Posts made by Wizz

Mr. Robot is seriously my crack cocaine, it just hits all the right notes for me.

@surreality said in Good TV:

This is why I keep harping on everyone re: 80s game. Dork.

YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I am slowly making my way through Stranger Things, roughly an episode a night due to my new schedule, but holy god I think I am enjoying it more for not binging straight through. About to start episode 4....TONITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Wait can 80's LA seriously be a thing

@DnvnQuinn said in An open letter to Fallcoast:

No more werewolf ghost babies in 2e?

Nope. They basically came out and said they considered the ghost abortions a throwback to the most negative concepts behind the metis in Apocalypse, which were themselves kind of fucked up and based around shame culture, so they just scrapped the entire thing.

@ThatGuyThere said in An open letter to Fallcoast:

I have know problem with there being 2E games but why do folks keep harping on the one option to play 1E changing?

Because 1E is a relic. 2E has done such an amazing job for the most part making each game its own thing, trimming the fat, and adding fun new elements to the system as a whole that any time anyone talks about going back I am baffled. I don't think anyone has ever managed to give me an objective answer for their preference either, aside from what can be considered nostalgia or just fear of new shiny things.

Wait...where smileys

WHERE SMILEYS

A vampire and werewolf cop duo.
CoD or oWoD, depending on how goofy you wanted to get with it. (Correct answer: way goofy.)

@Bobotron said in The State of the Chronicles of Darkness:

@tragedyjones
Welp, there goes one of my discussion forums... they're going to go insane with Mage Supremacy. Oh joy.

@icanbeyourmuse said in Destiny - A fantasy MU*:

Magic: Yes, how it works I am /loosely/ considering set spells that are connected to each God. So, there would be 7 spell sets, primarily (how many subsets in each one is negotiable still). And a friend brought up a valid point on this next angle: Magic is hereditary (that is not the friend's point, I'll get to it). How it is done is magic is passed down from a parent and only 1 child can gain the magic. IE if a mother has twins the magic from /her/ blood goes into one child and if the father is magically inclined his magic goes into the other. The parents can continue to use magic until the twins are of age (16, as an example) then their magic fully passes on and they lose their abilities (It keeps the magic relatively under control and there is not 50 million magic users).

@somasatori said in Destiny - A fantasy MU*:

Also in regards to magic -- can someone display a talent for magic at an early age? If so, where does it come from? Do people assume they're blessed by a particular god, or that it's an inherent ability within that person? How are these people treated as children? What do their parents think about them?

I think it would be kind of cool if, given that in the setting magic specifically comes from the gods and that the ability to use magic is both hereditary and temporary, that magic users are also essentially the setting's clergy. Reproduction is basically a divine mandate or duty, to ensure that the gods' power remains a tangible force in the world -- after all, if magic is ONLY inherited and a person dies without passing it on, doesn't the magic then die as well? Maybe magic users are in some way avatars of the gods? And channeling this power through a mortal body ages them or breaks them down in some way, so the need to "pass the torch" is at least somewhat urgent (that way you don't just have magic users holding on to their powers until they're ancient or whatever).

I actually really, really like Beast. It's definitely its own thing; Beasts are avatars of primordial fear and can bring nightmares into the real world, basically. Give it the benefit of the doubt and have a full read, don't just make assumptions based on the blurb.

@tragedyjones said:

@Coin They can dual dual wield?

no quadruwield lel

Rick and Morty.

No, seriously, is City of Hope still a thing? An old-as-dirt Son of Ether mad scientist who straight up doesn't give a fuck, has like a shitty garage lab behind a Taco Bell or something and wanders through the the World of Darkness just ruining lives, with a mortal+ little buddy who desperately tries to prevent him from doing too much damage and somehow manages to make things so much worse, because they themselves are incompetent and naive.

My dad worked from home for a while and kept a computer in my bedroom, back in like...'96? I was about 8 and very curious. I started with MUDs and found MUSH/MUX/etc not long after, but I honestly have no idea how. The first one I remember playing was a MUD based on the old Disney movie TRON, which I was obsessed with at the time. I've been playing off and on ever since, which kind of weirds me out sometimes when I stop to think about it.

I just don't really understand the changes to characterization. It's already suffering from massive Pretty People Syndrome, which is inevitable for TV, but why the hell did they age everyone by four or five years? It just makes their pettiness seem that much more obnoxious.

@Coin said:

Sometimes I do spend those ten or fifteen minutes on those two sentences. Sometimes I sit there and wonder about the right adjective to use; is it a rictus or is it a moue? Is my character showing contempt or not? How do I inject immediacy into this scene as bruskly and sharply as possible?

Not to give my writing any undue credit, but this is the biggest problem I've had the few times I've tried coming back to RPing after a long hiatus. People are used to quick poses and I'm over here trying to create art, maaaaaan and I've really felt the pressure just to hurry the fuck up, and I haven't liked it at all. Where all the wordy bitches at?

Back in misty age of 2004, I joined a roleplaying PbP community called AvidGamers with the username "Mister Wizard," because there was a scene in the Matrix where Neo is running down an alley and he screams that into his flip-phone and I loved the Matrix to like, maybe an unhealthy degree as a teen. (Oh man, remember flip phones? And what pieces of shit they were?) The "General Board" forum was its own little mini-community that stuck around looooooong after the PbP part of the site died, so I wound up going by "Wizz" for short for like 12 years and there are people from there I've known since then who still call me that on Fbook and I was too lazy to pick anything else on WORA, the end.

Um werewolves can retract their nards when they sense danger, JESUS DOES NO ONE READ THE SOURCE BOOKS ANYMORE

@Bobotron said:

A modern non-WoD supernatural game set anywhere but the East Coast, Las Vegas, or New Orleans.

EDIT: There was actually a small-town game a while back I got really excited about. It was set in the Southwest, had kind of a Night Vale vibe to it, and crashed and burned after like two months. I think it ran on FS3 (or whatever it's called)? People apped in some awesome shit, though.

Personally, I really like the "build your own monster" systems you can find in the Dresden Files RPG and Unisystem games like Buffy and Angel. I'd really enjoy a kind of bare-bones game without a lot of "franchise" elements, where people are allowed to app in pretty much whatever with those tools, with as much or as little society as makes sense for the creatures, all operating under a Veil Lite.

@Misadventure said:

@Coin So how far do we take this beyond stating "I'm not trying to be condescending"?

Am I lying? Am I unaware of my own intentions? If I say something in a way I don't feel is condescending, what more can I do than say "No condescension intended"?

That's all it takes, and it can be as civil as that:
"You thought I was being condescending there, that's not what I intended."
"OK, I misunderstood."

You just came off pretty defensive when you said you weren't being condescending, which is understandable, but that's what Coin was responding to. Like he said, it's easy to forget how much gets lost in translation. You are aware of your intentions when writing something, but this isn't a face-to-face conversation and I'm lacking cues like tone of voice or expression, really subtle things that let me know what is safe to assume. Nobody is accusing you of lying. But we cleared it up man, no worries.

@Misadventure said:

Shortest version: lay out how you will game-ify this to meet the needs of more than the one player who massively gets to decide what happens.

Tell me what game rules will not fall extremely to one side or the other if you play round by round, roll by roll, for this one, hugely important to the setting event. Remember, those players will be anywhere they want to be, on a moon sized map. They have 15 minutes. It has to go with the rolls. It has to go with their choices of insertion point and timing.

You're focusing a little too much on the "one player massively gets to decide what happens" dilemma and that's actually exactly my point. The Battle of Yavin scenario as portrayed in the movie is actually a terrible example of how this would work well, you're right, because there are already several "givens that wouldn't be" in my ideal game. It's a given that Luke is the only Rebel character remaining in the trench, or that the trench is even the approach the Rebellion takes -- why not set up an infiltration scenario instead, if it bothers you to set the stakes so high and balance them all on one player? My larger point is, you should be able to run the Battle of Yavin however the hell you want, it shouldn't matter that it was a single-file run down a trench in the movie. Maybe you wouldn't get the same nail-biting-down-to-the-wire conclusion to team play it like that, but the freedom of choice is again what I care about.

Or just go ahead and make the place, and play through the movie events. Hope ... what... where to start? "As an engineer, i min max my troubleshooting skills and make the exhaust port a corkscrew cuz heat don't care. about straight lines." Lets hope the droids make it through that hallway. Let's hope the escape pod isn't vaporized. And so on. (The Battle of Yavin IS a great binary because either the Rebellion there survives, or it does not. Then add in which characters make it, and if the Death Star does.) And let's hope that three dozen players think this is so cool that some random dice decided if anything close to the Star Wars story happened for the Star Wars MU* they want to spend time on.

This is what we keep coming back to and where our main conflict seems to be. I don't want to spend time on a Star Wars game to see the "Star Wars story" happen. I want to spend time on a Star Wars game to play in the Star Wars universe and tell stories there. It's like was mentioned in another thread, your primary reason to make a derivative game should be that the setting is expansive enough to survive a little tramping around in, not because you want to recreate the plot.

And I think the Star Wars universe is big and sturdy enough to survive the Empire crushing the Rebellion, or the Emperor dying on the first Death Star and the Empire breaking down into factions, or the Rebellion hijacking the Death Star and turning it around on the Empire, or whatever wacky thing. The setting and universe still have rules that would make the game an interesting place to be.

Good luck with that. You just can't make a set of game choices that will maintain authority to decide something that big via simulation minutia. (Never tell me the odds.")

Again, I still don't think you're giving me a compelling argument. You wouldn't like the story to diverge is all I'm getting from this.

I'll stick with avoiding the canon story events first hand.

If none of that makes sense, then don't worry about it. I didn't design the game in question, and I am fairly sure no one wants to play in any of the alternate settings I have mentioned.

That's actually not true for me, I remember several potential Star Wars games actually set in either backwater parts of the galaxy or vaguely-defined periods of galactic history that I think would have been a blast to play, had they materialized. I don't know why they never really got past the planning stages and I assume it was just for the normal reasons some games in development fall apart, rather than a lack of interest.

Also, please don't read my personal feelings or attitude into things, and I will do the same for you. If I am trying to be condescending, I will let you know. If you hear condescending without it being sent, adjust your reception.

Will do, my apologies.

And IS the whole point of RPing getting to replay through a specific story, a specific scene from one of dozens of stories in a place with thousands of stories possible? Is that the whole point? I don't think so.

That's not what I was saying it was?

ETA: Oh, for what I think is a really good example of working with canon material and letting players still have their own fate, look at Pendragon. Plenty of discussion on whether to use what parts of the Arthurian stories in your adventures. Also plenty of mechanics to back up that the realy really hard tasks are indeed really really hard to do unless you are completely stacked to do well at them. Think multiple checks to pass an evening, and have you have to make all checks across three evenings. Good stuff to think about).

I'll have to look at the system!