@Trashcan said in What happened, man?:

Sandy Petersen

Sandy was the principal author on Call of Cthulhu back in 1981. As far as I can tell that’s about the only thing he’s ever done in the RPG space. He was Definitely Canceled Due to Woke, though. In 1981.
ETA: I did some more looking on this and it turns out Petersen has recently made transphobic comments online and will be guest of honor at an upcoming 30-50 person anti-woke gaming “convention”, which I assume is what got him on the honor roll here. Still no new RPG systems I can find.

Most of his work after Chaosium is in the PC gaming realm. He has a large number of credits for id Software (level design on Doom and Doom II), Microprose (worked as a dev on Sid Meier’s Pirates and Civilization), and Ensemble Studios (was a developer on all parts of the first three Age of Empires games).

He’s since rolled back around to doing freelance work for Chaosium occasionally (though I imagine with their new direction that’s probably all but done) and making supplements for other games with a very Cthulhu bent.

Jonathan Joss, voice of John Redcorn in King of the Hill

@Gashlycrumb Yeah, I just checked old posts here, someone mentioned he got banned at MN, check the thread on Liberation from around October 12, 2023. So if he wasn’t there, I’m not the only person who believes he got banned there.

@Gashlycrumb The only person I know of getting removed from MN was Polk, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a case of toxic intentional gatecrashing.

@Gashlycrumb said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

One of the peculiar things about that very peculiar incident was that some of my crimes were easily disprovable using MU-features. I imagine you didn’t investigate.

What game in specific was this, and what feature access do you think I possessed?

That’s a real spicy pair of posts for their intro to this particular community.

@Gashlycrumb said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

So I try to get involved, and later discover that people think I’m trying to gatecrash even before I find out that the opening to participation I think I saw isn’t viable. And presumably it’s taken as malicious social engineering when I react to that by directly OOCly asking for plot-runners to open things up such that I can play.

Gatecrashing can be unintentional if a certain level of transparency isn’t maintained between all players and staff. Dropping in unannounced when a big scene is going on can be unintentional gatecrashing if a player isn’t aware of a planned plot event or whatever going on for a specific faction. It happens, and it’s on both the player doing the dropping in and the staff running that scene to civilly, and transparently, work out that the scene is not open for the PC in question, and why. If a player has a concern regarding a plot not being open to their PC, they should approach staff with a good level of transparency, so that the players of the faction or skill group or whatever that the plot is meant for doesn’t assume someone is trying to grab their turn in the spotlight.

At the same time, intentional toxic gatecrashers do exist, and I’ve seen them in most of the genres of games I’ve played in (be it fantasy, sci-fi, WoD, other horror, post apocalyptic, or whatever). I’ve witnessed players use OOC methodology to circumvent both coded restrictions in the game (such as times I’ve seen players use coded meeting commands to circumvent faction locks on rooms and exits) as well as IC restrictions to accessing plot (in one fantasy game I was part of, some players were allowed to help run the central plots of the game without staff level access, and a player straight up lied about having the ability to fly when it came time to attack a pirate airship in the middle of a wilderness area. The player running the plot didn’t have the ability to confirm that, and when they turned the logs in to staff, there was a whole mess of drama about it that resulted in retcons and the player in question being banned).

I did accuse you of that. If it was inaccurate, I do apologize, but I was basing those accusations on the information available to me to formulate what I believed was the most accurate chain of events. The transparency of the situation, or lack thereof, is the culprit in that specific accusation.

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

In any event, I’d rather have a safe and friendly game than a toxic one, even if that means some players won’t play.

This 100000%.

@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

So when I propose running a WoD game without sphere-separation, people spaz about it. Propose mandatory alt-transparency, same.

It really feels like proposing any tools that would help staff do more to protect a game from toxic players gets shot down very quickly, even by players who aren’t toxic in their own right.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Thematic Spillover, where the tone and emotional content of the game world shape how players interact OOC;

I think this (which is called bleed in a lot of academic essays on roleplaying) will exist regardless of anything else on the list.

Also, Systemic Enabling, Norm Internalization, and Legacy Culture could be merged into one single hypothesis about the active pattern of misbehavior found in a lot of roleplaying communities (these three things along with poor handling of Thematic Spillover are why a lot of LARP organizations such at the MES, NERO, and others end up turning into cesspools of irredeemable behavior.

There are a lot of interesting articles on bleed / thematic spillover and other OOC dynamics coming from the European RP communities (especially those involved in Nordic LARP), and most of them are published for free every year as part of some of the major RP conventions that happen.

I guess I can count myself lucky in that I know I’ve been on games that VASpider and Seanan McGuire were on, but as far as I can remember, I never interacted with them, or never in any significant capacity.

I’m not sure if it’s the same person every time, but I’ve run into players finding out that certain plots are restricted to certain IC groups that their PC isn’t part of, then immediately using every social engineering thing they can think of both IC and OOC to ingratiate their way into the plot, in some cases going so far as to use OOC RP support tools (meet and such) to circumvent coded locks on sections of the grid. They inevitably get caught, and then go into social engineering mode to try and cover their misbehavior and get out of it, often times seeding multiple versions of the OOC narrative through multiple staffers to confuse them and get off light. In one particularly humorous case, they didn’t know that 3 of the staff bits were actually the same person, the head staffer, who just used multiple staff bits to make dividing up the work easier, and when they tried their nonsense, they immediately got the boot. They’re still out there as far as I can tell. It would be nice to definitely find out whether they’re a random group of unrelated people, or just one stubborn person committed to a fallacy.

I didn’t even realize Crunchyroll did an Anime Awards, but it also dawns on me that any Award ‘show’ presented by an anime company is probably going to be heavily biased.

Is there an Awards show for Anime independent of the companies that produce it somewhere else?

Solo Leveling definitely doesn’t stack up to a lot of those other shows ‘nominated’, but I won’t deny that I enjoyed watching it. Personally, out of those options, I enjoyed Dan Da Dan and Kaiju No. 8 the most. Can’t comment on Apothecary Diaries because it’s honestly not my thing, and I’m not done with Frieren yet, so I’m still deciding on that one.

I just desperately want a solid science / math AI to do something newsworthy, like invent a 3d printer resin with no toxic fumes, or cure a disease. I feel like by the time that comes around, people are going to distrust AI in general so much that they just ignore it. I can see it now:

Science AI model releases an open source schematic for a water powered drive system for cars that gets 450 miles to a gallon of water and can drive at freeway speeds. crickets

@Raistlin Dang. I knew he wasn’t doing well, health wise.

@Faraday said in Best Games with Roster Characters?:

Ares also has a partial FFG Plugin based around the Genesys system. I don’t know how well it would adapt to L5R but you could probably at least steal some of the dice code.

I think you could probably steal most of the code. I just looked at it on Github and I think it mostly does what you want already, the code work would be reducing it down from 6 types of dice to 2.

Genesys has 6 dice types (Boost, Ability, Proficiency, Setback, Difficulty, and Challenge), where L5R only has 2 (Ring and Skill). Advantages (the L5R version of Talents) are pretty easy to implement too, as I believe the majority of them just let you reroll 2 of your dice in specific situations.

The dice for L5R 5th Edition could just be converted to a pair of charts and use regular dice. Then the code compares the d6 and d12s to their appropriate chart and the output would just be a list of results rather than worrying about the fancy symbols.

Then players choose what to keep and what to discard.

I’m sure there’s probably a coder somewhere that could do the whole nine yards though in an automated formatted wonder code thing.

Is it sad that I’ve met people whose natural writing and RP are so bad that I assumed they were LLMs incorrectly?

@STD Ah, then I’m curious as to what their numbers looked like through the various seasons. Might help to answer some questions about the 3 month thing.

@Ominous Have there been any games previously that ran on a seasonal format? If not, it might be something to take a chance on. If nothing else, it gives the people who are going to stay around more things to be interested in as time goes on.