MU Peeves Thread
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I totally gave Norwood a point at least once (probably more) mid scene because I desperately wanted to try to be better at something. I regret nothing because I never did succeed at a roll I spent XP on. Even if I can’t remember what the skill was now the high in the moment stays.
(Me thinking hard says might have been ride when Norwood was trying to save Cristoph Then he epicly fell of his horse and it was amazing. Regardless I crunched that skill till I got it to 6 because fuck if Norwood was EVER going to let himself fail that badly again.)
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@Tez I read this post 28 days later.
There has to be something zombie-related here.
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@Pavel Wouldn’t it be more Schrodinger’s Skill Check, so you can have the success/fail paradox? (The crit chance is the quantum part.)
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@dvoraen Perhaps. But Stat sounds similar to Cat.
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@dvoraen I think it’s more of a “Git Good Waveform.” The exact skill the XP is ultimately going to go toward is spread across multiple possibilities until the player observes a particular skill needing to suddenly be increased during a dire moment, which causes the waveform to collapse into the needed skill. We know that this unintuitive bit of mathematics maps to physical reality with the double sleight experiment. A GM calls for a roll from a munchkin player who rolls, announces the result of the roll and that they succeeded, and quickly grabs the die with a sleight of hand before anyone can see it. When the GM first glances at the munchkin’s character sheet, they see barely visible pencil markings for all of the skills. When the GM asks for a closer look, the munchkin player engages in another sleight of hand, and suddenly the necessary skill is written in pen and at just the right level to pass the skill check.
EDITS: Improving the joke.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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all the hypothetical scenarios about jumping from like 1 to 10 in a skill immediately makes me picture the Matrix movies where they instantly upload knowledge and both
a) cracks my shit up, picturing some random dumb hyuck suddenly rolling their eyes back into their skull just so they can solve the mystery in one scene or win the arm wrestling match or whatever
b) kinda makes me wish for a game where that mechanic was explicitly part of the setting, maybe for Mysterious Reasons. sometimes characters are suddenly just inexplicably experts at something they’ve never done before, what’s happening???
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@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:
I think it’s more of a “Git Good Waveform.” The exact skill the XP is ultimately going to go toward is spread across multiple possibilities until the player observes a particular skill needing to suddenly be increased during a dire moment, which causes the waveform to collapse into the needed skill.
I call it the “Personal Narrative Swerve Particle”. Where a character builds a narrative of being focused on one group of things suddenly becomes a master of something completely unrelated. So like when a violent druglord suddenly becomes the world’s foremost expert on neurosurgery.
One version of this I refer to as the “Oh You Didn’t Know Corollary”, where the character in question suddenly remembers their previous life as a teacher at Harvard Medical.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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That was kind of half the fun of The Network for me. Sometimes, with no memory of why or how, you’d just realize wait. I’m a PHENOMENAL ballerina? WTF?!?
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@Gashlycrumb Yes. I find that frustrating. Even more so when someone does it in the presence of someone who’s character is focused on whatever it is. This is what they built towards, let them have their moment of triumph.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring That makes me think it SHOULD be an MU Peeve, but it honestly cracks me up when I have a sheet and background BUILT for something, it’s a pivotal moment of opportunity in a scene, and the dice decide…
“Wouldn’t it be great if you suddenly sucked at that?” -
I had a char with maxed out skills because it was their focus in life. It’s all they wanted to do. I spent RL years investing and RPing and justifying and they were just the top of their game. We were in a scene and I was like YES! This is their moment. Everything they’ve worked for. This is finally when they will shine.
Roll.
Critical Failure.
I’m not going to lie I just stared at my screen for a long moment in silence and then started laughing. I’m sure I looked insane IRL. I mean I rolled with it, but damn.
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@Jenn I loved the design of The Network but just didn’t jive with the theme. I wish there were more MU*s like it around.
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not that you indicated this wasn’t the case necessarily but this is why I vastly prefer systems that have some sort of meta currency that allows you to stack rolls in your favor/allows you to reroll them, lmao. it’s fun to roll with a failure at a pivotal moment and it can even make a much more interesting story, but dammit, sometimes you just wanna do what you’re supposed to be able to do!
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It really just doesn’t bother me. It’s like @jenn said. Last weekend I learned that a friend of mine (a) is Ojibwe and (b) speaks Norwegian. I’ve known him for nearly twenty years,
My immediate reaction to people spending XP in the middle of a scene is “Noo! Wrong!” but after taking a moment to contemplate how this relates to that all-important question “So fucking what?” I don’t see it as being a real problem.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
My immediate reaction to people spending XP in the middle of a scene is “Noo! Wrong!” but after taking a moment to contemplate how this relates to that all-important question “So fucking what?” I don’t see it as being a real problem.
As I said, it’s a fringe issue, and only for some people (like myself), and most people who have this as a peeve it’s a low priority peeve at best, not something that would cause me to avoid a game. That said, if I ran a game, it would have an XP room and leaving mid scene to go use the XP room and come back would be forbidden. And I would suspect that having that policy wouldn’t be a game killer.
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Peeve, the (bad) public chat comedian. Everything is a fumbled attempt at a joke and a convo killer. We are nothing but a captive audience to them, and they refuse to engage with players in any way that doesn’t center around them.
If you’re gonna’ go up there with a mic at least be funny, aaaaa.
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@Yam the trouble is that people like this are generally bad at comedy due to a fundamental inability to read the room.
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@Yam The abundance of this sort of thing is why comedy-themes give me The Fear even when they’re totally great game settings. Discworld comes to mind. (Though I guess that short-lived Discword MUSH was actually pretty good, and my fear unfounded in that case?)
