@Flitcraft OMG EDDIE. It’s good to see you again! I was Thomas at Darkwater. Not playing anywhere now, but glad to hear you’re doing well!

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

1. The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
2. If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
3. “Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
4. Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

I am not going to live up to @Roz 's praise of me, but I do have thoughts. So many thoughts. I will not share them all.

But I will say that I absolutely agree with what was up above - you need to distinguish what matters to you about a L&L game. I want a political game, and my biases are towards systems that promote and perpetuate a political game. The degree to which lords, ladies, fancy balls, or fashion are involved is very irrelevant to me. In fact, one of my never-gonna-happen “would love” MU* games is a political game centered around a free city with power split between elected citizens, powerful merchants often from outside the city, crafting guilds, and the mercenary forces the city needs to keep from getting eaten by outside powers. Balls and parties would probably still be involved, but they’re not the draw to me, even though I know that they are the primary draw to a lot of other folk. The Prince/ss fantasy is real and valid!

That said, my other bias is systemic - I absolutely think you need a mechanized system for political play so that people can risk actual (in game) resources on their goals, and gain or lose those resources. But if you’re looking to make a sustainable system, it also has to be cyclical and avoid either the death spiral where a character can lose everything and have no way of getting it back, or the dominance spiral where someone can amass enough power that they effectively will never be able to lose enough power to fall off the top spot. Players are going to naturally try to accumulate all the power and influence they can in a game, and while some folk absolutely do play “for the story” and will set themselves up for major losses or reversals, those folk are not a large enough segment of the population to keep a power structure from stagnating.

There are a lot of different ways to build a system - dice are easy, but it doesn’t HAVE to involve dice. But my three principles for it are:

• There has to be meaningful in game stakes involved that PCs have influence over. (Maybe not sole influence, but PCs need agency.)
• There has to be scarcity in resources so that no one PC or group of PCs can be self-contained.
• There has to be mechanics to resolve meaningful conflicts and the loss/gain of resources.
• There should be mechanics built into the system that make it hard to maintain dominance or be stuck in perpetual failure. Floating somewhere in the middle should be relatively easy for those players who really want to just play fantasy rich people and hang out.

The specifics of what those things LOOK like? There’s five million ways to do it, you just have to think about what conflicts you want to promote and what resources you want players to focus on.

My preference is one + empowered mortals (can be supernatural, can just be political/police power in a setting where that has teeth and matters), but a small, selective duo or trio of spheres can be fine if you genuinely have support for those spheres.

I don’t know the system, but I’d definitely be interested. Modern Gothic horror/fantasy is quite relevant to my interests!

@TNP I’m so sorry.

@TNP My condolences. It’s so hard to lose your furry buddies, especially to something like cancer.

I will say I have returned to A Place after doing A Thing, and I take back the ‘not as dark’ comment. It can definitely bring the dark.

NEVERMIND. Spoiler does not actually spoiler. Bah.

I’m playing it! I’m enjoying it quite a bit - love the characters, enjoy the combat, and the plot is a Dragon Age plot: perfectly serviceable but don’t look too closely at the gaps.

I think there’s still plenty darkness in the setting, but definitely overall the writing and focus is on a lighter, more hopeful tone. There are times I have to remember that IC time and location has progressed quite a bit from Origins, or even Inquisition (“wait, everyone knows the differences between spirits and demons and is cool with the former?” - sure, years after stories about the Inquisition has made the rounds, and in places like Nevarra and Tevinter where these things were always seen a bit differently. It does remind me that Ferelden is, let’s face it, the depressed Bible Belt of Thedas.)

I’m gonna smooch the necromancer. IT WILL HAPPEN.

I absolutely got scared away from doing an application to adopt a cat because the application wanted a lot of info I wasn’t comfortable giving out (my income, etc.) and they wanted to do a walkthrough of my apartment as a second phase. Just not comfortable.

Luckily, the Cat Distribution System provided.

@Snackness But there’s no use crying over it.

@RightMeow said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

I know this is a first world problem and people have it way way way worse but…

I am over my current career. However, the idea of changing it makes me tired. The idea of finding a new job is annoying because I’m at a certain pay range that I don’t really want to lose. I don’t hate it, but I’m burned out in it. I feel too old to start something else (and probably too tired now). I just feel stuck.

Like I said, not the worst vent to have but it’s where I am.

Kind of in the same place.

I’m not exactly over my current career, but the workplace has changed to where we’ve lost our big contracts that were meaning we weren’t having to do the funding scramble, and I hate the funding scramble. I want something with a bit more stability, and I want to leave on my terms before the funding runs out and I have no other options.

But I absolutely despite the job search, I also don’t want to lose my decent salary, or my progress towards student loan forgiveness. And I don’t feel like I can be as adventurous as I might otherwise be because my elderly father lives with me and I pay all the bills.

Also, I’m generally lonely and crushingly sad about various things, including the utter failure of my writing, so it’s just like every day is stumbling blindly, hoping not to get hit by any disasters but never really being happy.

Just a gentle reminder to everyone that while the discussion about a fight over political discussions on another game is fine, we’d rather not see it become a way for people to have a political discussion by proxy here. People have been good about this so far, it’s not a ding on anyone, but just keep it in mind since things tend to drift the longer a discussion goes on.

On the other hand, fight over Lex Luthor’s presidential policies all you want.

@imstillhere said in MU Peeves Thread:

I will do the lifting to set it all up, I don’t usually mind.

What I mind is the person who says “I want to rp!” and then they say “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any ideas. What character would you like me to be? LOL!”

At least pick which of YOUR OWN characters you want to be, come on now. I’m not doing that for you.

This is also one of my peeves. I don’t want to choose your alt for you, and the fact that you have asked me to do so kills at least 20 percent of my interest in scening with you, because what it says to ME (whether you mean it that way or not) is that you have no particular ideas or interest in specific character interactions between our two PCs.

I do love a good, structured downtime between major arcs, whether those are episodes or just metaplot pushes. It’s nice to have some time where you know you can relax a little and pursue some slice-of-life or personal drama without the “tea party in the zombie apocalypse” issue.

But I do think you have to be careful about how long those times are. The Network tended to feel a little too long for me, but I think that’s also because it was such an isolated setting and blank slate characters. I could see being more chill with a longer downtime if it was like - the ‘episodes’ were missions into alien territory, and then the ‘downtime’ was being back at home base, having access to all the NPCs and your character’s life to pursue.

Balance in all things, I suppose. And making sure the downtime still has something hooky for people to poke at - this doesn’t have to be a mystery or something staff-run. If, instead of full amnesia, you had a situation where specific chunks of someone’s memory were gone at the start of the game, and each downtime they could pursue and ‘reveal’ that part of themselves if they wanted, it would be very player focused, but still give that feeling of ‘pursuit and revelation’ that could keep restless players engaged over the lull.

And it doesn’t have to be memory. In a horror game, it could be player-led additions to the setting - each downtime you get to create a piece of the town or an artifact in the creepy vault, or whatever, and explore its curse and backstory. Or if you’re in a weird magical school setting, every downtime each character gets to work on and demonstrate a single magical project. Just something to provide enough structure for people who need it.

@imstillhere said in MU Peeves Thread:

IMO, it’s not great to take a stance like ‘the church is in control of reproduction’ unless players are explicitly allowed to take a swing at that institution and that massive social control. Are they allowed or encouraged to make motions back to their own autonomy? Fuckfruits for all?

‘The church is in control of reproduction’ is one thing. ‘The church is in control of people’s bodies and everyone is chill with this IC because that is our ooc policy’ is uhhhhh less good.

I’m going to push back on this.

A game should disclose elements of its IC setting which are going to be dealbreakers for people. If you read an element of a game that is a dealbreaker, and decide “Oh man, don’t want to play there because that’s not something I’d find fun,” that’s good! The system is working, and now that game can select for players who will engage with the setting in good faith, and the players who would hate that setting can go elsewhere.

But saying, “Oh, I hate that element of the setting, so it’s a bad game unless you let me make a character who will try to dismantle that setting because of my OOC dislike for it…” well, that’s not good. That’s a dick move, unless the game is specifically set up to be ‘about’ cultural revolution.

Let other people have fun doing their thing. You don’t have to be involved. Not everything has to be for you, and no game should feel obligated to cater to or support characters that are just there to be disruptive because their players don’t like the setting.

@GF said in MU Peeves Thread:

There are so many questions.

If everyone in the game world is infertile, then what other changes are there? Do people menstruate? How common is sex, and how common is sexual impotence? Do people in this world where only fruit can make babies have a biological urge to have sex? Does the fruit, in addition to making your eggs drop and your wigglies wiggle, act as an aphrodisiac? Are people even sexually dimorphic when not under the effects of the fuck-fruit?

Oh gosh, this would be so interesting. I would absolutely play a game where humans were basically sex-neutral until they ate a catalyst and suddenly gained sexual organs. Especially if it wasn’t fixed and you couldn’t guarantee which ‘organs’ you would gain with each dose. What’s THAT society look like?

@mietze Okay, every birth event being a cosmic horror experience is both relevant to my interests and makes this whole thing sound twenty times more interesting.

Congratulations!

EDIT: Read the story, and wow, that was fantastic! Very awesome!

@junipersky Seconded. Back when I was job hunting, I was interviewed for a university position and a government position. The government position went radio silent, so I took the uni position even though it meant moving to another state. And if you’ve been in the university hiring process, you know this is not a fast thing.

It was literally a month after I’d moved and started my new job that the government position got back to me with news that I was their top candidate, and did I want to come discuss details. A little over four months! Of no contact or response!

But, ahem, the happy part is that I was very happy with the job I took.