@Hobbie I dunno, it seems like it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be your problem but is.

I had a similar issue, when there was a horse here. Cats love horses. Sometimes cats try to move in. I haze them (shout personal remarks, jump up and down, throw things. This works better if it’s a coyote or a cougar, that hasn’t already learned that humans are largely okay and has somewhere better to go) and it’s semi-effective. But once somebody elses’ barn cat decided to have kittens in our barn. Sometimes they’ll take the kittens back to their own ‘home’ barn somewhere in the neighborhood, once the kittens are grown enough to make excursions. I kept hoping for this to happen, but noooo. The mother just dissapeared (those coyotes do that) and I had two feral kittens to deal with, and before I could catch them one got the sniffles and died. The horse gave every appearance of blaming us for it and was sulky and uncooperative for days, and I caught the surviving kitten and am the owner of a now-grown cat who can’t be rehomed because he’ll claw the crap out of you for no evident reason from time to time.

ETA: This is a lot less common than it used to be, and it’s all because the humane society will give you a desexed otherwise-unadoptable feral cat for free for a barn cat.

Band names discovered in undergraduate papers:

Botched Butt Implant Removal

@Hobbie I don’t know about the local and national laws for you, but I would probably trap the lot of them and take them to rescue before you have a colony.

If things where you are are not too different from here, you can very likely borrow a cat-trap from your vet. The clinic I worked at had a couple that we let clients borrow.

I am pretty sure that being in heat is a miserable experience for cats, and being desexed is a total relief for female kitties. Poor thing.

@Dreampipe said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

Dropped my PlayStation off at a local repair shop. The store was broken into and it was stolen.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to turn this narrative into a country-western song.

It will not beat the one about the guy I knew who had an eye shot out with a bb-gun as a kid, the way everyone says will happen but doesn’t, and then, 15 years or so later, had his glass eye fall out in the shower and roll down the drain in a cheap motel outside of Baton Rouge. But it’ll still be a pretty good one.

Aww, but this is hilarious shit.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings.

And to run a good and popular restaurant, use beef tallow and MSG, make the waitstaff wear funny hats, mop the floor at least twice a week, and

Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck if people like the taste.

No, no. it’s MY advice you gotta take, and MY preferred style of game you gotta build or the hobby will die.

Sheesh, is that not obvious?

@Third-Eye I just went to ours. I missed most of the show but I thought I might burst into tears or something, 'cause Ded Bob at his old stage. Since Johnny Fox and then the fire-eater whose name slips my mind and then Ded Bob died, there are a lot fewer shows I care about.

How do we get the youth to take up sword-swallowing?

What @Roz said.

Honestly, one of the more hilarious things about having been in this hobby since the Lynx was the web browser…

…is that WoD games are just the same as they were in 1998, but the gamerunners say they’re different. And sometimes propose stuff that was tossed in 1995 for sucking as a fresh solution to the flaws of the bad old days.

To invert the trope that is this thread.

Ded Bob died four years ago.

But Ded Bob is back!

(The new Ded Bob isn’t as good as the old Ded Bob, but he hasn’t had thirty years of practice.)

Is there any software for the mac that will just bloody well tell me what is making that fucking alert sound?

@Pavel Would it be fun in that context?

@somasatori Yeah, I very much see your point.

Since the game was low-fantasy medieval-stasis setting, getting the best house in the city would have more to do with status than money, and the reality of housing shortages in a walled city was something more worth representing. Or so I felt. Not that it ever actually mattered.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@somasatori I really feel like most grid bloat in most games is from PC builds from idle / dead / retired PCs that just didn’t get cleaned up after they leave. I think most games just forget to clean that stuff up when characters idle out, but I have seen a few that will post up a bbpost about PC owned grid spaces that will be removed in an effort to allow other PCs to claim them if they’re popular.

I allowed myself to be weird and tyrranical about the grid, and didn’t let people just build, and when people left their houses and businesses stayed in place to be sold/rented out again. Buildings didn’t just disappear, but there weren’t that many empty ones either and I sort of hoped that the PCs might fight over some of the best houses in the city.

Cousin’s kid: (stands on the riverbank, at the shallowest part, singing loudly and slapping the water with an unbaited fishing rod)

Other cousin, her aunt: “You will never catch a fish that way.”

Cousin’s kid: (shrugs, stands on the riverbank, at the shallowest part, singing loudly and slapping the water with an unbaited fishing rod)

Cousin’s kid: (catches a pike almost as long as she is, needs help landing monster fish)

@Alamias Yep. In small part it’s sorta sensible – more stuff to spend XP on, slows down those maxed out sheets.

Considering how frustrated players were that they couldn’t get +jobs handled or, y’know, do much, because their GM was too busy rewriting the game system, and how offputting it is to new players to join a game wanting to play WoD20 and find a rewrite, it probably wasn’t anything close to worth it. Unless you count it being fun for Sun to write as the most/only important bit.

@Popes said in Liberation Drama!?:

@Jynxbox I mean, just because all that’s true, doesn’t mean she’s not doing it wrong. She removed Glabro as a form from Garou for christsakes. That’s asinine and probably REALLY fucking petty.

@Jynxbox I mean, just because that’s all true, doesn’t mean she’s not doing it wrong. She’s put characters where the players wouldn’t have them go. She’s ordered players to have their characters do certain things. She’s ignored players who say “My PC wouldn’t do that,” to those orders, and then weeks or months later insisted that the player agreed and yelled at them for not RPing that their PC did that. She’s fudged rules “just this time” to protect her chosen IC leaders from their mistakes. She’s responded to, ‘I have a plan to gain some real power in my faction, something that Leader can’t just take away,’ with, ‘No. You must be genuinely loyal to Leader or change factions.’ I think probably most players consider that stuff to be crossing a line, and it’s not what she wrote on the box.

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

Are there any other options that might represent a truly ethical source of PB art?

My tabletop players have made HeroForge minis of their PCs. Not actually downloaded them or had them 3d printed or anything, just screenshots of the miniature online. So, it’s free, and I don’t think anybody minds. Mind you they do sometimes buy stuff from HeroForge, too.

@Jennkryst Yeah – those games were all before Nemesis was released, and chose to ignore it and part ways with the canon timeline.

There was one good thing about the time-travelling murder hobos, which is that everyone OOCly knew their secret, since logs of their actions were shared on the game wiki. Contrary to the arguments of OOC masq proponents about how impossible this is, the players kept it OOC knowledge. Some managed to figure it out IC in purely IC ways. Many players thought it was pretty shite game-writing to restrict knowledge of and action regarding a universal threat to a small group of PCs, and had no desire to support or cooperate with that element of the plot, but still I have no recollection of cheating being a problem.

@Cygnus’s numbered points are all true. Probably understated.

It’s not because Sundance is unavailable, though.

Sundance has stated that model world building is the kick she gets out of the game. It’s not like a novel. If it was a novel you’d get to see what’s going on. It’s like a scale railroad presented in a glass box full of fog. You see the lights go by from time to time. She’s having fun building the details you might glimpse.

And sure enough, a person can build a not-very-interactive model-world MU if they wants. It’s the thinking that such a thing is a good game that’s the error. Alas, Sundance appears to have fallen into the trap of only taking seriously those people who are least likely to criticise her. So she does that stuff listed in those numbered points because it protects/serves/maintains the model world following her plan/vision. She appears to take objections as just being haters who don’t think she’s allowed to have fun with her own game – her trusted group don’t criticise, so she can dismiss others who point out how that shit is not fun.

I disagree entirely about the OOC Masquerade policy, which is, like OOC masq everywhere, a Bad Idea, a Pain In The Ass, and a Boon To Bad Actors.

I also disagree about Sun’s interplayer conflict resolution, which I have invariably found to be either in service to maintaining the untouchableness of the model-world, or in service to claiming to have resolved the problem as fast as possible, or informed by The Fallacy of the Golden Mean (the notion that if there are two opposing viewpoints the truth always lies in the middle.)

I love Trek and played Trek MUs, and I would again.

The first one I tried was not playable for me. It had multiple planets and ships and space code. It seemed to be the sort of deal where you’d do a group app as bridge crew of your ship and go around exploring and having ship vs ship battles.

The second one was Anomaly TrekMUX, which was pretty great. It didn’t have a pervasive bridge-crew/redshirt problem like people are predicting. At least, not in the sense of higher-ranking officers doing everything. At one point certain GMs were awfully keen on “this looks like a job for my alt!” plots, but that was Spider, and it did suffer Spidered-game problems of that era of MUdom. Really its major problem was that the really important plot was pre-written to end with the game runner’s PC saving the universe as part of a secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos, which is kinda lousy game for those who ICly didn’t groove on time-travelling fascist murder hobos, and having them the heroes a betrayal of Star Trek-ness. (And not in a cool, fun, Lower Decks kinda way.)

There was a spin-off one, Gamma One, which was also a bit of alright, especially considering that it too was Spidered.

Those games had space-station settings and meant to be like Deep Space Nine. DS9 didn’t have redshirts and was about the biggest ensemble cast on, outside of afternoon soaps. It’s a pretty good model of alternating and overlapping running plots for different playgroups.

I certainly didn’t get to do all The Things when I had a department head PC. But I did also acted as if it was my role as a department head to assign The Things to my IC subordinates.

There were also a couple of Trek MUs around that time that were each set on a single large ship, Enterprise-D like. This cut out the possibility of civilian characters, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.