Best posts made by Thenomain

@Lotherio

Do players want the big meta, tho? Those games I've seen the most activity on are either no meta or the meta covers everything but is not one thing. Smaller changes pile up without any one big thing.

Double-post follow-up:

The newest version of Prime Time Adventures (the seminal story-telling game structure for structured telling of stories):

Just like on a TV series, the producer takes on the responsibility to keep everything 
running smoothly. That includes:
• Making sure that the players, the people playing the game, are happy. 
  Is everyone getting a chance to contribute? Does everyone like how it’s going?
• Making sure that the characters in the game aren’t too happy. Is the story exciting? 
  Is there conflict and adversity? Are the issues getting enough attention?

Some of the most recent RPGs have amazing "how to run this game" rules and advice. They have come a far, far way from White Wolf's Rule Zero ("if the rules don't make the game fun, ignore them"). These are actual rules, and if the players and GM follow them, you should have a much better game.

Well on a Mu*, the player must also play this role. There was a time, not too long ago, when this was expected of every player. Something happened (I'm going to blame paranoid WoD staffers) where people had this beaten out of them. Now it's often easier to focus on your own character and not risk yourself to the ire and complaints of players and staff alike.

Cut that out. Players: Take more responsibility for the scene and respect for those in it. Staff: Support players who do this. Thenomain: Stop posting and get back to work.

Yes sir.

(Damn slave-drivers.)

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edit: I'm going to ignore that stupid Thenomain slave-driver.

From Apocalypse World:

To the players: your job is to play your characters as though they were real people, 
in whatever circumstances they and themselves—cool, competent, dangerous people, 
larger than life, but real.

My job as MC is to treat your characters as though they were real people too, and to act as 
though Apocalypse World were real.

This is my favorite advice. Really, anything that tells the players what their job is does by and far better than any generic "What Is an RPG?" advice.

Incidentally, if the players of Apocalypse World aren't each other's antagonists, you're not playing it right.

The GM (the "Master of Ceremonies", in this case) gets further instructions:

• Make Apocalypse World seem real.
• Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring. 
• Play to find out what happens.

There's that "not boring" again. And again, these aren't suggestions; the author is very clear that if you don't do these things then you're playing the game wrong.

It also has a bit of advice that I find cropping up in the RPGs I like more than others:

• Play to find out what happens.

That is: Embrace the consequences. (You thought I was rambling, didn't you?)

Apocalypse World is big on the consequence. Fate Core sugar-coats the pill of consequences so that people will grab for it like candy. Here's where the system tells you how to play, as opposed to relying on following the soft rules. Someone said "be more MUD-like" as a solution. This is where their model lives, and it's a good model. Good enough that more RPGs are going there.

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I think I'm done now.

Burning Wheel. It's almost impossible to get ahold of other than print, but it's the opposite of a Love Letter to D&D; it takes D&D down to the personal level.

I was wildly impressed by WFRP 2e, so I'll have to check this other system out.

@fatefan said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

Zweihander is a WFRP 2e retroclone that might work well, but it may be too crunchy (maybe?) for some. Also, there's lots of assumed PC death that MU*ers may not want to deal with.

I just downloaded the free preview PDF and... this book is six hundred and seven frickin' pages. That is all.

@Ominous said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

I have the 2nd edition of WFRP. How similar are they?

I don't know. I saw 600+ pages and balked. Yeah, I know WFRP is big, but something about it is inviting, readable. My brother likes reading RPGs as books, and WFRP is one of them. I flipped through Zweihander, saw "magboots" in one place and a page dedicated to "trinket value"--buying, selling, trading, really kind of a cool thing to see in a gritty realism game, but it was enough to make me wait, and wait I shall.

@fatefan said in Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game:

If I thought the PbtA engine was in any way translatable to MU*ing

I know. I've been musing on ApocEngine games and I can't see it reasonably scaling past 6 or 7.

@Arkandel said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Now you remind me of @HelloRaptor (I hope the fucker gets back here) who left because we had gotten too soft.

HR didn't leave because we got too soft, he left because he didn't want to change his tone because someone would complain about him being a meanie poopyhead. I mean, sure I love Lewis CK, but not everyone does.

@Arkandel said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

You know how there are counter-games? Games basically made by disgruntled players of whatever MU* who decide to do the-same-thing-only-better and almost invariable create the same-thing-only-much-worse? The same principle applies to forum philosophies too - by trying to 'free' the conversation, but framing it at the same time, what they're doing is limiting it.

For those who don't know this bit of history, there were two (two!) forums that were meant to be the anti-Wora, where only constructiveness and support were allowed. The people who ran them were so tense about anything else happening that they folded quickly.

What I see here that I never saw on Wora was that people are more willing here to say, "Hey, adult more please." I've seen it happen on more games, too.

What's interesting about the history of Wora is that people volunteered to go there, to talk there, to be there, to create Wora. Whether or not it helped, it existed and has left an indelible mark on our history.

I suspect that mark says "D-, See me after class."

@surreality said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

'Jaded Gamer'

THANK YOU. His name should be on a plaque somewhere, even if the subtext says, "Yeah, sorry about all this."

edit: I just found this quote on Facebook, of all places:

CATO’S partizans may call me furious; I regard it not. There are men, too, who have not virtue enough to be angry and that crime perhaps is Cato’s. He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

— Thomas Paine, The Forester's Letters Number 3 (April 22, 1776).

How to know when I have a day off: I hyper-post as if I had to make up for lost time.

(This is no longer true; I hyper-post because "that makes me think of", which of course everything does. I'm like Ark, except with less free time during the day, the lucky bastard.)

@Miss-Demeanor said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Fate, d20, etc. just aren't as widely known yet.

Fate was tried but a lot of people pushed back against the core Aspects system which can allow far too much latitude.

d20 was the other system that it was pretty much guaranteed that Wora people knew, but there were two popular D&D games. All others that were tried seemed to fail.

Thanks to Evennia, the systems that Mud-likes invent are starting to gain popularity here, too. All I'd need to do to make a 7th Sea game approachable is to say that the core "Roll and Keep" system used by Arx is pretty much stolen from there. Add pirates. Mix.

@Miss-Demeanor said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Thenomain You know, I have never played a 7th Sea game, but i have had so many friends tell me how amazing it is that I would absolutely try it. Also... pirates. God I would kill for a good pirate game. I WANT TO BE A PIRATE DAMMIT.

Sadly the new version of 7th Sea kind of sucks for simple roll-and-resolve mechanics, which I think is why people won't try Fate Core, or worse, won't push Fate Core when they do play it. (note: Fate Core is best when your character is pushed.) Maybe if we used the older, but somewhat broken version of 7th Sea. (If you play Arx, you already know what aspects feel broken, but they've simplified some of the things that can really break it--magic and swordsmanship schools).

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@saosmash:

Tomato, tomato. Roll & Keep is the core of both systems, but having never read Lot5R I can't comment further. Besides, if people want to get their Asian Pretendy Game-Time on, I suspect they would be far more likely to gravitate toward the Exalted power fantasy.

Roll & Keep itself is, I think, a beautiful core mechanic, but the way that Arx implemented it creates an artificial rarity curve based on--you know what, doesn't matter. 7th Sea does something similar, but not to the same extreme. The extreme that 7th Sea breaks its own core system has to do with magic and swordsmanship. Mind you, these can be beautiful brokenness, and I for one would welcome a broken system that people want to play over a perfect one that people wouldn't.

@Meg

I stopped reading the Hog Pit for a reason. I want to expect more of others and people demand more out of me, and that just isn't going to happen there. It should happen here, but apparently @Ganymede doesn't care. Clearly everyone's talking about him.

@BobGoblin

I have outlines in my head about how I'd code a The Strange setting, as I think it's more approachable than Numernera. But yes, I like the system and would love to play it.

@Woragarten said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

World of Synnibar because Theno said no F mentions.

Well people already like RIFTS....

@magee101

AGE, by Green Ronin. I'm still not sure how I feel about the system.

@Lithium

Mostly the chargen. I feel like I need a degree in Advanced Spreadsheets, or be a rehabilitated Eve Online player.

@WTFE said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Ganymede I have no experience with it. We're talking the past tense though; any particular reason?

I would like to remind you at this point that WORA is past tense. It was taken down by a server crash and a lack of being assed.

So in the sense of "still around", WORA is also a failure.

Incidentally, "still around" is a shitty metric of success.

@crusader said:

Spirit stuff is so prevalent that it detracts from the experience of playing a pack-oriented primal death machine.

And here I stopped reading. I am so, so very glad that Werewolf is no longer about being a "pack-oriented primal death machine", which is a throwback itself to 90s Werewolf.

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

MSB doesn't have the exclusive on these things, you know? Sometimes it doesn't go well and folks walk away pissed off. Other times a disagreement can be civil - I don't think @Ghost is hoping I get food poisoning, for example.

Being technically correct is not the same as being right, and yeah while I agree that @Ghost danced over a line, I don't think that his (or hers; I honestly don't know) response was out of line for what the thread had become.

I don't think you need to defend your views on this, but the more you do the more it looks to me like you're nit-picking, that you're missing the forest for the trees.

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

And I'd comment that its derailing from the original topic which isn't very cool of me but it was pretty derailed anyway.

I was going to poke light fun at @Ghost for participating in the angry derailing this thread after the diatribe in the "MSB Meta Thread" about how derailing threads (mostly advertisement threads) was evil. I was going to ask, "So now do you understand why people might go into an advertisement thread and remind others what this person did elsewhere on the boards?"

Then I wasn't, because I didn't want to derail the thread any further and I didn't want to be actually mean to Ghost.

Then I did, because I still like how context changes people's views pretty drastically, I found a way to frame the sentiment as a way that isn't mean, and it's not like I can derail the thread any more.

@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@Thenomain said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

So someone will create another client for real-time communications with the server, one that might not be web-based. I actually think "web based" right now to be still pretty limiting; look at the number of people who use Skype as their game-enhancing system of choice.

I don't understand why you're equating "web based" with "not real time".

It was an example. I know that with AJAX techniques we can do pretty much magic (Google, everyone!), but we as a forum specifically keep saying "web-based! web based!" as if it means anything. I see that mantra as another way of backing ourselves in a corner because we're parroting one single technology group and not what you can do with that group.

Technology Is Not Application. Or in other words: If all you want is a hammer, you'll end up thinking of only hammer-based solutions. Or in other other words: I don't want to trade one box to get into another; I want to think outside of it.

That is, we are agreeing now.

@Botulism said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Thenomain Far more people have read American Gods than MU*, though. Just saying among the MU* subset, WoD is more widely known.

Yes, I knew that. It's still a crying shame.

@faraday said in Course Corrections:

I mean, where do you draw the line? Like @ThatGuyThere said -- what about 'tennis shoes' or 'aspirin' or 'kleenex' or 'okay', or 'getting to third base' or calling someone a 'casanova' or saying you're going to 'go postal'?

It lies somewhere between "the suspension of disbelief" and "you know what I mean".

I mean, as another relevant example, let's say that you were trying to try and make a game where you were safe against modern social abuses, but people just could not get their brain around your explanation as why there's no history of selling functions of your body. An issue like this probably breaks either "the suspension of disbelief" or "you know what I mean". And in this particular example, it breaks one for some people and the other for other people, creating a situation that is beyond exhausting. There may be a right answer here, but there's no easy answer.

Writing is a skill, but when you have people of a billion skill levels all creating their own stories then further expectations need to apply. That is exhausting, but it's part of the give and take that we need to do what we do.

This is a very long and somewhat meandering way to +1 @Maira; changing cultural expectations doesn't happen overnight, and the person coming in needs to both be welcome and willing to change.