Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@Ghost
I'm not even bringing it up to bitch at you, really. Those posts annoyed me because they were off-topic and I felt like they were derailing a formerly useful thread into nonsensicalness, not because I thought you were too mean. It's far from the only time that's happened and lots of us are guilty of it. I even kinda agreed with some of your criticisms to those staffers, even while I found the way you phrased them hyperbolic.

I bring it up because it's a really good example of a reason to change how ad threads are treated, even while the commentary in them would still be legit enough in the Hog Pit or elsewhere.

Updated. I am trying the Arx thing/trying to get back into the BSG swing of thing at Fara's BSU. Games!

@surreality said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Apparently there is one. Someone passed along the advertisement for it the other day. It's new, so I didn't see any posts there when I signed up.

http://www.mushology.com is it.

I tried reading this site and quickly became annoyed. The content is lacking and scattershot (there are sci-fi and fantasy games existing that are not on here). But whatever. Such is websites updated by humans. What really annoyed me was this:

"Unfortunately over time the online community of text based RPG is at an all-time low and resting on the edge of extinction. It’s a sad time for those of us that remain dedicated to our writing muses."

There's a lot of RP on Tumblr and dreamwidth and in content spaces the average MUer doesn't interact with. Hell, I'd say there are more MUs I'm interested in playing than there were 5 years ago, though that's extremely hit and miss (I don't think things have gotten worse in the last 5 years, at least). It's myopic and, most of all, it's whiny and martyr-y in a way I find to be a huge turn-off.

My take on the hobby has been that it's not so much dying as evolving in ways that aren't necessarily desirable for us oldbies, and becoming more and more fragmented. Which might not be great in many ways, but it makes me kind of 'Eh' when people talk about being in an 'RP desert.' That attitude is part of the problem.

ETA: What I'd like to see is someone maintaining sites that I do think are useful, like http://mudstats.com/

A buddy of mine got me to watch The Expanse, finally, by recommending it as 'everyone of these idiots could be a MU character'.

He wasn't wrong.

I'd play the hell out of it.

I also came away from Logan wanting to see semi-dystopian alt-X-Men (maybe centering around whatever Eden actually looks like). It'll probably be awhile before I'm in the mood for more mutants, but it'd be an interesting spin.

@Botulism said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@Thenomain Far more people have read American Gods than MU*, though. Just saying among the MU* subset, WoD is more widely known.

It depends on your goal. I think a staff who put energy into advertising and running plots could get a small but active game out of American Gods (20-30is players).

Is that what every person who starts a MU wants? No, though I'm not sure why. Big games are filled with terribad. Small ones are harder to sustain, but I find them a hell of a lot more rewarding to play when I hit on one that sticks.

Also, like, what's TS at a certain point?

I've posted logs I don't think qualify, but they reference my character doing pre- or post-sex things before being about something else. This is character stuff, but a staffer monitoring this (lol) might think they qualify as sexytimes logs.

This is not an area I think people want to get into policing. I feel like people should use common sense, get the OK from all parties involved, and maybe include a warning if it's graphic. But if I'm staffing I want to spend my time on other shit.

@Roz said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

While I love aftermath scenes SO MUCH, let's be real on this: a lot of the reason for signing off at the end of a big GMed scene is exhaustion. I want to do aftermath, totally, but I usually want to do it -- the next day. Because a lot of GMed action or adventure type scenes have already been a couple hours, and they tend to be more intensive than RPing other types of scenes for that long.

Yeah. This. If I've been RPing for 4-5 hours, I need a damn break. It's unfun, and I don't want actual meaty character things to feel like chores (they're why I'm there). I'll aggressively chase people down for follow-ups, but they're more meaningful if I can actually play them, not just be shunted through them while wanting to collapse.

One of the things that keeps me at a certain distance to fantasy as a genre is the "stuck in time" nature of it. This is particularly glaring in series like A Song of Ice and Fire. It's been roughly feudal technology level for tens of thousands of years. That makes no damn sense. But it is a genre trope and I roll with it when I'm playing a fantasy game.

I do think an on-the-ball staffer should concoct and IC explanation for why there's no gunpowder, because it's really not a thing that's hard to innovate even at a low level of technology. For other things, like industrialization or even ideas like democracy, I do not think most players understand how radical this stuff seemed to someone who grew up in a society where they did not exist. It's an alien mindset that really hard to internalize.

Ads for EVERYTHING get derailed by randos.

Thanks for making this thread!

I agree people worry too much about prodigies, when this is a thing that should be handled by staff doing any kind of minimal app-review control.

I once apped a professional Pyramid (BSG soccer/basketball) player on an FS3 game and there was apparently some discussion about whether she qualified as a 'prodigy' because she'd been very good in high school and left college to play professionally. The ultimate decision was, no. And of course it was. This is totally normal for a professional athlete. You're naturally going to be at your physical peak in your 20s, and your career is going to be done once you get too far outside that. This is VERY different than a 19-year-old who wants to be a doctor. They exist, but the doctors in their 30s and 40s should be light years more competent.

The Pyramid player above had low-to-mediocre combat stats, because...she was an ex-professional athlete who had done no combat things until she was like 28. She had super-high Space Basketball skills, though!

My own experience with FS3 is that it's fairly forgiving of low skill levels in +combat (and that high skill levels tend not to be overwhelming - friends have whined at me because their 10s in version 2.0 didn't beat 6/7/8s all the time on opposed rolls. I was not a sympathetic audience for this whining).

This is a different issue than people who feel bad because they have Good as opposed to Excellent, or feel awesome because they have Excellent as opposed to Great. But I don't know that I care about those people. I understand that many people do care, though.

ETA: I guess I should add,for the BSU people, that I play Calliope there and she's statted to be pretty decent but not min-maxed, I don't think. She's Good in Piloting and Fair in Gunnery (with Exceptional Reflexes, admittedly, I DO think you can pretty easily fuck yourself over by misunderstanding ruling attributes. This is a good deal more important than skills imo), and she still manages to dodge pretty well and hit things an OK amount of the time in +combat.

I don't put all the lack of utilization of FS3's features on the want to just be the one to one-shot kill things (though I agree that impulse is sure as hell there). FS3 combat is very easy if you're just doing the basic shoot-until-baddies-fall-down, and it's easy to get into a groove where you're just riding the simplicity (both for efficiency and because - on my part, at least - laziness). Also, I know when I GM'd regularly I could've made more use of negative/positive modifiers to enhance what people were posing. Sometimes I did, a lot of times I didn't, because of the simplicity/laziness. I definitely didn't do enough to nudge players about the options they had.

There was a battle recently on BSU where, because of the sheer size of it, the PCs used the 'teams' to represent different sections, and I liked it a lot. It felt like it made things more organized ICly as well as OOCly, and gave me a better handle on which Viper pilots I should be posing to/how to balance suppressing with my ECO (who was an NPC at that time) and weapon targeting. Was fun! Made me wanna do more stuff like that.

ETA: I think it is on the players to let the GM know if they want to do something extraordinary and call for a Piloting roll or something. Two way street! You're in control of a lot of your own fun. Also, don't whine if you fuck it or don't actually succeed at your awesome thing in a way that would much make difference.

@Rook said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Realism? Most people I know, you know, we all know... are not the epitomes of their Thing. Olympic athletes, maybe. Yeah, yeah, I get that most games are superhero/fantasy games on logarithmic scales, but even in the scale of a game system... it always bugged me how some players have this attitude of "Best or Bust". Not you, specifically, but Gamers Out There (aka: They).

It's pretty hilarious how much your character stands out if you RP them as being...average at their job. Not bad, but good at some parts of it and not great at other parts of it. This is the way I've found to most enjoy myself in spheres/factions crowded with similar types.

My experience is more...

There's a certain audience for sim space (I'm not in this group).

There's a certain audience who prefer environments where travel is just free-form RP'd or done via GM fiat (I'm in this group).

The VEN diagram overlaps a little bit, but not very much, so if you make one type of game, it won't appeal to the other type of players. Some people will lump simulated space or grudgingly accept the lack of it, but I feel like this is just a different style of play at its core.

@Ganymede
Yeah, I feel like a good relationship isn't a story in and out itself but adds texture and drama to ongoing plots (because when something's important to you it amplifies how you react to outside drama) and ideally the RP within it is more interesting than the hooking up parts. The other stuff is what I'm interested in playing, at least. I try to make it clear real quick to players who only seem interested in the build-up that I'm another type of player, and so far I've been mostly lucky in my RP partners and our styles have complimented each other in terms of this.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

@Roz Sorry, I was actually using the generic 'you'. And yes, if you (generic) are not playing on systems that have mechanized social mechanics, then obviously none of the above applies to you.

I'm honestly curious how this discussion applies to PvE environments at all.

I have never seen anyone object to using social skills to bluff an NPC guard, or strike a better deal with an NPC merchant, or talk an NPC antagonist around to being on their side. How often or not often this stuff comes up and how powerful it is in a given scene depends a lot on the GM, but when it does, people are generally pretty enthused about it (I'd like to see it played up more in PvE environments, but that's neither here nor there). This all seems pretty explicitly PvP focused, whenever we talk about social skills on this board, and I think that ultimately comes down to the difficulty of ego management. Which the best system in the world will burst into frustrated flames against, alas.

I define metaplot pretty loosely. An over-arching story that broadly involves the whole game. I do think it needs continuity (continuity overall separates a sandbox game from a game that wants to tie its stories together more, I think). Apart from that, it can be anything. Now, metaplot does not mean it's necessarily INTERESTING metaplot for a particular player (people are interested in different things, and not all metaplot is well-done).

I try to at least interact with bigger plots on a game, and I don't do particularly well on sandboxes where stories don't have any connectivity. I've never been "screwed" by metaplot. I'm pretty good at curating my fun and involving myself in what I want to play and not involving myself in things I'm meh on, even when those things are metaplot. I feel like if staff's actively screwing over players that's its own Bad ST problem and I'm likely just gone if it's bad enough.

I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT METAPLOT.

I'm going to frame them by talking about a game I consider the best thing I was a part of in my MU career: Battlestar Cerberus (I was Hydra there, hi). It's also, in a lot of ways, the thing I'm most disappointed in myself about, but oh well you. Love hurts, but is worth the cost, or something.

Cerb had what I consider a pretty solid metaplot. It was definitely a metaplot the game was very hardcore about, whatever anyone else's feelings on it. Polaris, the head wiz and writer of it, was kind of a genius and he poured a fuck-ton of enegy into it. Highly detailed Cylon mythology that was actually documented on the staff wiki, an outline of several smaller plots that comprised a "season" while feeding the larger story (the 'season' structure is, indeed, a great way to do things) and, for awhile, pretty active plot staff and player GMs. When it was good, it was pretty great. It probably also felt rail road-y at times and was in many ways alienating to new players. Certain trade-offs in accessibility were made for story. I don't think this was right or wrong. Polaris made very deliberate choices about the kind of game he wanted to run and the rest of us in the staff corps agreed with them. I wouldn't want every game to be this but - for about a year and a half - it worked for what we wanted it to be.

It was also a fuck-ton of work. I was an ST staffer and experienced a high level of burn out. While the game allowed PrPs, the amount of emphasis put on the metaplot didn't encourage them, and left the staff STs without much time to encourage smaller side stuff. That meant there weren't many breaks of release valves for activity that help alleviate burnt out on other games. Also, at a certain point, real life happened and that loose outline for plots we'd had came to an end, and we got into an arc that was far more thinly-sketched. We sort of arrogantly assumed we could wing it but that wasn't how we'd been running, so things became both over-complicated on the planning end and under-served on the actual making-scenes-happen end, and it became a sort of tangled mess. This coincided with people going to grad school, people changing jobs, people moving from one continent to the other, etc., so carving out time to sit down and untangle the tangled mess just didn't happen, and the game just kinda died. A different kind of game could've handled a couple months of downtime while we figured shit out better, but that wasn't the particular monster we'd created.

I still feel bad for not giving that place a proper ending (all apologies to the players). It was great for awhile and deserved one, it just seemed too daunting, and the metaplot was probably a large reason why. On the other hand, it gave the story a framework that makes me remember the RP I did have there as some of my favorite I've managed in this weird hobby. So I don't know. Metaplot is great when done well but also really hard, is what I learned, I guess, which is not a revelatory statement.

@Tempest
Yeah, the elitism argument veered into weird territory for me. These are social games and writing games. That's just what they are. I think there's a difference between honoring rolls when the RP leading up to them was Not The Best (which I think you should do), but I'm not going to actively seek out RP with people I find consistently not fun to play with.

That said, I'm fine with social stats on games where they're appropriate. I like the idea that different kinds of plots can showcase different kinds of characters. It gets more meh for me when you get into PvP, but I generally don't play PvP games so my thoughts on them are kind of moot.

In fairness to at least some of the 'zomg this ruined my RP' (tho not a lot of fairness), the level of customization you can do with the FS3 system (and the spotty way some game-runners document it and what they're doing with it), has led to some wonky shit in implementation (BS Pegasus and its billion non-sensical action skills always LEAPS to mind). I hate the player/staffer, not the game, as it were, but if Wonky Game is all you've played, that's all you've seen.

@Tempest
Yeah, this is legit, and I presume it's due to a lack of other plug-and-play alternatives. It's like how that Kushiel's Debut game was running on a modified WoD system, which I always assumed was in part because it's fairly easy to get the pieces to slap together a WoD chargen.