Not a bar, but plays one on TV

7:07 AM

What is the origin of this room's name, anyway?

I am aware of the "but I play one on TV" part

in RPG General Chat, Apr 7 '14 at 14:44, by Joshua Aslan Smith

@Lord_Gareth I would totally chat this up with you in a side chat though I feel like its a better convo for sitting at a bar

kviiri

9:30 AM

@BESW Excellent one :D

trogdor

11:07 AM

lol

the origin of the "But I played one on TV" part is that one actor playing a doctor thing right?

BESW

I'm not a Doctor, but I play one on TV Commercial 1986 with Peter Bergman Vicks Formula 44

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trogdor

yes that

I want to say "comercials were so dumb back then" but really that hasn't changed

how specifically they are dumb has changed

kviiri

@trogdor Aye

Derpy

12:48 PM

in Kirin Village Outskirts , 5 mins ago, by Derpy

Totsukuni no Shoujo「AMV」- Never Fade

►

JohnP

1:43 PM

@RandomPerson Chat is never a waste of space. Well, except for Mos Eisley, but that's a different topic.

RandomPerson

???

Who is Mos Eisley

kviiri

@RandomPerson Mos Eisley is the Scifi.SE chatroom and it has a reputation of not being a very friendly place. Not sure if that's still the case though.

JohnP

@kviiri It was shut down over a year ago, with a strong warning from the Shog that if if EVER gets unfrozen, there will be hell to pay.

At my last unofficial estimate, the tally for Mos was uncountable chat suspensions, a couple of main site year long bans, one perma ban and a mod requested to step down. It was truly a wretched hive, living up to its moniker.

kviiri

@JohnP Good grief, what did they do in there? Was it fandoms fighting or what?

Okay on second thought I'm not sure if discussing it here is really warranted.

JohnP

@kviiri just very inappropriate chat/comments/activity that refused to heed warnings.

I think it's still accessible, since no chat room ever really goes away.

← 10 messages moved from RPG General Chat

@goodguy5 - We were discussing the Scifi chat Mos Eisley and its demise.

user15026

1:53 PM

I'd rather not discuss it at all, because some of it is...uncomfortable and borders on things I cannot be around for my own mental health, but at least if it's here it's easier I guess? I can just avoid the room for a bit

kviiri

Like I said, I don't really care to discuss it further so I reckon it doesn't have to go on.

Gwideon

3:02 PM

hello

vicky_molokh

/me waves.

Gwideon

how are you

vicky_molokh

Another quiet day at work. Also picking the soundtrack for an eldritch cult investigation story arc for my campaign in the background.

Gwideon

nice

vicky_molokh

Going through Nox Arcana albums.

Those seem to offer a varied selection of themes, all in various ways ominous.

Gwideon

3:07 PM

I've been using a bunch of synth wave for my sci-fi campaign

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Oh, synthwaves go for other themes.

Gwideon

yeah

vicky_molokh

Dynotron and Stellardrone are great for generic space stuff.

Gwideon

true. There's a bit more cyber punk within my campaign but i think i'm gonna start transitioning to using destiny music.

vicky_molokh

For cyberpunk, I guess you're already aware of Scandroid and other Klayton's projects.

Gwideon

3:16 PM

I am not

vicky_molokh

scandroid.bandcamp.com/album/scandroid

Gwideon

oooh I'm liking this

i'll have to use this

vicky_molokh

Klayton is pretty cool overall, and varied in terms of style. I'm using maybe 30%-50% of the projects for different themes. Though the Scandroid project itself seems to have started great and turn out so-so by the third album.

Gwideon

yeah I can see what you mean

vicky_molokh

3:31 PM

@Gwideon Also, I found that the VA1HA11A game soundtrack is pretty nice for a 'neon-lit nighttime city' theme.

Never played the actual game though.

Gwideon

okay. will have to check it out

vicky_molokh

Sorry if I'm being to pushy with all the endorsements. I can back off from that topic if it's so.

Gwideon

nah it's good

vicky_molokh

It's just that I have, probably since my first campaigns, considered thematic or at least mood-oriented soundtrack important to RPGs.

As time went on and I shifted to predominately online gaming, I started picking even longer playlists and got into the habit of timing the messages to changes in the music and sometimes other sound effects (with a mixture of successes and failures).

@Gwideon What sorts of groups/albums are you already using for your campaign?

The synthy ones.

Gwideon

using a bunch of mixes from astral throb and Odysseus

vicky_molokh

3:45 PM

I should check them out.

Gwideon

anyways

I've wondered about using I'm only human by rag n' bone man as a theme song for a space western

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon I suppose it could work.

I think I have an odd conception of what sorts of music is associated with Westerns.

But hey, I'm a silly foreigner who's never been to the American continents.

kviiri

I find it funny how ragtime is associated with Westerns and Prohibition

The former, a few decades early, the latter, similarly a bit late :-)

vicky_molokh

My primary associations with Westerns would be:
- Public Enemy from Starcraft;
- The Gambler by Kenny Rogers (ever since a few weeks ago);
- The Rebel Galaxy soundtrack.
And yeah, two out of those are space Westerns.

Some day I'd want to GM or play in a Space Western. Love the æsthetic, the frontier, the archetype of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. But I probably don't fit in terms of understanding the deeper meanings of the genre.

Gwideon

I would love to do a full on space western.

It's kinda one of my favorite sci-fi subgenres

@vicky_molokh What do you think those deeper meanings are

vicky_molokh

4:05 PM

@Gwideon Well, I remember that once I brought up the topic of loving the superficial imrpessions of Westerns, and got told that essentially I'm getting some misconceptions about the genre expectations. E.g. I wanted a campaign to have both the local aliens and the arriving humans being on roughly par in terms of technological development and military might (but very different tech trees), and was told that this is contrary to genre expectations.

I'll try to dig through the logs to see if I can find more concrete examples.

Gwideon

It's not against the conventions of the genre. Space westerns do tend to focus less on big stories though and tend to focus more on a small ragtag group or a lone gunslinger type.

@vicky_molokh but really I was talking more about the themes that usually come up in space westerns

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Well, theme-wise, IIRC the point of that criticism was that expectations of tragic asymmetry when the two worlds meet, which I didn't intend to follow.

I think I liked the Defiance setup more than that.

(But I only saw Defiance much later than that discussion happened.)

(Of course Defience is a futuristic but not truly space Western, what with happening on Terra.)

NautArch

@vicky_molokh I really really liked Defiance.

vicky_molokh

Yeah, Defiance was great.

MikeQ

The tricky bit about westerns is how to handle its somewhat racist attitudes towards indigenous cultures, especially if historical accuracy is a priority. Otherwise don't worry too much about getting the theme "wrong", just go with whatever seems like a Western to you and your intended audience.

Gwideon

4:16 PM

that's not the only theme space westerns can explore.I like the Idea of exploring humanity and that sort of thing and yeah.

vicky_molokh

@NautArch It managed to be gritty and serious, yet it wasn't hopeless. I found it about comparable to mid-seasons Babylon 5, which is about right where I want it to be.

@Gwideon Exploring humanity in what way?

NautArch

@vicky_molokh I was definitely bummed when it got cancelled.

Gwideon

I'm not really sure how to explain

vicky_molokh

Things I *want* to see in a Space-Western-esque setting/campaign, either as a player or as a GM:
- The new settlements may be less cool than the big cities at home, but are able to maintain themselves and produce stuff (I have a dislike for assembly lines being the end-all-be-all of crafting stuff in settings);
- Smaller-scale settlements;
- There is a place for PCs to make a meaningful difference (even if they're not superhuman);
- I want me some aliens, but with *both* some cross-species tension *and* some cooperation;

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh I guess I like exploring how broken people come together and how one persons compassion can affect people. I also like Seeing how people deal with violence. I also like seeing the wonders of space and how small that can make people feel. I'm weird I guess.

I guess the greater themes of westerns just with a scifi twist

vicky_molokh

4:28 PM

@Gwideon I think I have a certain hard-to-pin-down view of a distinction between broken and just imperfect-but-adapted-to-it. Compassion-wise, I think I very rarely found stories where my characters wouldn't skew heavily either towards or away from compassion, so e.g. 'do I spare this enemy' tends to get same answers per PC most of the time.

I do wonder how the 'dealing with violence' thing could go. This time more from a GM PoV, I think that's also one where story+players/characters combinations tend to be such that the same PC tends to either always deal with it with a shrug, or always be angsty about it.

I'd be curious to see campaign+character combinations for which things are more nuanced.

Gwideon

4:50 PM

well I was less talking in the terms of a game but more in the terms of the subgenre in general

Gwideon

5:55 PM

anyways um i'm not really sure what to talk about

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon What's your current science fiction campaign about and what's the setting like?

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh it's this group of people that got thrown together by a job and kinda decided to stick together. It's a space opera with some cyber punk elements. there's alot of tension in the setting as alot of the frontier worlds are rebelling against the central imperial governments. also there's alot of crime and other stuff.

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon So it's essentially a mission-runner sort of campaign against the tense backdrop?

Gwideon

It has magic in it < mostly because we had a player who wanted to play a warlock.

vicky_molokh

~~Oh. Ease of adding magic to it makes it sound like you're using one of the more generic game systems out there.~~ Wrong guess, it seems.

Gwideon

6:01 PM

@vicky_molokh yeah basically. I'm trying to push my group towards the center of the galaxy as that's were alot of interesting stuff happens and it's where I hope to get them kinda caught up in the whole rebel vs empire conflict

also it's based on dnd 5e with ultramodern and esper genesis added on

it's interesting trying to get stuff to work in sync without destroying everything. it's kinda a monstrosity mechanics wise

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Carrot, stick or both?

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh carrot. specifically the warlock. His patron has tasked him with finding a sword at the center of the galaxy

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Is the party generally reluctant to go there?

Gwideon

no not really

vicky_molokh

Ah, so prospects are looking well then.

Gwideon

6:07 PM

anyways I'm watching through rebels so I maybe a bit slow

vicky_molokh

Don't worry, this is the sort of chat where people don't generally expect immediate answers.

Gwideon

okay

vicky_molokh

I, likewise, don't always reply immediately even when at the keyboard. Usually either due to having some urgent-ish matter, or, apparently more commonly lately, because the page doesn't always update properly in the background.

Gwideon

6:25 PM

yeah that happens

Gwideon

6:49 PM

don't really know what to talk about

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Are you saying this because you want to chat but lack ideas, or because you feel some sort of external pressure to keep talking?

Gwideon

the first one

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Well, there's your campaign, there's music, there's language, there are other roleplaying matters, and there's the option of taking a sudden turn into some more philosophical topics that have been brought up from time to time.

Gwideon

7:08 PM

I don't know

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon What are the PCs in the party like in the space opera of yours?

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh Well I have a warlock who believes he's shooting a gun everytime he uses eldritch blast. I have an android face who can break the fourth wall and talk to the narrator. I have an arachne infiltrator who is your stereotypical assassin, there's also a lizard folk grounder who's basically the soldier of the group. Finally I have a small human infiltrator who's also the pilot for some reason.

yeah I have some weird pcs

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Not the quirkiest bunch I've seen, I think, but certainly quirky for the genre as I imagine it.

Gwideon

the group has called themselves "Idiots in SPAAAAAAACCCCCEEEE"

so yeah

vicky_molokh

7:30 PM

My secondary campaign's party (Eclipse Phase) includes:
- An AI first contact drone that got infected by an eldritch alien virus, becoming sapient and a psionicist, so now prefers residing in biological bodies because the virus makes cyberbrains uncomfortable;
- A thuggish dolphin who used to be owned by the octopus mafia of Ceres, now free, and usually keeping his mind uploading into metal dolphin-like bodies with telescoping tentacles;
- A human who was born in the 90s, and lived all the way to 2145, and underwent body modification to become anatomically dragonlike (wings and a breath-lik…

Gwideon

wow geez

Yuuki

@vicky_molokh I was about to say, you should just have one guy who's just some normal dude.

And everyone else in the party is in awe of them, like they're something the rest of the party has never seen before.

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon That party isn't too far out for Eclipse Phase. The sample characters throughout the book are comparable.

Gwideon

here's an interesting thought. if you were able to become an alien/race from any sci-fi or fantasy setting which would you become.

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Are only aliens, and biological ones at that, acceptable targets?

Yuuki

7:42 PM

Probably Terran, those guys appear in almost every sci-fi or fantasy story I've read. There's got to be some kind of memetic ability that allows them to invade the thoughts of pretty much every writer of the genre(s).

Gwideon

well androids and that sort of thing are also acceptable answers.

vicky_molokh

Because currently I'm thinking that an infomorph, whether from Eclipse Phase or Transhuman Space, is the best of all worlds.

In fact I've been thinking so for a long time.

Gwideon

@Yuuki HAHAHA

hmm I'd probably take tiefling. I don't exactly know why but the aesthetic is interesting and fun.

Yuuki

> horns = good
> more horns = more gooder

seems like pretty sound logic to me

vicky_molokh

Main reasons for favouring infomorphs are:
- No more need to be concerned about physical ageing of the brain;
- Can make backups;
- Can operate any body as the situation warrants, biological or synthetic, or none at all when unneeded;
- Can travel by wire, beam or (as a last resort) radio.

Gwideon

7:46 PM

@vicky_molokh Interesting. that does sound rather appealing honestly

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon I do hope I didn't use a wholly unfamiliar term. If there's a need, I'll elaborate.

Gwideon

no need

vicky_molokh

Of course that brings up some philosophical questions, and my choice is indicative of what answers I favour.

@Gwideon What about you?

Gwideon

I honestly kinda wish I could just be whatever I wanted.

@vicky_molokh Um honestly a tiefling

anyways I'll shut up

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon As in, changing as the situation warrants too?

Gwideon

7:54 PM

yeah

vicky_molokh

With the tiefling being the one that you fancy in the present but not necessarily in the future?

Gwideon

pretty much

um it's probably not just me but um I don't really feel comfortable in my meat space body. there are way to many times when I wish I could just change it.

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon For all the wonders of biology, human bodies can warrant a lot of improvement/change.

Gwideon

yeah it could

trogdor

8:26 PM

seems more than reasonable to me

kviiri

@Gwideon I think most of us do, at least occasionally

Although I'm an otter so I've got an objectively good thing going for me

Since Gwideon's been writing, I got back to working on a short story I came up with ages ago. It's about a hole in space, and time travel, kinda.

I should put more words into science, less into science fiction, but here we are, heh.

Gwideon

8:44 PM

i've kinda felt really burned out

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Crafting a narrative with no back-and-forth with someone else can be hard, that's normal.

Luckily, you don't have to push yourself to write if you don't want to, since you seem to be doing this at leisure and not as a job.

kviiri

I feel kinda proud of myself because my SO's a physicist and has a critical eye for science mistakes, I've pre-empted most of her commentary this time around

Gwideon

nice

kviiri

Now I must be off for the night

vicky_molokh

9:07 PM

Thinking of other quirky parties I've been involved with as a player or GM:

Transhuman Space:
- A bioroid who became an infomorph;
- A retired 3D-printer/factory;
- An allegedly Japanese spaceborn young genius inventor who didn't seem very Japanese;
- 7-9 little bioroid dragons forming a biological hive mind of sorts (NPCs).

Transhuman Space hypothetical (a show-within-a-show campaign that never took off):
- An uplifted raccoon who writes books for children;
- Some AI;
- An Elf Kitten* news anchor.
* == The Elf Kitten model of bioroids is made without ability to produce human speech.

DæmonSpace, a kitchen-sink rotating-GM anything-goes campaign:
- A dual-soul ghost that transformed between the mortal soul and eternal soul modes, one impulsive and offensive, the other defensive and slow;
- A dryad with binding vines and some other plant powers;
- A [PROTOTYPE]-like shapeshifter cleric with a penchant for showy blood sacrifices;
- A living shadow with fencing skills and short-range teleportation;
- (Prospective, never entered play:) A Necron-Lord-esque lich-like entity who could raise minions.

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh some one played a 3d printer

wow

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Yes. The 3D printer was probably the most intelligent character in the party, had (as I found out years after the game) software that made it great at predicting human behaviour, was a cool hacker, oftentimes schemer, and was the only one who tended to challenge my PC's penchant for telling others what to do by way of well-thought arguments.

Gwideon

9:24 PM

@vicky_molokh I'll have to let my pcs know about that one.

anyways

vicky_molokh

Mindjammer (prospective, waiting to start after New Year):
- A mothership AI (ship included) who started out as a wargame and meme-maker AI in the gamer community, aligned with the Commonality not out of loyalty, but due to having an enemy in common.
- Felinoid former pirate captain turned . . . defated and reeducated into being a black op / deniable privateer for the Commonality.
- Some sort of alien from hyperspace who's temporarily stuck here but is willing to look over and temporarily help out the Commonality.

I can shut up if it's gone too far.

(And besides I am running out of memories of quirky parties.)

Gwideon

nah it's good. I've mostly dealt with dnd which doesn't make super quirky parties from what i've seen

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon I've mostly been gaming in GURPS and lately in FATE Core, but armed with houserules and youthful overconfidence, we used to make some rather un-WoD-like parties with WoD back in the day too.

Gwideon

yeah

@vicky_molokh there is a mystic in one of my parties who has an eternal hatred for chairs.

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Surely that has to do with someone pranking her by carefully sawing off the legs off a chair at some point in the mystical academy?

Gwideon

9:35 PM

No idea

Gwideon

9:57 PM

I'm trying to do a short story based on the song Soldier, Poet, King

vicky_molokh

Sorry, not acquainted.

Gwideon

Soldier, Poet, King

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It works for a fantasy type set up. Also the whole album is interesting

vicky_molokh

I'm guessing it has Abrahamic subtext that I'm only vaguely aware of.

Gwideon

@vicky_molokh the album takes it's title from the screwtape letters by c.s. lewis. also yeah it has some abrahamic subtext but it's good music. I'm not religious but I can appreciate leaning on that symbolism

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon But either way, I'm drawing a blank on the symbolism because I only ever read Lucas and only very small bits of the other books in the Abrahamic tradition. I think the idea of a poet toppling a city-state is the most interesting of the bunch, but also I can't imagine myself making a short story even based on that.

Gwideon

10:05 PM

well I was thinking of relying more on the character archetypes presented. also the king part of the song is a giant reference to christ. specifically the "brow of beaten thorn", and "david's boy"

vicky_molokh

Also, I've been thinking: it's been about 1½ decades since I ever wrote actual stories meant for direct reading. I'm so used to presenting stories as RPG campaigns, but that allows me to be much more . . . careless about the phrasing and paragraph structure and all those things.

Gwideon

true

@vicky_molokh anyways I'll shut up. I like analyzing imagery in songs

vicky_molokh

@Gwideon Ooh, I like songs with meaningful lyrics, but often it's hard to decipher what the author was actually thinking of/meaning with the text.

Which is to say, I prefer 'easy mode' lyrics that I don't need to scratch my head for too long to figure out.

Gwideon

yeah it is

vicky_molokh

But some analysis is interesting.

Though at times a problem for me is parsing the text from audio, because text lyrics are unavailable. Or, in some cases, there's also non-singing speech in the songs which the authors assume doesn't require a libretto, but I at times have trouble parsing.

(English is my third language and I spend relatively little time training in audial fluency, and even less actually speaking it.)

Gwideon

10:10 PM

oh I can get a text version of the lyrics to you

vicky_molokh

Oh I already found the S/P/K.

But e.g. Mind in a Box left me scratching my head for a while.

(Speaking of which, if you haven't heard it already, I suggest MiaB for the cyberpunky stuff. It's got lyrics surrounding a narrative lasting about 5 albums so far.)

vicky_molokh

10:24 PM

@Gwideon Thinking of archetypes, I think there's something of a mismatch: if taken without relying on the subtext so much, two of the three archetypes seem like 'adventurers', and the third is unlike them. If he's an adventurer and king, then he's outright better. If not, he's the odd 'carry' in the trio, which seems like an unusual dynamic for a short story that's supposed to cover the toppling of a city-state.

V2Blast

11:02 PM

@NautArch As did I! And it didn't hurt that Bear McCreary did the soundtrack (with his brother Brendan performing on much of it) and David J. Peterson made the languages - they're two of my favorite figures in their respective fields. And it's a shame that it got canceled given the awesome cliffhanger it ended on.

Transcript for

Not a bar, but plays one on TV