Posts made by Warma Sheen

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/08/sport/bobby-bowden-death/index.html

This one is personal to me. I played for Bowden for a short time in 98. Legendary career.

@ganymede said in The basketball thread:

I'm not sure if Giannis meant any shade at all

I agree that this is true. The things people say are easily taken out of context. And Giannis being young and overtaken by emotion just had a moment where he wasn't filtering everything he says (and it honestly suuucks that anyone has to).

But given who Giannis has shown himself to be his entire career, I highly doubt he meant to throw shade at anyone. That just isn't him. It is far more likely to be a response to people who have been for several years now telling him that he'll never win a title as a Buck, that he has to go to a team to play with other superstars, specifically when his time as a free agent came up and he put his belief and career back into the Bucks. He's speaking to his own experiences, not to the detriment of anyone else's.

And while I'm happy that he's happy, cause personality-wise he's one of my favorite basketball players since Steph Curry, I don't necessarily disagree with those people he's talking to - under normal circumstances. I'm sure he would not be holding that trophy without a ton of injuries around the league. It takes just the right number of high profile injuries on the biggest teams in the league to put them there.

But... that's the nature of the game, and you can say that about most champions most years, especially recently. So I'm just happy he got his ring, however it happened.

@lotherio said in Good TV:

But I've enjoyed the CW series along with the two they started on their service, Swamp Thing and Stargirl. I think they jumped to their own tv service too fast though.

CW barely deserves its own channel, much less its own service. But at least they were smart enough to not charge for it, so points there. Still, I can only imagine the quality of the shows on the subscription based on what makes it to the network line up. I guess they're going for the quantity versus quality metric?

@bloodangel said in Good TV:

I'm addicted to Mortel on Netflix, a weird french show about making deals with demons. It's low budget, but the concept is strong.

It was very weird, but I loved it.

I idle a lot, mostly because I'm just busy with life. But I like being connected in some small way to the hobby I enjoy. So even if it is only being able to read channel chat or ooc room banter, it is preferable to nothing if I'm at work or with family where I only have time to check my screen every now and then.

Even when I do have time to RP it is tenuous at best because I could be pulled away at any moment which blows... but it is the best I have so I take what I can get.

@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!

If it isn't Vitas, I can't be bothered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWVc-xVZxho

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/08/entertainment/obituary-tawny-kitaen-dies-trnd/index.html

@ganymede Can't wait until that's normal to us.

@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.

@greenflashlight said in Good TV:

@groth said in Good TV:

In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?

In a world where the police murdering an unarmed black person on camera is okay because the black person committed a crime once, it's hard to imagine people being okay with a black man who wears a fighter jet like a suit and has orbital weapon platforms (Veronica) answerable only to him.

Ugh. Well, that gets into other sticky issues... but I do think that is why the Falcon and Winter Soldier series was good and necessary for Marvel and fans in general rather than Cap just handing over the shield at the end of Endgame and things just moved on like everything was normal.

So bringing it back to good TV... yeah, I recommend Falcon and Winter Soldier.

@greenflashlight said in Good TV:

@groth said in Good TV:

I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spider-Man in part because their iconic look is fully suited up.

I think being white is pretty key to Tony Stark, only because I'd very much want to know the backstory of how a black American got to be the richest man in the world after inheriting a position as the government's primary if not sole weapons supplier from his father during World War II. In a fictional world we're meant to understand closely parallels our own, him having those advantages in America while not being white opens a lot of question about how his planet's history unfolded differently from ours.

I think 'accurate' might not be the right word to use for the discussion as much as 'familiar'. The rich white man trope is familiar, not just in the US but in a lot of the world. But that doesn't mean a rich minority character wouldn't be accurate, even in the US. I don't think even a rich black man would be a huge stretch within the context of super hero entertainment.

But yes, for many people there would be the desire for some type of explanation, even though there are many obvious, simple ones.

@coin said in Good TV:

Being rich and white and being rich and black (even mixed, even if your father is alabaster) is still very different in the U.S.

That goes down a whole other rabbit whole of the black experience about 'passing'... whew. Too much, even for me.

@arkandel said in Good TV:

Unless it stretches suspension of disbelief... you're already coping very well with people shooting energy beams out of their hands, y'all. Do you really draw the line at them also being Asian?

I know it is rhetorical, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that some people are this shallow. Race/gender identity is a big, complex thing, but the answer is definitely - yes. That's over the line for a lot of people. And by a huge margin. Many people want their heroes to look a certain way otherwise they can't (or don't want to) relate to them.

Spiderman, Captain America, Thor. Just a few other examples people have been up in arms about recently. There are a ton more.

It is a big theme in Falcon and Winter Soldier, which I thought was very good, and something that was begging to be addressed. I'm glad it was not ignored.

I understand what people mean when they say that the game Vampire "brings out the worst in people". I just don't necessarily agree.

Again, I think it depends on the perception of whether or not what that person does is okay or not. "That vampire straight up murdered my vampire for the smallest slight. That person is the worst." Did Vampire bring out the worst in that person? Or is that just what one person thought was a completely acceptable response in the bounds of that game world?

Theme is a big deal. But there can be a big difference between a game and a theme on the game. If you throw an established IP like Vampire onto a MU and do not clearly establish your own theme, you leave it up to everyone to join with their own interpretation of it and thus their own standards of acceptable behavior informed on what they have or have not read (because we all know that much of the theme are in parts of the books that many people skip in favor of studying the dice and power rules).

So I throw support behind what various people have said in different forms which is that it is up to staff to maintain the kind of theme and community (game) they want on their MU. And when staff does that it works. And when they don't, it is chaos where some people love the game and others are collateral damage for those first people. Sometimes it just depends on whether you were able to get "in" with the right people, i.e. "cliques".

P.S. I do believe there are many people who can separate character and player, but it is generally safer to assume that they can't until you know that player well enough to be sure that they can. But even then, sometimes you turn out to have just judged them wrong. So is it possible, yes. Is it likely, probably not.

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

I don't know about the rest of you, but the backstabbing and the politics is the main draw of WoD (specifically vampire) to me. It's almost the entire point. That and the fact that there are no good guys, everyone is fucked.

When I started in WoD, this was the thing. And it was awesome. It was tabletop with friends and it included "fuck your buddy notes". These were index cards where we secretly wrote stuff we wanted to do. It didn't always fuck your buddy over, but sometimes it did. Every 30 minutes the ST would collect cards (everyone turned in a card regardless if they wrote something on them that they wanted to do), read through them, and secretly roll people's dice pools to see who did what, if it was successful, and if anyone else noticed. He would write the results on each card and hand them back. You never got a card back blank. Sometimes it would just be some random ass crap like "it is a busy night tonight. A lot of people are out." And you're just like 'wtf' is that supposed to mean. Sometime it didn't mean anything. Sometimes it was a clue to something someone else did (PC or NPC). And being surprised by what people were doing was the best part of the game. The important part was that you couldn't just do anything you wanted. There consequences besides the other PCs being angry. There were NPCs that had interests and alliances. There was the city in general to consider. Blood baths and shootouts were not looked favorably upon, nor anything else that drew attention.

It was great and in the top 3 of the best fun I ever had. But life stepped in. We got jobs or went to college or turned towards relationship and the gaming group broke up. So I found MUs. And, holy shit, MUs are not at all the same as tabletop even if you're technically playing the same game IP.

@faraday mentioned about how playing with friends is different than playing with strangers on the internet, but I think the key part of that dynamic isn't friendship as much as it is trust. You trust your friends, you trust the people you play with (we had different people in and out for play sessions and STers all the time and some I didn't know at all but it still went great). You trust the ST isn't going to fudge the dice for their friend. But on a MU* there's very little trust. Quite the opposite, I think. People are wary of staffers and other PCs, super skeptical about their intentions or motivations. People don't trust that someone else isn't just going to use their character as a weapon to avenge personal slights like an expendable object. Whereas real people (and characters played well) have consequences and things to lose, some characters act regardless of consequence since players can just drop the character and roll up another. So while I agree with the sentiment that friendships keep games fun, I'd argue that the key ingredient to a successful game is trust.

And that's not likely to happen on a MU* any time soon, if ever. (I could be wrong about this and I really wish I was cause that would be awesome).

@tinuviel said in A healthy game culture:

People are going to be dicks regardless of the system or the theme. Dicks are dicks.

In general, I agree. I'm not optimistic about people overall. But I think one of the big problems with that statement is that so many different people have so many different definitions about what it takes for someone else to be labeled "a dick".

When someone does something on a MU* it usually comes from a place informed by their own preferences. Very few people do things just to be cruel to others. To really understand why something was done you need to know things like: What is your interest in roleplaying? What interests you about this genre or game? What is your idea of fun?

Because most games set very few expectations or guidelines for what they want their game to be in order to open their space to as many people as possible, that's exactly what you get - as many people as possible with wildly differing expectations about what they want to happen, what should happen, and what they are okay with happening in this RP space that everyone shares.

So while the "don't be a dick" mantra seemed like a general, basic, simple concept that everyone could follow, what often occurred instead was people labeling each other as "dicks" as soon as they encountered someone doing something that wasn't in their realm of expectation.

On a base level, so many people are unable to see things from someone else's perspective, but especially so when they've been negatively affected by that person's actions. They are quick to label that person "a dick" because they don't like what that other person has done to them, regardless of whether it may be valid.

That person might not be a dick, you might just be narrow-minded. But that's a problem we see not just in our little niche world, but everywhere: differing (and shifting) boundaries about what is and is not acceptable to them, to others, and to groups as a whole.

@tnp That's just how my first one went. The second one hit harder, though. If you can, schedule it so that you have time to recover the next day. I got it in the morning and most of it hit me that night. I had aches and chills, freezing but sweating. It wasn't terrible but it was highly annoying and uncomfortable and kept me up most of the night. There also might have been a bit of hallucinations or just generally being out of it mentally.

But to remove most of the risk of dying from COVID - and thus removal of the anxiety of going out into the world - it was very worth it.

@ganymede said in Golden Road Pivoting to Contagion Chronicles:

Normally I would concur, but the blurb for the sourcebook expressly suggests that it was created for the purpose of multi-splat parties.

I would agree here. The fun of the sourcebook seems to be focused on different supers. Plus, people just like having different options. It wouldn't have been what I thought, but that seems to be what people like.

And since you have a sourcebook that takes the 'superfriends' concepts that is often a joke for people and gives it a full on developer thumbs up, you might as well play to it fully.

All of this sounds great to me. I think the addition of an official sourcebook will help people buy into the changes in the world. Sometimes people are wary of things head staffers change all on their own due to past incidents of that never working out well in the end.

I'm not sure why a standalone mage game doesn't/wouldn't work but crossover games seem to be people's favorites. I would have that that mages only would have worked out well in their own game. So that's going to open up more options for everyone.

And lastly, probably most importantly, this sounds like something different in something familiar. Many people are comfortable with the setting, but there's both new and different in this new chronicle so it isn't likely to be just yet another iteration of the same old thing. In that vein, I would suggest you encourage people to create brand new characters, not rehash old ones from old games.

New game, new characters, hopefully new outcome.