Posts made by Thenomain

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.

@Tyche said in RL things I love:

I'm a swiftie.

I heard that about you.

You know, from your wife-slash-girlfriend or husband-slash-boyfriend.

It's a bad joke.

On purpose.

... I think.

@Admiral said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

I would like a reboot.

Would kill the game unless it got a new metaplot to encourage people.

@Coin said in Good TV:

Cutting of filler bullshit

Filler bullshit is probably what killed Carnivalle. I love(d) HBO because they didn’t believe in filler bullshit. That was a long The Wire ago, but I was hoping it was still true. Guess not.

@Tempest said in Sin City Chronicles:

The guy who always has 2 friends app in with him is always going to have an advantage with him over the loner. Unless the group of 3 makes 0 effort to make outside connections or something, but even then, the lone person has an uphill battle even if they all start together on day 1.

And this is why staff always has the advantage over players when it comes to their characters. And so we slip further off topic with “should staff be able to play at all, or what kind of characters should they be allowed to play.”

Hopefully we can get this advertising thread back to what it is: An advertising thread.

@AlexRaymond

Expected to? Probably not. Allowed to? I’d be interested in how many people would take up that challenge for the fun that creating allows.

Forcing a rocket age game to be an old IP would be horrible, either Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Letting you and players collaborate to make your own universe sounds like a great time, and I wish you all great success.

@Arkandel

Really, my experience has it that a game with separated out spheres with 20 players has one sphere with 15 players and another sphere with 15 players, because people will play the sphere and therefore game they feel like that day. They also are able to keep in OOC contact with friends who play other spheres, giving them more reason to play that particular game.

I feel very confident about this because we keep needing to discuss Conflict Of Interest policies. If people played only one character on a game, no conflict.

@Lithium said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Thenomain My point was that you went off on a tangent, saying that I said all these things that I did not.

My point was that you went off on a tangent, saying that things are tricky that are not.

@Lithium said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Thenomain I never said it can't work.

You said it was tricky. I've often seen it work just fine. You want to do things another way because your beliefs, sure, but I've not seen it such a challenge that multi-sphere WoD games don't commonly work. (I didn't mention a few to keep things short.)

EDIT: There was a whole bunch of stuff there that was completely unrelated to what I said actually, and of course opinions vary but...

Where's all this holier than thou aggression coming from?

I'm running the wrong events? Please.

I ran bad events all the time. It's why I stopped. Why do you think this is anything more than an honest, if somewhat blunt, observation? If your goal is 'A', and your outcome is '!A', then something went wrong between conception and application. As it's not the game system, it's the application.

(edit, because I was edited under while replying):

Also: Yeah cuz the Seers of the Throne interfere with /everything/ /every/ mage does on a spur of the moment thing by joining into another plot? Then it becomes all about the mage, in every other splat event that a mage tries to partake in.

You know the bit above where I said that "someone is going to respond to this even though it's not the point"? I should have mentioned it on the second point too, apparently. "One example" shouldn't mean "all the time", but eh, there you go.

@Lithium said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Thenomain Not only making things easy for staff but also for players. It gives the game more focus. In my opinion when you have multiple sphere's the game gets diluted down and the stories are... tricky.

In the however long I played on Haunted Memories, I never found this to be true.

In the however long I played on The Reach, I never found this to be true.

(note, because I know someone is going to get snippy and pedantic on it like this is the point, which it is not: Of course things get diluted and stories get tricky, but I figure very little of it was because the game was multi-sphere and more because the game had characters of differing viewpoints sometimes working against each other's interests. Putting the words "By Night" on your game is a sure-fire way of saying "Generic American Bland City Of Generic American Blandness...By Night".)

What is challenging or difficult for one sphere is amazingly easy for the other and unfortunately it also makes it hard to shine and encourages massive optimization (I know, there will be those who do that anyway) in order to compete with the other splats.

Then you're running the wrong events, or running the events wrong. Let's take everyone's favorite "wah wah over-powered" whipping boy: Mage. Did you know that Mage has a counter-group that is just as capable as them but that much more organized? A lot of people forget this, either out of convenience or out of just plain forgetting.

In HM's Changeling sphere, we said "no" to non-Changelings a few times. There was a Changeling plot and Changeling politics. A few rare times a Vampire or Mage would try to manipulate a Changeling or three and they would be cut off or find out the hard way that when threatened with all-out sphere war, people will compromise fairly quickly.

Except for that one time where some Vampire players got a player (not a character, a player) banned from ever interacting with the Vampire sphere (not just them. the whole sphere) because they didn't like the consequences of their actions.

Anyhow, what I'm saying is that if you don't want to design a game that way, that's fine. Saying that it can't work is not true.

My cat will lick my mouth.

I finally discovered that this is when his water or food bowl was empty. He's a very good self-feeding cat so I just keep it full.

It's absoutely freaky, but I love that I have an intelligent cat.

@Lithium said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Thenomain This is a major reason why the game I am working on right now is single sphere with mortal and mortal+.

Which "this"? Making things easy for staff? I mean, good and all, but if that single sphere is Promethean you'd still have to consider these things. I don't want to say that if I had finished the Covers System for EldritchMUX that it would've been more popular, but it still would have needed to be done.

It's just getting done years later.

Because I'm a sucker, and I'm still coding for you people in this broken code system that I know like the back of my hand.

@Ominous said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Thenomain My city has something like three clubs, one of which is the awesome gay club. However we have hundreds of bars, and it's a college town so "regulars" aren't much of a thing when the crowd is constantly changing every year.

So what you're really saying is that social gatherings in different locations differ based on the local culture.

Why didn't you say so to begin with!

@Ominous said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Gingerlily Clubs are awful, pretentious places that offer none of the relaxation, conversation, and fun that bars offer

Alternatively, bars are seedy places full of the kind of cliques and locals who don't really want you there.

I don't believe this for every "bar", but from your description of clubs, you're going to entirely the wrong clubs.

@Meg is becoming an expert at Dad Jokes.

I worry.