Saturday, December 29, 2012

Random Question Soup

Posting to you live from the road where we're watching people be funny and getting drunk on jello syringes! John's professional life is an amazing thing.

But before we went out to this night of comedic debauchery, we filmed a vlog for you from like ninety million questions that filled up our question log over the holidays. Unfortunately, I don't have the transcripts of questions in front of me at the moment, but I'll add them to the post's text later. In the meantime, enjoy John in his sad blanket fort.


That was one of the more eccentric vlogs we've done in a while. Back to normalcy (with Slavs, goddammit) next time!

17 comments:

  1. How hard is it to run a character and be an ST at the same time (especially if you're new at sting?)

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    1. Impossibly hard. This has been covered in another post, which I'm sure Anne can find faster than I can. But the consensus between many experienced ST's is that trying to play a "PC" and be the Storyteller at the same time is a terrible idea and ends at best in mediocrity and at worst in horrible.

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    2. Yeah, mostly what Source J said.

      If you're talking about being an ST and playing an NPC, it can be tricky - the key is to make sure you play the NPC enough that s/he's available to the PCs and responds when they interact with him/her, but that s/he doesn't take up any extra time from them and doesn't get in the way of doing your other jobs as an ST, like calling out rolls and keeping the story moving. It's something you get better at with practice.

      If you're talking about being an ST and also playing a PC in the game, we don't do that. Ever.

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  2. Regarding the death... there's always the option of keeping the dead character in the game in certain ways if you coordinate it. They could always stick around as a ghost or something...

    For example, right now, in Lost Atlanta, my character Iztac Ocelototec, now the Aztec God of Jungles, having been completely fed up with his enemy, Baguada, a Gaulish God of Guerrilas, and, after one last ditch effort to patch things up, went "fuck it" and tried to murder him. The match was close, but he lost. While technically dead, and out of Legend to boot, he was turned into a living trophy head and, as such, can still talk and interact with people. The next step is reviving him.

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    1. Correction, the next step is teaching him NOT TO TRY TO MURDER OTHER GODS. Then he can be revived.

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    2. Letting the dead player stick around as a ghost works great in my games. If someone has Death Senses then things are very easy to integrate, and if nobody does then you can work some 'manifest as a figment' style rule into the game.

      But this is only relevant if you have some intention of reviving the character from the dead. If you don't, then you should probably just make a new character and not stick around as a ghost unless it really makes sense to do so for the story for a couple of games.

      Question from me! How do you get someone off your 'loyalty list' if they are consistently being horrible? More importantly, how does someone get on your 'loyalty list' in the first place?

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    3. Ha ha, that sounds awesome.

      The Loyalty "list" usually consists of anyone you have any reason to be loyal to; the Loyalty Virtue is all about your ability to form quick, inseparable bonds with people that you will defend to the death. Anyone in your family, anyone you have spent significant non-enemy time with, any friends you've made, and anyone you've ever promised to protect are all equally covered by Loyalty. If you have a reason to be loyal to someone, you are also Loyal to them; that's just the way you work, because Loyalty's part of the fabric of your being.

      This is the reason that things like Hod killing Baldur put the entire Aesir pantheon in an uproar, because their Loyalty is rioting every which way and they both can't let the death of someone they're loyal to pass by unaddressed but also can't in turn hurt someone else they're loyal to. They end up having to go create an entirely new person - Vali - to deal with the situation for them, most likely because they're all in Extremity already for failing to save Baldur and can't bring themselves to touch Hod as a result.

      As for getting someone off your Loyalty list - short of acts of great magical power (i.e., almost never happens), you don't. You can't turn your Virtue off for a person at will, even if they're being a huge ass to you; they may not have Loyalty, but you do, and it's not going away just because it's inconvenient. The same way you can't choose a particular kind of ecological disaster for Harmony not to care about anymore, you can't choose a particular person you're related to, friends with or strongly associated with to not be loyal to anymore, even if they keep stealing your wife, blowing up your house and setting bear traps in the woods for you. That's just not the way Virtues work. (Incidentally, Vengeance works the same way in reverse - once someone is on your Vengeance "list", that's a done deal. Even if they start donating everything they own to you and begging for forgiveness daily, you're going to hate them forever.)

      Dealing with someone who no longer deserves your Loyalty is uncomfortable and hard, and if you want to actually do much to punish or fight back against him, you're probably going to have to roll your Loyalty each time to work against it. Unfortunate, but that's what Virtues do - they don't care about fairness, only their core concept.

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    4. How easy is it to get on someones 'Loyalty List'? Cause shouldn't there be people you don't outright wish to kill, but you want nothing to do with, like maybe a group member that you always clash with or is your virtue dictating that you must be loyal to this person even if from the get go you guys clashed?

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    5. We usually give people with Loyalty a few weeks before they get solidly Loyal to the other people in their bands, but even if they don't get along overly well, that's going to happen pretty quickly. Clashing or no clashing, a band of Scions are comrades in arms; they fight together, travel together, and generally save one anothers' bacon pretty often throughout their adventures. You may not like that guy all that much, but after you've been fighting and performing missions together for a little while, you're probably going to be Loyal to him even if you think he's kind of a dick. It's entirely possible to be Loyal to someone you don't like very much - you see it all over stories and myths, from the loyal knight who knows his lord is a dick but serves him unerringly anyway to the clan ties that make characters save their family members from outsiders even though they'd like to punch their lights out themselves.

      Think of it like having a family member you don't like very much. Sometimes you've got a brother or cousin who is just a huge asshole, but at the end of the day he's still family. Loyalty works a lot like that.

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    6. We have had occasional exceptions for characters with really good reasons to not be loyal to one another, but it's an exception, not the rule.

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  3. Anne be careful there is a majestic Canadian Snow Slug behind you!


    ...

    Oh wait...Hi John!

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    1. God, their camouflage must be terrible.

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    2. True, but their thick hides make them almost impossible to kill with even the most deadly of pillows. Also I hear they are quite venomous.

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  4. Thanks for the Ourea clarification! Once you put it as Civilization vs. Untamed Nature, it makes perfect sense. My question was really because, well, the biggest Norse myth of all is about how the worlds will burn in flame, and Aztec myth and legends are chock full of star monsters and evil moon gods. By comparison, Greek Gods never seem to fight too many plant monsters (though come to think of it they do have a bad habit of falling in lust with dryads and being rebuffed by them, and I suppose for the Greek Gods someone refusing to sleep with them is the biggest antagonist of all :D)

    In light of your Ourea explanation I'm actually beginning to see Stvaranje in a new light. I mean, what do the Slavic Gods hate the most: Legendary beings interfering in the World. And what bigger example of Legendary Interference is there than a Titan whose entire purpose in life is to BREAK DOWN AND REMAKE ALL OF REALITY!!!

    Phew, that went on longer than planned, but then I've been away from the blog for a while. Also, I know this is a bit early, but I'm not likely to be online for a while, so Happy New Year everybody!

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    1. Exactly. Svarog! It's not okay!

      Happy New Year to you, too!

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  5. As for the last question, I have to agree completely. I play in two games, one where the number of people is 6 and we switched to Legend of the Five Rings. The other is 8 players and its kind of a mess.. If we take out the number of people in the game, the character interaction between players is pretty bad. Only reason I am staying is cause it gets me away from my family in a game system I do like.

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    1. Yeah, we've found that it's just hard to keep things coherent and even with too many players. The fun of having a bunch around is exciting, but it's hard to sustain.

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