Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65

@Roadspike said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough.

See this just tells me that Society doesn’t actually “love” him, but they fear his family’s influence (or the dastardly things he’s done to others, or even that he’ll get his stink of failure on them) so they let him do what he wants. The PCs, being special as PCs are, might stand up to Abelard despite his influence on Society.

I’d say that society might very well love him, because I have repeatedly experienced huge swathes of society loving people that I find absolutely despicable. This isn’t at all unrealistic; it’s actually incredibly common.

@Pyrephox said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I am not going to live up to @Roz 's praise of me, but I do have thoughts.

Joke’s on you, you always live up to my praise

@Popes said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

One exists. It’s called Match of the Millennium. It has SNK and other stuff too. Sadly, a chunk of us quit recently when staff decided to promote a foot fetishist, pedo nazi to a place of plot importance, and instead of going ‘oh, we’ll ban them’, instead doubled down.

lol why is foot fetishist included in this list of actual serious things

Honestly everything interesting I have to say about design of consequences comes straight from @Pyrephox’s mouth. They have a great brain for this sort of design.

@Ominous said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Faraday The original RPG, D&D, was built around players having a stable of characters, not the one character per player paradigm that developed as teens and college kids who had no background in the wargaming culture D&D came out of took up the game. Ars Magica has troupe style play. Collaborative storytelling forums/games on the internet are a thing with probably an equal sized playerbase to the MU* playerbase. Storytelling games are growing in popularity and we are starting to see them overlap with traditional RPGs. Sure, there will be people who decide such a game isn’t for them, but let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man. This has been done and was being done longer than one character per player, and the solutions to any issues should be out there already ironed out in the particular spheres mentioned.

Yeah, but those are all tabletop RPGs.

MUs fundamentally are not. I think a big recurring issue on MUs is people repeatedly trying to just port in tabletop RPGs and not doing any work to adapt it to the entirely different medium that MUs are.

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I think the biggest opportunity here is developing a system with interesting consequences. Yeah, there’ll always be players who only want to win no matter what, you can’t work around that other than identifying and getting rid of people who simply won’t play the game where it’s at. But one of the big reasons IMO that so many players have issues with this in games with any sort of competition or PVP (not talking about PK level PVP, just social reputation PVP here) is because the consequences suck to play. I think if someone wants to do a good L&L or Regency style of game, the number one focus they should have should be “how to make opportunities for consequences that are interesting and allow for a healthy cycle of winners and losers.” If you lose rep with the upper class, make opportunities to earn rep with shadier factions, that sort of thing.

It’s easy to say that players don’t like dealing with consequences, but often I think the issue that comes up on games is that consequences too often end up as All Or Nothing situations. Or players don’t have a good sense of what they can do to enact consequences on others, and without a variety of mild to medium severity consequences, people tend to only think of the biggest consequences that tend to be much more character-ending.

Neitherlands was one of the recent ones, and had a very wild ride of a thread over here. It was the gamerunner mostly running wild on this one.

@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Roz said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I did staff on a GoT game for a while (Steel & Stone), and we didn’t actually get any botherings from their direction. I’m not sure if they’d given up on it by that point, if we just got lucky, or if those particular rumors were exaggerated. Based on other behavior from Nymeria I witnessed more directly, I absolutely wouldn’t have been surprised at those rumors being accurate, though.

It happened. They threatened to ban, and probably did ban, people from Blood of Dragons for talking anywhere about the existence of Game of Bones, which was the one I ran. They threatened to ban anybody who was discovered to be playing on GoB. They stalked me across GoT fan discussion groups and MU discussion groups, evidently just to tell me and everyone who happened upon it, “If GRRM wasn’t so busy, he’d give Gashlycrumb such a smack.”

Their reasoning is that since GRRM gave their game his official approval, that meant he officially forbade all other ASoIaF MUs (Seeming thus to reveal that this couple who keep claiming to be scholars of fantasy literature have never read T. H. White.) and it is a horrible disrespect to him to play or even think about one that isn’t Blood of Dragons.

Some point during the years GoB ran, they stopped. I like to think it’s because I and GoB’s players kept laughing at them.

I absolutely believe you! Mostly whenever this topic comes up, I’m just like, how did S&S totally avoid this? I even asked Elf (the creator/headwiz) once just to see if he’d ever fielded anything that I just wasn’t aware of, but no. I know S&S was before GoB, but the talk of the BoD crew doing this were already very present during S&S’s days. I guess we just weren’t cool enough to get harassed

Michelle Trachtenberg at only 39 years old. Just awful.

@Jennkryst said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.

Depends on how in-depth you want the knowledge of other spheres. Enough to handle scenes? Great! In-depth knowledge of all rotes or something?

handwobble

You can always just ask the players to explain shit, with the caveat that more knowledgeable staff will be double-checking, and if they’re cheating or something, CONSEQUENCES.

I think it’s best to have all your staffers capable of supporting all your spheres with a reasonable level of comfort. If a sphere’s support is going to suffer if you lose one specific person on your team, then I think it’s best to not add that sphere.

Also, an uncomfortable thing that I’ve witnessed on kitchen sink games: abusive or predatory people get left in charge of shit because there’s no one else around to run the sphere.

@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.

If you have a little bit of tech savvy, there’s a bulk download tool you can set up locally to use. https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

@Pavel said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

Especially Game of Thrones.

Some time ago, there were a pair of SuperFans (who did some legitimate work with GRR Martin, to be fair to them) who ran a Game of Thrones game. I can’t recall its name, so it may well have been spoken about already. They would regularly berate others who made Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire games, to the point where one could characterise it as bullying and harassment.

That’s the couple who run the Blood of Dragons game that was mentioned, yeah. The infamous Nymeria is one of them.

I did staff on a GoT game for a while (Steel & Stone), and we didn’t actually get any botherings from their direction. I’m not sure if they’d given up on it by that point, if we just got lucky, or if those particular rumors were exaggerated. Based on other behavior from Nymeria I witnessed more directly, I absolutely wouldn’t have been surprised at those rumors being accurate, though.

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

@Warlander You’re diluting your message with the incessant updates about stuff that really isn’t that bad. The actual shitty stuff they’re doing is getting lost among all the kinda just normal MUSH-admin stuff they’re doing.

Yeah, if you’re actually wanting to be an active and effective warning and deterrent, you’re drowning out the salient points with uninteresting noise.

@dvoraen said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@Roz said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@dvoraen said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

(@Tez WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING WITH IMGUR LINKS REEEE)

Were you doing it with just the regular Imgur URL from the URL bar or did you right click on the image and get the actual direct image link?

I think it was the imgur-provided link instead of the direct one, yeah.

Yeah, then that’s just any URL for a web page; it’d be like expecting a BMD post URL to resolve to an image just because an image appeared on the page.

You have to have a URL ending with an actual image filename and extension.

ETA:

@Tez Same to you Miss Upgrader! Fix my spoiler block to redact properly!

this isn’t funny

@dvoraen said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

(@Tez WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING WITH IMGUR LINKS REEEE)

Were you doing it with just the regular Imgur URL from the URL bar or did you right click on the image and get the actual direct image link?

This was not accidental.

@MisterBoring said in Staff and playable pcs:

@Roz Totally. I’m all for people trying to repair relationships, but deception is not the way to make that happen.

Now, if someone came to me and was like, I want to rebuild the bridge and move on from this and in the process offered to make a new character to help push some plot I was trying to push, I’d probably see that as an olive branch.

Yeah, I’d at least respect it if someone was up-front with me.

But people also have to respect that sometimes the answer to even a polite olive branch will be “no thank you” and that’s okay.