Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@sunny is correct. I mean, who the f knows, and I for one don't care.

I try not to speculate what someone is or isn't like in RL if I just encounter them on MUs or just encounter them on the boards. I also take all things I'm told in these settings with a grain of salt (though not a very vocal grain, because I don't want to be that person who's claiming Cirno isn't black or something). If they're acting like regular players on MUs they're probably flying below the radar and everyone's happier for it, but their trolling here is pretty obvious.

@Sunny said in RL Anger:

@Misadventure
Because it's actually all the same guy and he identifies himself as having come from 4chan. It's not multiple invading trolls, it's a single 4chan dude.

Yeah, this poster (and these posters, when they come in packs occasionally) consistently mention 4chan and identity themselves as being an active 4channer. They are not ambiguous about this. This is just calling a thing what the thing is.

I continue to be baffled by the occasional 4chan obsession with MSB. Do they get points on whatever Bingo Card of Horrible People they have for coming here and trolling? I feel like the reaction, beyond those first couple crazies, has never really been all that entertaining.

Anyway, 4chan makes me RL angry but also RL baffled, to stay on topic.

I like Roll20 a great deal for online TTs but it doesn't strike me as really having the tools to act as a MU alternative at this time. The text interface is fine to capture play in a particular session, but saving completed scenes/subsequently linking them all together took additional work in gdocs or a separate wiki. You can run it alongside a MU client, of course, but once you're doing that I question why you aren't playing solely in the client or solely on Roll20.

All that said, I suspect the features it lacks are a matter of things not being requested/the developers not perceiving there's an audience for persistent text environment support, since it's mainly a TT session platform at this point. I value it a lot for what it is.

@Cupcake
That's sad. I vaguely remember watching The Raven (the Amanda spin-off) and recall kinda sorta liking it in the same way I benignly enjoyed a lot of those syndicated shows in the 90s. I hadn't heard any of the horror stories from its production but I was surprised at the time it didn't last longer.

I'm now remembering Queen of Swords, a random syndicated Zorro knock-off I really enjoyed, but I've yet to come across it streaming.

@Arkandel
Lois and Clark was one of my favorite shows as a kid and I've rewatched bits of it here and there over the years, so I can say pretty confidently...the answer is, yes. Yes, Dean Cain was always a bad actor. It might belong in the 'shows you don't want to rewatch' thread, but it was still fun in an occasionally doofy 90s way.

@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.

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.

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.

@BobGoblin said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

Unless the game will divert from the books; in which case just call it a damn alternate world (since there are an infinite number) and be done with it.

I just flat out assume any game created would be doing this.

I don't have a ton of interest in playing a game that follows the books, though one that uses an event from them as a jumping off point, certainly.

I also really like @Seraphim73's idea for a setting. In my ideal world it would do away with Rand (and all the book characters) altogether. Maybe say it's a different timeline with a different - NPC - Dragon Reborn. But I think the Arad Doman/Saldaea area would provide a lot of easy conflict, give reasons for Aes Sedai and Warders to be hanging around a place that wasn't Tar Valon, and could theoretically draw characters from other areas more easily than a place like Cairhien.

@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

@Seraphim73 Never finished the books. The world is interesting. 30,000 pages of "and then we go here and do nothing" is not.

Same. I got burnt out and rage-y around Path of Daggers (it was my first Rage Series. Oh, those bygone days of youth). I keep meaning to go back, as I'm told Brandon Sanderson actually finished things pretty strong but...so many pages, so many characters I stopped liking three books before quitting.

I think I enjoyed it as an RP setting far more than I enjoyed it as a series of books.

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

No, please, do tell.

My policy is not to feed the 4channers. Definitely don't want to tell anyone what to do but...eh, mostly I just wanted to paste the scarlet Fucking 4channer letter on this @Lain asshole. Which I've done, so.

@Meg said in Good TV:

I plan to, one day. But I started with the books first and I want to end with the books first.

Oh, honey.

Well, maybe GRRM will live.

@WildBaboons said in High Fantasy:

I had grand plans for a WoT MuSh using a slightly modified version of DF RPG. It fit so very well... but then realized I just don't have the time for that sort of endeavor, but it'd work! Especially for elemental based magic

I'd play the hell out of that. I always felt like the setting worked very well as a MUSH (maybe better than it worked as a series of dramatic novels). There used to be a decent audience for WoT games and I suspect it's still out there.

@Wizz
What's funny to me about Cersei's arc is that she's a much better character on the show, imo, than she is in the books. I feel like most of the characters became less interesting and nuanced with the adaptation to varying degrees (which is pretty normal for when something gets translated like this), but Cersei in the books always struck me as shallow and kind of dumb. I disliked her more and became less interested in her once we got into her PoV chapters. On the show, she's gained a depth that's helped salvage a lot of the plot contortions this season for me. A lot of the credit is due to Lena Headey's performance, since the individual beats she's had aren't hugely different than they are in the novels. Great stuff. Hoping she gets an Emmy out of this before the series is out.

@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.

@ThatGuyThere said in How to Change MUing:

When i log on it is because I want to RP with other people, even a great mu* based mini-game is meh to me because if I wanted to play a computer based game without other people well I have a console for that, or any of the various games I have on PC. I enjoy both forms but to me they scratch two completely different entertainment itches.

I get this. To me, the mindset I go into different types of games with is pretty divorced. I'm just fundamentally looking for different types of experiences when I play 2 hours of Civ V versus when I play a MU scene. Like, I love strategy games, but I loathe MU economies because I just don't particularly think they're made to do that well. I'm more ambivalent about other coded mini-games. I occasionally quite like some and find most pretty benign. I get that they're generally aimed at a different kind of player than me who gets really excited about them, which is cool. I only get actively GRR toward them if they both interfere with RP and I'm forced to deal with them. I'm cool with things that're opt-in and give fairly passive or negligible benefits, but if they take overwhelm RP/character interaction, I go off them real fast.

@Thenomain said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

Evennia baffles the hell out of me, but I haven't seen an Evennia-based game get the game/website interaction in a way that's any better than Wikidot and a staffer paying a minimum amount of attention. So. Frustrating.

It's not Evennia-based but AresMUSH seems to offer more of what I'd actually find appealing in a website-that-updates-with-game interface: http://mush.aresmush.com:8081/ I feel like that's more a matter of priorities, though. I don't love the Arx website but I feel like the game just has other priorities than it right now, and it's not the end-all/be-all of what an Evennia game website could be. What I appreciate is that this stuff is evolving. It's not quite at what I consider wiki-replacement level yet, but I could see it getting there in a few years, and that's exciting to me.