It really feels like Ganymede has just decided to let Derp drive it into the ground out of some need to avoid losing face from reversing a decision.

Well, I’m reducing my MSB activity to lurking now. Gany just basically said that the only person who needed to be apologized to on MSB for what happened was Derp.

I get two things from reading stuff from this thread.

1. That I definitely am not the target audience for Lords & Ladies roleplay.

2. That Arx, even with all of it’s trouble throughout its history, is a pretty good example of ‘doing it right’ in our hobby.

Congrats to all you Arx players and staff for doing cool stuff.

@hobos

Please stop. If you actually care, stop, step away, and come back in a few days or even a week or two. You’re making yourself look bad with each new post.

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

Bring back Victorian era drug problems!

I want a post apocalyptic game surrounding the events at one of the last settlements in the world struggling to survive against all manner of obstacles and threats.

@Jennkryst

I’m gonna have to run a one shot of the MMPR RPG in his honor.

Well, after that interaction with Ghost and some other odd shit I’ve seen today, I added MSB to my firewall block list. I don’t need that shit in my life anymore.

@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.

I love Coup!

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

The PC is supposed to be Machiavelli, but what I see is Mr. Magoo.

If I had a dollar for every instance the way someone perceived a character or the way a character is being played is wildly different from how it appears in their sheet & background, I’d be running DOGE.

Heck, I’m guilty of playing a character in a way that isn’t remotely how I’ve described them. Many many times.

It’s just a difference in perception. What one person perceives to be the actions of a genius is another person’s Johnny Bravo.

I’m not much for L&L games, but there’s one L&L-ish game that came out recently as a TTRPG that I’m sort of interested in: Our Brilliant Ruin. It’s a post apocalyptic game set in a world where the aristocracy chose to basically ignore a calamity that poses a threat to all of existence, The Ruin. It’s a strange energy that’s slowly turned all of the world into a rusted, collapsed, monster filled wasteland, with the exception of the Dramark, the last bastion of aristocratic society. The aristocracy is perfectly fine just maintaining the status quo for the small bit of the world the Ruin hasn’t claimed yet. Players can be members of noble houses, servants to those houses, or the unbonded, who aren’t attached to the nobility in any way, but also aren’t kept safe by them.

Oh, and did I mention it’s 100% free?

The Magicians is one of those series that I could never get into. I have nothing against it, I even own the whole trilogy (a kind Christmas gift from an old friend years ago). Everytime I pick it up to read the first one, I get about a third of the way in and just stop. It never clicked, even after my SO made me binge watch the TV series with them.

As far as magic school subgenre of stuff, there are examples of that I do enjoy. Most recently the anime / manga series Mashle. I’ve just never been able to get into the Magicians for whatever reason.

@Pavel & @Prototart

There is a game for that particular group:

I have no idea how to convert it into a MU, but I always thought a Car Wars MU would be sick.

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

Abelard builds a magical tank in his garage in less time than it takes Brigid to make a telephone call to her mentor, because Abelard’s staffer was quick and Brigid’s was away this weekend.

Having a staff that’s on the same page as far as activity and response times is so crucial in my opinion that it should always be on the mind of at least the person in charge of the whole game. I’ve been on more than a few games where spheres died because the staff assigned to them do next to nothing beyond the bare minimum, even less in some cases.

I understand that staff is completely voluntary, and RL > Game, but staff is volunteering to make the game run well, and if they’re not able to keep up with the rest of staff at a certain level of productivity, they shouldn’t be kept as staff. And if headstaff of a game can’t find anyone they trust to do the job correctly that’s also able to maintain that activity level for that sphere, maybe they shouldn’t have that sphere open.

It’s absolutely frustrating when the staffer assigned to you, or your sphere, or whatever is basically just a voicemail at capacity because they would rather play on their other PC or focus on some other staff task they’ve been assigned.

I think preventing the “all other spheres must die” thing is on the staff to prevent but at the same time, you can’t hold to theme for some of the WoD (especially OWoD) spheres if they’re expected to be buddy buddy because some major magical aura is preventing it. (Mostly talking about Vampire - Werewolf here.) Ultimately “a ritual long before the start of game says no” is sort of lazy in my opinion.

As far as day zones / night zones go, I prefer that people just set the time of day / night when they set the scene, and adapt to whomever they’re playing with. Day zones / night zones, again, seem lazy to me.

The families thing that TR / FC had was cool because at least you had the whole “blood is thicker than water” thing which didn’t feel as arbitrary as “ancient NPC said no”.

At least in CWoD / NWoD, the whole “kill other spheres” is replaced with “we’re wary of other spheres, but we don’t try and kill them outright as long as they stay in their lanes” (with a few exceptions, like the Cheiron Group with their whole we chop up everybody else to make ourselves better).

I think I’m done rambling now.

While I’m thinking about it, one thing I really dislike with multi-sphere WoD games is where there’s just an arbitrary “binding ultimate magick ritual 9000” that prevents any sort of conflict, and also permanently makes it night time in the entire grid and lets anyone go into the Umbra and all manner of nonsense.

At that point, it’s just goth supers.

I will also echo the either 1 or keep it limited approach.

My experiences with kitchen sink style games usually is that the splats just isolate anyway, or one splat becomes dominant in the overarching story of the game and everybody else feels ostracized. In one case over a decade ago, the game didn’t actually have enough people to realistically support a kitchen sink anyway, and ended up with roughly 2-3 characters per splat.

I would kill for a Mummy centric or friendly WoD game though. Not gonna lie.