Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

I think many players just want to be everyone's IC bestie, and assume everyone else approaches the game with that same mentality. Even if they behave ICly in ways that make being their bestie impossible unless you completely shut off your character's brain.

I've done the IC nemesis, and even just ICly frenemy, thing with players I trusted and were cool with it, and it's a lot of fun. It lets you play up different colors of your char's personality, so they aren't just blandly sociable in every scene.

@tragedyjones said:

For lifting a fitbit isn't as useful but it helps you get a good overview of your daily routine and health state, from sleep quality to food/water intake and resting heart rate.

This is what I primarily use it for. I mostly regard it as a passive data collection device. And, like all data, it's not particularly useful to freak out/be too proud about what happened on a particular day, but it's very powerful to track trends over time and try to make small but consistent changes.

Like Rasputin, I'll believe SerenityMUSH is dead when I see its bloated, rotten corpse wash up a riverbank. Even then, I'll want to poke it with a stick to make sure it doesn't twitch, and then burn its remain. Just to be sure.

I'd like a Firefly game that isn't Serenity, but I don't particularly want a Star Trek game that tries to be Firefly. Both shows scratch different itches for me.

Big Ship Firefly set on, like, a merchant cruiser that could support mini-ships tempts me greatly, though.

@Cobaltasaurus There are step tracker apps for your phone, though I have zero experience with the ones out there. My boss uses one, but I can't recall the name offhand, mainly because she talks about it in relation to complaining about how it eats her battery, not it working awesomely.

@Lotherio
Same. This is something I feel like there'd be quite a bit of interest in (Roll20 seems to be doing well enough for itself for online TT but isn't geared toward a lot of the functionality MUers want).

IIRC, there's still basic functionality for this set up on the old OGR/Gateway MU* thing (a dice system that can do most #d# rolls and RP rooms anyone can wander into). It's old and seemingly abandoned by whoever was maintaining it, but it still exists.

Oh man, I wish I could watch the early seasons of "Sons" again.

And maybe some day, when I've purged the feelings of deep disappointment from latter season "Sons" from my mind.

FS3.

Fitbits are not built as sturdily as they should be (the little side button came off mine 4 months in), but the company is great about sending a new one I'd they break down.

I mean, it's your game, do what you want, and a lot of players enjoy them. They just come with a certain amount of baggage and attract a certain type of RP, and I think you should think about if that's what you want your game to be.

@lavit2099 said:

@Ganymede

People enjoy political RP too much to say no.

Do they really?

I've seen maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe five players, in my life, who are actually, truly interested in feudal politics. The rest want to be knights and lords and princesses without actually doing anything. Which I honestly think is fine, but it's not political RP, and I honestly do think it should be minimized in my ideal D&D game. My ideal game is not others' ideal game, though.

Any real approach to politics in that kind of society also requires attention by staff to delegating resources and keeping tabs on alliances, all of which is a stupid amount of work if you want to do it right and just becomes nonsense if you don't.

I concur you can have plenty of scheming and alliance building between more D&D-ish groups, like mercenary guilds.

@Misadventure said:

I'd suggest reading some of those Penny Dreadfuls then. They are, in fact, usually terrible, or plain and simple.

Then again Dumas wrote in serials, and I like his stuff.

A lot of Dickens and the Sherlock Holmes stories were also serials. That stuff was the weekly TV of its day, so it tended to be churned out pretty quickly and with limited eye to quality, but there was a lot of it. So some of what we now consider classic literature started as very low, disposable entertainment.

@lordbelh
Everyone I've ever talked to about Terriers either LOVED LOVED LOVED it or, more often, had no idea wtf it was.

It makes me sad FX didn't do a better job of getting people to watch it when it was a thing they were airing, since I think it could've been pretty popular, but such is life.

MU*s are just inherently transient environments, both fortunately and unfortunately. A couple new players can really invigorate an IC group, but it inevitably means people will leave, often suddenly and without explanation. I think this means you sort of have to build in a way for people to cycle on and off, even if it's just "gone to the farm upstate/come back from the farm"). In BSG it was fairly easy to just say there were other ships in the Fleet people could wander on from, in addition to the main battlestar center of RP. I'm not sure the claustrophobia that's often part of the drama in survival stories is ever going to be possible to replicate on a public game with an ever-shifting playerbase, and I'll admit I'm also disinterested in stories where the apocalypse turns into constant social RP bake-offs and camp fire sing-alongs. The middle ground is probably about the best you can do.

I'm not big on rosters, but I can see the necessity for important IC positions (leader/sheriff/whatever). I'd really want the option to have my PCs die off rather than be picked up by some rando if I idled out (I've seen some chargens with a 'Last will' section where you enter what your preferred method of off-screening is, and that's nice).

I remember Cold Space! I think I even had a PC there for a hot minute, though it wasn't one that stuck. Cool setting.

@ThugHeaven said:

Mad Dogs on Amazon is pretty damned good too! I'm about three episodes in good acting and story.

Ever seen Terriers?

It's by the same people and on Netflix. It's a one-season wonder, but it at least has a decent ending.

@Ghost said:

The trouble with LordsAndLadies mushes is this: If things happen, then they're bad, bad things that affect everyone.

This is kind of why I like the North (or maybe one of the Free Cities) as a setting. It gets away from the parts of the books that are more straight Lords n Ladies-y and, depending on how you structure the theme, could give you more PvE things to struggle against. It's also less feudal politics, but I don't think most players do that well enough for me to miss it, frankly.

I have a large interest in a Star Trek game. I'd at least give this a look, though a lot of ST/SW games end up being far more interested in coded space systems than I am, so mileage inevitably varies.

@thebird said:

I really think that a lot of drama and "feelings of not being wanted" on MU*s can be mitigated simply by not assuming things, and adulting enough to speak to each other. Instead of sitting around and taking gossip at face value, or assuming something typed was meant offensively, someone is ignoring you for some epic reason when really they were just afk, etc.

Most people don't think about you nearly as much as you think they do.

This was probably my biggest revelation when I hit my thirties and it's so incredibly freeing.

I actually find the IMDB lists useful if I know a rough physical type/age I want to play, but don't have a PB in mind. I'll search for an actor kinda like them, troll the user lists people have put them on, and usually find something that works.

British TV and film is my go-to for "normal" looking people. Trolling for Bollywood/Nollywood/and random K-drama and/or Spanish-language drama actors and actresses tends to find me something useable if I'm looking for something in one of those veins.

I tend to keep certain faces in the back of my mind that I want to use, and hopefully eventually a character comes along that will fit them.