Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

When I play a character who's subject to IC discrimination, it's because there are aspects of the theme or setting that I think are interesting to explore with that specific type of character.

Like, on a GoT game in the long-long ago, I played a bastard (the illegitimate kind). There were specific class and personal issues I wanted to mine for dramatic purposes. I did this! There were character arcs! It was good times! Some people do enjoy playing off IC adversity. I have zero OOC issue with players who just don't want to engage in this stuff, but it would've been weird and not particularly fun for me if this character had been ICly legitimitized and never faced any sort of social side-eye.

Like I don't get the extension of the argument from 'players should be able to opt out of dealing with racial and homophobic slurs that exist IRL' (which I basically agree with) to 'all IC discrimination serves no dramatic purpose', if indeed that is the argument that is being made.

@Olsson said:

Guess that's what sells now then.

Alas, which is a peeve of mine.

I prefer a one-piece and have all my life, because I swam for exercise for so long that's just how I approach going to the pool. It's a bitch to find ones that are vaguely stylish/not made for 60-year-olds, and I feel like it's getting harder every year.

You can also give people extra Luck points, and in a situation where characters COULD die in +combat based on conditions the GM lays out, those become pretty valuable.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow Its like skinny jeans. Someone made them. Someone else said they looked good. And now they're EVERYFUCKINGWHERE. I hate skinny jeans with burning, fiery passion. Unless you're a stick with great legs, they do not look good. WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY BOOTCUT JEANS?!

I was in college when skinny jeans became a thing like 15 years ago and I remember thinking 'God, I can't wait until the inexplicable love for these passes.'

Still waiting. Takes me forever to find bootcut jeans when I'm digging through racks. I suspect tons of women also feel this way and they go quickly.

A quick blurb on what posing is and how to do it. The various commands (@emit, etc.) and what the norm writing style in play is (third-person, present-tense).

@Coin said in RL things I love:

I'm typically torn because I do not enjoy watching people I cherish and consider my friends end up in such horrendous situations and do not want that for them at all. But at the same time, politically speaking and as a citizen of a country that has had to deal with interventionist policies... yeah, zero sympathy, man.

I've been trying to look at Trump in the larger context, but that just gets scarier. He's just the symptom of something bigger going on in the world, to my mind. Brexit and the rise of people like Le Pen in France feel like part and parcel of something similar, if not exactly the same. I don't have an ounce of sympathy for the people who voted for him. I'm freaked the hell out about where they're taking us (the global 'us').

One of the things I liked about Second Pass (which I found in its last days, alas) was that it said explicitly in the news files 'The style for this game is third-person/present-tense.'

Just say it upfront and clearly so you don't get the journal and forum RPers dying on their hill of past-tense posing, and we'll all be happier. I get why newbs do it, it's only when it persists after months on the game that I start to grit my teeth at it.

@Paris said in RL Anger:

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

@Thenomain AGREED.

Here in Az, the area around Arizona State University in Tempe used to have affordable apartments ($800/mo for a 2BR around 2005) around the campus. Since then, those apartments have all been bought out and replaced.

Thst's a shame. I lived about a block behind Mill because it was actually affordable for a young couple to rent there, unlike Mesa, and there was always something to do even if you were mostly broke.

I'm in Tempe still. Which I love, but it's a different world than when I was going to ASU back in early 00s. I live far enough off the college area that my rent isn't crushing, but it keeps creeping up year by year. I'm trying to save up enough to buy just because, at this point, a mortgage on a decent condo would not be more money than I'm paying in rent each month (and might actually save me bank in a year or two the way things are going). Also, I might as well buy now, because even if I work outside the area I'll clearly never permanently LEAVE (I moved back 'for awhile' like 10 years ago). I need to accept that I cannot quit you, Tempe.

@ganymede said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Frankly, I like FS3 because the experts don't always win. I can't tell you how many times I saw Spectre missing or not damaging Cylons, and Trash Panda miraculously made it through a frontal assault. It does what Faraday wants it to: simulate a modern combat situation. And it does it really well.

Yeah, same. If anything, FS3 tends to make lower-skilled characters more effective than a lot of systems (thereby kind of massaging the difference between them and higher-skilled/more veteran characters, which is a frustration other players have with it, but that's not the complaint).

This sort of gets at...how much is a dice system responsible for making players feel validated and important to the story? And this is not a minor thing. This is maybe the most important responsibility a GM has. But it's always going to be about a player's feelings, what they want (and don't always communicate wanting particularly well), and how well or how poorly an ST is balancing their stories and doing plots that a variety of types can be involved in. Players also have to be honest with themselves about what they want to play and...play that thing (as the game allows). But, hopefully, we don't only feel validated when we get a critical success.

@PuppyBreath said in RL Anger:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in RL Anger:

This attitude is gross and insulting to anyone who considers themselves a responsible gun owner (I'm not, but I grew up in a family that hunted and my parents had them around. I still kinda like target shooting on occasion). What terrifies me isn't guns, it's the morons who get them with zero interest in safety, respect or proper training and see them as an extension of some politically misguided Ameri-peen.

I don't know if you're talking about my attitude or theirs.

Oh, theirs. Sorry, thought that would be obvious, but if I were you I'd also be freaked.

@thenomain said in Make it fun for Me!:

That is, this is me reminding everyone that people "win" at games for different reasons. Griefing is the opposite of @Three-Eyed-Crow's "telling the best story", and is how some people win.

Sure, but I think this is a class that's going to be pretty dissatisfied by cooperative MUs that don't have a heavy PvP element (games, for the record, which I don't play often enough to comment on them much). Playing the game you're on, not the game you want it to be, is part of what having fun with the game entails.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

And what I find kind of amazing about this, is how ill-suited and often semi-broken for real-time, text-based RP a lot of these formats are (I've read Facebook RP, man. I have read it and shall never forget). But people muddle through because life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. I think part of the reason Arx is so - comparatively - explosively popular is because it's found a way to hook some of this audience into a MU-like format, which is MUCH better for this kind of RP in so many ways. Once you get players into this format, its positives for what we do become clear. It's an indication of what's possible, to me, not an anomaly (and it displays the problems of scale when you manage to tap this audience, but that's another conversation).

@pyrephox said in Spotlight.:

But, y'know, I think it might be an interesting idea for smallish games to keep track of players and how many plots they've 'starred' in, and just make an effort to reach out to players OOC if they haven't starred in many, or any, and just see if there's something they'd LIKE to do.

This kind of gets at a question I have: what does "starred in" a plot mean? Obviously if you were a prominent PC in a major storyline who slew a big bad, that was a starring role. But there's a lot of angst about the GM paying attention to someone for literally one pose in a scene. Or even something as inconsequential as playing a game at a PC-run event (I have literally heard complaints about this, including games for which there were no prizes). I think staff should be mindful of this stuff and tracking involvement/focus in some kind of quantifiable way is a good idea, but I've heard complaints about "attention hogging" that really do seem to amount to "stop doing all things."

@mr-johnson
I honestly don't think a playable prologue is a terrible thing, or that staffers can't have some kind of vision for their stories. They shouldn't be totally pre-planned, but I also think plots with NO direction tend to be frustrating in their own way. Like, don't let one terrible PRP run by someone who's clearly a moron make you think a loose outline is some kind of source of evil.

@faraday
My CAG character on BS Cerberus nixed the killboard specifically because I did not want to deal with the OOC drama that comes with it.

This made IC sense for a handful of character reasons, but...that was the major impetus, not going to deny it.

This is what's frustrating to me about this stuff, because these complaints are incredibly burn-out inducing when they're about the little things. Oh, there were complaints that a person took part in a game at my party? Whelp, I don't terribly want to run parties anymore, because clearly doing ANYTHING gets you flack. Yeah, this stuff is silly, but so much of it's ABOUT the silly stuff that it takes away from legitimate complaints about game balance and favoritism.

@pyrephox said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

For me, it's a lot more about setting building than mechanics. The more a world or setting 'holds together' and operates by consistent rules (even if they're complex or hidden from the players), the more that I get excited about it, and the more 'immersed' I feel in it. Mechanics rarely enhance or detract from that, for me, unless they're really egregious or contradict the 'fluff'.

I'm the same way. I can RP with a decent degree of immersion even in something like a Gdoc, which I know a lot of players can't, because there's no skeleton of a world to hang anything on. But if I feel like the internal consistency of the setting doesn't have any meaning, or that my actions as a player don't carry any weight? I lose it, whatever systems are in place.

Players who I don't feel are playing thematically are a far bigger problem for me than staff or code most of the time, I will just own that. I've been in this game long enough that I'm quiet about it and try to tune it out. I don't have the strength to be a scold in me. But, it is a thing.

@apos said in Spotlight.:

100% the main cause of cliquishness in the hobby is people wanting to limit their exposure to microaggressions and griping like that. This hobby imo is powered entirely by enthusiasm of participants. It is incredibly easy for just a few persistently negative people to pretty much gut a game faster than a Custodius could ever dream of doing so.

Yeah, I'll admit this BS is the primary thing that makes me jaded about the hobby. I think the cheaters and harassers and true bad actors are anomalies. They're terrible, but you ban them and, problem done. But you're going to have to deal with jealousy every day, even from players who are mostly OK a lot of the time. You're going to have to deal with pettiness every day. This stuff is human but it also just really wears me down. I do this for fun, why am I bothering with these people? I tend not to bother when I know what BS awaits me and I'll confess it's changed the way I approach playing, even though I still enjoy it.

I like coded weather as a thing I can optionally reference. Same with time of day. I'm an emit hater (the immersion they give to some they break for me) but if I could opt out or even just lessen frequency I wouldn't freak about them as a great evil or anything.

ETA: where they particularly ugh me is when they become 5+ lines of not quite right randomness I have to scrub out of a log, particularly a GM'd scene that a lot of people may want to refer back to.

@bored said in Spotlight.:

I think MU players of any... veteran degree are going to understand that being the star all the time, or even ever (if we're talking Luke level), is impossible and would be quite happy to settle for something along the lines of the GoT secondary cast.

You would think so! And yet I can think of multiple examples of people who had roles everyone in this thread would consider "starring" in plots that have complained bitterly about not getting enough spotlight when someone else got attention (and you know what, folks, when you do this in a semi-open setting, do not assume it won't get around, you are wrong). I mean, those are the unreasonable people you can't make happy no matter what, but I don't think they're as much a minority as one would like to think.

@wildbaboons
Do 'people here' hate FATE or are there just some vocal posters who do? I have pretty limited familiarity with the system but I know of it and wouldn't NOT play a game that used it.

I hate a lot of things but my hatred is not a reason for anyone who loves them and is willing to do the work of showing players the ropes about them to not make games.