@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

My peeve remains wanting to start a character on a game somewhere knowing full well I don’t honestly know if I have the time to play enough to avoid getting idled out.

I’ve been running a game for almost 2 years, and I do miss being on the other side of the screen sometimes. Especially when there are cool concepts out there that I want to see succeed.

@Sillylily Slayers, the Buffyverse audiobook by Amber Benson, was pretty effing entertaining, imo. It was kinda like listening to an olde-timey radio show, but make it Buffy. ~If anybody is looking for something in that realm.

The only consolation I have is that I’m in NY and we’re safely blue. Schumer and Gillibrand already hate Trump and will do anything to stop him. So will the governor.

@Coin I was not aware of that. Definitely something to look at next time I peruse Ares games.

I was looking for something in my emails this morning, and came across one with the subject line “Oh, the drama” that was of course about RP drama and, also, 19 years old at this point.

It’s basically a TREASURE TROVE of nonsense, but I need to share my favorite line, from a player being extremely over-dramatic at me. Context is that he was VERY PARANOID that he was going to get banned, and I pointed out that Camden (my fellow co-admin at the time) had JUST told him he wasn’t in danger of being banned.

"Dylan…It’s insane not to plan for the ‘what ifs’. What if Camden gets hit by a bus?

I’m happy to say that Camden never did get hit by that bus.

Things have been a bit rough this last week since my cat passed away. We’re trying to get back to normal routines, though, and part of that for me is working on Dark City. I thought I’d share some screenshots of character generation. CG is mostly done though I’m making minor tweaks based on feedback from my beta testers.

attributes.jpg

skills.jpg

review_screen.jpg

I don’t think this person posts here (Cayric? You out there?), but if they are… ❤ ❤

I’m having one of those nice moments as a storyteller where something I just randomly dropped in a scene on a whim has ballooned into a wee plot, and one of the players swept up in the story happily surprised me and tied the whole thing back into the metaplot in such a way that it even filled in a plothole for me. 🙂

The parent(s) of student(s) at my district were picked up by ICE and detained. The student(s) are with family, but it’s still shaking up this tiny-ass rural, progressive island community. And it’s shaking up me too even if I’m white as Wonder Bread.

@dvoraen said in General Video Game Thread:

Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 Release Date Trailer

Well, I know what I’ll be doing on April 24th.

I don’t normally endorse these kinds of videos, but…

XBox Deep Dive into Expedition 33

fan my face

(ETA)“This team gets it.” is basically where I’m at. I mean, even just talking about why there’s a world map I was like: snap point(/ETA)

Also, I would go gay for the Creative Director because of his accent.

@Meg said in Meg's Mu* Mist:

Updated. Trying to get back into this lil hobby, this quaint what did you call it? RP? Are you sure? Well, if you are sure you want to call it that. Sounds a little sexual tho.

meg I couldn’t decide whether to do a “one of us” GIF or the “come play with us” creepy girls from the Shining to try and sound sinister. Please advise.

My cat, Veronica Mars, passed away Monday night. She was my special little girl for 17 years. My wife and I are devastated. There are no words to express how much we’re going to miss her.

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@MisterBoring Yep! If you wanna crap your guts out for your snack foods, you gotta come to the US!

@Gashlycrumb said in New Sin dropped:

… how the killer will handle this one in the remake of Se7en, which will have to be called Ei8ht.

Obvs the exact same, just Empathy is the Goop-filled Gwen so her death is a two-fer.

@Watcher616 In the meantime, the Sith Empire is snapping up at least one world for every world the Resistance might have a chance at gaining, probably because Aryn has at least one leadership alt there. She has alts in leadership positions in every major faction (Empire, Resistance, Mandalorians/Kora), except possibly the Hutt Cartel.

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

I got an itch to go actually look at AoA today and well, even without the absolutely crap behavior from staff, this game is far too complex for my tastes.

Speaking of messes, this just hit the grid. Note the posting dates of the original message and the comment.

=========================<* 8: Game Updates - 218 *>=========================
Message: 8/218 Posted Author
Free Starter Ship Dec 09 2023 Cujo

Hello all

We’re instituting a new Chargen feature, in the form of a free starter ship. If you make a new character, and want to request a free ship once you are IC, then we offer you the newly updated Slingshot cargo hauler.

The new Slingshot comes with 200 tons of cargo space. Max Speeds of 50 MGLT in space, and 80 MGLT in atmosphere. It is still a 1 crew ship, with a bunk behind the pilot’s station, with interior room for 2 passengers to at least sit fiairly comfortably while traveling the space lanes.

In the end, we are now offering free ships out of chargen. If you make a character, and want a ship to start off with, and the new Slingshot variants sound appealing to you, then make that new character, and put in the request once you are approved and IC!

AoA Staff
===================< Comment 1 - Added Jan 26 06:09PM GMT >===================
Discordia Commented:
think Please note a few things about the starter ships. You may not resell them, pass them on to other players, or otherwise profit from the ships, beyond ther scope of what you do in regards trading/travelling. They are offered to players as a means to allow you to get up and running for travel and running cargo only.

When you no longer want/need the ship, +request to staff and we will reclaim them.

Additionally, please be aware that these ships are intended to give you a leg up. If they remain your own/regular ship is your choice, but please be aware that if you mod the ship, and later trade it back into staff/we reclaim it for inactivity, etc, you will not get back the money you paid for any modifications you added to these ships, nor will we return the mods to you to use on a new ship. Ideally, you should be looking to purchase a ship of your choice and add mods to those, as those can be resold/traded if desired. Though you still won’t get back the cost of mods if you resell the non-starter ship to staff.

Please see +bbread 8/222 and +bbread 8/225 for some of our other ship programs.

for those of you wishing to sell back ships you no longer need/want that are not the starter ship, you can sell these back to staff for half of the base credit cost you paid. Mods costs will not be returned to you.
------------------------------< +bbread 8/218 >-------------------------------

The delay in posting this is pretty interesting. Good mods are still too rare and expensive to risk losing them to such a bad trade as this policy sets up, creating a powerful incentive to hold on to modded ships (an incentive the dinosaurs likely paid no attention to, since they’d do that anyway. It’s not like anyone’s going to prevent them from hoarding ships).

And I’m sure if you ask about it, ‘It’s always been like this!’.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

How often did you get players running things?

I don’t remember off-hand, but I’d say it was probably somewhere around 75-25 Staff-run and player-run for straight up combat scenes. But this could also be because I had just fallen in love with the FS3 combat system and was running a ton of scenes.

Seeding plot points to PrPs has to be done carefully, and if I’m being blunt, only with trusted plot-runners. On The Savage Skies we had a few player-run-plots that went off the rails and had to be reined back in via minor retcons. I would only provide metaplot seeds to plot-runners who have demonstrated a good handle on the basic setting, and only then after having an explicit back-and-forth conversation so that they knew what they were introducing and at least some of why they were introducing it.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?

There were certainly players who were chasing that side of things pretty hard. Interestingly, it was particularly the players who were on the side gaining power who were chasing after it, because they knew they weren’t doing anything, and yet their side was still gaining power and influence and they wanted to know who was doing it and why. Knowing players in general, I expect that they would have found the person who was gathering the power and done their best to shut them down – and I think they would have succeeded, but it would have caused a power vacuum in the Crown Council that would have caused short-term chaos in the war effort (but probably would have come out ahead in the long term).

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

TWOP definition

I had only tangentially heard of this source (Television Without Pity?). I think that my definitions came from working in gaming companies (tabletop and video) where there are some things that are immutable or relatively immutable (setting) and some things that can change with the story being told (metaplot). Looking at the wikipedia definition of metaplot, I don’t think that I disagree with the first two sentences at all:

The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.

I definitely think that that’s talking about metaplot – the events taking place in the setting that connect all the various storylines going on at once – rather than setting – the details of the world where the action is taking place – by my definitions.

I think staff should be able to play or not play as it pleases them. If they’re open about it, so the people who shit themselves if staff does/doesn’t play (and I’ve seen it go both ways) can make an informed decision.

Staff should also feel free to remove and boot any player who can’t shut up about that. I’m a big fan of staff getting noisy people who can’t accept the policies of the game but for whatever reason can’t leave TO leave so they don’t wreck the environment for others.

Twenty years ago, I often got pretty enraged when I saw staff member PCs (and I agree with Faraday that sorry guys, everyone’s going to know who they are even if you don’t put a tag on it, that’s the way things are) “hogging all the spotlight,” Now, honestly, I’ve gotten to the stage that I just don’t care. If there are things going on that I can participate in, then I will stay and participate until I don’t feel like it anymore. If nothing is available to me but lookyloo, usually I’ll leave sooner. Not with animosity, but just because it’s boring, and I don’t have control over it anymore. I have found that the last case seldom happens, honestly. I’m not in the proper geographic area for prime time for more places, but I can almost always find people to enjoy who at least enjoy me enough to RP with me.

I wish I was better at dual wielding (playing and STing). I could do it pretty well when I was younger, but honestly I just find it super hard to focus that way now for a variety of reasons. So if I ever do do my little glorified tabletop thing, I won’t be having my own “pc” because I’ll have my hands full running STed scenes which involve keeping track of multiple characters even if they aren’t as fleshed out as a PC, and that will max me out. I never assume I am unique in the hobby, so I think that’s why some people also don’t like to have PCs on games that they run (or if they do they are pure flavor side pieces with friends, for funsies).

I think that it’s a good idea for all alts on a game to be public, for avoidance purposes. I don’t think this should have to include all alts in the hobby ever. To some degree there’s some trust involved. I am shit for remembering people’s alts usually. But If I find out that there’s someone who has expressed negative things about me in the past, while I won’t avoid them on another game in the sense of flouncing off on public scenes or crying to friends about how they too should not play with that person (luckily my friends in the hobby would kick my ass if I behaved that shittily, unless the person was a creeper/abuser, but those are rare and usually my friends will spot them before I do), I also don’t seek them out. I also don’t lie if someone asks who I am. I just don’t like broadcasting because I do have two consistent stalkers still in the hobby that will OOCly seek to interact with me if I am publicly known on a game (but they’re both kind of weird and tend to get removed eventually). I wouldn’t be upset if I even interacted with them wittingly on a game (they don’t tend to disclose who they are). I just don’t want the OOC interaction.

@Arik No idea!

@Jumpscare Time to immediately swap to it myself.