@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.

One of my RL friends is currently working on a tabletop RPG where the players are androids who are the only beings on a space station after a mysterious event kills all the humans, and advancement comes in the form of software updates being transmitted from a satellite light years away, so you build this little track of advancements in the order you want them, and every time a cycle happens (a nebulous in game unit of time that represents some level of narrative motion), you check a box in the top most item in your track. When it fills with checks, you add it to your sheet and start checking the next item. He’s working on some mechanics for rearranging the queue, but so far it’s been pretty fun the few times we’ve met to test it.

@helvetica All I remember from that episode is the bike.

@Roz Agreed. Both of those are dumb.

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

From what little I know about Ruby, we all know that she’s picking LC for two very certain assets that appeal to Ruby’s target audience and nothing else.

Pistols? It’s pistols right?

@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.