Best posts made by Thenomain

@Arkandel said in RP Ice Breakers:

Ice breaker: Join a scene and don't make yourself un-roleplayable.

It's that easy.

Once on Haunted Memories, three of us were having a little scene in a little park. One woman came by and we posed for her, tried to include her, but she ignored us entirely. Soon, a man came along and was 'surprised' to meet her there. Then they left to have sex.

It's not just about being approachable, it's also very much about finding people who want to be approached and then figuring out whether or not it's a fit.

I do want to state with as much emphasis as I can without being seen as insane: If you RP with someone and find that you two don't fit, it's not time wasted. You RP'd. Success! Two players now know each other a little better. More success! Now you or they might see you in a scene and know that they can at least play with you without wanting to tear your ears off, and visa-versa. Success?

Yeah, why not: Success.

@Three-Eyed-Crow

Name me a thread that doesn't get derailed or drift by offhanded remarks that become even more offhanded. "That reminds me" is pretty normal.

There's also a long-standing philosophy from far back in Wora days that staff who come to defend their game are doomed (often a self-fulfilling prophecy) while those who explain their game seem to be praised, or at least understood. I wouldn't be disappointed if only people who started an advertising thread were allowed to post in it, then we'd no more have the people who are excited about a game than those who have questions about it.

To me, "gritty" is more about realism in fantasy; hunger, disease, people trying to live and survive. I've played a fairly gritty D&D campaign before, so it doesn't need to be reflected in the system. What will the GM focus on?

Since we rely on the system to fill that role on Mu*s, I'd like to add Burning Wheel to what I consider as gritty. I don't think Dungeon World is gritty, though Apocalypse World is. AW doesn't have any "survival" rules, though if you read the book you know that if you're not playing up the post-apocalypse then you are playing wrong.

This can be handled by wikis and news files, for the bolder games that are willing to make a statement like "you are playing this wrong".

@magee101: "Friday Night Firefight" has been the name of the combat system since the original Cyberpunk (2013, of all things; how we saw the future as depressing and how unexpectedly depressing it came down to be).

@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Thenomain said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

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

The Cleveland Browns

Exception that proves the rule.

I love Browns fans. If there was a conceptual opposite of "fair weather fans", these people are it. When you can go to your stadium on game-day when you don't even have a team, you should win a fucking prize for a mix of both sad and awesome.

That is, their team might not be a success, but damn their support base is.

@bored

Dude.

Really?

Look in the mirror.

See that person?

That person is likable.

You're making that person really hard to like right now.

Do right by that person.

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

As far as I'm concerned, people should post what they RP. The good the bad, the ugly, the sexy.

As if I need more reasons to avoid RP. Knowing that I'm being logged hits some of my stage fright and performance anxiety. I've been lucky to be able to play with some really very amazing writers, and every line I type I feel like I'm letting them down. Exposing this to everyone? Hello introvert.

I will just leave this here:

Fables.

@kitteh said in Course Corrections:

Maybe they really were legos. This has happened before.

I mean, nobody here is complaining about five people hearing a Bob Dylan song 30,000 years before he was born. Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) said he tried his hardest to not do things like this, but the idea of interlocking blocks as educational building tools shouldn't be the problem; calling them Lego should be.

@mietze said in Course Corrections:

What's wrong with staff saying "Clearly you've put thought into this and we respect that but it's not a direction the game is going to go, no matter what you roll, by our choice?"

Again, nothing. Just as there is nothing wrong with a player being excited to learn the technology level of their favorite fantasy world.

I wish more staff would say "no" this way, because it shows that they have an understanding that the player is trying to engage with the game, and that's the motivation you want out of players!

But a lot of staff take the attitude that this player is being a problem, and get short with them out of habit. It's a terrible staff habit, and even staff need course corrections.

If the player fights back then yes, there's absolutely a reason to direct them to the Great Egress, but staff aren't exempt from the expectations of people not being crude when they're being honest.

@mietze, @surreality,

You're both right.

Patience and understanding. Both directions. Nobody in this hobby has the right to make any personal demands of you, but you should respect their efforts every bit as much as you're asking them to respect yours.

I will absolutely play on a game where I don't trust the staff when I don't need the staff to have meaningful gameplay, which is 90% of everywhere. I know how to do this, have gone through this hobby with people who know how to do this, and am happy to be with people I enjoy regardless of staff.

What people like @Paris usually mean is that they won't play on a game where staff cannot be trusted to be adults, to handle a complicated situation fairly or honestly. Not saying you don't mean exactly what you said, Paris, but there are plenty of people who aren't so rigid in where they will play if they get a chance to play in relative peace.

Hell, I played on Haunted Memories for six years being a person either disliked by staff or in a group specifically targeted by staff via rumors, if not action. Hell, I had the headstaffer and his wife put a "do not contact" order on me partially because I wouldn't let a shitty situation lie but, and here's the fun part, neither could they. I don't know about today, but at the time I wouldn't have trusted them any more than I could throw them, and since I didn't even know where they lived I couldn't throw them an inch.

And yet, I wouldn't have given up the experience of that game, of the character I played and almost everyone I played with, no matter how much I complained about it. I made some tight bonds that were that tight from the crucible, and there were other fantastic players playing fantastic themes.

I don't need to trust staff to do anything more than approve my character and keep the play-space open and free for exploration.

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@Thenomain You've mentioned in the past feeling bad when you didn't have enough evidence to kick people you knew were bad out of the game. Do you regret that decision now? Would you have done the same thing today?

It was not my decision alone, but I would have made the same decision. Had Troy or Lemuria had said that they wanted our multi game abuser removed from the game, I probably would have caved and done so. Had someone even under complete anonymity told me exactly what happened, I would have done so. It came down to punishing someone and being able to tell them why, being comfortable that I understood why, and nobody would give me that.

This is very much a "because I said so" situation, but I expect good staff to be benevolent dictators. I didn't have any sort of rule of law that I was going with; I was going with a rule of conscience.

Hell, I don't care if I don't believe that staff does THE right thing. We are human beings, we have a million personal belief systems. I want to know that they do A right thing.

@mietze said in FS3:

Uhhhh why is a developer who shares their system being criticized for making improvements or changes and making them available to people 3 times in 10 years?

As long as it's constructive, and mostly has been. WTFE is just being a jerk about it because I think he doesn't know how not to be, but his points were taken by Faraday, who is amazingly patient with us. We're probably not as bad as corporate management.

@faraday

To agree with you, this reminds me of something Brus and others used to say on Wora: Treat others as adults and expect them to act like adults.

My spin on this is: Be patient and understanding. Not so much that you are a doormat, but enough to let people correct themselves when things do go wrong.

As far as I care, I can deal with anyone who shows willingness to try and not be a jerk. I do have a limit, where someone shows time and again that they don't care for anything but their own world-view, tho right now it only has the name of VASpider.

@Ghost

As a thought: Being accused of shit-talking or participating in a witch-hunt can be insulting when you're being straight-forward, and can quell conversation that might reveal the nature of the problem. I am not saying that you're wrong even if I disagree with you, but the issues of approaching an issue does go every direction. It's why I took your musings as a straight-up and honest question that deserved consideration and answered.

I was going to be sarcastic (because c'mon, look where we are), but because I wasn't your response to it was, "Uh guys, this wasn't my intent." You stepped forward like an adult to discuss things and explain yourself rationally. Respect was shared.

The same goes with this response to @Roz, and kind of answers a few people as well. "Treat everyone like an adult; expect others to behave like an adult." Once this edict starts being used by everyone, this is how we can approach touchy issues without devolving to name-calling.

Like, you know, "crap-flinging" or, to bring it back around, "witch hunt".

I'm not saying I'm innocent of this either (especially to you; sorry about that), which is why I mildly berate myself at the start of this thread, to remind myself to stop doing that.

--

edit:

@Ghost said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

Well, VASpider is just the first one in the stocks.

Then it's up to all of us to keep ourselves in check (like adults) so that we don't start down that path. The first step is being able to identify when it's us, and when it's not.

Here's my metric:

Q: Does the situation negatively affect the ability of a game to fulfill its role?
A1: Yes -- Consider taking action.
A2: No -- Consider not taking action.

Nowhere in this is "happens on the game or not" a consideration.

@The-Sands

No more than D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase, or Fill In The Blank are broken by default. Each system does a thing well and does a thing not well. Life is pain, Princess; anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

In a rare case of making snowballs in hell, I agree with @Tempest. You get this on any game where character location is important, which almost all of the time is going to be games where PvP is likely. This happened very frequently on World of Darkness games, to the point where combat would happen in an instanced application of the room called a "Time-Stop". (And boy, did it stop. Horror stories for another day.) The people in the time-stopped instance had to agree that anyone not there at the time would be allowed in.

It also depends on your game's theme. (Calling @WTFE: I'm about to use the term correctly.) If your theme is isolation, then being anywhere at any time could be seen as theme-breaking. Part of the theme of Firefly/Serenity, and really most Westerns, is that you are somewhere that you can be anything you want to be, including wicked or dead. There is no cavalry. There are no cops. There is you and them.

Part of what excites me about @AlexRaymond's "40s Rocket Age" project mentioned here is that there's really no reason not to be where the action is; a lot of the time, the action is wherever you make it. I find this to be a better setting for Mu*s, where people do want to be able to get to wherever The Hotness is taking place.

Part of what doesn't excite me about Star Trek games is that a lot of people who like this game style wants to fly around in a ship, zoom zoom exploration. This is 100% Pure Awesome, and the "travel time" issue solves itself because you're at the whim of the code.

The only Star Wars game I was on did what one of my original staffed Mu*s, an ElfQuest, game did: If you were of faction 'X' you stayed in areas that faction 'X' were known to be. Players respected theme and setting and rarely tried to break it, and other players would encourage people to not meander but instead make someone of a different faction if they wanted to be in a different place. I like this play style because it's more RP-centric.

Anyhow, some idle thoughts.

@griatch

I think she should give it names instead. Might I suggest each major release is a different sci-fi show, and each point release something from that show.

And then not use numerical releases at all, except for a lingering build code.

... Tho I want to see the resulting bug reports.

@tragedyjones

Bathrooms.