I'm reading a lot of articles about EMP shielding, the contemporary dangers of solar flares, current military and civilian precautions and protections, and so forth.
> Reading the first books reminded me how much younger the writing style is. Nevertheless, Rowling still can't resist throwing in a few bogey jokes which I find a little annoying. But I did LOL at the U-No-Poo joke - I'm a staunch fan of eschatological humour.
I have learned tonight, in a conversation that could come out of Monty Python, that a measuring scale's precision and accuracy are two very different and not necessarily connected factors. My dad obtained a measuring scale that weighs grams up to two decimal points.
> It's the most precise weighing instrument ever built! So it can tell me this thing's exact weight? Oh, no, it's absolutely inaccurate, but it will give you completely the wrong answer to three decimal digits!
> Grimm Sight: You can spend a Fate point to compel a wesen to reveal themselves to you: this gives you knowledge of their Wesen aspect as if you'd successfully used Create Advantage.
> Grimm Reputation: Any time you would gain a free invoke on a Wesen aspect, you may instead place the boost Grimm reputation on yourself if you don't have it already.
@doppelgreener For a Wesen, it's literally having a serial killer show up on your doorstep.
Grimms are generally like ordinary humans, except they can see Wesen and have an ancient and proud history of brutally and often indiscriminately murdering Wesen. They're rare, though, so to most Wesen they're like the boogeyman... until one shows up.
A lot of Wesen have brutal traditions and natures of their own. Wesen are people with animal aspects, and often they indulge in their animal sides.
Some Wesen are subject to violent urges that they can't or won't keep in check, while others just have unpalatable traditions. Many Wesen, though, are just fine.
Grimms consider it their duty, as the only non-Wesen who can recognise a Wesen who doesn't want to be seen, to keep Wesen in check when they run rampant. A lot of Grimms take it too far and just assume all Wesen are bloodthirsty beasts.
Most Wesen, when confronted with a Grimm, assume that their life is in immediate peril and will attack first to defend themselves even if they've done nothing wrong personally. This doesn't help make Grimms think of Wesen as potentially non-violent folk.
The main character in the show is a cop who comes into his Grimm powers in his 30s. The general reaction of Wesen is "He's a cop? That's just not fair."
One of the struggles the show regularly returns to is how the main character tries to reconcile the brutal "law of the jungle" nature of most Grimm/Wesen conflicts with his duties as a police officer.
When the non-violent Wesen in his neighbourhood (including an extended family of beaver Wesen) discover his nature and that he's an honourable kind of guy, they start plying him with gifts to keep on his good side.
On the other hand, later in the series we meet a young woman whose Grimm powers kicked in when she was a teenage orphan: for more than a decade random people have been turning into monsters and attacking her, and whenever she tries to get help or explanations she's locked up as crazy.
Also one of the main character's best friends is a wolf-wesen who has turned his back on his family's bloodthirsty traditions. He's a vegan clock repairman who does yoga meditation to keep his wolf in check.
@doppelgreener Luckily the "your soul in his eyes" thing only happens when the Wesen is in woge (manifesting his animal characteristics, making him look like an anthropomorphic version of that animal, but only visible to Grimms and other Wesen; to normal humans he still looks like a dorky guy in a plaid sweater vest).
(Instead of a dorky red-eyed wolfman in a plaid sweater vest.)
(I love this show, and I especially love the dorky vegan wolf-man with a geek-on for clocks.)
They do a good job of keeping the story grounded in the main characters, while constantly expanding the scope and depth of the Wesen world. From "monster of the week" it grows into a plot that is equal parts soap opera and political thriller, mixed together, complete with magical amnesia-comas and evil shadow governments.
I do plan to draw on some of Grimm's ideas for our game as it advances.
While a lot of its specifics require the "Wesen are the primary Weird thing going on" paradigm that doesn't work for us, its general ideas about the way secretive supernatural power structures work locally and internationally are very useful. Not least because, unlike a series like The Dresden Files, Grimm is more of a "build as you go" story where it feels like stuff is being made up along the way.
and how the first part of it applies to a character who tends to jump on problems too early outside of combat (i.e. they solve other folks' problems before the problems can generate drama/plot), and is methodically aggressive in combat
the main conflict driver for the character is internal -- it's reconciling her childhood (ancient Sparta would be a good analogy for it) with living in a world that is not nearly as martially-minded
So: a) the campaign is designed to give different kinds of problems that your character doesn't have trouble with, b) the conflict you have for your character, no one else wants to engage with
this sounds like you really want to play a different game
this is part of the reason I'm such an advocate of nailing down what a game is about to begin with
Pick one major thing that would make your character more involved in a way people could relate to. Maybe you help other people's problems with more empathy, for example
Remember: realism often isn't fun. Just enough plausibility is all you really need.
@Bankuei @Bankuei -- I often need more plausibility than many other RPers -- OTOH: I can make characters quite dependent on the fine details of a scene for their decision-making, and also willing to leverage details that sit below the abstractions they want to use
@Bankuei basically -- I have trouble designing chars so that their success/failure ratio is interesting: either they bypass problems, win most of the time, or lose most of the time
@Bankuei -- there are players in it I mesh very well with, and some who will barely talk with me because they feel my style of RP does not respect the emotions of other players enough
That's actually a big issue. If people are feeling upset with you - as players, I would seriously consider if I'd be able to modify or play with these folks
If I knew I was making a game unfun for people, and not getting the kind of story/challenge I want from a game, AND there seemed to be no way to talk about it, I would stop. No one is really getting what they want and there's no road forward to fixing it. I might talk to the people I mesh with and ask if they want to play a game with just us.
Actually, I also tend to avoid or leave groups that can't talk about the game honestly, because I figure when problems crop up, we'll be stuck without a way to address them
This actually changes a lot of the questions you've asked
because it's a big difference between "GM +5 players " vs "There's 50 players and most of the interactions are between players amongst themselves in character and few people actually know each other offline"
I don't think too many folks here can give you answers other than the ones people have already said: play a different character, play your character differently, go find another game
You have to meet the group as much as anything else
yeah -- on the "play a different character" front -- one of my main problems is getting those characters involved in the storylines of others and getting them engaged in the storylines of those characters
is that simply a factor of playtime, or is there something else that's going on there?
