Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

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!

On the one hand, I think perspective is useful. My dad was involved in the protest movement during the Vietnam War (and was later drafted as a conscientious objector). He wasn't at the Democratic Convention in 1968, but he had friends who were involved in the riot. We talked about it a bit during the campaign last year, and I'm not sure I can really internalize the scope of that kind of social unrest. This seems bad, but it's not really comparable. We have generational tunnel vision, both in terms of social change and the upheaval that comes with automation. We've been here before, though I don't know if we've learned anything (it's the not learning anything that I view as the actual problem).

On the other hand, I'm certainly uneasier than I've ever been in my lifetime. I don't know what the next five years are going to look like. There are ideas I think would be helpful in making the future a softer landing, (universal basic income is one of them) and fundamental changes in the way we think of and value work (we're in drastic need of better and more child/elder-care, for example).

I don't know. It's heavy shit.

I play on Normal on my first go. Then tick it up to the next difficulty setting if I'm doing subsequent playthroughs, but I don't go much higher than that. If I'm frustrated, I'm not having fun. Conversely, if I don't feel like I'm playing a game at all, but just pressing buttons to advance, I also don't have fun, so I tend to get off Easy pretty quick unless it's a playstyle I'm REALLY unfamiliar with (or really bad at).

I generally use opposed rolls for one-on-one sparring and the like on FS3 games (opposed rolls are actually one of my favorite aspects of Fara games). I don't think the +combat is suited for everything, though for what it is suited for, I think it does it well. It made learning to GM large combats on BS Cerberus pretty painless (I did some player GMing before I was a staffer there, and my experience player-side made me more sure I could handle it), and I thought it worked well for small group combat on X-Factor, even if the mutant powers still had to be +roll'd and up to some GM discretion.

I think it's a good example of a line that's not hard-and-fast. I'd probably look twice at Hello Kitty in a Firefly game. But it's also a setting where there's clearly Old Earth iconography still around, and where cartoons and advertising imagery exist (I'm thinking of the Fruity Oaty Bars from the movie, and the imagery in that jingle isn't a million miles from Hello Kitty). So it's at once a thing I'd find kind of jarring, but also a thing that upon reflection I don't actually think is wrong.

This is why I don't think players policing this stuff among themselves is a particularly good idea. Take it up the chain to staff or shrug it off. These things either fix themselves, aren't actual issues unless you're anal-retentive, or, frankly, reveal players as morons that it's preferable to avoid (if you're mean, like me).

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.

@Cupcake said in MU Things I Love:

The moment you come up with the pefect RP ship portmanteau, even if it's literally years too late:

Phyggy.

Phah, it's never too late. I dig it. I still go back to those logs when I'm on one of my random nostalgia trips. Good times.

I primarily use Mudstats when I'm rando-game hunting. http://mudstats.com/ You can at least do some basic sorting by genre and server type, and if the game's been on there for any length of time, the charts give you a decent window into activity. It's flat-out useless for new games, though, since it doesn't update regularly anymore.

Nowadays I mostly use friends/fellow players to keep up on newly-opened games. And...this board, for better or worse.

@Ghost said in Course Corrections:

• Staff reached out to me and basically told me "we agree with you but to keep things calm, give her some room"

This is what bugged the hell out of me about this situation. It happened repeatedly on multiple games (I played with a handful of her alts), and I know there were multiple complaints of this type about it that went up the chain to staff (different staffers) properly. There was a weird reluctance to call her on it that I never understood.

There was one scene where she fired at a basestar (this is a giant carrier-style space ship, that was in the sky overhead) with a rifle (this is...a rifle as we understand rifles) from the ground, and didn't get why it wasn't effective.

...................................................................

I do not mind being corrected in RP, though I usually prefer that correction come from a staffer or person with actual OOC knowledge of how the theme's being approached, like a player-helper. I don't like pedantry, but I want to play the theme I'm in. If I realize I'm doing something dumb, I try to stop doing it. I don't get the stubborn refusal to play in the world you're in. I also don't really know where the line is. Players shouldn't be the ones policing this stuff, but when staff is reluctant to address repeated issues, what do you do?

Idk.

@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.

@saosmash said in Course Corrections:

You know, in 20+ years of RP I don't think I have ever written a pose about Legos.

SHE DID IT FUCKING CONSTANTLY. MY GOD MY GOD MY GOD.

Oh gosh, this person. This person haunts my fucking dreams.

It wasn't even her inability to watch 1 ep of the show or 1 90 minute movie that got to me. But players repeatedly spent time finding Youtube links she could digest in 2-5 minutes, which gave her all the context she needed not to be an idiot about the specific issue she was being an idiot about.

She aggressively did not want to get it.

And then she got promoted ICly and I just ........................................................

She's an anomaly, though. Staff need to deal with this shit when it's ongoing and stubborn obliviousness to theme. When it's just a random one-time anachronism, I'm usually going to let it go unless it's so confusing it requires a repose.

@surreality said in Course Corrections:

Re: style stuff: If the game has a generally accepted standard they want or would strongly prefer people adhere to, they should post it somewhere. It varies a lot from culture to culture in online RP, so people may just have a habit of doing things a certain way and not notice. It may come off prissy to some, but most folks will be grateful they've been spared an unintentional faux pas (and/or potentially getting yelled at or vaguebooked about here).

Second Pass (a Pern place which I only found when it was on its last legs, alas) did this and I really liked how they worded it. I was trying to find the link but either its one of the many things my workplace blocks or the website is dead (which would be sad). It stated upfront that present-tense third-person poses were the norm. I think there were some other style things included as well.

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

@Three-Eyed-Crow

1. tinyfucking, hee.

If this spreads, I will be a happy person.

That's a long TS file and is the kind that just makes me shake my head. Long TS files tend to do that, because it twigs my, 'If you're spending this much time explaining Tinyfucking, you must really care about Tinyfucking' light in my brain. Which is never a positive for me.

But I get that people from vastly different game cultures than me think it's necessary. Mostly it depresses me about other players. Do whatcha got to do.

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.

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

I also think part of the nature of these threads leads to that.

Yeah, this is why I don't think these boards are actually very good for the infancy stages of a game. I think it's more important to have a group of players picked to invite (maybe 5-10) for some kind of alpha testing. And if the idea works for a few months, open it up once you've got a core you know will stick.

@EUBanana The insanity was why we loved it.

Though what I think TGG did best was concentrating its playerbase. It was always a small game, but the characters were mostly in the same concentrated area of whatever front they were on, and everyone had a reason to RP together (all the soldier PCs were mostly on the same 'level', which usually meant starting as privates). Every time I see a mid-sized game splintered into a dozen factions, it boggles my mind. You can get away with that if you're Arx or one of the giant WoD MUs, but most places are better-served by creating a sense of intimacy and character connectivity rather than trying to be everything.

@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.

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.

Cool! I was Strife and many poor dead bastards on TGG. Always up for MU nostalgia.