June Lockhart, 100, famous for being the mom in Lassie and Lost In Space.

@somasatori I totally agree with this. Each character in the roster could have a set of links to the important world lore that drives their character to help people find what they need to know.

@somasatori said in General Video Game Thread:

I don’t really know 5e as much as Revised/20th but the Anarchs are effectively the Sabbat now?

So the quick run down is: The Camarilla lost some major cities (London & Vienna among others) and some major players (Hardestat the Younger and the entire Tremere Council) to Hunters, and the Sabbat quietly packed up their shit and went to fight monsters in the wilderness (quite literally) leaving only small packs of instigators behind to run guerrilla strikes on the Camarilla to funnel resources into the larger Sabbat operation. With the lack of focused Sabbat activity and the Camarilla crackdown on anyone not a member of the Ivory Tower, the Anarchs basically get treated like the Sabbat in a lot of cities, and they respond as one might expect (also they got reinforced by the Ministry / Followers of Set).

I look at it like this:

1. If someone builds a game and puts it up on a server, generally the game comes in one of two forms: a sandbox where the staff only exists to help people get through character creation and otherwise enforce OOC behavior rules, or a curated story where the staff exists to tell a specific main story involving all of the characters approved for play.
2. I don’t believe any staff (on either type of game) should advocate for everyone RPing with everyone being required. There’s plenty of OOC drama that exists between individual players across the hobby that trying to force that is going to be bad.
3. I do believe that staff on games with curated main stories are 100% correct in requiring all players to interface with said story regularly, and are totally allowed to, and should, boot anyone that tries their hardest to avoid that, as games with staff driven plots should be looking for players interested in participating in those plots over people just looking for a new place for their circle to play.
4. I do believe that staff should incentivize players opening up their RP circles as much as they feel comfortable in doing.
5. I do believe that there are circles of players who plant themselves on games with the sole intention of only RPing with their own circle and ignoring the entire rest of the game. Usually they’re harmless, but I have been witness to a few instances where it was 100% toxic. I think that has to be monitored to a certain extent and dealt with if it becomes apparent that they’re toxic. Usually these people are not interested in doing the work to give themselves a private space to RP in.

@RightMeow said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

I give you a server so you have to do what I say ranks right up there with the working spouse telling the homemaking spouse that they have no say to their identity.

Then why do games expect players to follow the rules?

Even though I’m pretty certain that L&L (and to a certain extent, roster) games aren’t my bag, there’s a certain part of me that wants to give this a try, mostly because I’d be getting in at the ground floor.

I’m very curious to how much they’re going to tap into the wide and wacky world of Mystara for the game, as the local setting seems pretty generic compared to the giant mish-mash of stuff that actually exists in Mystara (not to mention the second campaign setting conveniently tucked inside the planet).

While I don’t personally have time to play there, it does look like it scratches an itch created by the Venn diagram of OSR fans and Ares fans.

@somasatori All 2e merits are done. Everything was reorganized, I’ve updated the lookup_data.py to reflect the new groupings. If you want to drag stuff over and test it against main, feel free. I’m going to start working on the legacy merits next.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Good, sane, active. Pick two.

It’s the triangle of MU staff.

@somasatori I forked your github to work on the merit dictionaries without causing you to get millions of notifications from git.

If you want to peek at what I’m up to, my most recent work is in https://github.com/wagenbach/PyReach-Revision/tree/main/world/cofd/meritsredux. When I’m done, I’ll let you know and you can merge the fork back into the main if you want, or just copy files over individually.

@Juniper said in The great escape (from Microsoft):

Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.

Have you tried Bodhi Linux?

@Pavel said in The great escape (from Microsoft):

And because Microsoft is… well… Microsoft, you may have to check/update this setting every few updates or so. I’ve definitely had to chase up stupid settings changes that updates have made counter to my desires.

Yep. So far I haven’t had to re-enable that on my Windows machine. I’m guessing since it getting reactivated in an update would mess up a lot of business deals, they don’t touch that setting with update packages. Only time will tell though.

If you can’t escape Windows, but want to escape Copilot, you can use Group Policy Editor to disable Copilot permanently. (Microsoft is required to leave this setting in their OS by the many many many companies that either don’t want to deal with AI stuff at all, or have contracts with other AI firms for their AI nonsense, so it’s just a part of all versions of Windows.)

Just run gpedit.msc, find User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot. There’s a policy called “Turn off Windows Copilot”. Enable that, and voila, no more pesky Microsoft AI on your system.

What about turning the West Marches into a game somewhat inspired by The Last Ship? The main section of the grid is a large naval vessel with plenty of room for people to spread out and do their social RP, but the plot bits come when the ship moors somewhere, and the grid extends to include a chunk of land, or another abandoned ship, and the PCs organize to go deal with the ST plots and find resources. If the ship isn’t moored somewhere, the exits are just removed and the players have to stay on the ship.

@Ominous No. I work in IT and have to be knowledgeable about all three major OS environments for work, so I slowly have collected a trifecta.

Strangely, because of my job, I will always be on all three. I have a Windows machine, a Macbook, and two Linux systems (one on Debian and the other currently being used to test Omarchy.)

Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of the Dead or Alive game series and the modern Ninja Gaiden series. He was 58.

@labsunlimited If I were to do Vampire in ND, I’d make it where the game represented the entire state, ignore the factions (so Cam / Anarch / Sabbat for OWoD and the Covenants for NWoD) and just have it where the players are the few Vampires roaming the state, and occasionally they gather in the only Elysium in the state to resolve disputes and stuff. Maybe one Prince for the entire State if you really want some level of organization.

WoD North Dakota would be interesting for some spheres and not for others. It would work well for Werewolf and Mage, but to do Vampire there, you’d have to increase the populations and sizes of the major cities to support Vampires, and by doing so, eliminate one of the unique aspects of North Dakota as a state, namely the relative isolation and small populations of the communities there.

@Jennkryst said in PyReach:

I guess I’m finally finishing that post about one of trans ally and author of Animorphs Katherine Applegate’s other series, Everworld.

I remember that book series. I read the first book, it reminded me of that old Canadian kid’s show The Odyssey in a way, and I didn’t finish the series because the first book did nothing for me. It seemed well written, but it just didn’t hook me.