Posts made by ThatGuyThere

@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:

Click here to login with Facebook.

Or as I like to it, see which of my 'friends' are stupid button.

@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:

My judgement call on this is to work with @newpassword, rather than an IP ban. IP bans are not as reliable in the days of VPN,

How does requiring an e-mail do anything to help with ban reliability if anything it would make them less reliable. Hell I could sign up for a game requiring an e-mail as three different people right now. Four if I ever bothered to activate the e-mail account that my isp has for me.
Granted that would be more work than I would ever bother with but no less possible. If the idea of a ban is to deal with the player not the character an e-mail really is only as trustworthy as the person who provided it.

@Packrat
In the interest of being constructive, if you have a game where the war is important make it feel important to the players. Not exactly sure how to do this, but on Star Crusade seeing the updates on how the war was going always felt a but like I was reading reports generated by Big Brother, i.e. The war against Eurasia continues....
I know the places being fought over belonged to PCs in a lot of cases but the updates never seemed to matter it was a list of we won these places the otherside won these places go about your business.

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

Google accounts without a phone number are ridiculously easy to break into, just as a heads up.

I would be highly amused to see the look on anyone face if they went through the effort to break into my gmail.
I don't do anything over the internet that is important, hell I don't even shop with anything but a prepaid card on the interwebs.

@Derp
Hate to break it to you but you don't have to give google a phone number to get an account. I have a gmail account and have never given them a phone number.

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

I've been on probably dozens of games that require email, due to it being a general norm in some areas of the hobby. I've never really seen anything bad come out of it. Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

I can get a burner phone to give the number to people too but that doesn't mean I think handing out a phone number should be a requirement for 90 percent of things.
And yeah I have a e-mail I give games, it is a throwaway not connected to any real information of mine that I never check and delete all in once every three months or so. Giving it to a game serves no purpose I do so to get to the playing part but it benefits any game not at all, since it is the least effective way to get info to me. And benefits me not at all because any info sent there will not be seen by me. It is the electronic equivalent of saying have a nice day as someone leaves a store.

@faraday
The phone number comment was more a moment of snark directed at games that require an e-mail addy.
And I fully agree that MU*s are a lot like showing up at a con to play, just not sure how that means I should trust folks on games since i wouldn't at a con either.

My whole point on the trust thing as I stated the first post was that it is not an automatic thing that requires time and interaction to build into, good policies are a start but only a start.

@bored said in Fading Suns 2017:

Weirdly, I think that SC was a better game than the average.

Then I truly pity your MU* career. I can honestly say without hyperbole that Star Crusade was the worst game I lasted more than one scene on.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

@ThatGuyThere I like to think of it more like showing up in a new town at a gaming store (or a con) looking to play.

That is fair enough, but while I have played with strangers at a con, I do so because there is little risk (a bad time) and the potential for reward. I certainly wouldn't give the other folks at the table my phone number. And while I would show up to a con to play, I wouldn't say I trusted the folks running the thing either.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

Thanks. Though I think the hobby as a whole could do with a little more slant toward giving people the benefit of the doubt. We've all been burned before, but at some point it comes down to what kind of community you want to build and be a part of. I don't think I could have kept playing MU*s this long if I went around looking at each new game like the players and staff there were about to bash me in the face with a shovel at any moment -- even though I've certainly experienced my share of bashing.

In defense of the hobby but not the species, I trust the average person on a game the exact same amount I would trust the average person walking down a street. I don't expect to be bashed with a shovel at any moment but I also don't expect positive interaction either, so I proceed with caution until a level of trust can be developed.

@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.

Sadly the blender of bureaucracy can rear it's head at any moment. (I am going to use that phrase a lot now, even in RL, thanks @Thenomain
The stand by of run things my staff is not a bad rule on principle, if run things by staff meant paging on duty staff member with Hey can I run <idea> for <people> and getting an answer. Even a quick no is fine and to me preferable to how thing normally go in my experience. Instead it is page staffer with the question. Get told to put it in a +job, put in the +request likely wait 2-4 days for an answer, if the answer is yes then contact the folks I want to run the plot for to work out a time when we will all be on. Likely the thing never get run because the interest I have in running something quick has died in the week or more wait to actually get the thing moving.
Honestly this is why I still play on CoH staff there for all their faults are like run stuff if it stays self contained we don't care. I have found a small clutch of like minded folks and can run things with out a week delay.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

Before the introduction of the PrP to WoD games, people would run whatever, whenever. Even I, one of the worst STs you could have the misfortune of running something, could feel comfortable saying, "Hey, let's go out into the swamp and kill some ROUSes!" Now? Forget it. I'm not sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy.

It might just be on the WoD side of the community but this is very true. Back in the Dark Ages (1990s) I would run and play in stuff all the time. Sometimes even long complex plots though they were never called PrPs it was usually just hey we are hanging out lets go do something and fighting random threats, or someone would say, Hey here is the idea I have and we would play, no rewards past the enjoyment of RP.
Then things got more formalized, you had to run things by staff, which is not bad in theory but kills the ability to do it on a whim. Even on places that have very little oversight I am hesitant to attempt to run any sort of plot because I don't want to deal with hoops even if there is a goodie in the form of XP or other reward at the end. Running becomes a chore rather than a bit of fun for the night, and no surprise I have noticed a lot less things being run comparatively.

Yeah it is not a huge discount but it is still a 10 % discount if you go with the normal 5 beats equaling and Experience so while it is not as large as the one in pre-GMC NWoD it still is there, lets say you start the game with each asset skill at 3, which seem fair for a professional, if you later add raise those to 5 you would end up with 4 beats which granted is not a huge amount but it is almost enough to buy a merit dot. If you started with a 3 and a 2 in those skills which would likely pass approval on just about any game than Pofessional training would net you a full xp which is a free merit dot.

@surreality said in CofD and Professional Training:

nWoD is the one with the discounts. CoD doesn't have that. You get a free skill dot at a certain level, and you get some specs. You do not get a purchase discount and all skill dots are 2xp flat cost without xRating coming into any of it at all.

Slight correction at level four you do get a discount just in a round about manner. You get a beat for buying a skill dot and since beats become xp you end up with a rebate of xp. Still a discount even if you pay full price initially because you get a cut back.

@Arkandel said in Marvel: 1963:

The last time I heard of Busiek doing anything was in the early 90s! That's a long-ass G.R. Martin-like break he's taking.

He has done a lot of Astro city stuff volume three went from 2013 to 2016 but you should really read every scrap of Astro City if you have not and like Busiek. that started late 90s and did a long run on the Avengers 98-2002 and the first hunk of Thunderbolts Starting in 1997-2000. All three of these are good reading and fairly easy to find collected editions of
He also did a fairly long run on Superman starting 2006 though I did not read that one so cannot comment on quality.

@Ghost said in CofD and Professional Training:

I'm gonna venture out to say that a lot of the time the draw for professional training, from the player perspective, is to get that 9/again or the other perks that come with it. They usually want those perks to be used for augmentation of other rolls. A 9/again for social rolls means shit on a game where social combat doesnt take place, but comes in very handy in say, Changeling Contract rolls that use said social stats.

Regardless of the rest of the issue if Professional Training were allowed on a game I would definitely restrict the benefits to mundane uses of the skill, not power activations since while those often roll skills they rarely entail the actual IC use of skills in a manner in which Professional training would be applicable.

Edit to add: I somewhat agree with Gany while i might allow it in a multi-sphere game I would limit it to a mortal only merit.

@Misadventure
Never been a fan of allowing respecs myself. And this is coming from someone who made a Werewolf once without the skills that two of the three gifts i got in c-gen used.

@Lithium said in CofD and Professional Training:

That's how I feel about it anyways, we have st's to judge combat scenes, why not st's judging social combat? It costs the same XP, it should be just as useful in situations where it applies.

the big reason comes down to time. Yes i am sure if I am on a game and get into a combat or a social combat I can request staff arbitration. For either one it is not likely to happen right away so the scene would most likely get paused and go to jobs. While I would be fine with that if a conflict cannot be resolved between the players but past experience has shown me that if the scene has to be paused most of the time (2/3 roughly) the whole scene will get retconned rather than brought to resolution.

Another reason to use familiar-ish dice mechanics over more complex math even wen used on computers is Cgen.
There is a fairly sizable portion of MU* who absolutely agonize over C-gen, (Thankfully I am not one of them) and worry that a poor decision during the process will end up crippling their character. (In some systems it can) this is with pretty straight forward mechanics present a complex mathematical system that is unfamiliar along with the rest of c-gen will lead to a lot a folks hitting a big wall when they try to make characters.