Posts made by ThatGuyThere

@arkandel said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

I really think the only feasible objection we can make here is for players who don't buy stuff, but roleplay them. Yes, that's an issue. If I don't buy Drive I shouldn't drive better than a random person on their commute, else I'm cheating.

I played off this once on a character I ddin't buy drive for him but he was embarrassed by not knowing how so he insisted he could drive. Ended up in three IC car accidents before other characters stopped listening to his insistence that he could drive. Also didn't help that he was only Dex 2 so had one die to drive when called on.

@kanye-qwest said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Wait, why should everyone have these, though? People don't all have these skills. Like driving I get, imo you should be able to be fine driving a car baseline but maybe you aren't a stunt driver or a getaway driver or a street racer unless you invest in that skill.

While I agree with your thoughts completely, game designers often don't. For example with the drive skill, in OWoD days, Drive 2 was required to be able to drive a manual transmission by the skill description. So my that same skill description nearly everyone in my high school should have drive 2. I grew in a rural area where driving manual vehicles was pretty much a universal skill.

@sockmonkey
I don't see this as stopping min-maxing just obfuscating the effectiveness of it. If I want the character to be really good at something I will still rush that stat to excellent the only difference is now two characters with excellent are not necessarily equal. In the end you would just have people vaguely min maxed rather knowing exactly min maxed.

@surreality said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

It also means that, like the firearms expert knows they need a gun, the subterfuge expert has a better understanding of how they must appeal to their target to be believed. Neither gets to just 'make up' how they want this to happen, however we see people do this with social rolls all the time, and then demand that not only does it work, it works the way they want it to no matter how impractical or unrealistic the approach they chose is, even if it is just as impractical and unrealistic a means of impacting their target as the stick and "bang".

This is one of the many reasons I am a big fan of resolving all the dice stuff separately than posing the results rather than mixing the rolling and the posing as it goes, simply because I have much less issue with the losing and more the the patent absurdity of some of the poses attempting social manipulation I have seen. It is similar to how if someone rolled computer hacking and then posed having two people sharing the same keyboard to make things move faster a la NCIS, I would either ask them to alter the pose or as someone running the scene I would just nope on the roll.

@the-sands
If your point is hard and fast rules can be gamed yes that is true but I still prefer them to vague guidelines that can just as easily be gamed and that it do little more than add a prelim argument to the main event over the social contest.

I think it could be interesting but I share Roz's dislike having people RP FCs that are actual human beings. Especially since some actually use their real names.

So I would go with all OC but let people co the unlicensed video game route so every one knows King Slender is a very thinly veiled Ric Flair, etc.
As far as keeping Kayfabe or actually doing the matches as a work I am really torn on though I think it could be a lot of fun either way. And I would likely play either way, who wants to join me in the Ammunition Association, which will totally not be like the Bullet Club.

@bobotron
You sir are far more optimistic about humanity in general and MUSHers in specific than I have ever been or likely ever will be.

Edit to add: I would far prefer some hard and fast rules to prevent the worst than all the trust and hopes of cooperation in the world.

@bobotron
My question is who determines the threshold for minimum effort? To me that just seems like opening a second can of worms. Is it three poses? 5 poses?

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@ixokai

Let's leave aside 'completely ridiculous argument' because I don't think anyone is going to reasonably argue that 'Hey baby, wanna fuck? +roll' is a valid instigator for Social Conflict.

Actually I have seen pretty much that. You might not have but I have. I was playing a male character had a female character pose the most unseductive "dance" towards may character, when my character acted disinterested said person wanted to roll to seduce mine. It might not happen often but it happens just as often as I have seen asshole walks into a bar and for no reason instigates a physical combat..

I think the biggest problem is that both divergent camps on social combat are wrong, the it should be like physical combat, doesn't take into account that there are certain principles people and character won't cross, the agency side of things doesn't take into account these principles tend to be quite a small number of things.
I think @surreality had the best suggestion in the other thread of giving each character three core tenets they would not break or something to that effect.
Of course I also think the rolling should be done and then the poses so that poses could then be crafted to reach the results the dice suggested. Because we can all point to examples of times when people have posed things that would honestly cause the exact opposite reaction from the one they wanted in a social scene.

@auspice
Wow, I have been reading and discussing comics since the late seventies (my older cousins taught me to read with them before kindergarten because it was the easiest way to keep me occupied while baby sitting) and that chick has the stupidest comic based stance I have ever seen.
Trust me I read a shit tonne of 80s indies and yeah some of them were hard as shit to make out because of bad lettering, hand lettering doesn't somehow make your art purer though done wrong it can sure as shit make it impossible to read and enjoy.

Not all that familiar with EP, I read it once a few years back and never played it but throwing in my thoughts.
I would tend to have the gate just be a PRP thing. Keep the main grid being where ever you have the game set, and for those that want to to gate crashing plots have them use rp rooms.
If you want staff over sight of said plots just require logs to get the goodies from the plots, that way even if the players do something staff disapproves of it doesn't spill out to effect the rest of the grid.

@thenomain said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

@thatguythere said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

I think the biggest drawback to a small game is not being able to easily avoid those you want to.

Or learn how to play with people you don't want to. That's where we started, and it creates some stressful encounters but none so stressful as "now I can't play this game because xxx plays there".

I am perfectly capable of playing with folks I would rather avoid.
I played with people i didn't care for a lot back in the 90s but now I ain't got time for that shit. Most of the time it isn't anything personal or an y real issue it is just, Person X's style doesn't gel with mine, so why wastes both folks time by forcing a scene?
Besides spider who I have only RPed with once to my knowledge there is no one I would avoid a game just because of their presence.

I think the biggest drawback to a small game is not being able to easily avoid those you want to.
Take a game with 100 people on, even if I want to avoid 4 or 5 that is not hard because there is plenty of folks around, even if each the the people you want to avoid is in a separate scene that still leaves people to seek rp with.
Take a small game with 10 people, and 1 person you really don't want to deal with, it is not that hard to see nights when most of the game is in one scene for you are left with the choice of dealing with someone you don't want to or bouncing.

Yeah White Wolf has allowed ads for MU*s on their official forums in the past but that is a big step between giving folks a place to play like a MU or Roll20 where I am sure WW knows that WoD of all stripes are played and posting hunks of the book.
True a company might not have an issue but why poke at the sleeping bear in this case.

Bad is going to be different based on the game for the most part, different communities have different standards. Your first list is pretty universal but for the most part of lot of the issues will most be a clash between the player and game culture.
If the game is set up where the outcome to most conflicts are negotiated than my preference for dice based resolution will conflict with that how I deal with that is what determines weather or not I am a bad player for that game. For the record my response would likely be to bounce and not look back, making me not any kind of player of the game.
I do think staff is a lot of cases is not clear about what the culture of a game is either through lack of communication or through just being out of touch with the situation down in the mud but that is an entirely different issue.

For me the difference is when the behavior is a pattern.
Do something bad on one game and I will be open to giving that person a second change. Everyone messes up at times and one mistake shouldn't doom anyone, at least if it doesn't cross line into RL stuff like doxxing, that to me is a one strike you are out forever type of thing.
But if a person has shown that over a period of many year and many games to have the same behavior then I has no problem pre-banning them, yes while change is possible the person has shown repeated issues so someone else can take the chance on them, I will play the odds.

I discovered it for the gif threads as well.
It has been glorious.

I might be the odd one but Vampire is the one game line where I prefer the NWoD version to the OWoD. The whole Sabbat vs Cam thing never really interested me. I find the political structure of the covenants more interesting and you still have the VII and the Brood to provide adventure antagonists.

@darinelle said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Facebook. Messenger.

If you have sent me 3 things and I have neither seen nor responded to any of them, don't send me 15 more. Wait. Unless you only want me to read the last 2 things you've sent me, and to get annoyed when I see 18 messages from you when I finally have a moment to breathe? It's gonna make me super cranky. I am not your stream of consciousness.

that as never happened to me, if it ever did without someone being in the hospital I would be unfriending he person.