Best posts made by Warma Sheen

@Miss-Demeanor If they aren't fun, then don't play with them. If you are being bullied by other players and your staff refuses to do anything about it, the fault there lies again with the staff not the players. But being chased off the game is different than being shut out of a sphere. If you got Mean Girl'd, then that sucks and it shouldn't happen. But it sounds like you didn't like how they play anyway and didn't want to interact with them.

@arkandel Agreed. It was the more subtle things that made the show good. Another was that as much as race was a theme of the show, I can't remember any white characters that were racist (maybe I missed some). Any negative issues with race were focused within the black characters and their experience with America (as a whole and as a Captain).

So they completely bypassed the old, overdone 'whites are racist' cliche and went to more relevant and dramatic themes of the black experience within the US and the dynamic of how we feel a part of America and also apart from it and how do we reconcile both of those things, which are almost universal for black Americans.

I wasn't a big fan of Magicians but it was very, very MU*. I felt like I was watching a live action MU*. Not great for TV (for me) but great for a setting.

Since this is an apology thread...

I'm sorry that all spheres aren't power balanced equally. And I'm sorry some people have the expectation that it should be, despite numerous editions of the same game lines where they absolutely, and continuously, do not try to balance one sphere's powers against all the other spheres' powers.

And I'm sorry that despite plenty of people jumping in on multisphere games to be mages where they can lord their infiinite might over others, that people find them rather boring when they are placed in a game all on their own.

Oh god! I'm so sorry! -sobs -

I think having the Contracts be universal is an excellent idea. I think a lot of players chose their seeming based on the contracts they could get more than the Seeming itself which left a lot of the story and connection to the seeming completely ignored. Players are players. And this helps preserve certain choices to be more "genuine". Of course you'll still have people who choose their seemings based on the extra bonuses. But I suspect you'll have much less of that sort of thing than you did before.

@Cobalt When I got my first apartment it was a studio because the location and price was great but there were no other 1 bedrooms available in the building. They said I could take the studio until a 1 bedroom unit opened up. But by the time one did, I loved my studio so much I didn't want to leave. I didn't need much space and everything I needed was close by. And it was so easy and quick to clean! Why pay so much more just for a little more space and more walls. I actually miss living in a studio now, so enjoy it!

@theznar said in Interest check: Early Rebellion SW game:

So. D6 is working like a charm, I finally got pennmush running after banging my head against a really dumb wall for a few weeks. I'm hoping to have a functional game in early January, if I can wrap my head around a wiki, since that seems to be something all the kids want these days.

Get someone else to handle the wiki if its not your thing. It seems to be a popular thing that people volunteer for. More people can wiki than to code, it seems.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/27/gamestop-stock-surge-reddit.cnnbusiness

Love it.

Edit: As I read more about it... apparently this is no small thing, but a huge financial fucking deal that has the potential to break big aspects of the market. A lot of people are going to be out a lot of money when this is all over. Others might be much richer. The market is a gamble. I don't know much about it so I have no idea how it will play out.

I have always had a place in my heart for game stop for being there for me before I was financially stable enough to afford full priced games or game systems. But this doesn't really seem to be about boosting or saving the store.

I'm not so sure I love it as much anymore.

I like the general theme of things being in the darkness that most normal people just don't know about. They struggle against themselves and sometimes each other, and even on a good day the best mortal isn't much more than a pawn, the worst - a speed bump. But even the monsters in the closet have things to fear and aren't nearly as hot shit as they'd like to think. What will you do with your supernatural existence?

That's kind of how I see it. The thing about World of Darkness is that the theme IS all over the place. But that lets you take the stuff you like and ignore the stuff you don't. The problem with MU*s is that everyone takes and leaves different pieces and that's where we run into problems.

@Thenomain said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

A similar issue in the World of Darkness crowd used to be the Mage antagonists, the Technocracy. We've had Technocracy players and this shed light on a single problem: They had nothing to do but pick on the other Mages, and as they had a huge advantage of organization and backing, things quickly got into the realm of suck for the Mages.

To be perfectly honest, that doesn't sound like a problem. That sounds like the way things were supposed to work. Except that players whine and cry because they want to use their powerz for frivolous stuff out in the open without penalty. Players have to respect the setting in order for the game to work, otherwise it doesn't.

@acceleration said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

When players are reduced to a sandbox setting, they tend to get bored and move away. Players have very limited power to change the world, so their storylines tend to stall out without major events to frame them around.

The sandbox syndrome is one of the biggest problems in MU*s that people don't want to deal with. Its the reason staff feels like they need to come up with a big bad or monster of the week. Because players don't want to play against each other . They want to play against something that makes them feel powerful cause they're gonna beat it down, usually with a much smaller chance of death, then brag about it to other PCs. And staff accommodates because its easy. You think up a thing, make it impossible to find and harder to kill - until the the PCs have jumped through enough hoops and ran around in enough circles, when The Thing is found with little difficulty and is killed even easier. Once you give into that sandbox syndrome it is a black hole of repetition cause that's what everyone expects now (which is, by the way, what most people expect now). The community is mired in sandbox syndrome. Kill big bad, feast on xps, buy more powers, rinse, repeat until PCs get so fat and bloated the players start complaining that they are bored and the game has no depth, as though they haven't perpetuated the problem the entire time they are on the game.

But there are games that can be about something other than fighting a thing much bigger and badder. There can be games about things much smaller and gentler. Take WoD for example. It has an entire setting what constantly revolves around monstrosity versus humanity, yet humans on MU*s are constantly treated as inconsequential background noise. It always becomes big-bad versus PCs. What about greedy evil human versus the helpless poor human. The reason those kind of games don't exist? See above. Players want to solve the problem with loud, flashy powers, then get upset if their characters get killed off by the things that exist by theme to kill off anything using loud, flashy powers.

Also, how to deal with XP bloat? Stop giving out so much xp. No. Stop. If you're giving out mounds of XP to get people to come to your game then you get people on your game who look for mounds of XP. If you think the only way your character can grow or change is by devouring XP, you're missing out on huge and varied paths of character development. Again: a learned and perpetuated mentality in the MU* community. Many people believe this because they have experienced this. They have not been able to change or grow their characters except by spending XP. They can't affect the world around them in any satisfying way so they have to be content with just spending XP. Because again, that's easy. Give XP, spend XP. Staff job done.

We look for all the easy answers, usually because games are so big that is all anyone has time for. When staff does look to do more, they burn out and close quickly. And so we end up with the mess that we have now where everyone sees how bad things are and we keep recreating those bad games over and over and over again, despite the wrongs everyone sees and acknowledges but no one has the time or inclination to fix for any sustained period of time.

Unintentionally kidnapping babies hurts everyone.

The more you know...

Chontio was really fun with a cool concept. RL got me and I wasn't happy with the character I had made so I kind of gave up on making the time. My faults on both ends. The game itself was very good.

There were certain things that made it good where others have not been so good, but I don't think its unique to SW. Its just the way games are run. One thing is theme. There's a definite theme to the game and the setting reinforces it. It isn't just the sandbox everyone plays in, it is part of the theme in a way that people are unable to ignore. Most games don't spend enough time on the setting. They just pick a place and overlay their game onto it. PCs then ignore at their leisure and no one says anything about it.

The second thing they did well was stress the rarity of force users - then let anyone play one. But rather than just leave the distinction there, the force was worked into the plot lines in ways that were obviously there, but I wasn't able to stick around long enough to get details on. There are only so many PCs on a game. Even if every player is a 'special', it would still be drowned out compared to the millions or billions of people in the game universe. And since the staff gets to come up with the theme there are numerous ways to work that into the setting and plot. And if for some reason you can't work that in, then no one gets to play one. Letting some but not others fill a force user role is a dangerous recipe for early game death, if only for reasons of public perception.

There were a couple of other things that they did well, but the end result of most of it is summed up as: dedicated staff. You can't run a good game without dedicated staff and they did a very good job of focusing content into the game that people wanted to engage with rather than some places which just toss out fluff out of obligation to 'run something'. Its so annoying to feel like you're in a scene where it feels like the ST (player or staff) is just running the scene to fill some quota and really couldn't care less about the outcome or how it affects the story or the characters involved.

I've been in many, many SW -combat scene #223948- where bad guys are thrown at PCs like cannon fodder and staff call themselves having created plot. That, actually, is both very annoying and very common to SW games.

@Seraphim73 said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

But even when I play these grizzled veterans, the meat of their story has to be ahead of them, in my opinion. They shouldn't have single-handedly defeated a platoon of enemy soldiers, married a princess, become king, given up the crown, and created their own form of kung-fu. But having played minor parts in two or three dozen battles/skirmishes? Sure! Great! Just means you have something to compare your on-grid accomplishments to. But I think that on-grid accomplishments should always be the highlight of your character... or else why are you playing them now? Shouldn't you be playing them back when they were awesome?

Here you have the classic catch-22 wherein you're allowed to take a certain set of stats for a particular type of character - then the staff tells you that your BG doesn't justify those high stats - then the player goes back and justifies those high stats with having single-handedly defeated a platoon of enemy soldiers, married a princess, become king, given up the crown, and created their own form of kung-fu - at which point the staffer shakes their head at the player for a background they shouldn't have.

If you don't want players to have done all that, don't require all that as justification of stats that you allow. And it isn't the player's fault if you push them to justify those and then they get in your game and they can't do anything as exciting as what you've pushed them to put into their background just to get approved to play the character concept they have already been encouraged to play in your game.

If your game allows people to start their characters with 70 to 80 percent of any person's absolute maximum potential, then you need to allow for whatever else comes down the line with that decision. If you really want people to have their most exciting moments on screen, there are much better ways to do that than to tell people to write less interesting backgrounds, like limiting how great people can be to start.

This is yet another reason BGs have devolved into little more than whip cracking and hoop jumping - on some games.

@Thenomain said in Tales of Cobalt-Colored Woe:

To those who have helped, you have my undying gratitude. I've been thinking of what I could do for those insanely amazing people who have donated $100 (and higher, holy shit!), but short of baking cookies or code services, I can't think of anything.

You've probably done it already over the last however long you've been doing this. Many of our funtimes are due in big part to you and Cobalt, specifically those of us who play WoD. So its been done.

There are so many preferences in how one enjoys games, one of the problems we have in the MU* community is that quite often people try to shoehorn one particular way as being better than another way. People are different. Different people enjoy different things. One way to help with this is RP preferences, but something more structured that gives people a better idea of who you are as a player and what you enjoy.

@surreality said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

Rant and rave and diarrhea of the mouth making assumptions that are pretty profoundly unintelligent while hypocritically trying to claim someone else is making assumptions as though this discussion or any other is based solely on scientific fact which I seem to equate to my own experiences, while at the same time saying everyone else's experiences are not only completely invalid, but a fantasy.

Besides being caustic and acidic for no reason other than you can (first clue of being unstable), you're completely off the rails about what the conversation is about and are just losing your shit for no discernible reason.

Your first point shows we're not even talking about the same thing so trying to have a conversation with you is pointless, as supported by many of your other off-topic, baseless points.

@Faceless said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

You won't get a benefit at the bar scene or the coffee shop scene or the TS scene, but you generally don't need the merit there.

You feel that perhaps that sexual position while sipping your latte may be far too advanced for you, despite being a thrice-virgin ninja vampire wizard demon. You seem to think that an attempt could leave you with a rather nasty cramp. If you wish to proceed anyway, then roll Dexterity + Athletics with a 3 dice penalty.

I beg to differ, I believe it's most useful there.

I stand corrected and concede.

Character death by bad die roll. I've never seen that happen.

Mostly because I'm not purposefully narrowing my focus to create sympathy and avoid responsibility for personal choices.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But it probably happens far less than people make it out to be. A character's death usually has far more involved than one single bad die roll, but because that's where things end, they blame it on that.

Its like when someone misses a field goal in the final seconds of a football game and the loss gets blamed on him, regardless of how easy it should have been. There were still 60 minutes of football in which plays and decisions were made which all led up to that point. Same with characters. Did you min max your sheet and spend all your XPs making a glass cannon, then fail some defense or resistance roll badly? That's not dying from a crappy roll. Everything you did from CG until then is what led to your character's death, which ended with a crappy roll. Your character, most of the time, puts themselves into situations or makes decisions which leads to being in a situation where they die due in part to a crappy roll. But not only is crappy rolls part of the system you're using, your choices and decisions and actions got you to that point. That's your character's story, whether you want to ignore it and only focus on the parts you like or not.

Sure, everyone has their own idea and preferences for story, but I don't understand how anyone can come onto a medium with this many other contributors and still expect to have full control over everything that happens to their character. I know that mindset exists. I'm not putting it down. All I'm saying is that I can't understand it.

I play because I can't roleplay elsewhere. I mean, I probably can, but its a whole lot of effort and I'm not sure the results would merit it. But this has been my outlet for RP for a long while. But if I could go back to having a regular group of friends to RP with, I would. Unfortunately, life hit is all. Jobs and different schedules and relationships and such.

As far as what I get out of it, mostly wish fulfillment. I like doing things I wouldn't be able to do in RL (which is why I hate casual bar/coffee shop scenes). Give me some powers, give me some agenda to fulfill and let me start working out some problems. That makes me happy.

Unfortunately, I've found the MU* community only scratches the itch barely and I wish there were more games with more people that played like I like to. Instead I feel the constant need to tiptoe around people's feelings so they don't dramasplode on me, and I have to do it both ICly and OOCly and that's a whole lot of emotionally draining effort that I'd prefer to not have to spend. But this is what I got available to me so I make it work. Sometimes.

@ganymede said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:

I get fussy when my PC is killed or rendered unplayable by someone else because they are having a snit.

This is how I felt recently when the sphere wiz made the sphere environment toxic to me and I had to choose between giving up the character and languishing in a sphere that was hostile to me.

It feels very much different on handling losing a character based on whether it was because of legitimate IC circumstances or OOC pettiness.

I was telling great stories with great people and that all got cut off in an unpredictable snap. I handled it by just focusing my time and energy on other things, despite the loss and messiness of another person's nastiness.

But that's a danger of the hobby and I was aware of that going in, so it softened the blow. Also experience. I've lost or had to give up characters before and it has become easier the more times I've had to do it.

@TiredEwok Thanks. I always wanted to try the Arkham Asylum lines but just never got around to it. I was just about to buy some on steam for 75 percent off. But free is a much better deal.