@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
then even if I DON’T have a rule explicitly against it, it should largely be fine to say: ‘no, bad player, no biscuit’.
While naturally you can do basically whatever you like on your game, perhaps the first instance should be a “oh I should make this a policy from now on” moment instead of an instant boot.
Sure. Where did I imply it should come with a boot, instant or otherwise?
As a hobby we should be able to tell people who abuse rules (or rather, abuse lack of rules) to just fucking not.
If I ran a game and someone tried to raise their stat mid-scene or even mid-roll and got caught (not because I think it’s okay if you don’t get caught but because you can’t do anything if they aren’t caught) then even if I DON’T have a rule explicitly against it, it should largely be fine to say: ‘no, bad player, no biscuit’.
Changing an entire system (whether I agree with it or not due to other reasons) based on something like this is ridiculous; the kind of thing metaphors including babies and bathwater were made for.
(EDIT: also the kind of reasoning conservatives and would-be-progressives use to ban things – ‘oh, but it could be used to do this one thing, so we’re gonna ban the entire thing altogether’.)
My take is: if staff is going to impose certain gating tactics when it comes to the expenditure of XP, then it is staff’s responsibility to provide the chance and situation necessary to everyone, actively.
If you don’t wanna do the work, don’t apply the restriction.
@Autumn said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m okay with limits on how many individual XP requests I can submit within a given time frame, in the interest of preserving staff sanity … but also I would probably limit myself on my own even if the game doesn’t have one. I’d feel like a selfish jerk for flooding the system with 20 XP spends all at once.
Limiting how much XP you can bank at once is one I’ve never encountered. Of the two, I’d much, much rather have to deal with “you can only spend N XP per week” with “you can’t have more than Y unspent XP.” At least with the former you can eventually get it spent without losing out on any.
Which does bring me to a related peeve: you can get it spent if staff have consistent guidelines for what you need to do to spend it, and will tell you what those guidelines are so you can work toward them. I’ll go along with almost any XP spending requirements if the game is good enough, but please for heaven’s sake tell me what I need to do to meet your standards.
The ‘how much XP you can bank’ is rare, but a lot more common in our spaces now a days because it’s the default for FS3.
These problems largely stem from people trying to apply RAW to MUs. Most of those ‘time gates’ are IC time gates, which aren’t an issue in most tabletop games at all because the GM usually just goes ‘okay, time skip, spend your XP’ at some point. This is what those rules are written for.
Applying them to games with 1:1 or even 1:2 or 1:3 (rare as those may be) time progressions means no time skipping, and thus people have to wait real life units of time, which it was never meant to work with.
@Pavel said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
@Coin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
@Ominous said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
@MisterBoring said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.
Everyone has to be able to see the stats if you’re just doing pdfs; otherwise, how do they know you’re rolling right? “Yes, I totally have five dots in every attribute and skill. You can’t see the pdf, but it’s totally there.”
At this point in the hobby, if I don’t trust the other players on the game I’m on, I’m unlikely to give it much importance. Like, are we not past lying about stats? FFS.
Exactly. You manipulate or rely on corrupt staff to give you the stats you want. This isn’t third grade.
Well, you’d know. 
@Ominous said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
@MisterBoring said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:
At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.
Everyone has to be able to see the stats if you’re just doing pdfs; otherwise, how do they know you’re rolling right? “Yes, I totally have five dots in every attribute and skill. You can’t see the pdf, but it’s totally there.”
At this point in the hobby, if I don’t trust the other players on the game I’m on, I’m unlikely to give it much importance. Like, are we not past lying about stats? FFS.
@Colette said in Freeform or Systems?:
I think this would be a better approach than the more vague soft-limits people often go for, which just tend to cause more arguments if anything (“Blasto-Man has a strength level of 20 tons, it says so on the official website” “But in this iconic scene in Blasto-Man #274 he’d be generating 3978.6 kilonewtons of force…”)
The problem I have with any kind of stat system is what I call the Batman problem. Batman has shit stats compared to Captain Randomthrowawaycharacter and if you play to the stats, Batman becomes a joke,
I keep mooting the notion (as a thought experiment, I don’t think it would actually work) of a system which has one single stat: Narrative Weight. Want to app that one paper-thin character who once appeared in a Superman comic 30 years ago and was created purely to be a threat-of-the-week able to knock Superman around easily? Sure, go ahead. Narrative weight 1. She can knock Superman around easily for a while, but she’s always going to lose any important conflict.
That’s why any game I run promotes joint narrative storytelling; Batman doesn’t become a joke because everyone works to make Batman be Batman. I also typically do not allow villains and any PvP is strictly plot-dependent.
For Excelsior! (and Better Tomorrow) I worked out a sort of tier/scale system for powers/skills but it was mostly more of a guide as to what was possible; the system itself was still consent-based freeform.
@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
Damn, why am I catching strays over here?
Which one is yours?
Excelsior, specifically. I also helped with Better Tomorrow (who were not abusive) and With Great Power (again, not abusive).
@sao said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Pretty sure in any hobby, any undertaking done by humans on this planet, if there is a way for a person to have even imaginary authority and/or influence over other humans, there is going to be an issue with sex pests.
I mean, yeah. I don’t get this whole “man, that one genre, those people, so bad!” And it’s almost always someone who plays in that genre, too; like, you counting yourself, or are you the pristine exception, my dude? lmao
@MisterBoring said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@Coin said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
This largely implies that World of Darkness games or Star Wars games or Lords and Ladies games don’t share the same issues and, uh, lmao.
Yeah, the issues are tied to the hobby and not a specific genre. There might be some validity to the concept that some genres attract more of them than others, but I would argue it’s probably not a giant gap.
It’s the same with “man, WoD players” or “man, comic book players”. The venn diagram of MUers who play WoD, Sci-Fi, Horror, Comic Books… might not be a circle, but the overlap is so much larger than anyone really seems to think.
@Kestrel said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.
Double post but what? This largely implies that World of Darkness games or Star Wars games or Lords and Ladies games don’t share the same issues and, uh, lmao.
@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
Damn, why am I catching strays over here?
People who think staff have so much power that they have to be always polite and obsequious to players or it qualifies as abusive.
Fucking weirdos.
As with almost everything, it’s preferences, like Roz said. But there is absolutely something to be said for a game facilitating several different ways of interacting/playing.
If you have a big proclamation or press conference or whatever, and the storyteller wants it to be a scene – they can make it a scene. Plut places in there with tabletalk so people can sit around and chat with their buddies while it’s happening.
Then, the storyteller can take the salient bits of the scene, post them on a forum --the aforementioned e-mail it COULD have BEEN-- and the people who didn’t go can pretend they went and sat quietly listening, without the player having spent the time.
If you don’t LIKE the big scenes, don’t GO to the big scenes. If you do, GO.
It’s not a problem solved by one-or-the-other decision making, folks; these are issues that can be tackled inclusively.
@Warma-Sheen said in Warma-Sheen:
As Hollywood on TR, I was banned because I kept pestering Troy about trying to get other staffers to quit talking crap about my character on staff channels. She told me to stop bothering her and I didn’t. It wasn’t until after I was banned did some accusations about cheating get thrown out after the fact from which I never got a chance to address/defend and only heard about 3rd hand, which I think were about looking at my own jobs as a staffer, to which, if that was a thing, wasn’t more than occasional typos of the many, many, many jobs that I handled there.
Troy: is that the dude who used the Shemar Moore pb?
Coin: yes.
Troy: that dude was straight up cheating.
Troy: i’m glad he remembers all those details, cuz i sure as fuck don’t. but he was a fucking menace.
Troy: ask yourself why the staffers were talking shit about his character.
Troy: the game was better for it when he left. and by left we mean got kicked out. sorry not sorry.
also, as Coin, I will say, i remember Kelvin being the most metagame-y, minmax-y, Pledge-abusing, power-gaming dude in the Changeling sphere, and this was CONCURRENT (to a degree) with VASpider’s tenure there, so keep that in mind.
cheers.
@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:
@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but could someone post the pose in question? I just want to see how we know it’s AI.
Same. I’ve been accused of using AI even with glaring grammar errors (I’ll spell check but I use Oxford comas, …, --, and even semicolons). My grammar will never be perfect.
it’s not great to know ppl think I’m using not human programs for my very human poses. I don’t think I’m a robot… if I am I feel like I m missing some perks.
I think assuming Oxford commas, semicolons, and mdashes are signs of AI writing is ridiculous and stupid. I am not the one who compiled a list of poses from someone and ran them through an AI “detector”, either, which is why I didn’t point any fingers.
The mere POSSIBILITY of it happenings sparked my comment that if you’re gonna do it, just let people know.
