@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.

Me too, but I understand some people enjoy that Masq stuff, so having the PDFs kept somewhere away from prying eyes would be ideal in that regard. If no Masq, then just have them somewhere that staff can easily see when players are updating the important bits of the sheet. If a character in a fantasy game suddenly has 18 Strength when they had 7 the week prior, staff need to notice that stuff. And yes, I’ve had a few poor experiences in games where the players kept their own sheets privately.

@Ominous said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

The only downside is that everyone can see your stats, so, if you’re trying to keep that hidden, coded stats it has to be.

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.

@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

Would you avoid a game if it used PDF character sheets instead of a coded chargen/web-based character creation system?

No, as long as the staff on that game had control of the database of PDF sheets and were alerted if anyone was to update their sheet outside of what was allowed by the rules of the game.

It depends on the people I’m RPing with. If it’s either of my regular RL groups, freeform is fine. If it’s a game with a bunch of relative strangers, I’d rather have some sort of structure to the task resolution and character sheets. I’ve had several bad experiences in the past with freeform games with strangers (a PBEM and a couple of forum games) go absolutely haywire because everybody had a different interpretation of how capable given characters were.

My go-to system for Superhero games when they show up at my RL tabletop group is Wild Talents. The One Roll Engine does superheroics really well, and the basic resolution mechanic takes only a few minutes to explain.

Over the years I’ve played HERO, Champions, Mutants and Masterminds (1st & 2nd Editions), Godlike, Capes, Aberrant, Scion (yes, I count Scion as a superhero game), and MSH. I feel like having a solid core system is important for a superhero game as you need to know what the baseline for task resolution is before you start throwing superpowers at the narrative, or you end up with everyone operating on their own idea of what the power scale is.

@hellfrog said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:

@Colette yeah but you can just ban them again and make more mocking additions to their banning post, and eventually - probably after they send some unhinged email to your coder about exposing his girlfriend on facebook - they will get bored and go do something else. Ask me how I know!

A game I was playing on around 2013 had a problem with a ban dodger so persistent they temporarily blocked all Comcast connections except the IPs of players known to behave.

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique. That’s what I learned from taking and reading the results of this survey.

@Pavel said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

We have WoD. MUDders don’t. >_>

Haven of the Embraced is / was a thing.

@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.

@DrQuinn Active communication between staff and PRP runners is super important, so stuff like what you went through where the staff just shut down is rough.

In my personal experience, while I have never interacted with Chaucer or Vorpal, I’ve heard enough about them from people I trust that I steer clear of Superhero MUs because of their behavior specifically.

@ham said in When is the last time you played?:

The amount of fun we have on these games is really pretty largely up to us, and it doesn’t require newness or hotness. It requires effort.

Totally true. Newness and hotness are optional. They can definitely help some times, but if nobody puts in effort, no fun is had.

@Testament said in When is the last time you played?:

Maybe, it’s just out of the vain hope that some ‘new hottness’ will appear and grab everyone’s attention like some games used to. And if for nothing else, the drama threads those games would create here. I never really played The Reach, but man did I love reading about it’s drama.

I don’t think it’s vain. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve gone from a constant stream of cool new hotness stuff to waves, and the time between the waves grows longer. Eventually though, I suspect it will be retro enough that it will make a big comeback.

@Gashlycrumb I was just introduced to Persepolis in the last month.

@Ashkuri See… I knew shitfuckery was going to happen. Hence the need to delineate between the two.

@junipersky said in RL Peeves:

People being late for appointments but not calling or texting ahead to let us know.

I had to deal with something that might be the reverse of this last week. I had an appointment, and I try as hard as I can to be at least 10 minutes early for all of my appointments. I arrive at the office, walk up to the receptionist, and explain why I’m there, and the receptionist might as well have jumped out the window. She was incredibly rude and acted like I derailed her entire day by not being exactly on time. It was like she wasn’t prepared to have people sitting in the lobby waiting for appointments and anyone doing so was a personal attack.

Because of my new night classes, I’m now in the not actively RPing side of things.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

Twice now I’ve seen someone ragequit on ares via… attempting to blank their profile. Like delete all photos and then try to leave the fields empty. Then individually leave channels.

That reminds me of the person on a Cyberpunk themed game around 2003-2004 who demanded that the staff retcon all of the stuff they did that affected the main plot.

Ooh. Another peeve of mine:

People who attempt to argue rules that are clearly written.

Two Examples:

1. A player in a combat scene in a tabletop D&D 3.5 game I played in tried to claim that Improved Initiative was situational and per the PHB did not apply to the combat scene we were involved in. Improved Initiative in the 3.5 PHB has some of the simplest and clearest rules text in that book.

2. A player in a Vampire game tried to argue that they shouldn’t have to make a degeneration roll for killing a feeding victim on accident while at Humanity 8. While the Humanity rules aren’t exactly simple, they do clearly state that accidental killing is a degeneration roll when you are Humanity 6 or higher.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I recollect a staffer doing this, with five people waiting around for the scene said staffer had scheduled themself, with all the players evidently too afraid to page, me doing so and getting “I will not be doing that tonight,” as a response to me, and evidently complaints to others about my horrible soul-sucking behavior.

There’s also the inverse, where a player or staff schedules a scene and then nobody shows up, causing the scheduler to become a nuisance, in one case I can recall actively claiming nobody else on the game understands the theme or setting.