Posts made by Wizz

@Sparks

Sure, it's a pretty similar concept. Only it'd be on a MU* and...in this community... because I am a crazy fool who wants to watch the world burn

@Lisse24

I'm not saying that it's not "real" RP, I'm just suggesting people not incentivize it. The reward for those kinds of scenes should be having fun playing through those relationships and expanding the character, not XP. I think it'd kinda cut down on the circle-jerk that some places turn into.

@Ganymede said in High Fantasy:

@Wizz said in High Fantasy:

I'd kinda like to see a MU* that is run more like a public OTT. Players can have bits that multiple characters are attached to and these characters are part of limited campaigns (as in, will end, characters get sent to that giant tavern in the sky) with scheduled scenes. "Downtime" rp is an option, but not incentivized or rewarded in any way - no weekly XP, no cookies or votes or whatever.

I mean...I'm not gonna do it but. XD

So, kind of like what @faraday's doing with BSG:U?

Kinda! Only I'd even wonder about having a unifying setting or theme at all. You could just have randomized, anonymous sign-ups for campaigns or something, and these could be anything from one-shots to month-or-year-long sagas, basically just give people the tools to scratch whatever itch with a given RPG system.

@Apos said in High Fantasy:

I don't think it is either, but that wasn't what I was getting at earlier. Okay so take like werewolf characters you see on the wikia for any WoD game, and read them over. I'm positive that if you looked at them, you get a pretty good idea how that character spends their time, day to day, between the major plots that shapes their lives. You can probably picture all the little minor social interactions.

Now try to do the same thing with a lot of dungeons and dragons characters. [...]
And those are the questions people need answered when doing the random RP that shapes social interactions on MUs, so anyone setting up a game in those settings has to be the one to answer them, even though the thematic settings already seem to be established.

What you all seem to be saying is that what we think of as a functional, successful MU* needs to look and play basically like a simulator rather than a role-playing game. I think that mindset is also behind a lot of the complaints we have about the state of most current games -- dinosaur characters, treehouse clubs, endless bar-p, sandboxes, etc.

I'd kinda like to see a MU* that is run more like a public OTT. Players can have bits that multiple characters are attached to and these characters are part of limited campaigns (as in, will end, characters get sent to that giant tavern in the sky) with scheduled scenes. "Downtime" rp is an option, but not incentivized or rewarded in any way - no weekly XP, no cookies or votes or whatever.

I mean...I'm not gonna do it but. XD

@Coin said in Good TV:

@tragedyjones said in Good TV:

At least The Hand had a reason to raze New York. In fact, razing NYC wasn't even their goal, just a byproduct of getting what they are after.

Except alexandra goes on this spiel about how you get used to seeing cities fall and how they were behind all the big ones like Pompeii. So it's still the same story beat.

This is what I meant by the Hand's end goal and motivations being pretty confusing, especially for someone like me who never read Iron Fist/Daredevil and doesn't know much about the Hand in comic canon. It's first established in the show that the

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS wall/door is some kind of portal to the dimension in which K'un-Lun can be found and the Hand wants to return there for some reason, but when the seal is broken it just...reveals a dragon skeleton? Which they want to harvest as the "substance" they use to come back to life/maintain their immortality is in the marrow or whatever. Was trying to get to K'un-Lun just a ruse, or is every doorway directly through dragon remains under every major city they destroyed, or...? And the dragon's skeleton honestly did not seem all that huge, how would removing it destabilize the city?

@Jaded
Agree. I really enjoyed the first few episodes but I thought the finale especially was just weak as hell. I am also not at all ashamed to admit that I thought the Hand was completely wasted. Their motivations, structure, and end goal wound up just being bizarre and confusing, and they were basically not a threat at all.

JJ and Cage were basically the only redeeming parts of the season for me!

@Jaded said in Good TV:

Anyone with some general thoughts on S1 The Defenders? Trying to decide if I want to binge it or not.

I struggled with it and ultimately don't think I liked it very much. Definitely not as impressive as all the solo series have been so far IMHO...but then, I gave Iron Fist a hard pass after a couple of episodes and thought the Elektra arc was the weakest part of Daredevil S2, so these two things being Defender's focus was a pretty big turn-off for me.

@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

My takeaway is that indeed you SHOULD play WoD so dark that players do in fact lose their sense that they have anything in common with these people in the game.

Enjoy.

Then you misunderstood me. The only thing I said you SHOULD do is understand that an undercurrent of darkness running through everything is pretty much the premise of the games, it's right there on the tin. I also said that I don't think everything should be 100% soulcrushing grimdark 100% of the time, like @Coin pointed out that doesn't even make narrative sense. @Pyrephox pretty much nailed what I'd like to see, but a lot of people seem to want to play Twilight Barbie dream house instead so idefk

@tragedyjones said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Bright and cheery is just as valid a horror trope as creepy violent.

Absolutely, but to be a horror trope the bright and cheeriness should be a veneer. I mean come on like at least make it so you had to sell your ability to laugh to a demon or something in order to run The Baked Bean.

@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@wizz One thing I never want to lose in any setting is the sense that (for players) they understand and can relate to the typical NPC of the setting. Human beings can adapt to a great deal (because among other things we are a terrible species to ourselves), but there is some point where I feel like that common ground, that common grounding in human experience no longer applies.

I don't really think it's all that hard to imagine a universe where the forces that paranoids rave about are actually real and influential and to picture yourself or someone you know in that world, and how they'd/you'd eventually degrade and succumb. I know that's pretty dark but that's kind of the idea.

@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

That idea of everything is actually messed up always goes against the grain for me. I've been in places where bloody revolution was about to happen, where you don't walk on the side of the road because (not mines) there are bodies in shallow graves, places where corruption is the norm, and still people are people. They try to live normal lives.

That's still the real world, though. The World of Darkness, at least as described in the core books traditionally, is not the real world. It's a place where humanity has been corrupted by forces they can't perceive or understand and that corruption is reflected back at them in every facet of their lives and/or they literally live in a broken reality meant to subjugate them. Anything bright and shiny is there just to distract them from the existential horror that is their entire existence.

I mean TBH I don't know that I would enjoy it either if a game laid it on that thick 100% of the time and everything was only ever super grimdark, but at the same time I find a lot of people playing it completely straight with characters in their early twenties owning and operating happy little themed candy shops and I don't find it satisfying at all.

@tangent
I was exaggerating for the laffs but I think most people who play these games could recognize that general attitude.

@Thenomain said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

One of the things that absolutely scares me away from any roster system is that not only that you may have history there that you weren’t aware of and having to negotiate hooks severed with other parts of the game, but it’s entirely possible to play it wrong and mostly this is no longer that character, it’s now another authors take on that character.

This may explain why I can’t get into superhero comics.

There seems to be two groups of superhero MU* creators/players:

1. "Purists," who create and play games set in one specific franchise at one specific point in the publication of one specific series and GOD HELP YOU if you haven't bought issue #374 Vol 2 and didn't read the editor's response in the letters column IN THE ORIGINAL PRINT RUN which explains Magneto's real motivations because fweqnf;PENFWQNIKN

2. Fun people.

@Chet said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

For instance, I have chtirophobic conduct disorder RL, that's the Scarecrow, people that make sibilances (whistling, sing-songs, mutters) are sometimes sociopathic, and the chtirophobia (fear of birds) causes it to piss me off. So, I display sociopathic behavior to anyone that tries a sociopathic tactic.

"Chtirophobic conduct disorder" is not a thing.

"Conduct disorder" is a thing, "chtirophobia" (...ch...chirophobia?) is the fear of hands, but there is no official diagnosis for "lashing out at people because they whistle like a bird."

That is an armchair diagnosis from someone who is avoiding a real and very serious issue if I have ever heard one, and please understand I am not trying to be mean when I very strongly suggest you talk to a professional.

@Misadventure
I love the job, I think it provides a good and necessary service for people who definitely need it, but I think you're right. It just sucks.

Basically just forced two of the directors at my job to finally give me the promotion they've been talking about for three months. They were super fucking sketchy about discussing dollar amounts when it came to the raise, they just kept saying I'd be at the top of what was technically allowed for my title and that my peer and I would be "taken care of." (We were both being promoted to managers, east & west coast operations respectively.)

Turns out the raise is just a dollar more an hour and I am still just scraping by every single month, juggling overdue bills and watching my credit plummet. My family is trying to talk me into moving out of the city and back to my hometown so they can help with my kid and I can go back to school and I am so, so angry and tired. I love them to death and I am so thankful that they want to help, but I put two years and SO much energy and life into this job and I absolutely hate the idea of starting over from square one.

@Auspice

Tell me about it

@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:

• Demon: "We'd love to bring it forward. Bring your pitches." Some other lines, like Wraith and Changeling, may come out in different formats first.

Plz make Lores not just all over the fucking place. In the fiction (especially the Greg Stolze trilogy) it seemed like they were supposed to work more like Spheres, which would be cool.

@Coin
Shadow Gifts should definitely be universal, and really just combing through ALL the old books for salvageable bits (including nWoD Forsaken) would probably save us a ton of time, but I ask because I'm pretty sure most of the breedbooks have auspice Gifts, right?

Ultimately I have zero problem just moving forward with your suggestion and applying auspice across the board and if you're already feeling like doing the homebrew thing would just lead to burnout I trust your experience, it's a lot easier and straightforward to make cosmetic changes to each auspice (Sun Gifts instead of Moon Gifts, just for the obvious example) but making unique things is something I can't help but be enthusiastic about, haha. I would like to see your Camazotz stuff if you've got it online!

@Coin
Do you mean the Auspice Benefits, or the Moon Gifts?

The rest of the template is very simple and you could probably mix and match gift lists and auspice skills super easy, but I can definitely see why writing an exclusive homebrew Gift list for each and every one and thinking of a unique exploit that sometimes-is sometimes-isn't even really all that mechanical would be tricky.

Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to go through the old Breedbooks and convert one of those Gift lifts to CoD?

@Coin said in Brainstorming: Hybrid/Homebrew Werewolf Game:

Basically, i involves dialing things back to a situation more akin to the pre-War of Rage, where the werewolves were actually just one more species of Fera. If we're combining CofD and cWoD, it would essentially be that instead of the Forsaken being the premiere shapeshifters who had a Pangaena ancestor, each of the shapeshifting species would have their own Pangaean ancestor, probably each one of those having mated with the moon (or, in some cases, another large spirit, like Helios, or had absolutely different origins, like the Nagah and their River Kings).

It would essentially present a world where all of the shapeshifting species had their own role, including the werewolves, and they (ostensibly) worked together, etc. Think more Hengeyokai from cWoD, basically.

The one thing I'd want to point out here is that it is a really good idea to keep the "role" thing going, but each one should be revisited. The oWoD Fera and Garou were all united (basically, originally, on paper) under one deity, and she literally gave them their purpose, but in CoD the Uratha have a role because they specifically inherited Wolf's "duty," which was to BE Wolf. S/he was the spirit of the hunt, s/he was literally his/her duty. There is a huge goldmine of unity but also conflict and contradiction there that doesn't have to be driven by jealousy or pride like it was with the Garou, the different Fera could have coincidentally (or intentionally!) just been created to do absolutely opposite things.

This also kinda ties in to how I see the Triat existing in the game, BTW. I don't really want to do the Apocalypse thing and have them be these insane forces spinning out of control and balance. They are not "good" or "evil," they just...are. I think it'd be kind of neat to have each Pangaen ancestor originate from (or be an aspect of) one. Wolf came from the Wyld, Spinner-Hag from the Weaver, Plague King from the Wyrm, just for example.

It would be larger in scope. Depending on how it's structured, you can have Auspices remain across the species (Rahu, Irraka, etc.) and apply the species themselves as Tribes (doing away with the Tribes per se and, perhaps, instituting the Pure as an interspecies sort of coalition) which is my personal preference, or you could do away with Auspices and keep the Tribes, giving each species a function and having that take over as Auspices (Uratha are warriors! Nagah are assassins! Nuwisha are teachers! Whatever whatever!) You could also keep Auspices AND Tribes but then you have to buckle down and apply the same for each species, which nnnnnnnnnnnnnnngh that's a lot of work.

See, yeah, that would be a ton of work, but I LOVE how different auspices were (mostly) for each breed. Sometimes the writers just cheated and copy-pasta'd, yeah, but I think it would really be worth it and extend the life of the game to put the time and effort in.

Regardless, mechanically speaking, the other species would work the same as werewolves, with different bonuses and different natural abilities, lots of customization via Merits (e.g. instead of giving Nagah AGGRAVATED VENOM from the get go, they need to buy up from a slight paralytic agent that barely slows other shapeshifters down, to something that does outright organ damage on contact). I'd probably keep the bonuses for shapeshifting within the same parameters as the Uratha (i.e. in Gauru they have +8 total in Attributes, so everyone would get +8 to distribute, bonuses to senses might be different sesnes but same bonus, and then some judgment calls for specific things).

+1

For species that have very large differences within the species itself (for example, cats, who can range anywhere from 'lynx' to 'tiger' I would probably do something similar to how the Mokolé were handled, with Merits that can adjust forms to suit whatever the player wants to play.

I am definitely in the camp of More Options Are Almost Always Better. I actually love having choice paralysis sometimes when I find a game and get really excited about all the possibilities!

I'd also probably definitely bring back the Camazotz, because they're my jam.

GURAHL/RATKIN 4 LYF