Posts made by Thenomain

@Ominous said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

George R. R. Martin making video games. No one will expect their character dying halfway through the second chapter.

We call that game Chrono Trigger.

@Ganymede
AFTER they ended the Bloght so fast that people disbelieved that it happened. Duh they are special

@Kanye-Qwest

If you say so? I don't understand what you read and certainly not what your objection is. .

@Ganymede said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

DA:O and DA:I? You so super-special, yes you are. Warden or Inquisitor.

What? As one of the last two Grey Wardens in Ferelden, even with an old treaty you have to lick the boots of pretty much every group who signed just to get them to agree. And the only group who has any respect for you by title are the Dwarves. You're only one step above nobody.

In DA2, you're a displaced noble. Horrors. Once you buy back your family estate, you could sit on your ass for the other two thirds of the game. You're the DA:O Noble Origins by default. Not exactly "from nothing".

@Ganymede said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

I don't think DA2 is gritty because its attempts to be gritty fail.

I think you fail.

I think your mom fails?

Forget about your sibling: your mother... (etc.etc.etc.)

Yes, I agree 100%. These things are horrible events, but they're presented as a 5th Grade Puppet Show that had all the horrible parts edited out by the PTA. The game fumbles this ball so hard that the quarterback almost makes a touchdown for the other team. The bit with Hawke's mother? Tragic, but not gritty until a little bit at the very, very, VERY end. The bit with Merrill? Tragic and a bit grittier. Bethany in the Deep Roads? Yeah, okay, that was a bit gritty (especially the epilogue in the next chapter), but it was mostly tragic. DA2 was a game of tragedies on a field of bland covered with bland with a bland chaser. This is not gritty.

Morrigan is living with the Sword of Damocles over her head. Sten is trying to survive knowing that he will eventually have to kill himself. Leliana is living with the world's worst case of false hope. The first town you pass through after surviving the Blight is very obviously overcrowded and filled with prejudices. The stories in the Deep Roads hit hard and don't stop until the scripted main plot at the end. Even the Redcliffe plot, which I thought was the weakest main area, were still grittier than the plot of Hawke's mother.

Were the events in DA2 gritty? Sure, if they weren't so badly handled. But they were. They were handled like a stereotypical 1950s housewife handles a dead mouse: At arm's length and with as little involvement as possible. I have to do a lot of mental gymnastics and read between a lot of lines to make it as nasty as they intended.

The game Dragon Age 2 was not gritty. I stand firmly by this.

@Kanye-Qwest
I don't think DA2 is gritty because its attempts to be gritty fail.

@Kanye-Qwest

Of the two family members that I lost, the first was almost impactful save for the 1960s cardboard set of nothing that they gave us, the other was handled so badly with the most lame foreshadowing. I mean yeah, at least there was foreshadowing, but both situations came down to nothing more than reacting to something bad that happened around you. It was a cookie cutter example of what gritty might have looked like if they fleshed it out more. Or, like, at all.

DA:O does what a good drama should: Introduce the characters and their situation before messing with it. Hell, the City Dalish intro alone left me rooting against the humans, doubly so as I had chosen a female character for that. I chose a rogue to begin with, but by the end of the intro I wanted to go full on assasin.

The world this Hero of Ferelden left was not a pretty, golden one.

I will give DA2 one prop for not pulling all the punches (like FO4 utterly wussed on). You could leave things kind of messed up at the end, but in such small, inconsequential ways. DA2, to me, was a game about waiting for something to happen.

Good for a Mu*, I suppose.

Edit:

Thanks to the DLCs, my shithole home had two gigantic statues each worth at least the price of the hovel and more, and so many weapons, armor, and magic staffs that we probably could have eaten like kings for a year.

Gritty is a mood, not a setting. DA2, I feel, failed it horribly.

@escapegoat

DA:O and DA:A, yes. DA2 and DA:I, not so much. I prefer the gritty side of Dragon Age far more.

@Ghost

-1 Points to Punindor.

@Ominous

So Tolkien. Fair enough.

@Misadventure said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:

That is odd, I've seen places that have names like Guest 1

The number is added as part of the whole Guest system. Chime's Mux fork has an amusing bug in it where the Guest may start at 34 or 16 or other random numbers. I've asked her to leave it in.

or Orange Guest, etc.

Probably Rhost or Penn, not Mux.

Someone had made a character called Guestronaut and I liked it so much that I wanted to make this every guest character.

Unfortunately I couldn't make this the default guest login without forcing everyone to type 'connect guestronaut' at the login screen.

We have guest characters now, if not guestronauts.

@skew

... Goddammit, do I have to do everything around here?

@Karmageddon said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

That sounds quite a bit like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk Your Elusive Creative Genius.

People, this is worth listening to, especially for her description of what Karmageddon describes as well as the story about 'Ole!' at the end.

Thank you for identifying it and thank you even more for quoting the relevant part here. I find this a very compelling argument that externalizing your creativity is not a bad thing.

Having others to lean on, having real people to connect with, is I think the modern day equivalent of it. There's even a modern theory that says that great ideas practically never come from a single source. Yup, it's another TED Talk: Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From. Someone has turned this into a brief TV series, not unlike Connections.

The point I'm making in this thread is that several thinking people seem to say that the less we put everything on ourselves, the more capable we are. The Greeks put this on imaginary entities and culturally accepted it. Johnson is putting this on collaboration. Tulpas? Sure, why not.

@SkinnyThicket said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

I'm interested in what separates tulpas from the hoard of characters we all roleplay over the years.

How much stock we put into them. How much life we breathe into them. How much we are inspired at any given moment.

Do you hear the voices of your characters commenting on your lives, like tulpas?

No. Never. Sometimes I'll say something like, "Hah, Bob would never fall for this shit!" The character is not me.

Is the line between your characters being real and fictional occasionally blurry?

No. Never. But the line between the character not mattering to me and mattering to me, that line blurs all too often.

I don't think it's healthy, mind. I will (not now, but have, and will probably again soon) quote the edicts of Apocalypse World as ways to help keep the character from getting personal. For instance:

• Call the character by name.

Not "me" or "my character", but "Bob". See what happens to Bob. Will Bob survive the firefight? It helps. Oh no, Bob was just ripped apart by werewolves! Laugh, silly Bob.

Okay, now over here we have Tad....

Do your characters talk to each other inside your head?

My RPG PCs? No. Never. My world-building characters? All the time. How would this go down? Let's see if this situation feels real.

Do you ever front and pretend to be your character?

No. Never. That sounds to me clinically problematic, and you should probably get help.

@SkinnyThicket

My characters are alive in my head in the same way that some worlds are alive in my head. They have motivations, internal consistencies, desires, and other things like that.

I don't believe they are real things outside the construct of my head, no.

There is this thing I call the "IC/OOC Split", which is the gray area between thinking like your character or not. I can get upset if my character is hurt or abused. This is a sense of ownership that I have, of familiarity, not that this is a living thing that exists through me.

There is a TED Talk that I wish I could find about the depression that sets in after you're successful. The speaker, who I believe may have been Anne Lamott of Bird By Bird fame, talks about how the Greeks used to have the Muse, and Household Gods, and other such things. These would allow them to externalize their successes and failures, to have a place to put such thoughts that weren't squarely on their own talents. She argues—I believe successfully—that having an external allows us to accept what happens because it's not strictly our fault, nor our responsibility to repeat the act.

Spirits are nonsense, of course, but so is putting all that pressure on yourself, which was her point. The thought of a "tulpa" is not surprising, and if it helps then that's good. If it hinders then it's not.

@Kanye-Qwest said in MSB twitter:

If you see something, say nothing - and drink to forget.

Stop being likable when you're not trying to be the opposite, damn you.

@Arkandel said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

@Thenomain Oh boy.

I don't know. I think "we don't have much tolerance when you do things you were asked not to do" isn't a bad game rule. I mean, hm, general rules of the game, one should probably read, "We have stuff that's not allowed. These are not allowed. Seriously. Everyone has to read this file and we're going to clench our teeth at you if you ask for stuff that, somewhere, says it's not allowed."

@Arkandel

Only one that I can remember at this point, which was something far more along the lines of "don't do this because you'll be told no so don't bother". There may have been a hint of "please don't do things you know you'll be told no to". These are the sections that had the smiley faces in them.

So I decided to check it out. Apparently this place used to be a Pern game, or their code was cribbed from one. It happens. This is from the "tutorial" rooms:

Since this is very specifically a Pern based game, names that would not fit the Theme are rather frowned upon such as Cyberboy, or Dragonkiller.

Pernisms exist all throughout the tutorial room and there are no existing help files. The login screen says they're in Beta, but I think they're really in Alpha.

Now, I've played plenty of games in this state, so this isn't a criticism, merely a fact.

Since this has been a topic here, this is the first paragraph of "help feature character".

Feature Characters are available via application and either a submitted
 writing for that character or an audition RP. The same application process
 that applies to non-feature characters MUST be followed. 

I imagine this application process will be outlined somewhere in the future, but for now it's uncertain what's meant.

Later on:

Unavailable, staff run cameo characters

The word "cameo" is important here, indicating to me that these characters aren't meant to be played characters. This list is pretty much the entirety of the major characters from the Dragon Age games ... except those in the 'taken' list...

Taken Feature Characters

Inquisitor- Torrent Lavellan
Commander- Cullen
Anders
Dorian Pavus
Leliana-Divine Elect Victoria

So while even Nathaniel Howe is on the "not playable or staff cameo" list, "Leliana", Nightingale and Grand Mother of the Church, is playable.

Finally, Chargen. Fortunately the guest character is free to go through the rooms, but no wonder: You set a name, a history, some personality traits, and you're pretty much done. One help file indicates that you can have any skills from any of the Dragon Age games including DLCs up to Inquisition (so not the DLCs from DA:I).

This is the help class file:

DWR welcomes the classes, specializations, and skill trees all the way up to
 and Including Dragon Age: Inquisition. But, not the post-release DLC specs
 and extra skills or spells therein (yet).

There are three base classes: Mage, Warrior, and Rogue

The only race restriction is that Dwarves cannot be Mages due to canon lore. 

Please also note: Staff reserves the right to restrict any specializations or
 classes that become too prevalent in applications, in order to maintain
 game/play balance. And that the skill trees specific to feature characters
 (ie - Merrill from DA:2 for example) may require additional scrutiny during
 the application process and have a higher chance of being rejected. 

For information on each class and spec, the best place to start is here:
 http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Classes

Finally, I notice that only Mushes seem to have serious reservations with bans. In my random reading of files, I saw three references to being banned from the game. One of them was in requesting what they call an "NPC Race". The discussion why probably belongs in a different thread, but with the number of :) scattered through the same help files and tutorial screens, I got the uncomfortable red flag feeling. Hopefully it's just me.

Anyhow, that should help some of the unchecked presumptions.

@tek said in Dragon Age: Dread Wolf's Rise:

@Thenomain I mean taking an established character and just doing whatever the fuck with it feels lazy to me.

Because that is lazy. It's a shared game world, and a canon character is an established part of that world. As Mis says, most games would never allow yo to do that with the setting. Unless that person is staff, as this has happened before and it looks like it may be happening again.