Brovo

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

New Gripe

Reading comprehension. Two little words that certain individuals will never seem to understand. When I say "the staircase is gone", and the staircase was the only way for enemies to reach you, this means you are safe since you cleared that floor. Oh, no, wait, you're setting up a defensible zone with explosives instead of bolting for evac when the part of the city you're in is about to be torched... Why?

The reason I can't write smarter plots or more original environments is because the average person isn't capable of understanding it. I don't even say that with malice or a sense of elitism, either. I find it rather frustrating, actually, but I can at least use it as an opportunity to try and teach and uplift those who want to learn. I like those people. They could have the most god awful reading comprehension ever, but if they want to learn, I can help them, they can get better, and everything only gets better from there.

Then you have the people who refuse to learn, who want me to hold their hand and tell them everything in explicit detail, then laugh at me for my "feeble" and "simple" stories that they easily "figured out". Because they were incapable of reading between the lines and needed to be told everything. Those people are the first and foremost on my kill list and I do it without shame.

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Pachamac said
I agree with this, but I also want to mention that on the flipside, in my personal opinion I'm done with stories/rps with gratutious levels of death and carnage. When it's done to an excess, it actually becomes meaningless and trite, and extremely difficult to care for any characters when the possible likelihood is that they'll just die. Shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are actually the worst offenders of this for me. Death isn't shocking. All they seek to do is try and make said death as shocking and gorey and over the top as they can, and again it doesn't elicit any reaction from me other then an eyeroll. Whilst I wouldn't like to see an rp where all the characters survive, considering what the stakes involved entail, I would actually rather have that then ridiculous pointless and over the top murderthons.

Brovo said I'm not advocating that every story needs to contain gratuitous amounts of death and carnage...

Death is a tool. Depending on the story you may or may not use it. For instance, you wouldn't likely use it often (or at all) in any kind of academia type RP: You don't use a hammer to nail in a screw. I mean, you can, it's just not going to be nearly as effective as a screwdriver.

It just bothers me when I see a story full of red shirts who IRL would get fucking slaughtered in seconds somehow surviving against a billion to one odds several times over. It's completely nonsensical and stretches my disbelief to its absolute limits.

On the flip side, yeah, I agree, it's trite nonsense to go for extremely gory and shocking deaths all the time. It's just grit for the sake of it, which is neither remarkable or creative. Heck I find the most surprising and hard hitting deaths are the ones that happen suddenly and give you no chance to say goodbye. Character A is standing out in a street talking with his love interest. They thought the area was clear. Bam, sniper shot. Bam, character A falls over dead instantly. Bam, instant shock, terror, fury, and sorrow as everyone else ducks for cover and tries to survive.

Now, in an RP, it's hard to justify where an instant, warning-less death would be appropriate to deliver as a GM towards a player. The general idea being that a player has control over their character and should be allowed to weigh risk and reward to try and come out on top, and there's no chance for them to do that in an instant stealth-execution. So you have to deliver it in other ways, which can be a bit tricky sometimes. You also can't straight up murder the entire cast, if you do, the story is over.

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

Chrononaut said Also full roleplays I want to join. I'm staring down Legends of Renalta right now! Seven people would need to ragequit at once. How do you even get 6 people over populated? WHAT IS THIS

They'll die eventually, one by one.

New Gripe?

Whenever I see a 'dark' or 'gritty' story, that involves extremely fallible characters, with limited resources and experience, in a situation far above and beyond their capacity to resolve alone... And somehow... Not a single one dies. Not one. It could be six nonathletic, unremarkable, ordinary people, in the zombie apocalypse, surrounded by thousands of zombies, but no matter how insane the odds, they somehow, always, survive.

This murders my immersion faster than a hamster in a meat grinder. It completely kills any suspense or concern I'd have for my characters in that situation. If Jimmy Junior is dumb enough to go melee a few zombies alone with nothing but his trusty baseball bat Stevie, then Jimmy Junior should just straight die. The GM should just kill Jimmy Junior if the player doesn't do it themselves. Otherwise, danger is meaningless, and the plot, no matter how violence and excessive, becomes boring and flaccid as a result.

I'm not advocating that every story needs to contain gratuitous amounts of death and carnage... But any story that contains survival elements should at least have people, you know, not survive from time to time.

Alright, line up to make your quips everyone

Darwinism 101. Let the cancer die so society will improve by culling the stupid.

Good enough Doivid?

Legend of Renalta 2: Reborn

@Everyone: Mission selection ends Saturday afternoon/evening. At that point, any tied missions will get randomly selected.

As well, I'm slowly building a "grand library" of sorts to keep information on factions and NPC's. (Though at the moment it's focused on NPC's.) So you have a place where you can go to quickly look up names and the like.

As well, for those of you in TLB who caught a sneak peak of the technical map, I'll be porting those over to LoR 2 for battles as well.

The example map is for TLB, but you can get the general idea for LoR.

Map + Notes

White="Pathable" terrain. Sidewalks, streets, etc.
Black="Obstructions", usually buildings. Building interiors can be explored.

The surrounding grey is fog of war.

Still debating if I should even try to put full character names in. To make them fit in small spaces is truly painful. U1 & U2 are U-ARM soldiers. E1 & E2 are shapeshifter mutants. Carolyn and Georgia are... Obviously in a terrible position!



It'll require more fiddling as it's used, but this doesn't take too much effort on my part and given a little bit of experimenting it should alleviate the feelings everyone has of being lost in fights.

The Last Bastion: Bunker Chicago

"Borov, where is the post?!"

Soon™. Over the weekend is the most likely bet seeing as how I won't have work to do.

In the meantime, I've been hammering out a rudimentary mapping system with my totally radical art skills that any four year old with a crayon could do better.

Map + Notes

White="Pathable" terrain. Sidewalks, streets, etc.
Black="Obstructions", usually buildings. Building interiors can be explored.

The surrounding grey is fog of war.

Still debating if I should even try to put full character names in. To make them fit in small spaces is truly painful. U1 & U2 are U-ARM soldiers. E1 & E2 are shapeshifter mutants. Carolyn and Georgia are... Obviously in a terrible position!



It'll require more fiddling as it's used, but this doesn't take too much effort on my part and given a little bit of experimenting it should alleviate the feelings everyone has of being lost in fights.

Let's B!tch. I feel it's a healthy release for our roleplay annoyances 2.0

#1: Characters who have no motivation to do anything. As a GM this frustrates me, as I have a lot of other stuff on my plate and generally have other players to assist. If your character has no motivation to see the plot through, then your character doesn't belong there and should be a background NPC. Simple enough, no?

#2: Twits who seemingly can't tell the difference between a character and the person who is playing that character. Why, yes, that character of mine happens to be a deluded zealot. No, I am not a deluded zealot myself. Yes, that character is an attractive female. No, I assure you, I am neither attractive nor female in real life.

#3: A player who creates a character for a role play of mine, then refuses to accept assistance in the creation process. Generally, my worlds are very dense and complex, and contain a lot of information to explore that I simply can't squeeze in a single plot introduction without murdering the pacing like a sacrificial lamb. So when I'm offering you advice and criticism, it's not necessarily because I think your character is bad, it's because I'm trying to help you fit that character into the world. Really. I'm trying to help you. If you can't take that, how can I trust that you will take any of the mature concepts presented in the story in a mature manner. Such as a person you like getting killed off, or a love interest you want turning you down?

#4: Role players who walk into a GM's world and start rewriting and adding significant events without warning or asking, and expecting the GM to comply. Something like adding a small village to a large fantasy world is fine, but if you're going to start going on about some massive civil war, the least you could do is get it verified by the GM first so the world isn't plagued by crippling plot holes. This is made worse if this pops up right in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation, as it likely derails the entire conversation unless the GM thinks fast and attempts to come up with enough hand wave bullshit to fill the plot holes as they pop up.

#5: "Mature content" does not mean pornography. When my phone at my work place got temporarily banned from the work net because connecting to the 1x1 section triggered a ban filter based on pornography about a month or two ago, that's a sincere problem. One that will prevent me from taking the 1x1 seriously for a long time. Which is a shame because it can be a lot of fun with the right people.

Solving the fermi-paradox

AlienBastard said Although there lies a new issue; What about self replicating probes? A civilization that used such probes would be able to easily comb the galaxy in a mere 10 million years.

**IGNORING BALKANIZATION EFFECT OR NATURAL DISASTERS**

1 Cycle = 1,000 years. (Travel + colonization.) Each cycle, the number of colonies doubles, assuming that each colony sends out one ship per thousand years.

Maths

NUMBER OF COLONIES
1 (Starting homeworld. Thrown in for funsies.)
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1,024
2,048
4,096
8,192
16,384
32,768
65,536
131,072
262,144
524,288
1,048,576
2,097,152
4,194,304
8,388,608
16,777,216
33,554,432
67,108,864
134,217,728
268,435,456
536,870,912
1,073,741,824
2,147,483,648
4,294,967,296
8,589,934,592
17,179,869,184
34,359,738,368
68,719,476,736
137,438,953,472
274,877,906,944
549,755,813,888 = 40 Cycles.

40 Cycles = 1,000 Years (per cycle) = 40,000 Years.

Milky Way Age: 13.2 billion years.
Time to complete colonization of the entire galaxy: 40,000 years, given no natural disasters and assuming they found a way around the Balkanization effect.

Forget self replicating probes. Even assuming the slowest possible speeds (sub-light) a civilization could colonize every single planet in the entire galaxy in less than 40,000 years.

If there are aliens out there, colonizing shit, in my humble opinion, the most likely solutions to the Fermi Paradox are...
#1: The aliens (regardless of the numbers) have a Star Trek like no interference policy on developing civilization.
#2: There are no aliens capable of spaceflight. We were the first to win the genetic lotto race in terms of intelligence.
#3: They colonize planets which are utterly inhospitable to us, therefore why we simply don't encounter them.
#4: They don't use our ancient methods of communication, so our every attempt to contact them has of course failed as a result.
#5: Balkanization took them down: Every civilization manages to get a few dozen colonies out and then fails to upkeep any sort of coherent empire due to the inability to send communication faster than the speed of light. Resulting in fighting amongst the colonies at worst, or a genuine feeling of not needing to proceed further out into the galaxy at best.
#6: The chance for intelligent life to crop up is simply so insanely low that if there are other alien civilizations, they're simply off in other galaxies and haven't figured out how to traverse the abyss between galaxies in any remotely safe or viable manner.
#7: The chance for a hospitable planet is simply so low that the odds of mass colonization are very low.
#8: The odds of a successful colonization might actually be very crapshoot at best. (IRL, colonizing North America from Europe had a lot of failed colonies. Imagine that, but worse, out in space.)

The Library

Raen Elvarasi said
That part I do need to explain further. XD And it is based mostly on the fact that she would be extremely different, and more or less outstanding...I have been to places where shit like that happens. In one of the places in California that I lived, it was like that. People looked for "Outsiders" and basically fucked with them, gangbeat them, ect. Easy targets, with no connections.

Yeah to a tourist who has money sure. To random nine year olds? That takes a special kind of evil. Which is apparently omnipresent.

The concern is mainly that your character has no incentive to talk to or develop relationships with other lirbrarians. Which would stem from a history of insane levels of abuse and hatred.

The Library

Raen Elvarasi said
Did you read the History by any chance? Looking for critique as I mess with it.

Honestly? Okay, umm... Why does everyone beat the shit out of your character? Like, its one thing to have bullies and tragedies and abusive parents and so on, but like, literally everyone? How did nine year old girl survive, eating her own scars?

Idk I found that weird.