Best posts made by The Tree of Woe

Haunted Memories: My time playing Changeling and Mage was so limited as to not even merit a mention. As in, the day I got approved as a Mage, my first RP was with Juerg, and I didn't bother logging the toon in again. Werewolf, I played Wilhelm -- and in the game's infancy, I played an Iron Master Rahu whose name I no longer recall. Vampire, I was Jeremie.

The Reach: Not even going to bring it up. My entire time there was suffering the "attentions" of players even crazier than me on my worst day, when it wasn't staffers sitting dark on private channels because they were stalking players. Fuck the Reach.

City of Hope: Cristobal. Looking forward to having a place with a large body of players so I can finally quit BSD Mux I mean City of Hope.

By Right of Blood: Andy. I love Sabbat, but nobody else seems to. Sigh.

There are others, but damn if I can remember them.

Last night's The Flash ended with, as the Narrator of Townsville would put it, "A good old-fashioned super hero super villain super fight." Firestorm, the Flash and Green Arrow vs. Reverse Flash.

DC's really turning the dial on its TV stuff up to 11.

There was a sort of general amnesty declared, and even guys who didn't decide to give Utopia a shot settled down in San Francisco to sort of live under the umbrella. Avalanche opened a bar in SF I remember.

The X-Men also were acting as jailers for a lot of their more insane or irredeemable enemies at that point, rehabbing some and just keeping others under VR lock and key because you can't let Sebastian Shaw run free, but you can't just kill him. I guess.

I thought this was going to be a discussion of the way Superman is played on games, which has been, based on passive observations, a textbook study in how having an encyclopedic knowledge of a character's adventures in no way confers and understanding of that character's psyche.

The real crux of the Superman story is surprisingly simple: he is a person who has power and strives to exercise it with responsibility and restraint. He is fundamentally opposed by those who have power but do not give a damn about either of those things.

All great Superman stories centering on conflicts between him and another character come down to an argument over use of power -- Superman vs. Lex Luthor, Superman vs. the Elite, Superman vs. Mongul, Superman vs. Brainiac, Superman vs. Hank Henshaw.

@ganymede I 100% agree with you. Character backgrounds and powers writeups can be provided by staff, ON A WIKI, liberating players from the onerous chore of having to write them up themselves, only for them to be trashcanned when you're done playing that character.

Prove basic knowledge, interest, and intent. And if it doesn't work, nothing is lost.

My creative writing teachers (at a school known for it, at least regionally) were all about domestic fiction. We had one visiting writer in who talked about how she wanted to show the "positive side" of alcoholism.

I say this completely unironically: fucking white people.

The lit was somewhat better, there at least we got a ton of variety, and I learned that magical realism is weird, yo.

@ghost Thank you. I was trying to say that last bit and just could not find the right words.

The larger problem seems to be that Marvel came up with this story, and numerous readers went "Um. Ok, so he's mind-controlled?"

And the Marvel writers went "Nope, Captain America was a Hydra mole all along."

And numerous readers went "Guys, I'm not sure about this."

And Marvel went "No, no, it's great, shut up."

And then various comic shops (including the largest and oldest one in my home city), not institutions known for being too terribly woke, spoke up, and started saying "We aren't really thrilled about advertising for this event, guys. Nobody likes it. We don't like it."

And the response seems to have been "Well you're idiots shut up and enjoy Nazi Captain America."

I guess the way I usually refer to it is "X-Pac Heat." It's the kind of draw where it's largely hate and not any actual interest that's keeping people paying attention. Or, short version, Marvel invested a lot of energy and money into a terrible idea and then decided to press on despite the misgivings of their product consumers. Will the ending to the event bear them out? Possibly.

But this may be one of those times where it might've been a good idea to leak the ending before people started turning away.

@ghost That's fair, but ultimately I guess I do err on the side of nurturing people's ideas.

I'd even have to cop to allowing (ugh) Deadpool... he hangs out with Cable a lot and has positive connections with characters like Genesis. Against my better judgment.

But yeah, if somebody wanted to app Vance Astrovik or Firestar, even though they've never worn the X that's not that hard of a logic hop.

Also, in my mental canon, Scalphunter totally winds up the cook in Utopia's canteen. Because the idea of that terrifying killer handling the cooking tickles me more than a bit.

This:

http://www.thehindu.com/sport/football/qatar-to-be-stripped-of-2022-world-cup-fifa-whistleblower/article7291607.ece

Here's the thing, and it's the thing a lot of vampire players don't get -- if you are there to be the villain, you have to not be one when you're off the clock.

On superhero games, honestly I think there should be a policy of characters who traditionally fall into antagonist roles being evaluated on a one for one basis to determine whether they're viable long-term PCs.

Magneto? Yes. He's been an X-Man as often as he's been tilted against them.

Mystique? Possibly... she's eminently treacherous and players have done a lot of gross stuff with her. Needs a lot of thought first.

Apocalypse? Naw. Constant exposure to Apocalypse kills his heat.

Mr. Sinister? Hell no. He gets brought out for a plot with staff keeping a close eye on it and then put away again. Anyone who wants to play Essex long term is a creep until proven innocent, at this point. And I loves me some Sinister after Oscar Wilde.

@BetterJudgment When he quoted Cicero and compared Obama to Caesar, I thought about somebody nailing Ted Cruz's severed head and hands to the senate podium and I smiled -- just a little bit.

I never understood the train of thought that goes "I love this setting, and I'd love to play in it, except we need to throw out everything about it." Amber without the Princes and Princesses, Transformers without Optimus or Megatron (c'mon, it didn't even work when the actual SHOW did it), Star Wars without Luke, Leia, Lando et al.

I mean, I guess I understand that you don't want those characters usurping the story? But it's a little like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, innit?

And I find the STEM-focused types to be artless, soulless choads who have to break everything down into a numbers game, and in so doing ruin everything.

@Silver I will admit sometimes I'd love to RP, but I don't know the fuck's going on!

But really I think at times my desire not to stand around and chat makes me something of a pariah. I should probably take a cue from you and fuck with people's heads a little more.

@Pyrephox: The LARP circles around here call it the Cigarette Test and it's usually used to critique storytellers, but it can be used on players too.

"I went to get a pack of camels. A cabal of Assamites jumped out from behind the 7/11 and tried to bushwhack me." "Man, he failed the cigarette test."

For what it's worth, I believe Cirno is being genuine in this instance. I've brushed up against racism against African-Americans from Chinese guys that would make garden variety bigots go "Now hold on a minute!"

Then again, they get theirs. I still fondly remember the anecdote a friend told me about all the Chinese students eating together, except one girl who was alone. When he asked her if something was wrong, she looked up and said "Oh, no. I'm Mongolian."

"They fear me."

The Status system for the current edition of MET is awesome, easily adaptable to Requiem, Changeling, or Mage, and should at least be considered.

Needing to lose weight and my doctor's wholly sensible advice of cutting back on carbs, especially after 6 PM.

It's gonna be a hungry summer....

What I would like to see is tighter theme control. No, your werewolf is not a fucking viking. No, your vampire is not a fucking viking, ignorant of the modern world, unless they're a thousand years old and have been in a dungeon for 800 years of that.

Unfortunately, I can't complain that people shouldn't play irritating, dirt-humping Acolyte pseudo-primitives. I can say that I had my fill of them on HM, but the covenant's geared that way, so.

Probiotic yogurt. It's amazing how well they've marketed something whose selling point is it has bacteria in it.