Posts made by Thenomain

So months, even years ago, there was a discussion on this board where the differences between all the Shadowruns was hotly (very hotly) debated (fought over) and I have found myself since trying to think of what Shadowrun would look like if it was created today.

I have my vision, but I've run into a snag: What does Shadowrun mean to you? What is the core of the game? Sure, what is fun is important, but all of that can be handwaved and re-added or things that aren't fun can be taken away.

What is it that makes Shadowrun its own game?

I already know: Magic, Metahumans, Cyberpunk. But I can create a lot of different game worlds with these three elements. What else? Is it the D&D-style dungeon-crawl (the 'Run)? Is it the animistic-only spirits? The Native American take on magic? Is it Tolkien? The beauty of the emerging magical world? What?

My interpretation is available on request, but I don't want to taint my question with my own views to be argued over. Argue over your own views first, please!

@Ganymede said in Comics Stuff:

a lot of us prefer to forget Mina Harker having sex with Allan Quartermain.

... I hate you.

@Lithium said in Marvel: 1963:

@Arkandel I never once said it's a new problem.

It is a problem that is exacerbated by FC's however.

It's why /I/ prefer a game that is OC only.

Lith.

I know we've had our differences, most of them stemming from communications, but this is what you should have lead with. You backed yourself into a corner (don't argue; your initial post was very hostile) and are now trying to explain your way out of it.

This is your point, right here.

Let's everybody pretend this is what Lithium said so we can get to the meat of this, please.

note: I don't have anything against leading with hostility, but I see the point being made here and we've already exhausted the "but you said it this way" part of the discussion.

Ahhem.

Moving on.

HISE (How It Should Have Ended) quite commonly features the problem of "why doesn't Superman just keep saving the day". Any episode featuring or about the Superhero Cafe (Diner?) is hilarious and you should watch them. It tickles me because my analytical nerd brain can't get over the Superman Paradox, as well as "why doesn't x do y" or "why don't we kill off The Joker" and so on and so forth.

Some RPGs have answered these questions. My favorite comes from Wild Talents: "Because that's boring and athematic and also don't do that." (Wild Talents also has a system for losing faith in yourself, which is the other half of that why-not question.)

Superhero games are for certain mindsets. I hope that "1963" expresses the kind of player they're looking for up front, maybe not by saying if you're x don't come here, but by explaining what the game is meant to be about.

Signed,

• Thenomain
  (Not a Superhero Kind of Person)

@tragedyjones said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

Why would I read the thread? Has anything posted in the history of MSB ever been worth reading?

Who are you, again?

@Arkandel said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

@vanderlylle said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

Didn't Spider try to set up this game already? Victorian London Mage?

The people involved and the way it's implemented count a great deal more toward the success or failure of a game than its setting, IMHO.

Staff a MU* well, put thought and creativity into it, time it right and it'll probably be great whether you set it in the most generic modern US metropolis, medieval Chinese village or on the Orient Express traveling through the world.

The major difference is being inspired by the theme and providing more ready-to-use hooks for plot-runners to use. Not that these aren't more important factors, mind you.

Translation: Yes, and I hear it was pretty bad thanks to the selfish twat-oven who ran it.

@bored

Victorian Reverie. I played there as one of the few humans. It was okay, tho I had a lot of problems with the staff. And the grid. Er, and the code. So, yeah.

@Roz

So it's a matter of trust between the author and the reader. I can imagine if I had to go out of my way to set up a system that auto-deducted $10/week from my account, I'd be upset if I had to mess around every week tweaking it to my liking.

Incidentally, "a matter of trust between the author and the reader" is what I assumed from the start, only now it has a non-trivial measure of the reader's involvement of time, cost, etc.

@Roz

If that isn't a plus, I would make it one. "Okay, bored with Cap for now, oh damn William Gibson has written a comic!"

See, comics for me seem like one of the more transient ways of absorbing entertainment. You don't have to be ADHD with them, but it helps?

But isn't part of the attraction of the comics scene is that if one storyline doesn't interest you, there are other stories out there and you can wait for things to blow over?

@Seamus

Point. I normally assume that Penn is almost always a superset of Mux.

Umbra these days should exclusively be handled by reality levels. Just sayin'.

@ThatGuyThere

I meant more the author/writer/artist, not the original creator of, say, Iron Man who has changed massively over the years. I meant more the Iron Man that you're reading that day, which is not the Iron Man someone else writes. (This is very different from TV shows, where multiple people can write a single character very consistently. c.f., Jean-Luc Picard.) How one Iron Man is portrayed is still being portrayed, in a general sense, by its creator.

The creator/observer relationship varies widely between mediums. This is what I was talking about. Knowing that a lot of comic book creations are mandated by the publisher, I included them in the interaction spectrum, but I am trying to focus almost exclusively on the observer (reader).

The original purpose of this was to try and figure out why @Arkandel used thematic/setting reasoning to say the Captain America revelation was bullshit, when comics are and always have been riddled with similar faux pas. His approach implied, to me, that there is an internal logic to superhero comics, when a lot of what turns me off superhero comics is the complete lack of internal logic.

There can be reasoning and consistency with the inconsistencies, but I'll be quite surprised if it's the kind of internal sense that I find critical in world-building.

@Bobotron

On Aether, I coded a comparison system with output of the percentage better or worse one character was over another.

Similar to the "60 - 20 = 40%" idea, but I think better framed letting the characters determine how a challenge with a 12% skill difference would go. (edit: in the above example, a 300% power difference, or 33% the power if you're the weaker.)

@Arkandel

All good points My curiosity is still how the fan/creator/creation triangle relationship is handled in the comics space.

@Arkandel

Three people have written Spider-Man for the movies, so I'm not sure how you can say one person writes for the movies. They're getting reset once every few years. Movies put you in the situation where you are potentially resetting expectations with each one.

TV shows, now....

@tangent said in Comics Stuff:

@Thenomain Is it maybe because after the story ends we know how it played out and can more easily see it in perspective? For instance, I think it was awesome that Jason Todd got brained with a crowbar by Joker. The next Robin

Unless "the next Robin" was also Jason Todd (whomever he is), then this is entirely different than retcons and reboots. It is absolutely fictionally continuitous for there to be a stream of different people in the role of Robin, or even Batman, or Superman, as long as those aren't all Billy Ward, Bruce Wayne, or Clark Kent.

@tangent

Character is an incredibly important aspect of fiction. Writing a character wrong is still bad writing, so I think we're on the same page here.

I just don't usually see where one inconsistency (never aging because of constant reboots) is acceptable and another (sleeper agent) is not. To me, it's because of the fiction implied by the established foundations.

This is why Female Thor was no big deal. Nor Superman quitting America. They were character consistent. Therefore, is the internal consistency entirely based on character?

It's interesting to me.

@faraday

In the OOC nexus, knowing how the player object arrived provides a lot of context for helping newbies. Arrived from the landing pad? Hi new person! Arrived from chargen, starts asking questions, they're probably connected.

I do not feel comfortable when I don't OOCly know how a person arrived to my scene. It may not be logical, but knowing how the object entered the room grounds me to their presence. It may be a skeuomorphism thing.

@ThatGuyThere said in Comics Stuff:

My personal advice for those wanting to start with comics is to look at particular creative team runs on titles rather then the series as a whole.

Yeah, but until you get into comics, how do you know what team you like? And unless that team involves someone with the brand recognition like Gaiman, how do you know what they're writing at any given time? That is, like Mushes, it seems like the best way to get into comics is either diving in and working it out on your own, or being introduced by someone else.