Pokemon

So apparently we've definitely established that in the pokemon universe: DEAD PEOPLE CAN BECOME POKEMON. They can then be crammed into pokeballs and forced to do your bidding.

 I'm not kidding. Meet YAMASK.

 His description in Pokemon Black:
  "Each of them carries a mask that used to be its face when it was human. Sometimes they look at it and cry"

 and in Pokemon White:
  "These Pokémon arose from the spirits of people interred in graves in past ages. Each retains memories of its former life."

 Between this and the fact that the pokemon already looks like it's crying is really amazingly creepy. ((And a little bit cool.))

 It's definitely a very interesting dark element in an otherwise happy and perky game that revolves around people and their happy little animal-monster companions, although if you think about it, the concept is teetering on a dark bent already. People are sending their children out to go battle people with other animal-monsters, and capture wild, untrained ones in pokemon balls.

 Realistically, you could get yourself seriously freaking hurt if you tried to tangle with a twenty foot rock snake armed with a tiny water spitting Newt or the like, but in the DS games, you merely risk getting knocked out, not getting turned into a red smear on a cave wall.

 I often regale (bore) people silly by pointing out that I have actually played an pokemon game where the trainers and pokemon could get hurt, or even killed trying to catch particularly dangerous wild pokemon, but really, it was a pretty Kick-Ass roleplay. My trainer actually lost their hand being cocky and stupid, but thats what you get assuming that you're going to take on an pokemon with a blade on it's head by yourself. It really really is a fun idea and people should try it more often. 

My Useless Superpower:

 So apparently I don't have the ability, necessarily, to predict when game is going to be off for the day. ((Sadly we're off again this week, because of my husbands job... again...))

 ((Please excuse me while I thrash around on the floor in withdrawal.))

 Anyway: Apparently I do have a superpower, although it's a fairly useless on. I shall call it my "Doom Sense".

 Doom Sense tells me when a game is about to take a nosedive into the mizzenheap. ((Or septic tank if you'd prefer less creative words.))

 A month or so ago, my Doom Sense kicked in. At the time it was fairly mild, but piercing. Kind of like someone blowing a shrill whistle a couple rooms away... but I'm getting ahead of myself. First I have to explain a little about the game, but not so much that it's entirely clear what game I was playing. Unless maybe you're part of it. If you are part of it: HI. I'M SORRY FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAS YET TO HAPPEN TO RUIN YOUR FUN. I REALLY AM.

 Anyway: The game started out a while back, it was based on an fairly popular series and that was cool. There was art of the characters, and all that kind of fun stuff, and the artists were using this in part to pay their bills. Cool. The only down side was that this technically kinda went straight into the dark gray-to-black area of the host where the RP was set because most of the characters were coming into existence via cash, and not via any other kind of unpaid event, and the site kind of frowns on that because they'd rather have your money instead, kthnxbai.

 No one really made a big deal about that however so no one really got in trouble for THAT. But as the game went on, we started having a problem that became later nicknamed "Carpet Shop". The staff would work with players. They would allow people to set up plots, character histories, character ideas, character developments... pat you on the head and tell you how AMAZING an idea you'd had and weren't you so clever? YES YOU WERE! YES YOU WERE YOU LITTLE ROLEPLAYER YOU! 8D

 ... And then they'd turn around and carpet yank the idea and tell you sorry, they HAD in fact actually agreed to everything a week to a month ago, but they'd changed their minds and you couldn't do that now. They however, apparently could do anything they wanted. Past lives for their characters? HELL YEAH. Past lives for anyone else? Nope, totally forbidden, including you, person, who we encouraged because we loved your idea so much. Yeah you've been RPing out hints of it for months because we said you could and we all loved it, but now you have to stop. Sorry.

 It was things like that OVER and OVER. And every time someone turned around, the staff had given themselves a brand new Ultra Amazing Shinything. And their new UAS was of course massively integral to plot and massively powerful, and could beat all of your characters, at once, with one hand tied behind their back while suffering from the flu. And they had the flu, to show you they were human too and oh they suffered. THEY SUFFERED. It was sad.

 This obviously started to build up into a giant wall of discontent, people sitting on it and wondering if it had happened to anyone else, but kind of afraid to ask because everyone wanted to be liked, everyone hoped the staff would like them and maybe, maybe give THEM a scrap of shiny-things, let a plot through, let a character not played by the staff actually do something of more importance than tie their shoe... and no one said anything for a long long time.

 And then one magical day, the staff, who were also the artists, decided that the quit. If you didn't have all your art yet well... you'd get it..............................................someday. Never mind that you'd paid three-weeks-work-of-grocery money to GET your multiple art stages. You'd get it......eh. Someday. whenever.

 This set off a shockwave through the carefully layered walls, and people started actually discussing everything that had hugely upset them, especially the time after time after time that not one, not two, but dozens and dozens of promises had been given and then broken.

 There was a huge outpouring of bile, and then someone stepped in and said: Hell with this, we like this rp's basic idea, we're going to see if we can continue this.

 And for a while they did. Any it was good. And plots ACTUALLY HAPPENED. And the staff DID NOT pat themselves on the back with new UAS's every week or so, and IT WAS GOOD. AND THE PEOPLE WERE HAPPY.
 And even better, they decided that there would be no more Canon characters brought in, because it had created just too damn much strife. AND THAT WAS TERRIFIC AND EVERYONE LOVED IT.


...And then the doom sense tingled, as the lone remaing artist started taking, with staff permission. NEW. CUSTOM SLOTS.

 And the doom sense said "This is some bad shit there. Yeah they need money, but they're not staff anymore... Shouldn't they just be selling art, not characters?

 ...And Doom Sense said "...I think I'm gonna kinda bow out here. I don't like this shit."

 And Doom Sense was right. For lo and behold. In the land in which no more canon characters were to ever be released, ever. THEY RELEASED ONE OF THE TWO CENTRIC MOST POWERFUL CHARACTERS OF ALL.

 And the Doom Sense spake and it said: "Hell, I don't care who got this thing, This is the beginning of the end son, the old bad shit has come back like a cancer, nothing good can come of this! Avoid that crap like the plague, woman!"

 And I'm kind of thinkin' Doom Sense might be right about this one. No matter how many awesome players you've got it's kinda hard to run anything on broken promises, no matter how good the behind the scenes reasoning might have seemed.

Murcrow! I curse You!

 So I've been playing Pokemon Soul Silver. This is not a new game... in fact the NEW game comes out on the sixth, and I am looking forward to that -like crazy-. All new pokemon, and all that kind of badass stuff. I kinda stopped playing Silver for a while, but the release of the new game and GameStop releasing legendaries kinda made me pick it back up. ((Yay for Celebi!)).

 Anyway I've gotten as far as the Safari Zone, you know the drill, thirty safari balls, and the choice to throw mud or bait at the pokemon you're trying to catch, or just chuck a ball. I've gotten a fair variety of pokemon this way, so it's not a bad deal for the amount of in game money it costs you, if you're patient. However, the one pokemon that WILL NOT stay in a goddamn safari ball is FREAKING MURCROW.

 I have never been able to actually CATCH that damn pokemon and it drives me totally crazy. Fortunately I was able to look up where to possibly find it in the wild so I'm hoping to snag the little bastard in an actual bastard, but I've wasted more time trying to cram that black feathered bastard into a pokeball....


 Seriously it's got to be having a detrimental effect on my sanity. That and the fact I haven't had an solid eight hours sleep in a week. X_X We can all thank the MiniMonster for that, something's been making him incredibly restless at night and he won't go back to sleep unless someone gets up and sits with him until he goes back to sleep. This usually takes about an hour, with him cramming his tiny hands into your throat, armpit, or eye-socket occasionally, and trying to get comfortable.

It's Her Birthday and She can Cry all She wants to

 Here's a little "Pro-tip" to all you young, stary eyed roleplayers out there. ((All of us cynical, twisted ones already know this sort of thing.))

 If you don't have the time to play an important role in an active game: DON'T APPLY FOR IT.

 Seriously I shouldn't even have to explain why this is a terrible idea. I mean, who doesn't want to have a chance at being important to the plot and story at large. In our dark twisted little hearts, we'd all love our chance to shine for a little while, but at the same time, if you know you're not going to be able to keep up, if you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that things are about to get crazy, not once but over and over and over again... think carefully about taking on anything that requires in game responsibility.

 Not only does it hurt the game at large if you can't be there to play your lynchpin role, but it will also hurt it if you promise to do things by a deadline, and then push it off... and push it off... and push it off...

 The mature thing to do at this point, if you have found yourself in such a role, would be to speak to one of the moderators or storytellers and explain your problem, and see if they can -take the role off your hands- so that you're not holding things up. Especially if the story is bopping right along otherwise, and people are anxiously waiting to see what you'll do.

 The immature, not so classy thing to do is sit back, make a bunch more characters, and go fish around for them to get roles that are, if not AS important, still pretty important, and ignore the character that's lynchpin for a certain role.

 If you do the second option, and you do this for... oh... six months or so, especially if you do this while RPing with others of your characters and chattering cheerfully away, please don't be excessively surprised if other people become strangely angry with you. I mean, again, do I really have to say why it's unreasonable not to expect people to be frustrated at this juncture?

 And if on top of all of that, when finally confronted by the fact that you haven't done more than wave your hand vaguely at the things you promised to do when you took on the role, that you, personally, agreed that you would do...

 Please please for the love of god don't throw a tantrum about how it's your Motherfarking birthday and it's not fair to call you on it that day.

Subconsious, Star Wars and Stellar Behavior

 We had another round of our Star Wars game this weekend, that was pretty fun. We all kind of had to laugh though since it seems there are now something like three factions going on between FIVE players, and none of them trust each other, and or, may be trying to screw everyone else over. The GM barely needs to throw conflict at us, we do it to ourselves!

 It's still a lot of fun though, and I suspect we've got a lot more chaos NOT from the group on the way, since once we leave Ashpat, ((which is the  Star Wars version of visiting Vegas...)) we're going to the Kiffar home-world, where hopefully we'll finally see an advance in the GM's plot arc for my character, involving the reasons why his psychometry powers are -completely off the freaking charts- and occasionally unpredictable, in ways that have once or twice actually proved dangerous.

 I'm really kind of looking forward to that, since I've been waiting a long time to get a little more information on that arc.

 Maybe that was why I had -really messed up dreams- last night about my character being somehow turned into a woman, and having to escape with the help of one of his greatest enemies. ((In the game it's Set Harth, who's trying to 'collect' him. In the dream it was ALSO a woman.)) Oh and in the dream he was also made pregnant. 

 ... Yeah my subconscious is pretty messed up apparently.


 Otherwise on a more NORMAL note: I found an new Pern board to RP on. So far it looks like it'll be pretty fun, though we got a nice front row seat to some drama with a couple players flipping their lids over a temporary ban on blond hair and blue eyes. ((These are both recessive traits in the first place, and most Pernese genetics don't much come from sources that would provide either blond hair or blue eyes.))

 Therefore a temporary ban when a massive amount of the site is blonder than barbie is actually not that unreasonable, and has nothing to do with the actual personality of the character.

 Fortunately things seem to have settled down to a dull sulk from the offending parties, and things are moving onward.

 *awgone*

Not Really Surprising

So I've been looking to break into this one RP community. Generally speaking, everyone there is stellar and really nice, and I've actually been 'gift bombed' with a dozen or so shop items (non rpable but super cute and very sweet.)

The setting is really interesting, there's overwhelming amounts of potential, and there's character art involved. It's a -ton- of fun and I am -dying- to get my character accepted and pulled in. (Since art gets drawn for the characters this is a slower process than in many settings, and not guaranteed, though there are a lot of ways to GET a character.

 Anyway, we've all been... tollerating is probably a good word for it... this one potential player. We all hang out and talk, but this one girl only comes in to say things like 'hello'. She might or might not bitch briefly about having to do CHORES. (oh GOD. The HORROR.)
 But mostly you get blank stares, pokes, and... TANTRUMS.

 She refuses to interact with anyone making general statements, nope, you've got to speak to her BY NAME or by god you're IGNORING her. And god help you if you ignore her, because she'll eventually get mad, then she'll post in bold.

Then.

 Sentence by Sentence.

 She starts to use larger

 And larger

 and LARGER TEXT

UNTIL SOMEONE SAYS HER NAME. 


Then she goes into a routine as though she has NEVER met this person before, no matter how many times they've said hello to her and been immediately snubbed or been given passive aggressive behavior.

 And this charming individual, who will only interact with you if you include her name in your post, and even THEN acts as though you're inconveniencing her. Who doesn't know about the shop. Who is uninterested in ANYONE'S characters.

 Bitches that she's "lonely" and it's "so hard to meet people."

It's amazing the degree to which I'm not surprised that she has trouble with this.

Photo@#*@^it.

And once again Photo@#*It fails me. Therefore I'm using the blog to get stuff onto the net again.

 I did not create this picture, just the character. I'm putting it in my sig because an really nasty little bitch has ripped off my character and I want to display the original.

You take the High Road and I'll take the Low Road, and we'll both play the same race in next game

 So my roleplaying group has been debating characters we wouldn't mind playing down the road in our StarWars game.
 I mentioned that I wouldn't mind playing a male Torgruta I'd designed a few years ago. Based partially off the pretty much total lack of canon male Torgruta and my extreme distaste for Ahsoka Tano, (Especially early on.) Jak, my character, was pretty much supposed to be an equally attitudinal Torgruta, only one that actually gets in trouble for his attitude, and is intended to have some dark side issues as a result of his attitude.

 This is when one of the players revealed that he wanted to ALSO play a Torgruta, also male, who would not be Jedi trained but WOULD be force sensitive and have a lightsaber.

 I have to admit, especially since I came up with the concept so long ago, my first reaction was to be annoyed, and feel copied since the characters are -so- similar sounding at the outset.

 As a follow up, I'm not sure if I'm being fair in my snap reaction or not. If the two of us had been playing Human force users, I'm not sure I'd have reacted the same way.
 Especially since I'm -pretty- sure I can predict the way his character will act. Probably quiet and uncertain, not terribly take charge.

 There's a decent chance that they'll still be pretty individual characters, but still, I can't entirely give up on feeling a LITTLE Copied, weather or not I actually am.

One Hundred Rifts Vampires ((That's worse than a copy of Twilight))

 So I logged on this morning to check my email and found out that a guy who used to belong to the role playing club I was in while I was in college had found me on Facebook. This is why I have mixed feelings about face book. I mean stupid amounts of Virus aside, the bad people can find you just as well as the good.

 Well... BAD people may be a stretch. People you're not sure you wanted to find you. This GM, We'll call him Rifts, because that was one of his top picks to run a game in, for whatever reason -had it out for me- as a character. I think I tried three times or so to play a game with him and then I gave up. This didn't include the times he was another player with me.

 One of the times we played, he let two of the other players play DEMI GODS. Me, I got to be human. Nothing else. In the Rifts System, this is tantamount to being painted with a target that says 'Squish me'. Demi Gods get TONS more hit points, and they're much harder to kill. I mean in the rifts system there's damage... and then theres "MEGA" damage. I kid you not. Damage that is worse than normal damage. One point of megadamage probably would have redused my character to five or six dust motes floating away on the breeze. Maybe fewer dust motes.

 Let me continue by saying that Rifts Vampires can take MULTIPLE points of Megadamge.

 Somehow I survived character creation and the first hour or two of game, and me and my obnoxious demi-god companions found our way to what was apparently a vampire den in a house. This was all kinds of fun, because they decided to fight us. I don't remember why. What I DO remember is finding out that there were not only a hundred plus of these badboys, they all thought my character was REALLY INTERESTING. This was because the GM had decided that the sword my character had as standard equiptment had an enchantment on it so it could damage vampires. Well... damage is a strong word.

 It could chop bits off, but NOT kill them. Also it radiated an massive aura that let them know where I was, AND it glowed, just in case they missed the aura. So the game pretty much ended up with me desperately trying to chop super-vampires into enough parts so that they couldn't kill me.

 Yet ANOTHER game: We were playing characters who'd never actually been on earth, but had recently landed to check out the damage that had originally made us leave. ((An alien threat of something called Invids)). Invids btw can imitate the appearance of other species, usually choosing humans to imitate.

 My character stepped off the ship and started looking around the camp site, and suddenly heard rustling in the bushes. The GM had me roll a hundred sided die. I rolled a 1. This worried me, because usually rolling a 1 in gaming is REALLY a bad thing.

 That was when a tiger jumped out of the bushes....

 Before we get too much further I'll explain that I did not actually get eaten at this juncture. Nope, the die roll was to find out if the INVID TIGER was friendly or not. My only chance of not being eaten FIVE MINUTES into the game was rolling a 1 or a 100. So I ended up with a friendly pet alien tiger. The GM sulked. ((My character who had only seen videos of cats thought it was a tabby.))

 Later in this game, I'd ended up separated from the group for part of a mission, and my 'kitty' was with me as we drove along on my motorcycle. I told the GM I had to leave because I had class early the next morning and it was getting very late. He threatened my character if I left, even though I was not in a position to disrupt the game if I left, because it would have taken me most of the night to get where I was going, and no one else was hanging on my next move.

 I told him I -needed- to be awake for class, and that there was no reason to do that since, as stated, no one needed me to be there. He sulked, I left.

 I came back the next game and found out that he'd had my character fall asleep at the handlebars and flip over. He'd rolled, again, and again, the dice had saved me. My Invid Kitty had pulled me from the wreckage barely alive.

 I quit the game.

 I can think of -several- more examples of this sort of behavior, and I've never really figured out if I was just -that- annoying of a roleplayer. ((I should mention that he MADE my character be an princess, when I'd actually written her to just be a low level soldier?)) or if he just had it out for roleplayers with boobs.  Anyway, he just jumped up on facebook to say Hi, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that.

Send in the Clones

 Ok so it's been a while since I posted anything, so here we go again.

 I've stopped playing "Citizen Screwed", so I'll probably remove the stupid button altogether. I just don't see the point in spending free time getting increasingly pissed off. That really kind of defeats the purpose of a GAME doesn't it?

 We played StarWars again this weekend, that was a lot of fun, it's still a pretty insane game since most of the group is clones. Most of. Not all. And not as in "Clone Trooper" clones (Although now we have one. XD)

 Good times anyway, though our 3P0 unit thinks he's Rambo. That might work better if he was actually designed to function in a more Rambo like fashion.
 A tip for you, B3P0! Don't piss off large fast moving things unless you legitimately have a route for escape on your slow ass legs.  Silly Droid.

 Ended up regaling someone last night about details of an NonPlayer Character I ran for a while during a home brewed system. In the original game, I couldn't pay anyone to interact with him even though he was supposed to be a major source of information. However since he didn't tell my original players how amazingly COOL they were, everyone pretty much ignored him.

 It reminded me again that there are tons of levels of role-players, since the girl I ended up talking to ADORED him from the concept up in all his creepy glory.

Citizen K...er... Screwed.

 So I've been continuing trying to play "Die 2 Nite", which is an sort of fascinating observation of forty people failing to communicate in a spectacular fashion.

 It isn't a bad game, a little slow on the pick up, and only about as actually rp involved as you let it be. (IE: not really at all)

 The premise is simple, your character is a survivor in a zombie wasteland, and you need to survive as long as possible. This is tricky with increasing waves of zombies attacking your town, and the need for food, and water, so you have to decide what to build and when to build it. This seems all fine and good, especially if you have some older players in town who've played before and know some of the most efficient timelines in which to produce things to maximise survival.

 Except that so far... that doesn't happen.

 There are forums for people to communicate and decide on things, and let people know what's going on, but in the first town I was in, it turned into a fiasco, with one player deciding he was going to refuse to contribute anything to the town, and exploit anything and everything he found on his personal living space ((which produses much less safety at all than using the same resources to, say, enforce the town wall, or build a work shop to reduse the cost of building the town wall and other upgrades.))
 Other players decided to follow suite, and it ended up with everyone building things to cross puroposes, and we got devoured in short order.

The second run through: I lasted a day. I attempt to go out scavenging, then tried to help rescue someone. My character ended up stranded in a zone, I couldn't leave without being killed or injured by the zombies, and although another player could have showed up and helped walk me out by outnumbering the zombies, no one would come when I asked. Or when anyone else asked.  ((That's one way of reducing the number of mouths to feed, and of discouraging people from trying to bring back resources.))

 This time through: We've already banished one player who started at day one taking every resource he could find and using for himself, and he turned around and started causing problems for everyone else. One player was poisoned, and we suspect him, or possibly another player with unknown reasons, and we now have a THIRD person doing the same thing as person one. Plus out of the formerly forty odd people in the town, only 6 or 7 are actually using the forums at all, and the rest are doing... well... whatever they want. Thus we wasted time to get the workshop done before the hoardes got big with them building a big wall before we needed it, and now they're STEALING the resources that could save the town, so that they can do...

 ... Well we're not actually sure what they're doing. They're not upgrading their own housing with it. They just seem to be squirreling it away somewhere. It's totally baffling, and kind of frustrating. It seems likely that the only way to actually survive this game is to get a ruling majority ((around eight players who can agree to shut someone out of using town resources. Eight being the minimum number to 'shun' someone to this end)) and have them all in the same town.

 The stupid part is that this shouldn't be necessary. It should be at least on some level gut level obvious that earning two points of defense making a prettier house is way less than earning THIRTY points on a wall. And equally obvious that if you can only eat one food ration a day, than it might be good to let the other people in town use the available ones while they try and find more so that things like emergency supplies can be built, thus ensuring longer survival and more points per round.

 It's nice to know that if there's actually a zombie appocalypse we are all completely screwed.