@Arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:
Baldur's Gate 3 confirmed, suckers!
Pff, you remember that Bard's Tale remake? It was absolutely horrible. Just because someone's coming out with Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't mean it'll be any g—
From the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2
The first one is absolutely for CoD (2e).
I'm not entirely sure how deeply @skew converted it over to V5. I knew he was doing an Rhost conversion but didn't know it was for V5. Let's see if we can get more info....
Update
Skew says it was intended to be Vampire 5e for Rhost, but he never got that far. He fell into a pit called Ares and is enjoying all the unicorns and sex that it brings, or something.
(He also says that it does bring my CoD code to Rhost, so the foundation is there if you want to V5 it up on Rhost. It's not unsensible to do so but I have fixed quite a few bugs and brought some necessary changes to the system, so y'never know.)
Suspending disbelief in a challenging situation is best accomplished by someone with skill and talent.
I mean, it's not like I didn't say this three times now.
Sometimes that skill is, "Because I was going around the Universe trying to help an entire quarter of it. Where were you?" Beat hit, world built.
I would've preferred more show-don't-tell, but we're lucky the movie wasn't a trilogy. Not that the entire first one couldn't've been about fifteen minutes and been just as impactful. It was good enough.
And we haven't had a lot of good enough outside MCU lately.
Besides smaller projects like Doom Patrol, I mean. We have a lot of good enough outside MCU, just not on the big screen.
@Jaded said in Good or New Movies Review:
With Disney acquiring Fox this means they no longer have to do that, which is why we are having a movie coming out called "The New Mutants."
See Above re: Doing it Right. It's going to be a challenge to fold the two universes together since extremely different world-changing events have been happening in either of them.
It could be great.
Or it could be horrific.
The people in charge of the MCU are the only people who've gotten this superhero franchise right, but I'm still on the side of hoping they don't and keep me interested in two equally intriguing franchises and story worlds.
@Ganymede said in Echoes in the Mists - Discussion:
@Livia said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:
She was so close!
Then come visit and play! We have all sorts of fun 2E bloodlines to work with.
Echoes Staff: "Are you playing now?"
Thenomain: "Eh, no."
Echoes Staff: "How about now."
Thenomain: "Eh, no."
Ganymede: "I'm there."
Thenomain: "...Goddamnit."
@Jaded said in Good or New Movies Review:
@Arkandel
I agree. And since Disney just concluded their deal with Fox, I suspect we're going to be seeing a whole new X-Men reboot anyways, to bring them into the MCU.
I honestly hope that they don't, or if they do that they find an absolutely amazing writer and director to make it work because, as a completely non-comic-book nerd:
I mean, in a world where Tony Stark can, practically alone (with jump-starting from Banner) can [[redacted for the three people who haven't seen endgame]], the whole "Mutant Plight" would seem starkly out of place to me. The ending to X-Men: The Last Stand would've come a whole lot sooner. "You don't want to be goo-boy? Come to Stark Clinics for your free shot."
I just...nngh. Hope not.
(Heh. "starkly". Stark. Jokes.)
Maybe tools can help communication, but I'm leery of trying to use code to solve social problems.
It is such a relief to see this mentioned. And this:
It's important to remember - the 'X-Card' nor any of the other affiliated ideas is not a 'rule' by which anyone must abide.
And this:
The X-Card thing feels too thin to even be called a system
And this:
The X-Card is a message from a player to a storyteller regarding the content of the story being told.
A social rule is not the same as a business rule. The social space is the space all this comes from and returns to. The rules we play with are rules we agree on, not rules we are forced to engage with.
I am enjoying thinking about the idea of FTBing certain elements of a scene, not just the scene itself. I like "instead of drugged your character gets conked on the head" level of meta-scening.
—
But part of what I think Sparks is saying (and Faraday pulling out) is that people often don't know they have options.
I don't think it matters which of the many systems people have come up with to make things as comfortable as possible as long as people are comfortable enough to say anything.
(no john cusack in the rain; it's not that kind of "say anything")
I think a lot of us in this hobby (and other close-knit social hobbies; we act most similar to local theatre) are still used to just accepting whatever it is that's put in front of us that we're myopic to the first-look, the fresh view of a newbie who is trying to learn the rules from Step Zero.
I think that's waaaaay overthinking the whole concept.
I think a lot of us are.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
The best way to know you know something is to teach it to a child.
Not everything has to be nitpicked
Blasphemy upon thee/In the Church of Nitpickery.
I also think, again, using it as a base when its base is the whole issue is....kinda like building a house on a foundation when the foundation is cracked through.
Except that a system that doesn't work en toto in a different context may have elements that do.
The foundation is just fine for the environment X-Card is made for. There's nothing cracked if it's applied reasonably. And if it's not? Don't blame the hammer if someone uses it as a weapon; recognize that it's possible and continue designing for the reasonable player, not the crazy ones.
Vampire 5th Edition, Page 423-5: Appendix III: Advice for Considerate Play: Calibration Techniques
These authors know and knew they were pushing lines hard (c.f., the entire rest of the Appendix) and that even when—or especially when—you're pushing propriety you need to accommodate.
Yes, I know the irony considering that Paradox Entertainment fired them, but there it is, "The X Card", right there.
Sure it's not at the start like in some RPG books, but it's there. It's also in Changeling.
I see your premise as taking an all-or-nothing approach. That is, if you're okay with Vagina Dentata then you must also be okay with Breeding Rules.
People should be aware of the game they're about to play, but everyone has limits.
I was just in the middle of editing that this only works if everyone is acting in good faith to one another.
Which is the position we should start from, not be argued into.
Also, the "smoking" flag probably doesn't carry the same weight as the "self-mutilation" flag and certainly doesn't carry the same weight as the "doing horrible things to my character" flag.
They should be treated seriously, of course, but someone with understanding would probably get why not talking about how to FTB some of these things is why they raised the flag to begin with, good faith or otherwise.
Like I said: Nuance.
This is a response about nuance.
If a character is known to smoke as a response to something that is happening, and another player pull out the x-card about smoking, then I hope that a discussion takes place.
Even if the discussion is: Okay, we can FTB on the smoking, but this is what my character is doing throughout this while he's repressing bad memories about the situation we're RPing about right now.
The person pulling the card should understand that, too. I can understand the chilling effect of not wanting to get into an argument or being told you're wrong, but the player you're pulling the card on should get a chance to find a way to make it work for everyone.
Is this too hard?
It's not as easy as telling someone, "This is the World of Darkness, not the World of Fluffy Kittens."
It's not hard, but it's also not universal. When people disagree or slip up because they're running a plot as well as managing everyone's personalities—and people will slip up—then others will feel empowered to complain. And we'll be right back here on Soapbox reacting to gray-area situations like they were black-and-white.
Patience and Understanding are the things that make any of this work. From the people who are running things, from the people who react to the mistakes, from everyone.
I personally think we should start there.
And thus it invalidates the system at its core.
Then people disagree with the core of the system, or the system is wrong for the situation. You change the system until it works.
This is Game Design 101, people. I am not arguing the points, just extrapolating on it.
The whole purpose of the card system is to be no questions asked.
And if you don't like it, change the system.
Which is what I said.
But this system is no-questions-asked.
Then the system needs altered out of its original purpose for a new medium.
It's a thing we do because not doing anything leads to problems.
We're used to house-rules, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't apply that philosophy here.
@Warma-Sheen said in General Video Game Thread:
@Sparks Thanks for the review. I've never owned a VR system before but I've been waiting to own one since I played a VR game in a mall in Miami in 1993 / 1994.
How many times did you picked up by that pterodactyl? That thing was terrible and so sssslllooooowwwwww.
But what's more, this could easily be misused by people just interested in controlling the scene to more easily meet their whims.
It's fairly easy to tell if someone is abusing a system to manipulate a scene's outcomes. Not everyone, of course, but most people are terrible at making up believable lies. And even if they're not entirely believable lies, if the outcome is a matter of still coming up with a realistic IC situation then so be it.
The liars and abusers will out themselves. How quickly is a problem, but how much of a problem is up to each of us to decide how far we're willing to accept...whatever it is. Which is to say: Toxicity isn't a binary.
If it were we'd never eat McDonald's again.
@egg said in Demon: the Fallen:
@Jennkryst ...then the original wiz shut theirs down again, and someone else reopened their reopened version, wherein it becomes such a rabbit hole that my brain just shuts down.
Unlike the game.