I just want to give a HUGE shout-out to @Jumpscare – both things I brought up in my feedback last week have already been addressed!
No more smacking into walls when I try a command that doesn’t exist, no more awkward freeze when I see a new person and aren’t sure if they’re an NPC or not! 
That kind of responsiveness from a game runner just feels like MAGIC.
Thank you @Jumpscare!
HELLO. Hi. I had a version of this this playlist over at Musoapbox and it’s time to migrate this here. Hi.
I’m terrible with names, so I’ve included context and descriptions in case you’re terrible with names too. I’m also absurdly shy and retiring online for someone perfectly happy with public speaking IRL, so we may not have chatted much on past games even if we played together, but if you recognize a character come say hi!
Especially if we were on Haven together. I was way too into the IC/OOC divide there, and I have basically have no idea who I was playing with there except @Selira, hi Selira.
Theo Matthiessen
Shy, skittish telepath who compulsively reads minds (though he’s getting better at control). Telepathy/Therametry.
Ronan Bishop
a disorganized lurker
Deadpan, surly guy who saw an astonishing amount of Deep Lore for how briefly I played him.
Leocadio Vasquez
Prickly, sardonic asshole who was also, due to the conceit of the game, temporarily at least like 10 other characters, most of whom were less asshole-ish.
Liam Byrne
Snarky Irish mechanic there to fix things and Have Opinions.
Isaac Cohen
Sweet American theatre kid there to fight fascists.
Sidney Whisper
“Everyone needs something, and I’m very good at being that something.”
Member of: the Whisper House
Irreverent courtier who spent 90% of his time getting cheerfully drunk with people and ignoring plot.
Tuomo “Tommy” Virtanen
a lanky, brown-haired young man
Member of: The Red Gold Society, The Lamplighters, The Synthesis Project
100% human guy who stumbled in and out of a lot of Deep Plot. I still get wistful about Tommy, and I was lucky to play with some great people. Not that I have any idea who they were.
Cade Torres
a rangy, hard-jawed teenager with shorn hair
Academy student
Tense, sulky Academy student. Accidentally specialized in having conflicting desires around empaths.
Nikolas Levesque
a trim, dapper man with bronze hair and full beard
Member of: The Scions
German Demigod Veteran. Present at the final battle with Sarkur, was marginally helpful in saving the world.
Marshall “Mars” Carver-Heinz
a pale, slim man with dark blue eyes
Member of: The Vanguard
A feral, unapologetic Faeborn mess who was occasionally charming.
Milo Vasquez
a rangy, hazel-eyed young man with curly blue hair
Blackfield College student. Member of: The Libertines
A charming Faeborn mess who was occasionally feral and unapologetic.
Dekken
the compactly-built dreadlocked man
Atrium student, Aide to House Borsail
Dekken was my very first (and only important) Armageddon character, and he lived two and a half years real-time before I retired him. Two and a half years. Poor immortal bastard.
Cassan
a lanky, curly-haired man with a lame left arm (?)
Bard with one good arm who made a lot of great embroidered belts.
Denian Mellos
Something something Lawful Neutral bard in Verminasia/Arkane?
I’m absolutely terrible at min-maxing and being strategic about XP/leveling, so FS3 has been almost ideal for me on the two games I’ve played with it.
On Savage Skies I did screw up a little by having a character start super underpowered, with almost no truly high stats. IIRC an admin even double-checked if that was really what I wanted to do, and I said my dude was inexperienced IC and I looked forward to leveling him up over time. That was true, but I didn’t realize just how long the cooldowns on XP spends were, and just how long it would take to raise a stat from middling to high. I spent a lot of XP on that game and maybe barely brought him up to where he could have been straight out of chargen.
(Could I have reached out to an admin for help? Sure, if I were a different person that did things like asking people for help instead of stubbornly living with the consequences of my own dumb decisions.)
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
On every oldschool stat-heavy MUD game I’ve ever played, I ended up with completely hopeless builds and spent my XP all wrong and was always nerfed for everything compared to anyone who actually understood how to take advantage of the systems. That was less fun.
Very cool vibe and chargen!
Two pieces of feedback as a new player:
Without friends nudging me to stay I would probably have just given up the fourth or fifth time I had a moment of social paralysis because “here’s yet another character standing alone in a room or street, and if they’re played by a human I want to pose and interact properly, but if they’re an NPC I’m going to need to use very clear to commands to trigger dialogue from them, but my character would never just wander up to an actual person and demand their name and job title, but if they’re an NPC there’s no ramping up with smalltalk and I just need to run through the dialogue tree for this NPC to get an idea of their role in the game, but if I guess wrong and use my NPC-greeting routine at a human I’m going to be mortified, and oh my god whatever, I only have an hour of free time tonight, I’m going back to the hotel and logging off and doing something else.”
I know that NPCs being puppeted by storytellers will have a clear flag for that, but for every other NPC in the game there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing them from PCs except that they’ll usually auto-talk at you once you introduce yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem of knowing how to interact with them on first contact, and as someone who already gets pretty overwhelmed when trying a new game and getting into the RP flow of a new character, that was driving me absolutely nuts.
Suggestion: Some kind of indicator for which characters are NPCs would be a huge help. Given that there’s already an automatic flag when NPCs are being puppeted by staff, there clearly isn’t a immersion thing going on where we’re trying to pretend NPCs should be indistinguishable from PCs, they’re just indistinguishable when in actual NPC mode. Making NPCs more easily identifiable will also encourage new players to be more proactive exploring their scripted dialogue, and there’s a lot of fantastic dialogue.
where? surely you must mean west) leads to me constantly smacking into walls or walking where I don’t intend to when I forget commands.Having the game automatically try to parse unknown commands as directions also makes experimenting with commands feel a lot riskier. I saw this was also a major part of @DrQuinn new-character-immediately-gets-organs-harvested-when-offline ordeal, because they typed a command starting with d that the game didn’t recognize and interpreted as down, taking the character out of the safety of the hotel room.
Suggestion: Limit the number of unknown commands the game will try to parse as directions. Logic like if command in ['s', 'so', 'sou', 'sout', 'south'], go south (handwavey placeholder code, I don’t know the codebase) would still allow for half-typed directional commands but not try to fling characters southward whenever the player forgets that scan or whatever isn’t a command used in the game. This would make experimenting with commands less risky and prevent inadvertent IC movement due to OOC mistakes.
I’m looking forward to exploring the systems and getting into the lore of town!
Aw, you’re all fantastic. 
@Babs said in Tuomo, Leo, Theo (Clarion’s playlist):
I think I only had a couple of scenes with Sidney, but always wondered what happened to that guy.
Bonus context on Sidney: He was an original character and I never bothered to ask for a secret for him, so he very literally had no (plot-relevant) secrets. I like to assume he just faded into the background and continued having a very pleasant and low-stakes life of drinking and lounging.
I just logged in to Arx (I really appreciate that the site is still up), and the final tally for Sidney was:
I have no regrets.
@Roz …oh. Well that’s much less harmless. 
I thought it was just somebody having solo pretendy funtimes playing their Character A meeting and hanging out with their Character B. Not something I’d do on a game, but sure, whatever.
Pretending they weren’t playing two characters and hiding IP addresses and mixing up poses and funneling stuff back and forth is… not good. I will take the radical stance that it is, in fact, bad.
I would personally never play a roster character*, but I would also never play in a game based on an existing canon universe (like superhero games), so that works out. My brain just can’t do it, I’d collapse into a heap trying to play them “right.”
As someone said above, I’m perfectly fine playing with roster characters, but it’s awkward when there’s a player swap and the character is inevitably different afterwards. That just comes with the territory, though.
(*I did actually pick up a roster character on Arx for like, a month, and then got overwhelmed trying to work out his past relationships, and never ended up playing him. That’s the closest I’ve gotten, I think.)
@Juniper Idk, but it’s nice of them to let you know you shouldn’t play with them again!
@Roz said in Tuomo, Leo, Theo (Clarion’s playlist):
okay but was aleksei deemed handsome
IIRC yes, but sadly there are no black journals mooning over him, possibly because Aleksei was also deemed Alarmingly Involved in Big Important-Looking Things.
I would personally never play a roster character*, but I would also never play in a game based on an existing canon universe (like superhero games), so that works out. My brain just can’t do it, I’d collapse into a heap trying to play them “right.”
As someone said above, I’m perfectly fine playing with roster characters, but it’s awkward when there’s a player swap and the character is inevitably different afterwards. That just comes with the territory, though.
(*I did actually pick up a roster character on Arx for like, a month, and then got overwhelmed trying to work out his past relationships, and never ended up playing him. That’s the closest I’ve gotten, I think.)
@Roz said in Tuomo, Leo, Theo (Clarion’s playlist):
okay but was aleksei deemed handsome
IIRC yes, but sadly there are no black journals mooning over him, possibly because Aleksei was also deemed Alarmingly Involved in Big Important-Looking Things.
Aw, you’re all fantastic.
@Babs said in Tuomo, Leo, Theo (Clarion’s playlist):
I think I only had a couple of scenes with Sidney, but always wondered what happened to that guy.
Bonus context on Sidney: He was an original character and I never bothered to ask for a secret for him, so he very literally had no (plot-relevant) secrets. I like to assume he just faded into the background and continued having a very pleasant and low-stakes life of drinking and lounging.
I just logged in to Arx (I really appreciate that the site is still up), and the final tally for Sidney was:
I have no regrets.
HELLO. Hi. I had a version of this this playlist over at Musoapbox and it’s time to migrate this here. Hi.
I’m terrible with names, so I’ve included context and descriptions in case you’re terrible with names too. I’m also absurdly shy and retiring online for someone perfectly happy with public speaking IRL, so we may not have chatted much on past games even if we played together, but if you recognize a character come say hi!
Especially if we were on Haven together. I was way too into the IC/OOC divide there, and I have basically have no idea who I was playing with there except @Selira, hi Selira.
Theo Matthiessen
Shy, skittish telepath who compulsively reads minds (though he’s getting better at control). Telepathy/Therametry.
Ronan Bishop
a disorganized lurker
Deadpan, surly guy who saw an astonishing amount of Deep Lore for how briefly I played him.
Leocadio Vasquez
Prickly, sardonic asshole who was also, due to the conceit of the game, temporarily at least like 10 other characters, most of whom were less asshole-ish.
Liam Byrne
Snarky Irish mechanic there to fix things and Have Opinions.
Isaac Cohen
Sweet American theatre kid there to fight fascists.
Sidney Whisper
“Everyone needs something, and I’m very good at being that something.”
Member of: the Whisper House
Irreverent courtier who spent 90% of his time getting cheerfully drunk with people and ignoring plot.
Tuomo “Tommy” Virtanen
a lanky, brown-haired young man
Member of: The Red Gold Society, The Lamplighters, The Synthesis Project
100% human guy who stumbled in and out of a lot of Deep Plot. I still get wistful about Tommy, and I was lucky to play with some great people. Not that I have any idea who they were.
Cade Torres
a rangy, hard-jawed teenager with shorn hair
Academy student
Tense, sulky Academy student. Accidentally specialized in having conflicting desires around empaths.
Nikolas Levesque
a trim, dapper man with bronze hair and full beard
Member of: The Scions
German Demigod Veteran. Present at the final battle with Sarkur, was marginally helpful in saving the world.
Marshall “Mars” Carver-Heinz
a pale, slim man with dark blue eyes
Member of: The Vanguard
A feral, unapologetic Faeborn mess who was occasionally charming.
Milo Vasquez
a rangy, hazel-eyed young man with curly blue hair
Blackfield College student. Member of: The Libertines
A charming Faeborn mess who was occasionally feral and unapologetic.
Dekken
the compactly-built dreadlocked man
Atrium student, Aide to House Borsail
Dekken was my very first (and only important) Armageddon character, and he lived two and a half years real-time before I retired him. Two and a half years. Poor immortal bastard.
Cassan
a lanky, curly-haired man with a lame left arm (?)
Bard with one good arm who made a lot of great embroidered belts.
Denian Mellos
Something something Lawful Neutral bard in Verminasia/Arkane?
@Juniper Idk, but it’s nice of them to let you know you shouldn’t play with them again!
@Roz …oh. Well that’s much less harmless.
I thought it was just somebody having solo pretendy funtimes playing their Character A meeting and hanging out with their Character B. Not something I’d do on a game, but sure, whatever.
Pretending they weren’t playing two characters and hiding IP addresses and mixing up poses and funneling stuff back and forth is… not good. I will take the radical stance that it is, in fact, bad.
That sounds a little weird but totally harmless to me, honestly! Unless they’re getting some kind of unfair advantage from it, or avoiding opportunities for not-just-with-themselves RP or otherwise refusing to engage with the game, I hope they have fun with it.
Wait, so we’re not talking about vignettes or solo RP or whatever here (which most of the world would just call writing, tbh), but someone playing two characters in a scene together?
I just want to give a HUGE shout-out to @Jumpscare – both things I brought up in my feedback last week have already been addressed!
No more smacking into walls when I try a command that doesn’t exist, no more awkward freeze when I see a new person and aren’t sure if they’re an NPC or not! That kind of responsiveness from a game runner just feels like MAGIC.
Thank you @Jumpscare!
Very cool vibe and chargen!
Two pieces of feedback as a new player:
Without friends nudging me to stay I would probably have just given up the fourth or fifth time I had a moment of social paralysis because “here’s yet another character standing alone in a room or street, and if they’re played by a human I want to pose and interact properly, but if they’re an NPC I’m going to need to use very clear to commands to trigger dialogue from them, but my character would never just wander up to an actual person and demand their name and job title, but if they’re an NPC there’s no ramping up with smalltalk and I just need to run through the dialogue tree for this NPC to get an idea of their role in the game, but if I guess wrong and use my NPC-greeting routine at a human I’m going to be mortified, and oh my god whatever, I only have an hour of free time tonight, I’m going back to the hotel and logging off and doing something else.”
I know that NPCs being puppeted by storytellers will have a clear flag for that, but for every other NPC in the game there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing them from PCs except that they’ll usually auto-talk at you once you introduce yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem of knowing how to interact with them on first contact, and as someone who already gets pretty overwhelmed when trying a new game and getting into the RP flow of a new character, that was driving me absolutely nuts.
Suggestion: Some kind of indicator for which characters are NPCs would be a huge help. Given that there’s already an automatic flag when NPCs are being puppeted by staff, there clearly isn’t a immersion thing going on where we’re trying to pretend NPCs should be indistinguishable from PCs, they’re just indistinguishable when in actual NPC mode. Making NPCs more easily identifiable will also encourage new players to be more proactive exploring their scripted dialogue, and there’s a lot of fantastic dialogue.
where? surely you must mean west) leads to me constantly smacking into walls or walking where I don’t intend to when I forget commands.Having the game automatically try to parse unknown commands as directions also makes experimenting with commands feel a lot riskier. I saw this was also a major part of @DrQuinn new-character-immediately-gets-organs-harvested-when-offline ordeal, because they typed a command starting with d that the game didn’t recognize and interpreted as down, taking the character out of the safety of the hotel room.
Suggestion: Limit the number of unknown commands the game will try to parse as directions. Logic like if command in ['s', 'so', 'sou', 'sout', 'south'], go south (handwavey placeholder code, I don’t know the codebase) would still allow for half-typed directional commands but not try to fling characters southward whenever the player forgets that scan or whatever isn’t a command used in the game. This would make experimenting with commands less risky and prevent inadvertent IC movement due to OOC mistakes.
I’m looking forward to exploring the systems and getting into the lore of town!