Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

I definitely dislike the idea that liking open sheets versus liking to be surprised is a representation of player quality. I've played in both environments (though not in PvP-heavy ones, I play primarily PvE games) and had good and bad RP (and great experiences and awful experiences with asshole dice-monger players) in each. I think viewing it as an environmental cure-all is wrong-headed and will end in disappointment (also I like to be surprised sometimes and consider it sometimes better RP, which certainly doesn't make me a better or worse player), and I instinctively hate-on the idea that being pro a mechanical choice denotes superiority. But there are other arguments for doing it that've previously been espoused in this thread, like transparency for newbs or ease of GMing without full staff powers, etc.

@mietze said in Open Sheets?:

I will say that I think games where there's a culture of open stats seem to (in my observance) have a more consistently high quality of rp/player on them; but I think that's largely due to self selection. The players who want to win against other players at any cost and cant help themselves are going to self select out.

I think you get different kinds of assholes and bad behavior. It certainly cuts down on the nakedly-obvious system workers/manipulators, but I'm not sure how much of a problem they are in pure PvE games anyway, whether sheets are open or not. I still feel like I see plenty of pouting and dick measuring over skills, it just manifests in different ways.

The main things in favor or open sheets for me are the ease of PrP running and the ease of chargen for newbies it promotes (since you can just point to a character type and basically say 'copy that'). So I do agree it has positive cultural elements, even though I don't think it impacts RP quality as much as the PvE versus PvP split does.

My issue would be more tied to IC secrets and full backgrounds than mechanics. There's stuff I think is just more fun to reveal in play. I've had generally good experiences on open sheet games and think they solve a lot of problems, but I haven't become a blanket 'these are the best in every situation' person.

@sunny
Yeah my answer is pretty heavily 'it depends', though I'm more pro open sheet than not. They work well on PvE games and I've enjoyed the ease they give PrP runners in environments like Fara's FS3 games. There are obvious issues in any kind of environment where you're supporting PvP though.

This hobby would be about a thousand times more enjoyable with a little more chill and a lot more self-awareness but ¯_(ツ)_/¯ it'll never happen and this is why a lot of us don't staff anymore and fuck humans etc etc.

I mean, I deeply appreciate that a lot of people still do. It's shit a lot of days.

You'll be missed! My only real interactions were with Leta bit she seemed like a great character.

@buttercup
I keep hoping for a Suns resurgence. They're by far my favorite of my hometown Phoenix teams to watch (and when I can go the games are a blast) but they've been under-performing for ages. Next year in Jerusalem (Arizona), and such.

@apos
See, my spawns blink with the rest of my activity notifications (which Potato is shit at and often drives me nuts, I dream of better days! But will never be a Mac user so as sure I am that Atlantis is wonderful, so it goes!). Which at least keeps up with them, but it also kind of maddening. Would be nice to have the discord/slack feature to mute a particular channel window without creating a totally different spawn or leaving the channel but, as has been said up-top, Ares already seems to be heading toward this functionality. So I dream of better days on my PC more realistically.

@coin
Yeah, I'm usually of the same mind about treating the movie version of something as a divorced entity. I just couldn't get there in this case. Or I didn't so much want a "correct" take on the book as an entirely different approach to adapting it. Idk. I feel like I could write a deeply undergrad-y paper on my reaction to it in terms of what audiences bring to movies for good or ill, even if ultimately I wasn't much beyond, "I guess that was pretty OK" with it as a product. Storm Reid was aces, though, and I hope she gets big things out of it.

Super belatedly.

"Wrinkle in Time" was an interesting watch for me, because it didn't work but it's one of those things that didn't work for reasons I find kind of intellectually interesting to take apart. Its failings are as much as on me as on the movie. It wasn't really the adaptation I-the-reader wanted. It wasn't really aimed at even as broad an audience as something like the Pixar movies was, but lived firmly in the realm of being first and foremost for kids. My expectations were for something different when Ava Duvernay was attached to the project and were calibrated incorrectly, not in terms of quality but in terms of the movie she and the studio (who knows which, a lot my issues were script-level) were clearly interested in making. I didn't love it but am certainly not sorry I paid money to see it in a theater.

It is probably as good an adaptation as we'll ever get and a lot the performances and visuals were fun (loved Zach Galifianakis' Happy Medium cave).

I realize some Mushers don't use spawn windows but I struggle to imagine functioning without them, and shifting channels to other tabs/rooms ala discord and slack just feels like that, only less work on my end.

@lotherio
I mean sure you should if you want to do that. There are an endless amount of simple and low maintenance ways to just set up a game between friends, and I'll confess I'm frequently mystified that the players who complain about MUs or available settings, but really do just want to play with their friends, don't use Discord or whatever to do their own thing. When I personally talk about the potential of MUing it's in the context of games that have more persistent world support and more ability to centralize stuff like character stats and systems. I think there's a TON of statless, sandbox style rp out there that this community doesn't interact with and would be well-served to investigate. It just doesn't do what a MU does.

It's also a lot about presentation. I was pretty skeptical that a web portal could replace a game wiki, based on my experience on Arx (I get that this just isn't the focus of developers at the moment, so it's less a complaint than...wiki's currently have features it lacks). What @faraday did with the web portal at Ares largely turned me around on that, though. The reason MUs have sustained is because a lot of the "replacement" platforms like Storium just plain haven't been very good or haven't offered the ability for persistent world RP that was as deep. I can envision a web interface that is an actual, viable alternative, though.

There's not a platform that does all the things MUs do in terms of persistent, shared environment for real time RP, at least not in my experience. Platforms like dreamwidth journal rp and tumblr rp are very popular but also pretty dissimilar in terms of the experience they offer. I do feel like it wouldn't be hard to take what Roll20 has done and introduce more support for an ongoing world, it just doesn't seem to be what they think the audience is.

Ares and Evennia seem ultra promising and I'm curious if they expand the audience for this type of RP.

I think it's a decent idea. TGG ran similar short-term campaigns and the players who liked it liked it a lot. You have to accept it won't be for everyone and it'll be a niche game. You have to accept that people will like campaigns more than others. You have to be consistent about actually DOING other campaigns (consistency in general is a trait MUers lack). But the idea itself is a good one.

@thatguythere
I loved those damn things back in the day and some recasts were awesome. I treasure first seeing Nathan Fillion as Second (?) Joey Buchanan on One Life to Live (RIP).

@cobaltasaurus
This seems like it limits racebending PBs that default to white as well, though maybe that's fine (it's certainly not as visible or aggravating an issue as the opposite).

@scar I always do, m'dear. I always do.

@saosmash said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

@scar I mean it can but ... sometimes it doesn't.

Or, I mean, idk, I have used non-whitey actors for characters who were ambiguously described or not described at all that I took off a roster before, and that's a thing I would not have done if they'd have a PB that was a whitey. But, again, this might be aimed at other folk, that certain ain't a ton of people. Fair 'nough.

I like to pick my own. It's one of those little things that helps me feel like it's my character and not a thing I get to take out of the toy chest but not really have autonomy with. I don't mind suggestions but I will admit, I would avoid a char with a pb over one without if I had a choice. Even if I can change it that's not really my point. I have stated my vague discomfort with a lot of aspects with rosters before though, so this might be another one of those 'it's being done for Not Me players so I either need to suck it up or just play with different toys'.