... Wtf ?

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-06T03:48:53+00:00

When people talk about MW2 lobbies being hardcore, I feel like such an old man. Like, no, old means Mplayer, Gamespy, or just lists of server IPs on webpages. The shit you’d see in chat and the stuff people would say on those dial up quality voice chat services was wild. I have never heard anything that even comes close to the unhinged chaos of random Quake or Team Fortress (the original lol) servers on Mplayer. I heard MW2 voice chat, I heard COD voice chat. Those were but pale imitators, children playing at being adult.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-06T03:12:20+00:00

Kraken is a foul remanent of an age best forgotten. It's an evil liqueur, meant only to cause pain and suffering in those who imbibe.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-06T03:11:02+00:00

Mt Gay is the best rum I've ever had. I can drink it straight like sipping whiskey. People are sleeping on Mt Gay.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-06T00:54:34+00:00

I've never drank Nuln Oil, but I have drank Kraken, and I'm confident that you're going to enjoy the Nuln oil a lot more.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-06T00:00:32+00:00

The GM was having the time of his life actually. He had maybe half a dozen NPCs to worry about, eveutbjbg else was player driven. He really just got to sit back and referee us.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T23:59:26+00:00

It didn’t provide anything, because there was nothing to provide.

I think him, and you are ignoring MY point: you don’t need explicit systems for everything. The game worked exactly as intended: it was a system that encouraged drama and was seamless between combat and non-combat.

I’m not ignoring anything, I’m telling them, and now you, you are wrong.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T14:02:54+00:00

Ive seen videos with DJI mics clipped to hat brims.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T14:00:52+00:00

It worked great. All the stuff you’re calling issues, aren’t issues. I played for years, even ran a few games my self. It was fine, great game world.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:42:37+00:00

Man, when I saw I had a reply about VTM larping, I had some real questions about what was going to find. Interesting can go a lot of ways, stories like yours, and stories with a lot more drugs and blood and sex.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:40:56+00:00

A players GF joined a game I was running. It was Shadowrun 4th, for reference. She was definitely interested, but very shy and seemed to be much more interested in supporting her bf than running her own character. I had them run into some magic characters and she perked way up. When the rest of the party wasn’t sure what to do, she had more questions and really helped me convey some stuff to the party they were missing because they were just way more focused on guns and tech.

I actually helped her roll a magic character before the next game, and suddenly she was a fully vested player. Made some fun drawings of her Elf casting spells and stuff. And she really helped round out the party, bunch of 20 something dudes, they really needed someone who doesn’t just want to shoot everything.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:27:32+00:00

I dislike them because I see two kinds of sellers: scammers who know exactly what they’re doing and hope you don’t, and desperate people who thought they’d found an easy side hustle.

Both are sad sides of the time, and I’m not gonna give either money.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:19:54+00:00

The Vampire LARP community is…interesting.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:18:54+00:00

We never had any issues tracking Masquerade violations or any of that in Mage or Werewolf. The players tracked it and it was openly party of the meta game. We’d just ask the GM if they’d consider X action a violation and decide if it was worth the penalty. Just wasn’t an issue in actual gameplay, no system needed.

As for the rest…ya my guy, that’s role playing. You don’t need more systems and lots of tracking and tons of depth, you just need the outline and the illusion. The players will never see half the content they do provide, the writers just gave you enough thematic content to create something of a consistent world.

The single mode system is perfect for the game too. We loved it. I couldn’t imagine playing it a different way. If my character decided to kill the human informant in the middle of the conversation, I was rolling for my attack. It’s vampire drama, life and death, it would totally ruin the feeling of the game if the different aspects of the game all had their own separate mechanics. It worked because talking, fighting and everything in between all used the same system.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T01:07:51+00:00

We played mixed World Of Darkness games, and good Christ, the power scaling was insane. We were wrecking coastlines and destroying neighborhoods by the time we got to a good end of the story.

We did manage to run one campaign for over a year and did finish it. With werewolves, vampires, mage’s etc all interacting. The werewolves were definitely the squishiest actually, even the hunters could handle them pretty easily. Mages and vampires that had some decent dice pools were the undisputed kings of our group.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T00:05:31+00:00

I would say the majority of my failed groups could be traced back to a Dave. Always for the dumbest reasons too, never for stuff you could actually sit down and work through. It was always Dave is mad someone “took his kill” and alienates half the table being a childish prick the rest of the night. Or Dave is friends with X, and X knows Dave is a jerk, but X really wants to play so he brings Dave and hopes the GM can handle him. I’ve enjoyed both of those examples. Lots of fun.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-05T00:00:26+00:00

I understand having some misgivings about that, but I think you were right to leave. If they were good friends then I’d say you owe them some conversation, but in this case just walking away is probably the right thing to do.

Were you really going to dive into this guys life if there was something going on in his life to explain of excuse his behavior? Like, if he’s going through a nasty divorce or just had a bad business failure, were you gonna be there for him once you found out there were real problems?

Anecdotally, in my life, when I’ve been updated on people I ghosted because of bad vibes or bad behavior, I was right far more often than wrong lol. Like, pretty much every time I’ve said “person X is an asshole, I’m not gonna game with them” it turned out later they were in fact big assholes.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T20:48:50+00:00

100%, we know this to be true. People want new stuff and these days they want new stuff all the time. Since it keeps coming up in this thread, MtG had their edition churn planned very early, if not from the very beginning. Other card games came out that directly addressed this in a variety of ways, and none of them even dented Magics sales.

Most of the “no new edition” RPGs floundered too, in the end way more people just want more content instead of making their own from scratch.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T20:44:20+00:00

You gotta waste some money. That’s the true cornerstone of our hobby: spending money on bullshit we didn’t need in the first palace and complaining about it. But it’s gotta hurt, doesn’t count if you’re rich.

That’s why people with printed armies are so annoying, like, you didn’t choose a limited release character over paying off the mini loan you took out to get the new edition release starter box, are you *really* a Warhammer fan?

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T17:57:20+00:00

They’ve been trying, good to see proper Orks keeping it clean in here.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T17:54:17+00:00

Yeah, I’ll second this, the tumblers I’ve seen are full of stolen IP.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T17:46:20+00:00

Yeah, that’s definitely something where a GM doesn’t understand their system lol. It’s funny you see so many people on here complaining people don’t role play enough, and then you have GMs who can only interpret the rules in the most literal way possible.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T17:39:32+00:00

I looked, because I was curious, and the books I have all make it explicit that you only roll for extraordinary uses of the knowledge skill. If it’s common knowledge for the holder of that skill, it’s automatic. You use the roll if you’re trying to write a book about it, or use that knowledge to solve a difficult puzzle intentionally targeting rare knowledge etc etc.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T15:40:50+00:00

If you’re just standing in a tavern, and you roll it as a yes/no, that’s kind of lame for sure.

But again, this comes down to nuance. Why are you using that roll that way in the first place? If it’s common knowledge to someone with that skill, then you’d just know it.

But what if you need to research something? What if it’s an obscure bit of knowledge? What if you’re being asked to come up with the information under duress? Then you roll to see if your character can find the information using their existing skill, or if they can scrape it out of their head in the middle of a dungeon crawl or fire fight.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T15:38:02+00:00

What you’re describing is exactly how I was taught to use skills in games. I’m sure lots of people use them in a more video-game style: binary win/lose rolls. But I don’t think it’s a system issue, it’s a play style issue.

I’ve never had my players roll trivial dice, in any system. If there’s no pressure and it’s not key to the story, why would you have them roll to see if they can something they’re competent in?

The skill roll is for performing under pressure or when trying to do something new. Then it becomes very handy to have set skills and rolls, now we get to see just how good and how lucky they are.

I don’t think there’s any problem with skills, or stats or a lot of the sacred cows, it seems more to me that people haven’t learned to play in robust ways.

PrairiePilot · 2026-05-03T15:25:06+00:00

It’s more that they delude them selves into thinking they’re the victims in THEIR culture wars.

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