At one point I would have gotten the Virtual Adepts symbol. But let's be honest; it's pretty cool in its own right.
Posts made by Thenomain
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RE: RL things I love
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RE: RL things I love
@Bobotron said in RL things I love:
Tzimisce symbol tramp stamp
I can't even...
Remember, your can't even is someone else's fetish.
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RE: WW released Dark Pack guidelines
Please note: This is for Storyteller only...as far as I can tell. WoD Classic, V20, etc. As far as I can tell, it does not cover Storytelling; nWoD, Chronicles of Darkness, etc.
IANAL. I have asked @Ganymede to read it in case he has other opinions or inputs.
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RE: Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game
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.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
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.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
Then I'd like to distill many of my thoughts down to one line:
PC Antagonism Done Right requires the player to accept that their character is not the hero of the story, while their character does.
I also think the game should have a system in place where death, pain, suffering, and loss are meaningful, but as I believe that a player's job is to buy in to the theme and setting of the game they play on, this can be easily mitigated by the bolded statement above.
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RE: RL things I love
Things I Also Love: Being a killjoy. Muahahahahaa!
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RE: RL things I love
Photoshopped. Look at how the color and stroke thickness of the 'A' is different than all the other letters.
(RL thing I love: Fonts. I haven't done layout work in forever and I believe I still have about 4k of them kicking around.)
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@GangOfDolls said in PC antagonism done right:
Antagonism is best when its motivations in the character are pure.
Using this as a jumping-off point for some thoughts...
When filming the pilot to Firefly, Adam Baldwin was having some problems getting into the Jayne character until Joss gave him the bit of advice: Jayne thinks he's the hero of the story.
While I don't think Jayne's motivations are pure, but he thinks he knows the world to work a certain way, and it comes to a head where he is threatened to be spaced. He wasn't actually spaced, just the threat of it was enough to pull him back from destructive.
Two things happen here that I don't see happen a lot on Mu*s:
- The antagonist backed down. Life may be cheap in the wild (space-)west, but your life is still yours. There's no god to complain to, no director to put you in a bigger limelight, you're either alive or dead, and you can't achieve your motivations when you're dead.
- The protagonist backed down. I don't know if this is something I don't see a lot because I play WoD games, but seeing someone who feels slighted or wronged not take the nuclear option isn't common. So many characters are tooled to "win" that not taking that road seems like a player deciding to cripple their character. In my Firefly example, Mal would lose an easily controllable bit of muscle, an asset, and probably lose a few of his other crewmates and that would kill him inside.
Most RPGs aren't set up for these scenarios. Maybe Promethean (WoD) and it's keystone system. Maybe Fate Core. Maybe one or two others, but these aren't the stories we think of when we think of playing a tabletop RPG, and that's mostly what dominates this hobby.
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@Ganymede said in PC antagonism done right:
@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
When you jerks come up with a better one-word term than 'antagonist' I'll be happy to use it from now on in the thread.
The objection is not with your use of the word, but with the presumptions regarding what that word should mean.
It's like someone used the word "connotation" to describe some kind of disconnect between interpretations.
I blame the parents. (MST3K, now on Netflix.)
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RE: PC antagonism done right
@faraday said in PC antagonism done right:
Antagonism makes for good stories, but in a MU* environment I think it's a lost cause. Mostly for the reasons you mentioned, but it's even more than that. Let's pretend that there's a totally mature player who won't start OOC drama, needs no encouragement to play antagonism, and is an awesome RPer. I don't want that person playing my character's antagonist, I want them playing my friend. Because 95% of MU scenes are social in nature, and who wants to hang out with their antagonist? Antagonists are best metered out in small doses, and that runs contrary to what you want to be doing with your awesome RPers.
While I know I'm five internet-years behind on this thread, now, but I did want to say that this kind of player is exactly who I want to play against.
The word "antagonist" was unfortunate in its connotation to this discussion, but let's look at President Roslin and General Adams's relationship. They had aggressively different agendas through most of the early seasons, and in many ways they were antagonistic. Dr. Baltar was almost textbook antagonist, and your player description would thrive in that role.
In Amber, antagonists share the same space. In World of Darkness, you have people against you because it's Tuesday; a game of Vampire can be chock full of antagonists you can't kill even without bringing in the groups that are usually thought of when someone says "antagonist".
We don't need Cylons, we don't need Shadow, we don't need Sabbat, we just need two people whose goals oppose, and for this I want a million of the kind of person you describe.
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RE: Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread
I believe it's a call, not a mail. Check the vid com.
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RE: What do you play most?
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.
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RE: What do you WANT to play most?
@ThatGuyThere said in What do you WANT to play most?:
Although I did not vote this I think my dream MU* would be a Castle Falkenstien game that focused on adventure, that said I know it would never happen.
Nowadays we call that 7th Sea.
I bet it will happen.
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RE: What do you WANT to play most?
I have a harder time thinking of existing properties where it'd be hard not to play within, and most of them have to do with either superheroes or fiction series that aren't very well fleshed out, which makes them about as well known as original theme anyhow.
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WoD isn't horror most of the time anyway. Sadly.
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RE: What do you WANT to play most?
@Sparks said in What do you WANT to play most?:
I admit, I've been missing Lost Stars (original, invite-only science fiction game a friend and I ran years ago) something fierce lately, in part because of discussing the old DICE system I designed for there. But thinking on LS for systems design discussion reminds me how spaceships plus mysteries around ancient alien ruins was a fun combination.
LS had a distinct story arc, though, and we pretty much concluded it.
That never stopped Joss Wheedon. Or Mass Effect, come to think of it.
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RE: Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread
"What is this thing? It is called ... human?"
Meanwhile, twenty light-years away, the same race has been dealing with humans for about a year.
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20 hours in and I feel like I'm getting to the core plot. And I just got an achievement called "almost there", with only two planets at 100% viability. Ironic since I just did something that almost doubled the number of systems I could get to. Halfway there, more like!
I do have to say that I appreciate how you don't have to be a completionist to get 100% viability on a planet.
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RE: Hobby Glossary
I believe that Dark Metal was the first game where I heard the phrase "telenuke" and specifically in reference to mages, yes.
@Clarity , there is no code specifically allowing or disallowing this. When your game is a giant persistent RPG, you interpret the book rules as best you can. It's like role playing superheroes, except without the "hero" part.
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
If I had even one "she said", I would not have sat on my hands, but as it was, I had one person reporting on behalf of another, on four others, and none of those four were willing to explain the situation themselves. It was quite literally "he said that she said".
I don't feel insulted by anyone thinking it was the wrong move. I felt terrible at the time, but of me, Lamia and Troy, none of us felt that we could do anything, and we did throw someone off the game for things that happened on another game and we said, "Nope, not here, goodbye." The difference there was that we had someone who talked to us, we had a trail back to the events. Without that trail, without a reasonable connection, what do you do?
You do your best. And you own up to it.