.........by which I mean, some kinda urban fantasy that leans more on ridiculousness and shenanigans than WoD. I've said it probably a bajillion times but something like a Todd and the Book of Pure Evil meets early Buffy would just be fun.
Ares with the Fate plugins was stunningly easy going and I felt like I wasn't really all that far from making a game before life got rocky, oi. Sooooomeday I'll spin it up again.
TBH it's arguably hardly steampunk at all. Aside from one flashback scene with zeppelins, I can't think of anything that's not just Industrial-era tech, and it's not like anyone's waltzing around with a ton of extraneous brass buckles and wearing goggles on their top hats or whatever.
Carnival Row is fuuuuucking greeeeeaaaaat, ya.
I actually really admire the show's restraint with the steampunk elements, keeping them as a background aesthetic and not remarking on them really makes the world feel lived-in for me.
As for Dark Crystal...oi. I want to love it, really badly, because the movie is a childhood favorite. But something about modern high-def film and the incredibly stiff puppets, especially the faces of the Gelflings, just...wigs me out, and breaks my immersion.
What's kind of depressing is that occasionally he actually does have what appear on the surface to be good ideas -- I really liked the concept for his dream game for example, until he dug in like a tick on some bizarre mechanics to empower abusive players and actively encourage hate speech, at which point he melted down here and did his frothing at the mouth routine. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to learn there actually is some illness involved.
@Duke-Nukem said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
@Ghost So why are you obsessed with this Rick Sanchez guy?
He asked, with a studied nonchalance.
@Rinel The comic was over the top (and amazing) too. It's just how Garth Ennis writes.
Garth Ennis is the comic-books equivalent of a shock-jock radio DJ. He's deliberately offensive and gross on the level of a maladjusted teenager, TBH. He and Mark Millar are two authors whose popularity I will never understand, and Amazon made the right choice in trimming down the content of the series. It's still very explicit and dark, but in a way that is mostly not completely cringey and awful.
(Nobody is cutting their drugs with Maeve's vaginal secretions, thank god.)
The Boys was great, and I say this as someone who absolutely hates Garth Ennis and his juvenile "edgy" garbage. The material actually made it into the hands of competent writers, and was pretty compelling. I'd be excited to see an OC supers game with the same themes, but I think it would be extremely difficult to pull it/a game set in the universe of the show or comics off maturely and safely. Kinda seems like it could easily just turn into a creep magnet.
@Lisse24 said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
I think when you create a culture of OOC secrecy, you also end up creating a culture of gossip, back-stabbing, and negativity.
The difference between @Sparks' treasured experience of discovery via OOC secrecy at a table and logged into a MU* is that at a table, there is (at least presumably) a pre-existing bond of friendship and trust between players and between the players and the GM.
The GM controls both the flow of information and the appropriate level of reward for discovery vs the risk/effort involved in making the discovery, and it's usually safe to assume that a GM is directly invested in the enjoyment of every single player at their table, as are the other players.
Meanwhile in a MU*, not only are most players anonymous but prize anonymity and by default keep others at at least a very cautious initial distance if not outright distrust anyone they have no experience with, to say nothing about the PTSD-like baggage a lot of players carry about past abusive staff, let alone players who deliberately abuse their anonymity to harass or manipulate other players for their own in-game benefit. (Or creepy RL gross bullshit like sexual harassment, etc.)
As has also been said repeatedly and vigorously here by game staff, online GMs are not only NOT directly invested in each individual player's enjoyment, they outright cannot afford to be.
In that atmosphere, there is no guarantee of any real reward for the risk/effort of discovery and actually a very real risk of a stranger's active OOC resentment instead, given how ridiculously territorial players can be about "their thing" that only compounds astronomically if there is some perceived risk in OOC revelation/benefit to keeping the number of players "in the know" low or deliberately spreading misinformation.
It gets outright toxic and actively encourages and benefits toxic players, IMHO, and I will personally never play on another game with an OOC masq.
@Darinelle said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
@Wizz said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
Or even worse, putting YOURSELF through that mindfuck, especially if you're inebriated or have mental health issues?
Which is exactly what happened to you on Arx, since pretty much everything you think was going on wasn't actually going on. The only differential among what staffers can and can't do is that Tehom and NV lock down some of the delete permissions really hard, to prevent staffers like me from inadvertently deleting critical things that force them to revert to backups. But that has nothing to do with view permissions. Oh. And all staffers know who other staffers play and what is an NPC and a PC. Also as a player, if you @sheet char and nothing comes up? It's an NPC. And the PCs you think were staffbits really, really weren't.
You are so full of shit and it's honestly hilarious. Of course, since Valenzo's player bit was set to his player account and had no real view permissions other than what you all set on your game, there's really nothing I can take and show you, aside from player reactions in the Whites, some of which are p. subtle.
Seriously, fuck Arx. What a messed up little circle of staff/players and a fucked up OOC environment.
I will gladly go elsewhere, thanks.
It's sad as fuck that Evennia could be used that way, yes.
I think the difference between NPCs and PCs should be that players should know, OOC, literally any time they are interacting with a puppeted object in a MU*, and there should never, EVER be a staff-level account that exists that does not have the same view permissions as all other staff acounts.
No staffer should EVER be in doubt on their own game what is and is not a staffer-puppeted object.
Period. No ands, ifs, or buts.
Anything else is a serious breach of trust and just fucking kookooville.
Can you even fucking imagine being trained to ST in an environment like that, where you are never really sure OOC who you are talking to?
Or even worse, putting YOURSELF through that mindfuck, especially if you're inebriated or have mental health issues?
I think I do.
Sometimes people get too caught up in it and get possessive about IC game elements that are like...y'know, game elements. They're not real, so I get weirded out whenever I see it and unfortunately I see it a lot whenever I come back to the hobby.
Like, as much as I love telling stories -- and holy crap, I do! -- I could just be doing this on my own and avoid the weirdness, but...ahhhh there's nothing like collaborating!
@faraday said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
@Sparks said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
I'd also say the other defining trait is that the NPC does not get to be the protagonist. The story you're telling is not their story; they're not the hero who saves the day...the NPC doesn't get to be Luke Skywalker. They could be Obi-Wan Kenobi, however.
I agree with you in theory, but I think on a MUSH it gets murky because the traditional protagonist/antagonist breakdown doesn't really fit.
Even in TTRPGs, having NPCs with major roles helping the PCs can be problematic.
For instance, I could see Ben Kenobi or Gandalf being a super-irritating "GM's Pet PC Masquerading as a NPC" type of character in a TTRPG. They're more powerful, they step in and save the PCs from conflicts at times, etc.
People talk a lot about how MU*ing has changed the way we play these games, so I mean, why not just make playing powerful NPCs a different tier of the game and administration itself? This obviously works best on a game with a lot of coded things like goals, an economy, etc because then you can transparently display a ceiling and requirements for what NPCs want to accomplish IC and what their GMs can plot for OOC that the playerbase can learn and understand.
Make a GM position itself sort of its own kind of NPC, with certain RP tags or whatever, that umbrellas over a certain set of related lesser NPCs that GM also plays? These tags would probably need to be very abstract, but they could also be fairly specific? "This GM is about JUSTICE!!!" Or "this GM handles the Old Gods and stories about the insanity of discovering the unknown" for example.
GMs have a clear responsibility to their part of the game IC and OOC, to run plots for PCs and develop their stories, but in doing so they get to still play in some sense by trying to forward the stories that fall under their GM sphere, which itself could be an abstract system if you wanted it to be, really -- think like Imperial Mysteries from Mage, very high level goals that are not at all "this incredibly powerful NPC just gallops on down and solves this problem," but "this NPC is restricted in the way it can interact with the world directly but still wants things, so it tries to influence the PCs who can possibly accomplish that change."
That could be interpreted in a lot of ways for a lot of different kinds of games, and seems pretty fun to me!
@Sunny said in WoW Classic:
@Thenomain said in WoW Classic:
A bunch of young kids at work are going crazy about this “Magic the Gathering” thing. What the hell is going on in the world? Are we grasping for nostalgia so hard even people who never lived through these things are pining for it?
I think it's called 'we are getting old'. This happened with Bell Bottom pants, too.
I'm vacationing from MSB for a while, you know how it be.
If y'all wanna reach me, I'll be checking for PMs for the next few days and I'll share my Discord with you if ask for it and you're not just looking to scrap, haha.
In the between time of now and whenever, happy holidays/new year/etc. friends.
@apos said in Who are you?:
@wizz said in Who are you?:
- I love, love trying new food. Bizarre Foods is like, my one reality show I love. Favorite cuisines are fairly spicy or just interesting, like Indian. "Weirdest" thing I've ever eaten was probably balut, and I felt awful about it and had to eat it with my eyes closed.
I'm filipino and I'm pretty sure that balut isn't really meant to be eaten and is just used to prank people. Don't believe their lies.
Vietnam certainly fell for it. XD
Already taken down of course, but YYYYYEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS
