Best posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

On the one hand, fear of generating friction is what leads to a large number of problems in the MU* environment.

On the other hand, most players who would actually benefit from it are so bad at taking even the mildest constructive criticism that I've just ceased to bother (and I'm well aware that criticism some people think is constructive actually isn't, but that's neither here nor there). This is a game, and people come in with the mentality that they should be indulged rather than challenged. I've taken to avoiding the players who are worst about this, but I kind of understand it.

'Breaking Bad' was also more character-based than plot-based. It didn't really matter how Walter White decayed morally, just that he did decay morally and became more of a gangster/druglord than suburban high school teacher. It was all about what happened to that one guy and the supporting cast around him, there wasn't an over-arching mystery to solve or questions to answer (up until the last season introduced some flash-forwards that I don't think totally worked, but the ride was so good nobody cares about minor missteps). I'm really digging 'Better Call Saul' for the character journey and similar moral deconstruction of its protagonist, even if it doesn't have the ZOMG action most of the time that BB did.

Reading that Slate article, I think Moore's perspective of 'haters gonna hate' is more or less the sane approach, though I would've been more interested in what he thought worked/didn't work about the finale and final season of BSG overall now that there's more distance from it. As a viewer, I was generally fine with the finale of Game of Thrones, and BSG, and even Lost, but had larger, holistic problems with the final seasons and how they got there. It would be interesting to see the writers break down the challenges of landing a plane like those shows and what didn't work.

Mostly what I thought while reading that article is that I'm super interested in what Damon Lindelof is going to do with 'Watchmen,' because I think he's internalized the reaction to Lost in kind of interesting ways and (based on what he did on 'The Leftovers,' which I really dug in its second and third seasons and also dwelled on the idea of 'searching for answers to unanswerable questions will tear you apart' in occasionally pretty meta ways) become a better writer out of it. Which I guess suggests what Benioff & Weiss do next, with their Star Wars stuff or whatever, might be pretty good, even if my expectations after the last couple GoT seasons are kinda low.

I mostly don't see what this accomplishes as a practice that using the SUSPECT flag doesn't do better for a player you've had the kind of complaints about to make it seem necessary, since you can't monitor pages or mails or stuff that occurs when you're offline by sitting DARK in a room. I guess I'd rather have it stated upfront if it's going to happen, though.

@Lotherio said:

But literally less than a week after the move .... my co-head staff that helped spur the idea to try the place, helped build stuff on the wiki ... the same one that get me going to give password for the god bit and get the right db back up to the new head staff was removed from royalty and locked in the freezer for no apparent reason when they were still trying to help?

This sucks and, even if you're done with the place, it's awful to think you've left something you created in the hands of people you can't trust.

@Rinel
It won't be eligible in most of GoTs categories since HBO can submit it as a mini-series (bonus that it actually is one, unlike a lot of what winds up in the mini-series category), tho it's certainly of higher quality than most of GoTs last season, that aside. I'm digging it, even if it's harrowing to watch. I held off because when it initially came out I wasn't in the mood for grim, but now that I've gotten to it it's REALLY good.

@Autumn said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

@lordbelh said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

Furthermore, clearly while the character worships the Emperor, she blames the higher ups in the military for the actions of Imperial Japan at present. We can argue how much blame Hirohito deserves (seems a decent amount), but that's really besides the point.

I wanted to go back to this post for a minute, just to think through the more general question of how informed we should expect characters (not just this specific character) to be in the context of their time. The abovementioned hypothetical Russian Communist character in 1938 might very well be ignorant of a lot of horrifying things that have been done at Stalin's behest; probably the great majority of actual Russians at the time were. As far as this brawny Russian lad who wants to go and shoot some fascists in Spain is concerned, Stalin is the warm, benevolent, fatherly figure who protects the Soviet Union from fascists and counterrevolutionaries, not the guy who had the kulaks rounded up and shipped off to Siberia.

Is that problematic? Is it less problematic if the character finds out about the horrible stuff that's happened in the Soviet Union since the revolution, and, revulsed, abandons their loyalty to Stalin? Conversely, is it more problematic if the character finds out about them and refuses to believe it, remaining convinced that Stalin couldn't possibly do those things and it must all be the fault of counterrevolutionaries? Or if he finds out and believes it, but supports Stalin anyway, because sometimes hard measures are necessary to stamp out the cancer of fascism? Does whether or not that character continues to profess adherence to Communist principles make a difference?

I played on TGG MUSH (and occasionally ST'd!) there when we did a WW2 Stalingrad campaign and I'm struck that this...never came up. Changing times or smaller playerbase, I guess, IDK. And this was actual, historical Russia under Stalin (my character was an electrician who knew the Party sometimes made people Disappear but also knew it was better to keep your head down) rather than a more fantasy equivalent. Really don't envy any staffer trying to parse what players want/need now.

@Sponge said:

First we've switched to full consent. We don't actually think consent is the best way to go, but it's necessary for our main objective: abolishing RP staff. We feel really strongly that people having arbitrary authority over the RP of others is inseparable from the aspects we dislike in most games. Our goal is to automate away or abolish all functions performed by RP staff.

What you're describing is an anathema to anything I would ever want to play, but there's probably an audience for it. Good luck and such.

"Ascension." It's on Netflix now.

I didn't love it, but it and a lot of their recent programs at least suggest they're kind of trying again.

@Coin said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

I have always felt that the whole "well they haven't done anything here and until they misbehave within the bounds of the game we can't do anything" was absolutely ridiculous.

It's worth noting he actually DID do wrong things on Spirit Lake (being creepy on public channels, wandering into people's rooms and saying creepy non-sequitors there, paging staff and being a weirdo) which got him kicked off the first time. He just didn't do THOSE EXACT SAME THINGS again after being kicked off and returning via roster.

There's so much weirdness about downvotes I've stopped using them, even though I kinda like having a way to convey mild disagreement that's not worth posting, as well as mild agreement that's not worth posting.

This game is not a thing for me but there are certainly stranger pseudo-sex games online, so good luck to them I guess.

Like tears in the rain.

Forums are just easier to set up. Any rando can do it in 15 minutes (same with Tumblr games), and just as quickly abandon them. I'm cautious to call this kind of thing 'growth', but there's certainly a lot of it out there. Whereas with MU*s, you have to know something about the back-end to get one going, and at this point it's not a technology college students are fucking around with anymore regularly.

I do think there's potential in recruiting from those kinds of games. I sometimes want to try forum RP again (I haven't in years), since I can actually still do it from work, but I can never manage to find one that holds my attention.

I think you have to accept that the audience for historical games will be small, but small isn't terrible if it's sustainable. I played Chicago MUSH for a bit and TGG did well enough for stretches (though it had the added draw of being a war game). These games were never sprawling, 100+ connect behemoths, but they worked for enough time to be worthwhile.

It won't be huge but if the game-runner and players calibrate their expectations, that's not the worst thing in the world.

@Rinel said in RL things I love:

The difficulty of my ongoing Chick fil a boycott just dropped to zero.

Popeye's chicken sandwich is amazing.

I think of it as 'what KFC would taste like if KFC didn't make me hate myself' but yes it's better than Chik-Fil-A, too. Could eat their biscuits for days and days.

@Lotherio
Man I would play the modern rodeo game with like intrigue and competitions.

@Auspice said in The 100: The Mush:

I know a Staffer who I used to praise for keeping their characters more on the sidelines, but over the past few months... they began putting one of their PCs as the lynchpin in scenes more and more. And it's been kind of depressing to see.

I think this is another thing that can be solved by having more eyes/hands running a game (and thereby running plots), but it's one of those things that's really exacerbated on solo projects. Also, ideally, if you have someone looking over your shoulder, you have a check who can say, 'Dude, back this the fuck up' when you start to do dumb/show-boaty shit. This circles back to why I think the biggest problem the folks running The 100/Fifth World had was a lack of additional staff, not something specific to them per se.

@Sockmonkey said in Good TV:

Succession is awesome and I loved Euphoria. Zendaya's acting was heart breaking.

Succession is FUCKING BANANAS and I love it. I was turned off by the 'family drama about rich people' concept that felt really overdone but then I realized it was well-acted and darkly funny and 150% insane, so I will ride with this.

@Sunny said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

ETA: I think games like Arx where racism is not just not included, but strictly written out are a good step, because it offers some escapism from that? But I don't know if that's ACTUALLY helpful, or if it ends up actually being hurtful instead. I don't know, in the gaming context. I don't know how we can make these spaces better / more appealing for folks.

I think Arx is one game in a fantasy setting and, honestly, it's weird to me when fantasy settings DO reflect American (because it's somehow usually American, unless it's British) racial attitudes. Supposedly there's an in-theme reason there's such a mix of skin tones and maybe when we figure that out it'll be interesting!

It would also be weird to me if there was racism on a Star Trek game, except in a historical context, because...that's not the setting. When I was big into BSG games and had a couple of staff bits on a few of them, some of the things we had to reinforce thematically the most often were that stereotypes about gender and sexuality did not exist. It is very hard for some players to grasp this (though most often when it comes to gender, in that setting skin color-based racism wasn't really something people seemed to need to pretend was a thing).

Considerations on modern games or historical games are different, though whenever a thread about a historical game comes up there're always a lot of questions about how to approach realistic-for-the-time-period attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality.

While I think DA has an interesting setting, it's basically a fantasy pastiche (like ME is a sci-fi pastiche). If you're passingly familiar with fantasy elves and fantasy dwarves and fantasy religion and magic, you can get the vibe pretty quickly. Playing an elf or dwarf or mage would require further reading, but I think you can get by without playing the game. Ideally the wiki will be fleshed out with some basic info for total newbs, though.

I think this season might be my favorite. I replay the Urkel sketch and the aerobics one often.