Best posts made by ThatGuyThere

I have always heard it used as the one you have the lowest number in. From the olden days of random char gen it was the stat you dumped your worst roll in.
Not sure when it first came into use but I know I heard it used that way when I was in junior high so mid-late 80s.

MUSoapbox has definitely improved as a place to discuss things compared to WORA but I would be lying if I didn't say that WORA was a hell of a lot more entertaining to read.

@Alamias said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I'd be willing to play on a 7th Sea game.

So off topic but I would dearly love any 7th Sea game not focused on pirates, or even set in a coast city so Pirate folks count get their pirate on and the folks like me who would rather be Three Musketeers or the Scarlet Pimpernel could get our swerve on as well.

@faraday
To me it comes down to the simple thing I care about the idea more than the form it is presented in and in fact prefer the blunt forms.
If i have an idea and it is a bad one, which everybody does at times, I would much rather have someone say "Hey dude that idea is shit and here why...." than have someone say, "Oh that is an interesting idea but I would change these things..." if they say the exact things need to be changes I am much more likely to change them with the first person way of telling me.
Though I will admit this is a cultural thing that transcends mushing more to how people relate to each other in general. For example I would much rather someone tell me "Fuck Off." in a direct manner then resorting to the American South translation of, "Bless your heart."
Forums with enforced politeness I wouldn't even bother to read let alone post on. (Now some readers might very well decide that is a feature not a big but that is beside the point.)
Now I completely agree with you on mot of the post here being unsuitable for BB post on games but he two environments are designed for different things. One a game the purpose is to have fun and provide entertainment for the other players. I place getting along with the other players at a high priority and often do not join in discussion to avoid having hurt feeling develop because those would be detrimental to the purpose of the game. Here the purpose is discussion of ideas and to a lesser extent calling out what we see as wrong on games. I do not care about getting along with people here, though i do with some nor do I avoid the possibility of hard feelings because those in no way prevent discussion.

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

The Cleveland Browns

technically the Cleveland Browns are around again they did bolt for greener pastures once already.

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

New question: The majority of reference imagery available for a variety of things -- a lot of it art -- includes painted bare breasts.

I would avoid bare breasts without warning no mater how tastefully done because different workplaces have difference standards, at one of my past jobs someone had to talk to HR because they were viewing Renaissance art in the break room during lunch, for a college coarse but someone notices nudity over her shoulder and filled a complaint. Yes the complaint was laughed at by those who handled it but it still became a part of the personnel file. So I would put a warning about the possibility of something being NSFW on any link leading to a page with the art. Or a general on the main page saying hey art like this is prevalent on this site if this will get you into trouble wait til you are home.

This is an out of left field suggestion but a setting I have always wanted to see an RPG made for and one that would offer interesting possibilities for a MUSH. Robert Aspirin's Myth/M.Y.T.H. Inc series of books. Now the books are mostly comedic and that exact tone might not work for a MU* since comedy is very hard to write but I think you could alter it a bit to lighthearted adventure times. Set it in the Bazaar at Deva(an entire dimension that is urban market place.) You have a central location with a reason for anyone to be there and easy access to other dimensional travel where plots could take place, also you don't have to worry about the content of plots happening in other dimensions since you can literally destroy another dimension without affecting the Bazaar you can let plot runners run wild and still preserve the base game world.
Not sure what system I would use, I mean fate could work as a default and I think anything too crunchy would bog down the setting but i know there is a significant anti-fate crowd. WoD would not be bad from a mechanical point of view but i am afraid using the system would also import a darkness to the setting that would not fit. (Though the book series does have a vampire fashion designer and a pair of werewolf authors the Wolf Writers that pare pretty obviously based on the Pini's of Elfquest fame.) Anything mechanically heavier then WoD would likely be too crunchy to keep the lighthearted feel.

@Roz said in Course Corrections:

Also, like, just make up plastic block toys that aren't called Legos?

But why not then call them Legos? Yes i know they would not be called such in character but if that is the simplest way to communicate what they are why not? I am sure I am in the minority but if I read plastic block toys I would think something closer to Lincoln Logs or just the blacks with letters and nubers on them a la pre school before i thought Legos so while the name night be out of theme I would rather have the clear communication of what is happening then worry about the use of a brand name, unless they also want to police all such things like say Aspirin (also a brand name though one that has lost trademark protection) instead of whatever the hell drug would be to proper name for Aspirin.

You never answered my question, what themes are you leaving behind? Honestly I can't think of any besides fighting for territory. With out the higher purpose it seems like gang wars which doesn't particularly interesting to me. And without Harmony any mechanical teeth are taken form a personal story of degradation into a monster. I am not against changes in general, but what to you see the characters doing in this game? And why is what they do ICly important to them? These two things to me are the essential questions or any game design.
For example I avoid D-n-D games that are heavy on the dungeon crawl cause I do not like dungeon crawls. This does not make me or people that like dungeon crawls wrong but it does mean we shouldn't' be in the same d-n-d game. And that includes one of my RL best friends who I game just about anything but d-n-d with.

@Arkandel said in What does advancement in a MU* mean to you?

On St. Petersburg they used a hard-cap XP system you could hit once you roleplayed for a reasonable-but-not-too-high amount per week. The exact numbers might escape me but it was something like "you gain XPs automatically as you RP and you can make a maximum of 2 XPs per week". Once you hit the limit that's it, you couldn't go any higher.

At least one person I knew back then wasn't motivated to play any more once they hit that cap. The player was completely reasonable by the way and never one I associated with "play to win", just the contrary, but that's just how the system itself made them feel.

I did not play on St. Petersburg so I was not this person but I agree with them once I hit the weekly limit I would stop. Not because i need a reward for RPing since I have been in multiple scenes on Fallcoast this week and will get the exact same weekly rp if i had been in none, but once you start to reward X then cap that reward you create a system that caps my desire for X, in fact you incentivize delaying x if it is near the cap refresh date. Lets say you get XP for rping up to a weekly cap, if that cap refreshes on Monday for example and i hit that cap on Friday, if someone asks me for rp over the weekend I would be a fool not to put them off til the next Monday, because why do something for free when you can wait a bit and so the exact same thing for a reward.

@WTFE
Then those players might have issues understanding any mechanics. Heck the documentation on how the system works is available and except for the +combat parts it not complicated at all and the +combat parts are entirely handled by the code. Certainly not more complicated than WoD or Shadowrun or D+D 2.5/Pathfinder which have all been used for multiple games.
I have been on I two games that used it, and while i will admit most scenes did not use the mechanics, the same has been true for any game I have been on, mechanics tend to be brought out only when the randomness is wanted or when disagreements arise regardless of the system in play.

@Coin said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

it's debatably hard to justify reporting a guy to staff because he just paged out of the blue with a sex-related rant if he didn't actually cross the line, or stopped when asked to, or...whatever. But it still has an impact in making players uncomfortable.

Naw, it ain't. If someone pages you ot of the blue with a sex-related rant, then he already crossed the line and it's already entirely justified. Same if a person won't leave you alone when you told them 'no' or asked them to stop.

Yeah I have to second this. If someone is paging you completely out of the blue about sex or related things, how is that not complaint worthy? To me paging someone out of the blue with any kind of rant is already crossing the line, sex related content even more so because of the personal nature of it.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in FS3:

This is not a problem on the games you GM or the FS3 games I play on for any length of time, which are run by sane people who don't make you roll for stupid, mundane things you'd obviously succeed at.

This is more a a failing of the nature of RPGs than of any particular system. No game system can compensate for a sub standard GM or in the case of MU* staff. I have been in games with wonderful systems that have been horrible both on-line and in person because of this.

Yeah while 30 rolls is a good sample size for one combat, I would say that since I picked up a copy of Werewolf 1st edition 25 years ago it is not an exaggeration to say that between online and table top that i have seen 10,000 WoD rolls counting both OWoD and NWoD together. Most of that undoubtedly in table top, given FS3 is only online I wouldn't even want to think about the amount of time I would need to RP to get to even a tenth of that number of rolls with FS3 or any iteration.

@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:

Issue: The Trust Gap.

For me I think the biggest issue with trust is the lack of personal interaction with staff in on modern games.
Hell I trusted staff on DM and was actually shocked to hear of the shenanigans that happened staff side there when I learned of them. Why? Because these were people I had talked to and dealt with a fair amount even been in arguments and disagreed with but they were people I interacted with so trust built even if in some cases that was misplaced.
On a modern game for the most part Staff and Players do not deal with each other as people, now most interaction is about as impersonal as can be. Instead of relationships you are left with processes. This does appeal to some, I know @derp has stated a preference for process centered thinking, but for others, like me, trust is a personal thing that all the processes and well written policies will never build. It takes actual interaction.
to tie into the PrP issue, pretty much every game has a +policy about PrP and pretty much all of them make it sound pretty easy to get go ahead to run things, that sounds all fine and dandy but where the difference lies in how those policies are enforced/used and that varies widely. For example if @faraday and @rook both are running games with open PrP polices, I am a hell of a lot more likely to trust Faraday's and run a PrP mostly because of thier reputation with people I trust and my admittedly brief history on some games Fara has run/been involved in. No offense to @rook meant at all but I know nothing about him/her. So regardless of written policy on the game I would not have any trust in it so would not run a plot until that level of trust had been built.

My general thoughts on behavior run along the lines of an old saying i heard as a kid.
Once is an accident,
Twice is a coincidence,
Three times is on purpose.
And I would add "and a pattern" the the last one. In general not just mushing or gaming but in life I will forgive almost anyone once, the second time I think about it a bit more but most likely they will get chance number three. If someone does something a third time it becomes what they do and who they are.

@GentlemanJack said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Fashion combat?

Fashion making a difference is not really beyond the pale for RPGs though. Cyberpunk 2020 has a skill for it, Shadowrun has outfits that give bonuses to skills like Etiquette and Negotiation. NWoD has items of clothing and perfume listed as possible equipment modifiers to skills in the base book in the chapter about skills.
I am not into fashion myself as anyone who has seen my wardrobe will quickly attest to, but I don't see it as much different than any other aspect of a game world.

I have to agree with Pandora. If you want to encourage public RP you also have to have good place code to make it manageable.
Players will zerg rush any public scene that get above 3 people so you have to have the ability to handle that expansion of people that allows the scene to incorporate the new people without totally crushing the scene the initial folks were having. Plus places cuts down on the spam from large scenes which is a lot of the issue with large scenes to begin with.

@Misadventure Are you a koala?

@roz said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):

Yeah. It's not that there's no place for scenes or plots like this, but you have to just manage expectations. You want to be clear with players up-front at what they'll be participating in. People who are totally not cool with that type of plot will just self-select out.

I very much agree with this, I personally hate the predetermined outcome type of plots and will avoid them like the plague but I do not think having one is a big issue as long as it is clearly marked. You don't even necessarily have to spoil it by saying what is predetermined just somewhere in the event description of discussion clearly note that This Plot has a predetermined ending and you should be fine. I even do this in table tops sometimes the story needs a particular outcome to continue, but having the scene happen on screen is important so just warn your players and let those who want to self select out do so and it shouldn't be a real big issue.