have another +.2

@arkandel Which is interesting. And I don't think you mean 'just plot', either. I think you're more referencing that sense of /investment/. Shoving plot at people isn't the magical fix-all. When I can catch @Ganymede I'm going to pick her brain and show her what I've got in my head and what the grid is looking like.

One of the ideas was for the coin system to set minimum payments based on various Statuses.

So a Status (Organized Crime) 4 favor will have a base cost of, say 40 coins and negotiate up/down from there. Which'll bring status back into favor as something people invest in, and have use for. Even mortals, since, if they know of the supernatural world, they can negotiate for coins, just like anyone else.

But that's spitballing! We'll see how the chatter goes and what comes out the other end of it.

I won't dismiss an idea to spread things a bit. The problem is a lot of the time it becomes 'x sphere jumps through y hoops' while 'z sphere has v hoops' and it's all a big, inconsistent mess between the spheres.

So I guess that's the root of my idea that it's one of those energy sink things.

I want my consistency and simplicity, damnit.

There's only a handful of things that aren't self spend, and that's because they need notes to be set (like safe place, haven, vinculum cause no one should spend xp on that, etc).

Honestly, I figure if someone has the xp they should be able to buy the thing. They've put in time, or effort, or ST'd or whatever. OOC devotion to the game, to get the xpses, for the ic goodies.

I'd totally accept a note for renown, because there IS a story that needs to be there. A handful of small things, one big one, a mix? Whatever.

I don't care about sheets and xps or dice pools.

I care about the stories of the game, of the individual, of having fun. In the end, the sheet is just a tool, a guide. A means to an end.

And I -know- that's probably going to get me some side eye.

But this loosely feeds back into not dying on the xp hill, or the balancing the spheres hill.

I don't want to throttle one sphere or boost that one. By the book. Minimal hr's. Cause most of us, I believe, just want to tell our stories - violent, or sexy, or domestic, or sad, whatever rp is fulfilling - and the sheet is just a guideline. And if you have the xp, you've been active and playing and being the sticky stuff that helps hold a game together.

I don't even know if this makes sense. I'm super sleepy/tired after running errands all day and liable to nap for a bit real soon.

@ganymede Um. Yes. Fuck yes. All the yes. Let's do the amazing thing!

Yeah, but you get to run /anything/ vs prp limits (which need to be hashed out).

For alts, I'm currently leaning towards '1 per sphere'. So major template OR minor in a sphere, but not both. Have a vamp? Want to ghoul your mortal? Pick one.

As for Mage and Changeling having multiple things? I'm not sure. Part of that hesitancy comes from there not being a lot of experience with those two spheres on mushes. Changeling is brand spanking new and mage... I only remember one short lived game that had mage on it? And that was a few years ago? Squints

That said, IF players want to make their own and get people together to do it? Come talk to us. But don't expect it to 1) be easy, icly or 2) to not get fucked with by the other factions, the co-op, or the players/npcs. Big stuff needs big story or it's hollow.

I plan on most positions of power being npc's and have plans to handpick a few as people come in and things get going (as suggested earlier in the thread. I might be looking at @Ganymede. WANNA BE A PRINCE?!)

I also have plans for npc's that can keep shit from bottlenecking in case rl eats the pcs in those positions. Rules for all of that are on my to-do list for hammering out the specifics of what is reasonable and what is not, etc.

Oh, and as a side note, cause my mind wanders a lot: staff gets xp, same as pcs, when they st stuff. Dangles bait

@surreality If you want a 9mm, look into the Sig Compact (and there's one smaller, a Sub-Compact I believe. It's been years and it was too small for my hands). I know I'm late to the party.

There's just some arguments not worth having, and some things that, in the process of trying to fix them, get more broken.

For example:

I don't care about dinosaurs. We're low and slow xp, if someone is a dino? They busted their ass and helped build the game with their stories.

I don't care about trying to force an unnatural balance between spheres - I've seen it on a bunch of games and in debates here. People are never happy with the results, and often a handful of hr's throw things so out of wack tjat you need 10 more to try and fix it.

I hate hr's. It's hard enough for ST's to run stuff as it is, without adding 'Dig through an often disorganized wiki for obscure, badly written rulings' to the pile.

I find these things to be massive energy sinks with an itty bitty return that just isn't worth the amount of stress and burnout they can cause from arguing in circles.

@Ganymede is pretty familiar with my approach, by now, I feel. (Remember the dual praxes and the Diptheria plot, Gany? Man that was some backstabby fun.)

Make it easy for people to tell their stories. Hold people accountable and communicate about things. Be flexible as staff - if people wanna destroy chunks of grid? Let them. But you bet there will be consequences. @digging is easy. PK HAS to be warned of, and announced to staff ahead of time. No surprise kills, unless both parties are totally fine with it - yes, you can spend your own xp (mostly), yes staff will be watching and newspapering if a pk is requested/declared and someone dumps a bunch of xp.

Come, tell your crazy ass stories. DO over the top shit. Break things. Get your things broken. Live. Die. Start again. Fast, and fun, and simple. But also with a goal of creating that depth that makes people want to stick around. Some people want the kind of intensity and crazy from ye olde tabletop days of yore. Some people want the politics and the reasons to hold territory and work together. And I'm going to do my best to rally the growing team of folks on staff to give people that wild ride, those near death experiences that make people slump back in a chair after a scene and need a cigarette like: /fuck/.

Don't be afraid to lose, because losing can be amazing. Chicks dig scars.

This is where I'm coming from. I want to focus on story and building a fantastic game. I don't want to throw away energy worrying about things overly or getting sucked into arguments with no real end.