Posts made by Too Old For This

Doublepost but....

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I have to admit... getting that notice of shipping is one of the BEST feelings! I can't wait to see the beautiful artwork!!

@grayson I saw a few episodes of that one too! It doesn't have quite the cutthroat nature of House Hunters (Americans, we gotta make everything weird) but it was highly fun to watch.

@tributary said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@too-old-for-this said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff

@Deviante Yeeeeeeeeeeees. Sorta like how I watch House Hunters. I love hearing what the couples each do for a living, and what their 'budget' is. XD

"My husband is a professional dog walker, and I used to teach kindergarten, but with our first baby on the way, I've decided to give into my passion in art. We've got a real strict budget of $1,200,000, and I'm so excited to see what we can do!"

"My name is Jack, and I teach the blind how to yodel. This is my wife Diane, and she sells her eco-friendly homemade mudpies on Etsy. Our budget is $750,000 and we can't wait to find our forever home!"

@testament I will check it out!

@Deviante Yeeeeeeeeeeees. Sorta like how I watch House Hunters. I love hearing what the couples each do for a living, and what their 'budget' is. XD

@testament I also watch Dr. Pimple Popper. OH! And Botched!

I managed to lose my son's social security card. Again. I haven't used it for anything, and I kept it with mine in my wallet. I still don't know where it could even possibly have gone.

Hey guys? Can we maybe split this off into its own thread?

@crawfish There's also Felix the Cat from the 1930s!

Rosalie & Porter
I will be forever sad that they couldn't have had more time, but @Crawfish captured it perfectly!!

Blackram Family Catrait!
(from left to right) Cahal, Gaston, Teagan, Rien (+ their heir!), Nazmir, Ivy!

@il-volpe I would play the shit out of that.

@ganymede

We all know the cat was the true mastermind.

@l-b-heuschkel To say nothing of how complaints about a 'bad roll' take a sour turn when it was a contested roll against one of the other people at the table. Instead of Jane patting Jack on the shoulder to commiserate the dice screwing them over, Jane has to listen to Jack bitch about how if the dice hadn't fucked him he'd have totally kicked Jane's ass... basically invalidating her win. Much as there are times I want to really really have my character punch another character in the face... I hate pvp so much.

@Tinuviel I mean, oWoD Vamp gave you built in bad guys, giving a reason why the fractious Cam/Ind/Anarch clans needed to come together to make sure the Sabbat didn't, you know, end the world. nWoD took that away, and that's when I lost interest in Vamp. I have no interest in getting into constant virtual dick-waving contests with other players. Same with Werewolf and Mage, to an extent. Oddly, Changeling went the opposite direction and is probably why I like it the best of the main nWoD splats. It gives a clear and present NPC bad guy to fight against, rather than just the same bullshit office politics that I have to endure every day at work.

I would pay good money to see a 60s James Bond/Austin Powers/Evil Genius-esque game where everyone was a minion working under the Big Bad. Very tongue-in-cheek style, etc. where you end up facing off against agents from various world governments as they try to suss out your boss' Evil Plans (tm). Every so often in the arc the Bondian protagonist shows up and you just have to make a mad race to survive the inevitable fallout of the confrontation. And hey! If you guys win and the Bond is killed... that's okay, there's two dozen more empty tuxes just waiting to be filled by Secret Agents! And the best part is, you can have your main Super Awesome Secret Lair in some gorgeous but dangerous remote location... but minions can also be sent out into the world to perform tasks for the Big Bad! Maybe Sciencey Underboss Lady needs a ton of weapons-grade plutonium to power the Doomsday Device your boss is going to threaten the world with. Maybe Head of Security Dude has found a mole and your team has to locate and assassinate them! So many options... and if you die? Well, you were a cog in the wheel of Evil, roll up your next fodder bit!

Too many games these days are SUPER SERIOUS and have people getting crazy attached to their characters. I want to see one that rewards risk-taking and high rate of death. One where you aren't meant to win or lose, just have some crazy, wacky, hijinks-ridden fun!

@l-b-heuschkel Or the bad guys looking to take over the world. I cannot express how often I wished for a good WoD MUSH where the players got to be the bad guys trying to take down the good guys. But I agree, you can't have both factions being playable PC's, it invites entirely too much backstabbing and pvp.

@il-volpe So having played at a rather large Sabbat LARP for years? A good LARP group is as invaluable as a good TT group. Our group could be anywhere between 20-30 people, had one head ST with 1-3 satellite ST's on any given evening... but a lot of it was done on the honor system. You had to be trusted that what you were doing was being done correctly, that your 'rolls' weren't being manipulated or cheated, and since we were often at large public venues, that you weren't engaging in asshole behavior that would get us kicked out or asked not to return. And by and large, people stuck to it. Because we wanted the game to keep going, because we were having FUN. There were inevitably a few asshat apples, but they were quick to be ejected from the group and things never got so out of hand that we needed to involve property management or the police when someone had to be ousted. We did occasionally have to cycle venues, due to either costs... or subject matter. Some places just don't want grown ass people running around pretending to be evil vampires. But it was always done politely and we never balked when someone said we needed to move on. We just.. found another place. One of our longest runs was actually at a church that our head ST attended. That one always tickled me.

LARP gets a bad rep because there are shit ST's or shit players that reinforce stereotypes in the worst ways. But not all of them are terrible, much like with anything, it depends on the people involved and how they choose to act.

@tinuviel Understood. But I'm not trying to One True Way anything. I know what didn't work, in my experience, was any game where staff had PCs that they became invested in because those PC's then became more important than the game they were supposed to be running. At best, staff became absentee and uncaring of anything occurring beyond the spheres their characters were in. At worst, staff became blatantly abusive and aggressive. Neither of these are good. But that was my experience. I'm sure there are others who didn't mind, didn't care, or directly benefited that didn't see a problem.

@tinuviel It works for if you just don't want to be bothered, too. People set themselves IC Only all the time simply because they don't want to be pestered in pages. Or watch/hide. I had a friend set herself IC Only because she was in an important event and didn't want to be getting paged by a dozen different people. She then promptly forgot she had it on for the better part of the week, until she pinged me in Discord about how quiet it had been and I asked if she'd ever taken the IC Only tag off from her event. We had a laugh, she set herself back to 'normal', no harm no foul.

And nobody is saying 'everyone should do it this way because this is how Arx does it'. Arx developed these measures based on response they received from players and to combat situations that kept cropping up with some of the now banned players. It evolved out of the culture of the game. Another game may not have code support for some of these features, or may find they don't need some or all of them. It was just pointing out that all the issues that so many of those WoD games suffered... Arx has been addressing. It's not perfect, but it's forward movement. Absolutely find a game that does for you what you want.

@tinuviel If someone is harassing you on an alt, you need to say something. Enforce those boundaries, and if someone continues to step out of line, make sure staff enforces them. Secrecy is rarely GOOD for a game. And yes, Arx has its issues, nobody has denied that. But you also can't deny that staff there have at least taken large strides in the right direction. There, if you want to avoid someone, you can list yourself as IC-Only and you can't be contacted OOCly on game. You can also watch/hide so you don't show up as online to folks. You can put in No Contact requests through staff, and if that order is broken, now you have evidence to take to them for punitive action. They've made it harder than ever for stalkers, harassers, and general assholes to last on the game. That staff has actively posted multiple multiple times saying 'please tell us if bad things are happening' is a great step.

This isn't to say there aren't cliques and exclusion happening, there is. I don't think it will be possible to ever get fully rid of them. But mitigation is possible. Creating workarounds helps. This new Story Coordinator thing is a step in that direction. It won't matter as much of Player A will only ST for her friends because now your org's SC can put out a call for an ST of whatever level you need. Things aren't perfect on Arx, but they're heading in a better direction than any other game in the past 15 years that I can recall.

@kk This is why I sorta like Arx's approach. Staff get access to staff NPC's. These are extremely powerful characters that come from races/backgrounds that players cannot access. They have powers and abilities beyond anything players can access (currently, at least). But they are meant to be limited playtime. So like... if Staff 1 runs NPC A/B/C and decides they feel up for some RP, they can step into an NPC and reach out via messengers, show up randomly in events or on grid. They can scratch that RP itch, maybe throw a plot seed or something in with it, and they don't have to worry about needing xp to build their character. Their characters are already pretty much the pinnacle of their chosen fields.