Posts made by vanderlylle

@tragedyjones Still not seeing the problem.

@Bobotron Something like that is currently my plan for theme and a long-term through-line -- I am hesitant to call it a metaplot, but at least something that will give the game a framework beyond Bland By Night: Now with Other People Touching Your Stuff. I figure in an ancient city of vampires you'd have a certain level of entrenched power, and the best way to reset that scenario to the zero level for new PCs at game start would be some sort of Event that cleared things out and set the city into disarray. And I figure that having NPC antagonists control parts of the grid gives both external threats to let people fight--or to use in their power games--and lets me corral a smaller playerbase into a manageable IC footprint of a very large city.

How does it compare to Onedrive? Because I get Onedrive access for free currently, and it's literally Excel online. The only thing I have seen it not able to do is pivot tables (which are my new favorite thing), but I don't think those are common to casual users and anyway, you can just open the file in actual Excel and sync it automatically with the online copy if need be.

My company just started trying that--the new Dayforce system is not fully automated, but it's supposed to basically do the job for you anyway. It is one of the worst-designed programs I've had the misfortune of using, and can't even manage the basic functions of covering the three cashwraps and the cafe all day without your having to completely rebuild coverage for breaks and lunches. It also leaves unfilled shifts if people's availability doesn't look perfect for whatever arcane thing it wants, and it schedules people in weird areas of the store because you can't distinguish between 'jobs they do well/regularly' and 'if I have to have someone in this area for a few hours, this person is marginally better than a dead body.'

However, I /did/ set a new record on in-store excitement today when I had two of our regular problem customers that we've kicked out and attempted to ban already... decide to get in a fistfight while I'm the only manager in store all day. I ended up with a lot of blood on the floor, but kinda worth it to see one of my least favorites get punched in the face, and my #1 least favorite tased in return. Also, everybody's now trespassed, so all told, I'm considering it a victory.

My store has basically given up on ever having anyone at the info desk at this point. The MOD gets to man it, and if you're lucky you get maybe a couple of hours in the morning (when you don't need it) and at night (when you also don't need it) because we have to have somebody in for break coverage for a couple hours, but are required to schedule them for four hours shifts. Despite this, we still can't hit payroll and the customers and the employees are starting to ask if we're closing down because the store constantly looks trashed and half-empty of product.

Hell, I'm considering it a good day if we manage to not leave unfilled shifts on the schedule because our AM is a useless pile of crap. I came in to close the store on Monday and discovered I had nobody to man the second floor cashwrap. Sometimes, your coworkers are more your enemy than the customers. -.-

Having worked for a couple years in a used bookstore, I am always impressed by how people pay attention to. We'd regularly find nude photos in books, that one of us then got the honor of sliding facedown across the counter to the owner (and/or subject of photographs) when they came to pick up their merch credit. We also found money (even hundred dollar bills), family mementos, break up letters, I'm having an affair letters, I'm in jail letters... The letters always made for really wonderful dramatic reading for us in buyback.

Nothing, though, compares to the stuff people actually thought they were still entitled to get money for. Dog ate it? Just resell it. Cat pissed on it? Infested with bugs and rat shit? Nah, the used bookstore will take it!

No. No we will not take it, and we will a) yell back at you when you get pissed we didn't, and then b) go douse ourselves in the hand sanitizer we picked up in bulk at Costco.

One of my favorites out of many:

After moving cross-country, I got a job as a manager at a chain bookstore. This was March. Right around that time, the company was running a brief promotion that sent out coupons for a free ereader if you bought their largest tablet model. Good deal, right?

Fast forward six months. In September, I had a customer approach me at the info desk and put down her tablet. She tells me she bought this in San Diego and then saw the coupon for the ereader when she got back and she wanted me to give it to her. She had a printout of the email advertising the deal but not even the actual coupon, and because the coupon is what shows the expiration dates, she kept claiming I had to give her this device. I stayed mostly polite throughout, explained repeatedly that this promotion was outdated, I wasn't going to honor it, yes I am the manager so no you can't talk to anyone else, and even if it weren't expired, you don't have the actual coupon code and without that I /still/ couldn't honor it. Finally she got super pissed at me and went to storm out. And me, snide bitch that I am, said very politely after her, "Have a nice day."

Lady turned around and proceeded to ream me out for the next couple minutes, none of which I heard because she decided to lead with, "You need to go to customer service school!" After she finally did stomp out, I spent the next several minutes sitting in the floor at info giggling to myself and asking my co-workers if they thought this school would be accredited and did they have scholarships because I work retail and I'm poor.

@Cupcake said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

What I hazily recall is that staff felt that not enough people were comfortable with the period setting and its conventions.

Sounds right. I was also really meh on the change, because I had made an "Egyptologist"--basically tomb robber--turned Mystagogue. A 100-year-plus timeskip completely changes the nature of archaeology and the cultural perceptions of a character who engages in that form of it, and the "unambiguously bad" of modern time was a lot less interesting to me than pushing up against the colonialist perspective with a side of Mystagogue artifact-rehoming entitlement too.

No, it was definitely the same game, but I think Spider supposedly bowed out of running it for... RL, when it revamped? But was still there, being Spider-y behind the scenes? Or something? It was all very weird, and I'd mostly forgotten about that brief interlude of my gaming life where she was friendly enough to invite me into something, so I'm relieved other people actually remember this too. Seems like maybe there was a heavily HRed Immortals sphere, too, but I might be wrong on that one.

Didn't Spider try to set up this game already? Victorian London Mage?

@Coin said:

I had a Possessed character who ended up--at first inadvertantly and then because he essentially became fucking evil--drugged his girlfriend (whom he started dating before his possession). She had a sister who was also possessed. anyway, my character eventually broke down and confessed in a moment of clarity (and beating his demon back). The girlfriend acquired some distance, told her brother and friends, and it all looked like it was going to become some pretty spectacularly fucked up RP that I would have loved--

--and then her player got pregnant and everyone burned out and wanted to take a break and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgh, worst case of RP blue balls ever.

On the plus side, you got to stab puppies and I got my throat ripped out before we all fizzled, so good times!

I would love a shot at a Hunter game, especially if it could hit the creepy-dark-weird feel for real horror. I'm firmly in the camp that finds characters being in the dark a necessary function to get that right. In fact, I'd be down with the game being mostly Mortal/+-ish, with the possibility of compacts/conspiracies added later (whether that's via making themselves known or moving into the location where they hadn't been before, with options of course to recruit current unaligned PCs in either case). I'd love to see PCs working at cross purposes, moral ambiguity, death and other major consequences, the constant threat of becoming the monster by either being no better than them or being literally turned into one.

Mortal/+ is 2.0 ready as is; I am assuming you'd update the other powers as necessary, should it be a game that includes them. I think there's some other interesting ideas in 2.0 that could add a solid Hunter overlay to the base mortal stats. Adjust Integrity to work more like Werewolf, with a scale sliding between predator and prey, or use those poles as a Blood/Bone-style feature for willpower replen, etc. But those sorts of adjustments are obviously beyond the discussion at hand. The whole idea of Hunter is just exciting enough to me that things already running through my head.

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past? In the past.
What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop? Dnd 4e and 5e.
Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop? No.
Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity? Maybe.
Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop? ... Ish?
Misc: My schedule (retail management) makes regular meetings virtually impossible, so the couple of times I have played with groups it's been with the caveat to write me out for sessions if necessary or give someone else my sheet, which is no fun. That said, I really haven't enjoyed tt play. I thought it was because my first group was made of a strategic DM, a rules-lawyer, and me and my bff getting drunk while the two of them argued. Then I played with a group I really did like and... decided I still didn't enjoy it as much as MUing. I'd rather either hang out with my friends and socialize, or game, and tt mixes the two up for me in a way that makes both less fun. (And yet, I've made many good friends through MUing and actually moved across the country at the suggestion of a couple of them). Also I just kind of dislike DnD and I've never been able to convince a group to tt WoD with me. I once told a friend, while complaining about having to go to a tt session I was actually off work for, that, "It's not that I want to play DnD, it's just that I don't want my friends to play DnD without me."

As for why I like MUing (as opposed to just didn't enjoy tting) I'm in the MUing-as-literary-exercise crowd, too. My tt adventures have often seemed designed to make the PCs successful--the central conceit of the story is that they're the heroes, and it's less about creating a real-seeming character than fulfilling the role the story demands. I like the work of crafting sentences and scenes and themes, telling arcs that are not just about my character being the hero of a world but about the space this character occupies in a much wider universe, and making the medium work for me (this is one of my favorite parts of the wiki revolution, too--you can do fun things with text).

God that sounds pretentious. I'm an English major.

If @Tempest is done tantruming over the fact that some people didn't have the same experiences and/or make the same value judgements as her...

Another thing I really unexpectedly enjoyed about RfK was the lack of RP rooms. Having grown used to people using or creating temp rooms for everything--up to and including using them as actual on-grid sites--it was nice for rp to actually be happening on the grid. I wonder if the redshirt bits were actually a step backward in that respect. On the one hand, they were really useful for finishing up a scene that ran long, or doing something casual during a spammy event, or if I had two scenes I needed to do and only one time slot that the people involved could make. On the other, I wonder if it would have slowed the breakneck pace and the burnout rate sometimes if I were having to spread things out more, rather than doubling or tripling up as I know some of us were doing.

As an aside, I really hate the term PvP. PvP is what you do in video game multiplayer. What RfK did well was give many outlets for managed character-vs-character conflict. Hell, I didn't just want to screw with my character's enemies; I made a character who was his own worst enemy and I was looking forward to the opportunity for him to undermine his own allies, even his regnant. (Jealous vice yesss) Coming from there back into the wider WoD world feels almost like games want to discourage characters interacting, for fear something, anything, might happen.