Best posts made by The Tree of Woe

@HelloRaptor Sarcastic response: If it's not white, eurocentric, and would fit in World of Warcraft, gone.

Actual response: If it's not white, eurocentric, and would fit in World of Warcraft, gone.

Chult? Native civilizations wiped out.

Halruaa: Exploded.

Luiren: Caught in the shockwaves of Halruaa exploding.

Mulhorand: Swallowed up by some resurgent shit from Netheril, completely expunged.

Maztica: Whole continent replaced so they could have Dragonborn.

Al-Qadim and Kara-Tur didn't get touched on, mostly because the FR 4e writers didn't have time to bring them to ruin to add in the kingdom of blue-skinned elves who are often druids but totally not a WoW-rip.

Most recent:

Staff on a super-hero game engaged in behavior that deeply violated player's privacy and then proceeded to organize what I can only describe as an "arranged stoning" of that player in front of people they had communicated with when handing down the decision to expel them from their game. During this, uh, hearing, they refused to provide any concrete examples of genuine malefactor behavior, at least, from the player being banned. This has been talked over extensively in other threads.

More recently on a WoD game, I chose to leave because I realized I had an incompatible temperament with the person running the vampire genre. Some people were (and are) fine with them -- I viewed them as witheringly mean, trying to take a "stern manager" approach and coming off more as "Horrible Boss", trying to use something I wanted to do to steer me toward PvP in ways I wasn't comfortable with (said staffer has, based on my observations, developed a rep for going after people's +sheets without talking to them, and engaging in excessively punitive response without adequate communication as a storyteller, among other things), etc. In the end, I realized my experiences with that person made me dislike and mistrust them tremendously, there was no "corrective action" that could fix that, and that the best solution was for me to say my goodbyes and quit logging in.

Actually I was suggesting that @silentsophia look into probiotic supplements. Xp

@derp The Vivienne can also be difficult to pull off, because she's a sniffy manipulative bitch, which can be just the WORST without her being softened by a little humanity (like Vivienne was).

Also, it helps if she's right about pretty much everything (like Vivienne was, again).

I would say the primary thing that separates Shadowrun from Cyberpunk aside from the Genre Mashup is that Cyberpunk is in a big way about isolationist loners, exceptional individuals (usually white men, if memory serves, but you can say that about a lot of Sci-Fi) weighed down by a monolithic, oppressive system, and looking to defy the Powers That Be, to varying degrees of success.

Shadowrun has the same element of being an exceptional individual pushed to the margins of society, but is ultimately about finding others on the ropes just like you, and coming together - maybe for revenge, maybe for answers, maybe because you can't let your friend go alone, maybe just for the nuyen to get the hell out of the sprawl.

Cyberpunk is about isolated examplars - Shadowrun is about individuals isolated by society who find something meaningful in one another - one of the core precepts of Shadowrunning as defined by the first generation of Shadowrunners being "Find Your Own Truth."

It needs to be able to handle a broad variety of things, from sci-fi level weaponry and gear to sword-and-sorcery... and fairly adjudicate when they interact.

Right?

I loathe Hemingway, personally -- the best way I can describe his style is "flatulent."

Amber is a series of ten short novels and some short stories written by the late, great Roger Zelazny from a period ranging from the 70s to the early 90s.

Simple version: all conceivable realities are the shadows cast by two polar dimension primes -- "Amber", the city of which all cities are but a shadow, and the Courts of Chaos, which is a little bit like a giant Dali painting if you had to live in it and it was ruled by massive, feuding noble houses. Amber is ruled by one noble house, whose founder was a rebel against and refugee from the Courts of Chaos. His children spent a very long time being absolute shits, until the shittiest of them woke up from a coma and drank a very big glass of grow-up juice.

Mine's held up OK, except for the hinges, which are shot. I'm planning to piece together a desktop soon.

Actually FATE would be the perfect system for it, since it adapts very well to narrative flow, and can account for someone like Benedict saying "Well, you may have reckoned on these guys, but you didn't count on my five hundred thousand reinforcements."

Add: The "Z" key on my keyboard randomly quit, so I had to replace it. That's a good thing about Toshiba laptops -- replacing things like the keyboard is much, much easier than it is on other laptop designs. It was literally just a case of prying up the plastic strip at the top and taking out four screws.

Now see, I don't like the Sith Fanboying, but the Sorcerer in The Old Republic did it right.

Do you want to do the kinda evil thing, the evil thing, or the super evil thing? There is a right answer, and it involves force lightning.

Well, do you like looking at Ralph Fiennes naked and Kiera Knightly in period dress?

If so you might like "The Dutchess."

Came, saw, sent you an Overlord app.

To be fair, new management probably also equals new insurance. A lot of insurance companies jack the costs up if a landlord allows "dangerous" breeds.

However, two weeks notice to move out? That's sketchy. She should check what tenants' rights are guaranteed by the state. She ought to have, at minimum, a month to clear out (though she may want to be gone sooner).

My big turn-off, I'd have to say, is people who shut stuff down rather than looking for ways to build on stuff. For whatever reason.

People who may be otherwise great, but whose insecurity is so rife that the thought of you spending any time playing with anyone else drives them up the wall and across the ceiling.

People who lack the slightest bit of curiosity about canon material, especially on a canon or semi-canon game. Yeah, I know, decades of comic stories can be overwhelming (as an example), but take a little freakin' interest. You have chances to learn about a character you purportedly like -- take them.

Untrustworthy and/or bullying storytellers, storytellers who are deaf to player discomfort, willfully or not. Miss me with that shit.

People who play Nephandi, BSDs, Infernalists or Fomori on WoD games. Hard pass.

I like TS; creative generation of smut is an exercise in writing skill and mutual fappery, a weird sort of human connection through text; but I've had people try to progress from TS into control/manipulation so often that these days if I engage in TS with someone I'm often accused of being "cold" or "distant" after -- and perhaps I am, but it's only because I've had people bend over backwards to try and take autonomy away from me and I loathe the idea of doing it to someone else.

And even when I say it that way, forthrightly, people don't seem to get it. I have had people try to fuck with my head before; I don't want to fuck with yours.

I have said and will continue saying that a MUSH is more akin to a LARP than a tabletop, with many of the same hobgoblins. For the sanity of everyone else at the table, I shall decline to talk about those at this time.

Yeah, dump it. If you like the genre enough, find some like-minded people, wait a few months and start again.

I expect the cats put on a good show about 'WE DON'T NEED NO HUMANS' but are secretly mad they were abandoned.