@KarmaBum If you like FS3, I do happen to have the stats I put together from The Network’s Western series that y’all could use as a starting point.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

I want to hear your war stories.

I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.

Spoiler alert: They weren’t fine with it (well, not all of them).

For those unfamiliar, the setting was a small town in Wyoming just after the Civil War. There was a whole article on historical plausibility, but the most relevant rule was this (paraphrased for brevity):

This is a historical game, and on-screen portrayal of prejudice is permitted. Staff in no way endorses racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism, but we are not trying to rewrite history. Keep it IC.

Most of the PCs were super tolerant. That was nice in many ways, but it got to the point where:

Some of the players doing storylines about overcoming prejudice felt kind of gaslighted (like they were overreacting / their struggles weren’t real) Some of the players who stuck closer to historical norms felt ostracized (like they themselves were racist) It felt jarring any time a NPC acted with historical prejudice.

I got caught in the middle a lot, and it wasn’t fun. The worst situation was when two good players (whom I considered friends) left the game after other PCs threatened to

Spoiler

form a lynch mob to go after their characters, who were involved in an interracial romance

Were the other PCs acting historically? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes.

There was also tension in how to handle the conflict between settlers and Native Americans respectfully, which made me personally uncomfortable.

The biggest drama was people throwing fits over the number of “exceptional” characters. I approved PCs by looking at their character in its historical context: could that character exist in 1866? Many were bothered by the cognitive dissonance that occurred when you had all these exceptional characters together in this small town. But I wasn’t about to say yes to a female ranchhand but then turn around and say no to a Black doctor because we’d met some arbitrary quota of folks who didn’t adhere to historical norms. Some likened it to Twin Peaks 1866, and I was ok with that. Others weren’t.

@somasatori said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

The lack of metanarrative requires STs and leads to frontload their world-building in order to get the plot started.

I think this is a feature, not a bug. It gives you a vague structure and requires you to run your own game, with your own world and your own story with strong mechanics. If you can’t do that, the game might not be up to par anyway and running something from previous editions will only work well if your players stay on the rails you give them. Once they try something outside of the box, a lackluster ST will lose control of the game quickly.

nWoD gave out so much specific detail that canon became this amalgamation of 542542 different parts of 4924 different books, not all of which agreed with each other, leading to many an argument over which character can be what type of monster and how this player or that player doesn’t know how to play splat x at ALL because they don’t even know about obscure passage X and quoted some obscure passage Y which I don’t know about so they must be making it up or at least really misinterpreting the writers’ intent, which is SO very obvious, so I don’t even want to play with this person who is making a mockery of the game and ruining my own fun if they are around me. Because that’s how differences of opinion work. TLDR:

@somasatori said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

nWoD generally had something for everyone, eventually to its own detriment as time went on.

Separately…

@Pyrephox said in Nwod 2e vs owod:

A couple of places where CoD 2E stumbles:

I think all your examples, even by your own explanations, are of good systems that players and STs use poorly. I don’t think that’s CoD stumbling. I think that is players that are used to playing a certain way refusing to evolve with the game system and continuing to play like they always have in previous versions/editions out of laziness or because that’s what they’re used to, then criticizing the game system for not conforming to their preferences. The explanations of how those things work are great for a storytelling environment, as you say. People’s lack of understanding/willingness to use them properly is their own fault because it is a textbook example of willful ignorance.

@Aria Small update here, the angel cat I’ve been speaking about got into a territorial dispute on my driveway at 2AM today that woke my wife and I up. With it being so early in the morning and noting the pattern of activity, I can now solidly argue that the cat has been abandoned. I’m going to be looking into trapping her for her own good.

My first mud was ancient anguish. My first muck/mush was Metro 1.0. I was a baby back then but had dipped my toes into vampire before with IRC rp rooms like #VampireNights. Back when I was a real baby and lying about my age.

The tattooist I know using magic markers to draw these elaborate fake tats on his four-year old. Biomechanical sleeve, MOMMY’S #1 across the knuckles.

To answer the other half of the question, though, the “If in hindsight folks want 1-2 sphere game” bit, it’s just as simple: That’s the ideal, but we don’t live in the ideal world. If someone wants to play a Gregorian Chanter, they’re going to go ask an already extant game to add Greagorian Chant instead of just sitting around hoping for someone to make a Gregorian Chant game, because it’s far more likely that the former wish will be granted over the latter, even if the latter is the better scenario for all involved.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

@tsar I promise it wasn’t me.

lol you aren’t banned

Self banned maybe because I’m too much of a flake to be trusted

Dame Patricia Routledge dead at 96: Tributes pour in for star who played Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Jennkryst said in Character Death:

Taking a moment to think about it and remember that the L5R 20 questions includes ‘how should your character die’ because the idea of death is always in the back of their minds… Im wondering if that is a factor in the L5R MUs I’ve seen not doing terribly great for too long, or if addressing this and everyone going into it knowing there is supposed to be an almost romanticized view on a good/noble death… if that will somehow help it out? I dunno.

three cartoon characters are chained to a wall with the word death written on the bottom

I think the difficulty of all of these basic pieces likely holds it back from wider adoption. There’s a reason there’s 10 new ares games for every new evennia game. ANYWAY GOOD LUCK WITH THIS.

@MisterBoring said in FAT BEAR WEEK 2025:

Chunk is the winner. Also, I found out he’s got a broken jaw, so the injured contender story probably pushed a lot of votes his way.

“His face looks sad and that makes me sad” versus “his belly is very round and that makes me happy” definitely came into play in a few of my votes for Chunk. The broken jaw is going to be a permanent issue for him, so I hope he continues to have several more years of being a very fat bear despite it.

I keep glancing here, and keep meaning to make a joke about how the address involves gaslighting, but then I don’t do it, so now you all get to see that train of thought.

@helvetica The menchies!!!

@MisterBoring I’m not sure if it does, but if so, it would probably take someone with more technical skill than I have to make it work. 🙂

I think I’ve got character generation where I want it now, so I decided to try modifying the dice plugin for the game. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

It keeps the core functionality of the original dice plugin; you can still roll whatever you want, but I added a ‘Roll DMarvel’ checkbox. When you check it, the plugin rolls DMarvel(3d6, but one die is special: rolling a 1 counts as a 6 and gives you a Fantastic result).

Roll Screen:
32bd7150-94c4-493f-9641-e5f02bad679f-image.png

Result:
33026141-b86b-43a0-bec5-e840407490a5-image.png

@Cobalt said in Stupid Memes:

IMG_0818.jpeg

A million years later i just wanted you all to know i now have a custom made t-shirt that says “not friendly, do not approach” on it.

Have some Wingleader rosters up for grabs for some low-stakes responsibility/leadery PCs. With the impression age skewing older than Pern settings of olde, there’s a bit more room for maturity and politicking between Weyrs – which would be fun to see!

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/Aetra

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/B’stiao

https://pern.gaslightswitch.com/char/T’mas