@doppelgreener I was pretty much watching all day, but today had a much higher % of stuff I was interested in - I'll only be watching specific things for the rest of the week.

Speedrun terminology: sequence break. Where you exploit a glitch to break the natural sequence of the game by jumping to a future point you normally wouldn't be able to reach.

@doppelgreener This defeats the entire point of a speedrun to me. Not that I watch them.

I don't watch them often

They just did it in Legend of Zelda to walk from a house into another part of the map that wasn't where the house was.

in fact I think this is the first one in a looooong time

I do seem to recall vaguely watching one or two others before like, ever

@Magician Usually the interpretation is: if the game lets you do it, it's fair game for a speedrun. Super Metroid speedruns are defined by certain sequence breaks, and without them the run would be a lot less interesting.

That said, various games' speedrunning crowds distinguish between runs that do and don't use any glitches, and runs that use particular glitches or don't.

It's something of a fine line. If you can, I dunno, bounce off a jumping enemy and onto a platform above that you'd normally get to by running through half a level, that's cool. That demonstrates mastery of the game. But if you can just skip stuff due to a glitch, that's not particularly interesting to me.

@Magician I agree it's a fine line. The Zelda games have some extraordinary glitches though. Windwaker especially has some hilarious and entertaining ones.

Or rather, it's a very fuzzy line: various things like "if you stand over in this (completely normal) part of the room while these enemies spawn, the enemies lose their hitbox and you can do weird stuff to them". Is that a glitch or..?

It's kinda like that red-blue gradient where you're asked "define where it starts being red".

(Pictured above: not actually a glitch, but an easter egg that requires intense effort to unlock.)

@BESW Which game?

@Miniman Riven: the Sequel to Myst.

@doppelgreener A bug (or an undocumented feature depending upon who does the talking)

For some perspective: Super Metroid have Any% runs and 100% runs. In 100% runs, you need every item and to beat every boss. All glitches and exploits are legit (but there aren't all that many), it just matters you beat the game fastest (in any%) or get all the items and beat the game the fastest (in 100%). Any% runners will get the least they need to actually beat the game. Both kinds are highly entertaining to me.

Then there's 100% Reverse Boss runs, where you have to beat every boss in reverse order, and get all the items (any order). :D

There's certain frame-perfect exploits available that are so perfect and absolutely necessary that the speedrunning community is mostly certain the game developers themselves deliberately put those there with speedrunners in mind.

Hm. Was there even a speedrunning community when Super Metroid came out?

Wiki says 1994 was a landmark year for establishing a speedrunning community, three years after Super Metroid.

Speedrunning was a thing at least as far back as 1986, in the original Metroid game, which explicitly rewarded completing it fast.

Hmm.

> Released in August 1986, Metroid was one of the earliest games to introduce special rewards for fast completion times. [...] Prior to the inception of Metroid speedrunning there were special websites which documented these so-called "low-percentage" completion possibilities.

I don't know the history of the speedrunning community's establishment, but safe to say there was speedrunning, and Metroid was one of the games on the forefront of it.

Basically: Super Metroid has the mockball. Normally the morphball is fairly slow compared to your running speed. But if you're running, and you jump, and turn into a morphball right as you hit the ground, your morphball will move at running speed for as long as you keep moving.

There is a room with a slow-closing gate, and if you use the mockball, you can get past it just in time. This is the only way to get past the gate. There's no reason the gate needed to be slow-closing when every other one is already closed when you enter the room.

@doppelgreener The Mockball is a hazard in dwarven bowling.

@BESW Oh yes. That too.

Wow, this skip is crazy.

"Speedrun Skips" would be a good name for a band.

@BESW I think this that just came up in the feed ticker is something you were talking about recently.

Yup.

That blog is one of the best starting places for linking out into good discussions on those topics re: gaming.

(Not least because Bankuei and the folks he links to tend to be people who are personally otherised or marginalised by such tropes, and it's often easier to find discussions about them between folks who aren't personally affected by it.)

For disgaea fans, the game is now: Prinny: Can I really be the hero? estimated for ~35 minutes max.

Poor, dear Prinnies.

Hello

Oh wow. For some reason half the starred wall is by the humble myself. Am I turning into @BESW?

perhaps assimilated?

Oh my. I knew resistance is futile.

@BESW Brogdor, Eimyr, Sleepy, Woppelgreener.

@eimyr You belongg to uzz. You shall bee like uzz.

@Ahriman Hi, BTW. Nice to see you there.

I always see you, Ahriman, as a man of very similar taste in RPGs, looking at how often we race to answer the same questions.

I was not aware of any racing

Not intentional.

But I found a couple times "A new answer has been posted" in the middle of writing, and it was you.

Mostly on WoD questions.

Ah, that's ok. I had the idea I was annoying you somehow

Can you give an example?

Annoying? If ever, it's because of competitiveness and my view that I'm made of more hardcore Mage: Ascension essence than Mage: Ascension itself.

I'm sorry if I ever gave you that impression.

You never did anything wrong.

Just had the impression now

Based on your racing remark

It's one of the few rpgs that I know a lot about

and only Revised, new world of darkness is very spotty (and more sued as inspiration for use in other rpgs)

I have never played new WoD, so wouldn't compete with that and I actually prefer 2nd edition and 20th Anniversary recently.

I see advantages in cross splat play in nwod, the regular group is stuck in Revised

Also, why 2nd?

Hmmm

It depends on the game.

I heavily dislike the Avatar Storm metaplot in Mage

The idea that the Doissetep is destroyed is OK with me, but the cutoff of umbra is no as palatable

Also, "technocracy won, enjoy your game, and actually it's the nephandi who will win" is cringeworthy at best

Intellectually I totally understand and appreciate the "living world" effect of White Wolf's progressive narrative. But I'm not sure it'll ever stop feeling weird.

Mmm, understandable reasons

Same here. However, the metaplot steps between editions were so over the top, that it never fit my games.

You wanna tell your own story, White Wolf, go write a book. Let my players write their own story instead of getting to play in the wake of yours.

Our group mucks in Vampire

And they did, but the books they published were nowhere near as over the top as the metaplot events.

Most of the metaplot is generally ignored

Except for the Ravnos chronicle, where went to India to find out what happened

or the current Giovanni chronicle, where my former character apparently caused the cracking of the Abyss (and thus released the Demons)

Back to the question, I really liked the crispier mechanics of Revised. In Vampire I think I preferred Revised, but at the time it was very hard to come by where I lived, so we used a mix of splats, with 2nd ed rules as the go-to clarification

I don't think I've ever run a game in any system that followed the system-specific setting events carefully, except for two instances where it was a larger franchise with an RPG made for it after the fact and the reason we were playing was to play in that franchise.

@Ahriman Have you seen how 20th anniversary deals with metaplot?

Haven't really dug into it

@BESW Same here, but it's one of the reasons I both love and hate Faerun. I had a fellow player say "But Elminster did XXX that completely nullifies the story!" once. I replied with "Who the F is Elminster?". And that's how the group divided into pro-Elminster metaplot and anti-Elminster metaplot.

With regards to Mage, they gave you more freedom for certain points. Events were described and some options for consequence were present as well

@eimyr The appropriate answer to that question is "Our next victim."

(Or, in concession to D&D's levelling onus, "A guy on our hit list.")

@Ahriman They have a huuuge banner saying "OPTIONAL" they fly wherever they mention metaplot.

And they always present a few alternative options under "This happened", "This happened differently" and "Never happened" titles.

That gives more freedom

[thinks] I've dabbled in the Death Gate Cycle and Enchanted Forest settings, but always with major re-writes. The only franchises I've tried to adhere to closely are Dresden Files (which turned out to be an awful setting for us to play in because its established canon is very constricting) and SG-1 (which turned out to have made a terrible choice in matching RPG engine to franchise ethos).

Our group is always debating whether Zapathasura survived or not. Some think it did, others point to solar satellites

@BESW example for SG-1?

In my games Zapathasura never existed.

Or did. It doesn't matter.

SG-1 is a TV show about characters of great moral fibre succeeding against overwhelming odds through tenacity and ingenuity. For the official RPG they chose d20 Spycraft, a system which sidelines personality traits when it acknowledges them at all and places emphasis on a needlessly finicky combat simulation system that centres on high outcome randomisation. For a show that doesn't even have a combat scene every episode, and combat is almost never the way to solve big problems.

I can only assume they chose Spycraft because it was 2003 and the OGL had everyone and their uncle trying to force the d20 System engine to fit whatever game they wanted to publish.

(more often than not, combat in Stargate is a pressure to solve big problems right now before more people get shot.)

Alternity would have been a better fit

or Fate

(I have a great campaign outline that I've been sitting on for about eight years now.)

hee

sorry it didn't work out that one time with just the three of us

We had numbers AND system working against us.

it probably didn't help that it was just two PC's working with 2 characters each

yeah we did

And I was a lot less flexible in my ideas about how a game could be run, too.

That was, what, six or seven years ago, I think.

I am still a little surprised we thought that book and the system it had would be capable of helping us run that XD

jeez

that was a long time ago

just to be clear I would so play Daniel Jackson if that was a reasonable option XD

it isn't, but I am still excited for this game

I'd probably play Carter or Teal'c

and I am sure I can come up with a reasonable character to play

@doppelgreener that would be my third and second choices, in those orders XD

it makes things easy that there's only four to choose from

O'neil is fine, nothing wrong with him, but I don't think I could pull him off honestly

My idea for the campaign has us starting as non-SGC military, unaware of the Stargate's existence. Partly for drama and plot, and partly to help bring up to speed any player who isn't familiar with the franchise.

yeah I remember

and it's completely fine and reasonable that we don't play the main cast of the show

besides, you know I make too many of my own characters as is XD

I will have no trouble with having to do that for this too XD

@trogdor "'Pull me off'? I'm not on anything, Carter."

lol

you know what I mean you joker

or at least I would think you do XD

Jackson is the nerd who is sorta reserved until a subject of interest to him, which yes does include a bunch of stuff, comes up

Teal'c is the alien who only has something to say when it is important or he is misunderstanding human culture

Carter, I have no excuse other than that she is OP

she gets to do the science stuff and the shooty stuff

O'neal is too much of an in your face kind of person

not my first choice of a character to RP

huh. I don't think I am seeing rep updates anymore in the achievements drawer. I mean, you click the drawer and its there, but its not turning the button green

@Tritium21 you only see a rep update if there's a net gain, so if you've downvoted 20 things, a single upvote to your question won't show up. does that make sense of it?

@doppelgreener the only item that was new in the drawer was 1 +10.

then yes that sounds weird for sure

i'll watch out for if it's happening to me too

Ill watch to make sure it just wasn't the one time. If it isn't, ill go to meta.se

earleir +10 popped up without issue

ah, so nothing tells you if you got a downvote huh?

the drawer does, but you don't get popped up on your screen

@trogdor yeah, the flashy green rectangle only shows up if there's some kind of net gain to show.

i think this is a good question... until the last paragraph.

@Tritium21 Yeah, I was thinking about close voting, but having trouble articulating why in a comment, which I always take as a hit that I should reconsider.

@Tritium21 Doesn't that smell of duplication too?

@eimyr It might. I don't go looking unless i have seen one before though

I don't go looking at all, my search-fu is poor.

@Tritium21 I was seeing that for a few hours, too. (Around 0300-0400 UTC)

However, if the last paragraph was nonexistent, I think I have a good answer to that!

@eimyr But...if the last paragraph was nonexistent...there'd be no actual question there...right? @.@

basically what he needed in that particular arc is the application of the rule of three clues and some talking about game expectations, Same Page Tool perhaps.

@Miniman I can see the problem he has. Players are confused and unexcited. The question is how to fix and/or prevent that.

@eimyr I agree thats what he needed, but the question should still kinda be narrowed

@Tritium21 And that's why I VTCd as is.

Also, he actually asked the duck in the question, citing him: " but I wasn't fully sure how the PCs would reach their end goal of figuring out the source of the problem."

I once ran a D&D sandbox game for my friends set in the magical North Pole, without telling them it was intended for them to be a sandbox where they could do whatever. They were very confused, wandered the wilds a bit, fought some wolves, then attacked a Christmas Elf stronghold because they thought they were supposed to. (It's a game about fighting things, right?)

If he wasn't sure how to figure out his own adventure, how could the players?

The Christmas Elves in this game were actually evil, because Santa had turned evil and their hearts were bound to him - but it was still floundering.

@doppelgreener ouch, did it work?

@eimyr Nah, we actually only played one session because it was also in D&D 3.5e and we decided it was not the system for us. By the time we went back to 4e, we had other things to do.

BTW, It's a darn shame we often have to VTC or heavily change a new user's first question. I know how frustrating this is and I can only wonder how many people decided the site is generally unhelpful before they had a chance to embrace the SE spirit.

The players didn't like that they didn't get all their basic cool features and a number of non-auto-attack things to do at level 1, and I find that pretty agreeable.

I have never liked the ethos of other editions where your core features just get doled out to you level by level, so you never feel like your class is quite done yet. In D&D 4e, you are definitely your class at level 1, and you just get more awesome from there.

I can only second that resentment, Greener.

I always try to push "start at lvl 3" policy on any DnD derivative game I'm running or playing,

I'm starting to think dnd 4e is something that I would prefer to 3.5/PF

Where is 5e on that plane of "Frustrating amounts of disorganized prior material" vs. "bothersome and unbalanced mechanics"?

@eimyr He comes from other SE sites, perhaps that has given him enough background to know what to do?

At 664 rep in Academia I have my doubts.

Not that there's something wrong with Academia. Plenty of great folks there.

~500 points they start to really get how it works for...one stack.

@Ahriman Alas, individual Stack site cultures don't often translate.

Shame

RPG.SE takes a much stricter attitude toward many of the common Stack protocols and guidelines than other sites, which are either too large to moderate effectively, or have subjects which require aggressive modification of the Stack protocols in order to function within its engine.

@Ahriman Ding ding!

Ding ding?

Game of Thrones reference.

@Tritium21 Seems an edit has been made!

@eimyr that looks answerable to me

I left a comment, I wouldn't reopen it just yet.

Never got past season 1

or Chapter 2 of book 1

Never mind then.

[>_<]But I want to know

Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition's being speedrun in AGDQ. Darksiders 2 speedrun largely involved infinite-jump moves, tricks to make temporary (huge!) buffs last forever and ever, and getting out of bounds to infinite-jump or run across ceilings from the opposite side to skip large portions of areas. (They completed the game in just a few seconds over 1 hour.)

@Tritium21 And he rolled with stuck players

I really like how this question turned out!

Haha.

Good morning

Hi

How are things?

Pretty good.

Just wrote a backstory for an evil character I am going to play in a RP.

You?

Oh, I just got my backstory written.

What for?

someone is going to play me in a RP

trying very hard to pretend the joke didn't fail completely

Oh.

ho ho ho ho ho ho i get it

Sorry that went right over my head

Do you want to see your backstory?

I have a very exciting week ahead

Sure!

I still need to add some fluff but the general idea is there

docs.google.com/document/d/…

Today I'm going to a new tabletop gaming group to see what sort of people are there. On Wednesday there's my first swordsmanship lesson.

Things are looking pretty sweet.

Comments are on if you want to point anything out

OK, so how can he fail?

Because so far I can't think of a way of him unintentionally being bested.

unless PCs are elder gods

or is that a PC?

This is a text RP and he is not meant for combat.

still

He isn't all powerful.

I could always add something about how the ritual uses a bunch of his power

The portal one.

Is he a PC or NPC?

if you don't mind me asking?

Is this for a particular system?

It's a text RP

Free form

no system

@eimyr PCs are, more often than not, functionally indistinguishable from elder gods: unthinkably powerful beings who move through the world like a natural force fomenting chaos and leaving disaster in their wake, motivated by otherworldly understandings of the cosmos and treating the people they meet as fungible non-entities.

...

My next characters name will be Cthulhu

XD

I can't pull of that kind of insane.

Have any of you guys done text rps?

I don't even know what they are.

MUDs?

What is mud?

Vallheru clones?

Freeform chat ephemera?

No you literally just write a story for your character and then play them in whatever setting.

No rules unless the room makes them

...forum-based, LJ-based, email-based...

Are we just talking about freeform roleplay in general?

Just don't be a knob and most people don't care.

I do IRC RP all the time. sometimes with system sometimes without

I do chat based

"Text RP" is extremely general.

@BESW That's why I'm asking... PCs have powers to manipulate time by imposing the feeling of guilt or shame onto the Demiurge, who in his malice orchestrates a world-tearing event called retcon time...

Unless you actually meant "text RPS" instead of "text RPs." That's still unclear, but not quite so broad.

RPS = Rock, Paper, Shotgun?

Real Person Slash?

One sec

Role Playing Strategy?

I've briefly done email RP, I've done a bunch of forum and chat roleplay.

Rekt Possum Systems

When I think of "text RP," I generally default to the assumption that it's an unsynchronised forum freeform game.

But it could just as easily be Storium.

By text RP I mean. You make a character and introduce it into the world populated by other writers characters. Together you write how the characters interact with eachother and the world around them. Normally one person, the room creator, plays all the NPC. I have heard it called interactive storytelling before I think.

Well, I immediately thought of unarbitrated MUD-based GMless roleplay

I use rphaven if you guys are interested.

@Aaron And what everyone's suggesting are various ways and means for accomplishing that.

Each of them has very unique benefits and drawbacks.

Ah. I said I used a chat site like this one if that was the question.

I think I misunderstood what was being asked

@BESW White wolf players typically don't agree. The POINT of the game is interacting with the ongoing metaplot. This is the reason that CofD1e never displaced WoD, and why CofD2e gained a metaplot.

@Tritium21 As I said, I understand the attraction abstractly.

(What is CofD?)

the new name for new world of darkness

Vampire the Requiem is CofD

Chronicles. Right.

Well, I'm not too sure if that's the reason actually.

Why do they spell out "of"?

@Aaron otherwise it's Call of Duty? :D

Because CofD has no Black Ops or Modern Warfare implications

Ha! I got it :D

I think I have seen other things do that as well.

and the brand is owned by a videogame company...

"COUGHED: THE PLAGUENING."

lol

We should have a competition. Give everyone an acronym and whoever makes the funniest one wins

Funniest word combo

We do that with BESW semi-annually.

I have participated in at least one of those

(Best Entry Shall Win.)

@Tritium21 For me the only reason why I didn't transition to CofD was that it tried to reinvent the wheel by throwing out a pretty coherent backstory and writing it anew, only with fewer good ideas. Also, they tore Mage apart. What I think they should have done is to remove the metaplot and various splats and introduce the new mechanics, while keeping the old origins intact.

Bog Elves Smell Wretched

@eimyr nice XD

That was a shout-out to chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/26541447#26541447 and chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/11?m=26581636#26581636

@eimyr the idea when CofD1e came out was to have zero metaplot. That fell apart, but that was the design philosophy of the first edition.

(Bright Elves Smell Worse.)

@Tritium21 And I was moderately interested in 1st ed. Didn't even bother with 2nd. Cringed at God Machine.

@eimyr as did I

@Tritium21 How do you feel about 20th Anniv?

Plot note: Magical beings that are about the most beautiful thing to be around in the galaxy. Most species that think this don't have noses. Those beings reek.

All the ones I am coming up with aren't funny. I will come up with one at least.

@eimyr It is literally Revised Unabridged edition. So if you liked 2nd or Rev edition of the core rules, you should like 20

...

addition?

Revision?

For me 20th is the best thing since sliced bread, so I'm biased. 2nd ed fluff, revised-Revised crunch and metaplot OPTIONAL

god, I'm so monothematic

It has to be metaplot optional - the books cover mutually exclusive concepts in the metaplot

pretty much

More to the point, its "pick and mix your metaplot"

yeah, but you have an option of discarding it completely, apart from the very basics

Im just happy to get Revised edition Wraith

@BESW Oh, oh:

No wait I mixed up a letter. Uh...

[sleeps on it]

Bothering Evils? Summon Winchesters.

(B and E don't seem to offer up the best words for this one XD)

Boggart Elvis Summons Winston

Bogus Elvis is Seriously Wasted.

I have met a seriously wasted bogus elvis.

On the "things not showing up" front: I earned a badge three hours ago without the little ticker next to the envelope turning green. (I'm not expecting a green +X to show up next to it, but in my experience the little chart has turned green upon badge-earning.) Anyone else seeing this?

Ok, so bug in the drawer... anyone experience it on another stack?

hoot!

new year brought a montrous manual 2ed

More terror for my players!

its always an ugly situation when someone managed to get an answer in before a vtc... and the question gets edited to make the answer irrelevant

Something annoys me about the way musical instruments, especially guitars, are markets. "Precision, hand made in <insert country>". Musical instruments are by their nature precision. If you can play a chord on them in tune, they have been precisely built. There are no machines out there that take wood in one end and spit out an instrument from the other - they are by their nature hand made (even the ones that have steps done on CNC machines... and those carry the 'hand made' hallmark!).

@nitsua60 hey there