Posts made by Thenomain

@auspice

It's called networking.

Science Vs.: Comparing what people think or do vs. what science says or knows, and science doesn’t always win. The “Science vs. Marajuana” episode had so many reefer puns in it they have a running tally. Fun but scientific.

Myths & Legends podcast: Retelling, yes, myths and legends with a modern voice. This is about the only time I understood what the heck the deal was with the Norse myths. Ends with “creature of the week” where some magical beasties from all over are described.

Fictional: Same guy summarizing fiction, so like Cliffs Notes with personality, or Thug Reviews without explaining the underlying meaning. Just stories retold in a modern voice. They just finished up Count of Monte Cristo, which I could never get interested in, but summarized this way made me at least get why it was popular. Ends with a bit about old comic book heroes or villains that had no right existing because of how strange or pointless they were; very funny.

Lore: If you need to get depressed that what we believe in magic and monsters making us humans into monsters, this is the podcast. It deserves its high rating and Amazon Prime short series, which turns something dark into something dark with dark visuals and holy crap we did not come from a nice past. Entirely European and American, tho.

That’s all I listen to non fiction. I should listen to 99% Invisible, considering how much I bang on about design.

Speaking of banging on, here’s my list of current fiction podcasts!

Welcome to Night Vale: You all have read me praise this greatly. It’s Lovecraft by way of A Prairie Home Companion (now Welcome From Here), where black secret sheriff helicopters and unknowable blood stone circles are pretty much the norm. Mostly just silly, in a very off kilter way, but also heartwarming.

Alice Isn’t Dead: A woman becomes a trucker to find her missing wife and stumbles into a conspiracy far, far beyond her. Done by the same people as WTNV, but is about the loneliness of life on the road. Third and final season starts this year.

Within the Wires: Another WTNV production. WW2 left two thirds of the world dead and a new single world society has been formed from the destruction to stop it from happening again. The story is told via cassette tapes from a single speaker and it is strange and compelling and strange and amazing that it could be done. Season One is abosolutely worth listening to. Season two is more standard of a story, but has more world building in it.

Our Fair City: The remaining population of the known world of our near future is holed up, quite literally, in an insurance building in Hartford, Connecticut. Originally written as a series of slightly connected short for, stories, it has become a giant multi season epic tale of humanity in exactly what you’d think an insurance company as humanity’s caretakers would look like. Post-apocalyptic dystopia epic. Hartlife: The only life you ever need.

Sayer: I find new podcasts from the Q&A episodes of other podcasts. This one was from Our Fair City. Also a short form podcast, tho some seasons are more story arc than others. An asteroid hits Earth and a company launches it back into space to orbit Earth and be a staging ground for humanity’s leaving our now understandably dying planet. Be assured: There are no bees on Typhon.

The Orphans: This one I got from the Sayer crew. Far future survival story of a crashed ship on an almost abandoned planet. Season one serves as world building, and I’m hooked. Beautiful sound.

Edict Zero - FIS: How to describe this? Far future police procedural on a planet that we colonized after fleeing a dying Earth. The world feels like a world, though, messy and nuanced. Everything else would be a spoiler, except that one of the characters can be hard to take. The sound is not mixed awesomely, but the production complexity of this show is insanely great.

The Liberty Podcast: Speaking fleeing a dying Earth, this series takes place on an Earth colony in the middle of terraforming, and after a civil war a hundred years ago. It’s mostly about the safe and wealthy area which is for once not a classist high society utopia/dystopia, but a social machine that people live within. The area outside is filled with roving gangs and cannibalism because they don’t have the infrastructure to stay alive. Lots of lore, lots of world building, a nice and not black-and-white take on the order vs. chaos sci-if trope.

Wolf 359: This series was hard to finish listening to for the same reason Battlestar Galactica was: It is non stop pain to the protagonists, but the writing is solid and the voice acting is superb. Well, except for the fake Russian accent. Series starts as strange events on a space station around Wolf 359, and ends with a conspiracy against humanity by the company that sent them there. I feel this was a bit of back peddling, because this happens pretty close to or at modern day, but I think they pull it off well. Yes that’s a mild spoiler. So very mild.

The White Vault: A found footage Lovecraft story in modern day, featuring isolation and architectural discovery. Slow but well told.

Limetown: Staged as an NPR series, tho feels less fake than others I’ve tried. (Stage actors, stop being stage actors for these please!) After a small private laboratory town disappears in violence, one reporter follows the threads to find what experiments were pushing human understanding and ability.

The Bright Sessions: Another show that starts off as recorded notes, it does escape the “log” format to do more with the series. Takes place in a psychiatrist’s office where she helps troubled young adults deal with their psychic abilities, and how to hide it from the world. Takes powers as a physiological condition and not just magic brain juju. It does fall a bit to the “conastant suffering of characters” from time to time, but it’s well done so I forgive it.

Thrilling Adventure Hour: Olde Time Radio Shows done on stage with tongue placed firmly in cheek, done for comedy value. My favorites are “Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars” and “Beyond Belief”, but they’re all fun. It’s too bad to miss on some of the visuals, mostly actors reacting to other actors, but you’re not missing anything much from it. The audiophiles will recognize some voices.

Decoder Ring Theatre: Black Jack Justice: 1940s detective noir radio show starring “Black Jack” Justice and his partner, NOT SIDECKICK OR GIRL FRIDAY, Trixie Dixon Girl Detective. There hasn’t been anything since 2015, 67 hard-boiled episodes in, but oh is it worth it. Then there’s the audio book of how these two first met, which you should absolutely wait until you’re done with the 67 episodes.

This was the first podcast I ever listened to, discovered on the midnight audio theatre of my local NPR station.

And that’s what I listen to, @Sonder. Aren’t you glad you asked?

@kanye-qwest said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@thenomain it was a woman. An old ass woman, but STILL

...

Wow.

@kanye-qwest

Here, did you want me to explain what he meant to you?

...

I am kidding. Don't hurt me.

That guy clearly needs to stop.

@cupcake said in RL things I love:

1894 [...] Buryl [...] Pearl [...] Pearlie

If anyone modern gives shit to someone named "Shantiqua", you just point this out.

@ganymede said in Good Music:

You know who's shiny? David Bowie.

Thank your local embalmer.

I feel like I've been pulled into this sad man's kinks by somehow getting his kinks posted as a "training game" on Steam. At least with Sakura games everyone is warned what they'regetting into. (A little less so with Nekopara.)

@peasoupling said in General Video Game Thread:

@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

Steam hosts a choose-the-response type game on how to psychologically seduce women.

You give them gifts and only take them along on quests where you can make choices that boost their approval, right?

Hey Ash, Whatcha Playing: Hatoful Boyfriend

Watch this, then you'll understand when I say: "A li'l Column A, li'l Column B?"

So Steam has a sale on "Super Seducer".

Steam hosts a choose-the-response type game on how to psychologically seduce women.

You can buy this on Steam.

...

What the fuck, Steam?

What. The. Figurative. Fuck.

I honestly feel bad for anyone on Comcast. My condolences.

@surreality

I didn't say "house rules".

I said "explicit rules".

I disagree on your definition of Rule Zero, but this thread is already full of people nit-picking and going "well actually" at each other, so I'm out.

@faraday said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

@thenomain I don't think we're disagreeing with the historical timeline

And I wasn't saying that it wasn't a thing, but saying there was a historical timeline.

I'm also talking on account of explicit game rules. Whatever groups did, the game was written as a complete thing far more often than not, even if people didn't take it that way.

If you're not interested in this, fine, but please don't cast me as being antagonistic when I'm not.

@surreality

The game never gave GM Fiat, and there were arguments over that even before the Internet. D&D was a wargame style RPG, and any board game cannot just make things up unless that’s a rule.

Rule Zero flipped the discussion.

@surreality

Well consider the RPG field of the late 80s and early 90s. D&D and other wargame style games, where if it’s written down then it absolutely is a rule. Shadowrun was written this way too, and the Vampire came out and the book said, “Eh, just have fun with it.”

Sure, White Wolf at the time was a bunch of egotists, drug users, and hippies, but they struck a nerve and got an almost instant cult following. Beforehand, Rule Zero was not a thing.

Nowadays it is, because almost no games are written without thinking about it. There are a few games without Rule Zero, but those are games written well enough that they don’t need one, or in some cases are worse off with it.

So we have a torturous discussion based on the expectations of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.

D&D still lives firmly in the former where Storytelling lies in the latter, each of the systems flirting across the shades of grey that separate them,

@the-sands

Your issue is that people want to play the rules as written?

Huh. Okay.

@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

@thenomain Absolutely, and I'm not suggesting that they aren't.

That is not the subject being discussed. The subject is 'should skill descriptions be treated as rules?'

What kind of rule? Game system rule? Setting rule? Metagame rule? Do you subscribe to Rule Zero?

The answer to the first two should be both yes and no, because the answer to the third should always be yes.

Unless you are Lumpley and or know how to assure that your system rules match 1:1 with your setting rules. Then there is almost no need for Rule Zero.

Games with a Rule Zero are admitting that they may not have everything perfect, so to ignore things when they don’t make sense.

Therefore, your core question is the wrong question. It’s incomplete. It is without sufficient context.

Because if that, you should really go easier with people who see a different issue or answer.

RPG systems are imperfect at accurately representing real world situations.

I have absolutely nothing more constructive to say on this matter, because RPG systems are imperfect at accurately representing real world situations.

@mr-johnson

Well now I know the answer to the "are you insane?" question.

@the-sands

No, you got it right the first time. I'm asking what people need to consider as they are converting a TT ruleset to a Mu*.

What my long treatise was about is how code design isn't critical in this phase, and that you could make it non-critical for almost every phase.

@mr-johnson

Are you suggesting ORE for online play?

Are you in-sane?