Best posts made by Thenomain

Holy crap a fellow Aetherite. Yo.

I understand what @Pyrephox was trying to say, and I kind of agree with @Lithium too in the same way that I agree with @Arkandel's premise, which I mix liberally and get:

Play the stats hard, or not at all.

As long as people stay within the spirit of the game, I don't think there's any bad play that goes to either end of the spectrum. I don't even mind people opting to not roll dice at all if they can agree on an outcome. I strongly believe the dice are there only to create an uncertain outcome (Lithium's "tension"), or when people can't agree on what the outcome should be.

@Ping

I'm a huge fan of @SunnyJ's light touch on her strong setting and theme. Fallen World. Mage and Werewolf CoD. Joe-Bob says check it out.

And Betty White is OUTTA HERE.

@peverel said in Hey you motherfuckers.:

@Thenomain, that's generous: my insanity was just manageable. We were a good team, though. Is @Whirlwind still around? Is @Lolth? I haven't talked to any of you since the Great Database Panic of 2014-or-whenever-that-was.

Lolth is living her Norwegian life of Fish and Snow or whatever it is those depressed northerners get up to about the third of a year the sun barely touches the sky. Though I understand the times where the sun never sets is also upsetting. I feel fortunate for being around the Midwestern Latitudes where the worst we get is too much gray sky and freezing rain.

Whirl around on Facebook. His hat gets more action than I do, too. Sheesh.

@Bobotron said in Eliminating social stats:

I'l agree with 'play stats hard,' but it will never work on a MU*. Players are too ingrained into their way of thinking to allow successful social tests to color their perceptions, convince them someone is telling the truth, and all the things that social conflict requires. You will never get all players to buy into it, and that is the stumbling block that needs to be overcome.

I think some of the most fun I've had is when people volunteer to play negative traits, regardless of stats. I think the least fun I've had is when people refuse to play negative traits, regardless of stats.

From my days of creating LARP systems, I think people just want a chance to decide how they act out their lack of agency. You may tell me that I'm in great awe of this person, but don't tell me what that means; let me tell you, the GM, what that means. If that's cool with you, then win-win.

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@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Eliminating social stats:

I have never seen anyone object to using social skills to bluff an NPC guard, or strike a better deal with an NPC merchant, or talk an NPC antagonist around to being on their side.

I have seen players, even in RL tabletop games, refuse to be the target of such things from NPCs, however. PvE is all well and good, but try some EvP and see how far you get. (Further than PvP, I imagine, but not open acceptance.)

@SG said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Anyways, design a setting with this in mind, I guess.

Not a crazy idea. Probably should be one of the first concerns when deciding on a game to throw onto a 24/7 persistent environment.

I think, tho, that anyone should be able to say, "No, you can't be in this PvP scene because were you were not that close by." If it's PvE (plot, scene, whatever) then there'd have to be a more compelling reason.

This isn't a Space Game issue, but I can see how that kind of setting exacerbates the perception.

@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@auspice On production, as @Thenomain has taught us.

@insomnia

I demand tweed.

That is all.

@SunnyJ said in Eliminating social stats:

My opinion is: Social skills and attributes will not be missed. Good riddance.

The only social system I would ever use in a game again is Green Ronin's Intrigue system for Game of Thrones.

That is an amazing system! I like Fate Core’s stress tracks for mental/social, too, but requires much more player agreement.

Maybe if we can stop being such nerds for ten minutes and just enjoy the company.

@JaySherman said:

@Thenomain: I've tried to involve my players in game creation from the start, but most of the time they just kind of pull a Patrick and Spongebob, "Daaaah, whadda you wanna do? I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?" routine.

That's fine. Mark these people as 'here for the new hotness'.

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Your mom.

She is a very nice woman thank you very much.

@nightshade

You know, I know what you mean; I have never once asked for payment for coding for this hobby, and only once have I accepted payment for it.

I still have some of that Amazon gift card, @skew. My everlasting thanks.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

This is a great example of 'if you don't do it the way that I do it, you've got bad motivations/are a bad player' when it's actually personal preference.

No more than people insisting that if you are bad with people IRL then by extension so must your character. If "it's just personal preference" can justify abolishing social but not mental skills, then logically, the inverse can also be true. I'm in favor of neither, mind you.

There's a huge, very significant difference, actually. I can see why you would be in favor of rollplay instead of roleplay where it comes to social skills, if you seriously equate these things out to the same sort of thing. Apples and rocks.

I feel like the "rollplay vs. roleplay" thing ought to be the RPG equivalent of Godwin's Law, complete with the "and the invoker automatically loses".

Personally, I've never once had anyone be able to coherently explain to me what is WRONG with "rollplay".

I completely agree with you, but I think that my earlier comment explains it for me:

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion.

I do think that it is a conceit, a presumption, something that may not need to be true but a lot of people and a lot of games push. Writing is the foundation of what you do when you have a text-only environment so it's not unreasonable that people would float over to a kind of "it's either writing or it's in the way" philosophy. The problem being that it's not always easy to decide how to work with other people's styles.

I think it's critical that people do so, but people play for so many reasons I wouldn't even know how to begin.

Maybe some kind of coded system?

--

(If you can't figure out that's a joke, that's a joke.)

edit: Ninja'd by @faraday, but she makes the point much better than I did. She states what are probably truisms reflecting on not just us, but the entire RPG industry.

@Sparks said:

I'll eventually get off my ass and finish 2.0. It's been sitting at a 60-70% done state for ages, but since nothing actually /breaks/ in Yosemite and there's been little pressure, I've admittedly been taking my sweet time about it and working on other things.

How dare you have a life.

It's like how I'm working on the documentation.

<.<

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Your mom.

She is a very nice woman thank you very much.

I'm sure she's quite lovely.

I hope that your mother also treats you well, if she has not passed on and if so you have my condolences.

Anyone who turns down a chance to RP with @EmmahSue or @Coin are fools.

Or staff with them, to be honest.

To embarrass them with heavy praise, these are the people we need in the hobby.

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

@Lain

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion. Tabletops, as we know, RP for many reasons but mostly for sitting around playing a game.

I'd like to hear how your friends would do in a LARP or other situation where personal actions are more to the fore, and not 'I lie <clatter of dice> and win!'

Except "I lie <clatter of dice>" is about as immersive as "I cook the meth <clatter of dice>" or "I fortify the Sanctum <clatter of dice>" or "I cast magic missile against the goblin <clatter of dice>."

That, er, is exactly the point, yes.

it's not about immersion

For you. I wasn't talking about immersion for RPGs, but for quite of a lot of the particular group who is talking all around you right now, and many who aren't.

The number of people for who it's about loss of autonomy are not small, either, and they will be just as upset at being the target of Domination as being the target of a social roll.

@Jeshin said:

2. Is there a steampunk themed book that anyone can recommend?

3. What is Steampunk? @Sunny's "Steampunk And..." is a misnomer, because Steampunk itself is not a genre, but a style on a genre.

What I would call Steampunk is: The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello.

Alt-world Victorian with advanced mechanics based upon gear-and-steam technology. The thing about "punk" in "Cyberpunk" is that there is no consideration for the individual, the soul, ultimately making Cyberpunk a story about human beings. Cyberpunk is, again in my world, a disposable-future version of Noir.

We can see elements of what become some versions of Steampunk in things like Space: 1889 and Fallout (more neoretro-60s than neoretro-1880s).

The Difference Engine is maybe as pure as I've read for Steampunk, as there is clockwork technology mimicking our own but in the Victorian era, but with all the rules the same as our world. A Hard Sci-Fi Steampunk, if you would.

Castle Falkenstin calls it "anacrotech", as in technology that belongs to a different time period but will be represented by magic and/or mad science.

So I over-answered. It's my way.

@bored

I didn't see your response as sarcastic. It's a good point. We can no more be trusted with anarchy than we can with self-moderation under a heavy rules regime. We don't disagree on that point.

I wanted to offer some warning that "have rules" alone is not a solution. It needs to be tempered with leadership or earned trust (what some incorrectly call "favoritism"; thank you for reminding me of that, @VulgarKitten).