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If I do it in the game room, I won't be able to include the thread interactions I want, like people voting on monsters or dungeons, or deciding who to give items too. I want to have the LP forums vote on things and come up with cool magic items to hand in to the player. It's something entirely different than anything I've tried before. That being said, what makes DnD/tabletops tedious for you? Turtlicious fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Apr 22, 2019 |
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Apr 22, 2019 00:00
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How are you going to do combat?
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Apr 22, 2019 00:25
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I'm undecided on that, I want to get started to see what would be easier, but what I've decided for session 0, I'm going to cut out combat and write a summary going over the spells used and how it would look. So 2 dudes missing for 3 rounds or whatever, would be written out as a fairly even fight where neither can land a hit until the death blow is struck. I plan to make the thread one of the "icons" in the system, being a powerful leader OOC will or intelligence checks will be re-written to show thinking, or remembering in a way that makes cognitive sense. I'll basically be editing it so the GM is invisible that way the characters are front and center.
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Apr 22, 2019 00:43
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You'd be better off with a more rules-light, narrative-focused system than D&D.
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Apr 22, 2019 00:44
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Yeah I realized that shortly after posting, I think 13th age will be much better fit, plus not a lot of people play that.
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Apr 22, 2019 00:45
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I play a lot of d&d I just wouldn't really read it, the only d&d l.p. I ever watched was syrg's campaign, and that was a vlp How would people be able to vote on monsters/dungeons/items while still giving the players in the game any authority or autonomy? Is the idea for you to be the dm and the group?
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Apr 22, 2019 03:12
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Namtab posted:I play a lot of d&d I just wouldn't really read it, the only d&d l.p. I ever watched was syrg's campaign, and that was a vlp I would be GM only, and I'm not sure where the road block is? I do one session a week, put up a poll for the adventure next weak, and that make that work within the context of the game, you know like any GM does when he reads a dungeon manual or item guide? Like there's whole pre-written adventures that don't take away player agency, I don't know why getting goon suggestions to work in would be impossible. I've done something like this before, when I ran a West Marches style game that had like 8 - 12 people who I dm'd over the course of 4 months, letting each players actions reverberate through everything else.
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Apr 22, 2019 03:27
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 then. It seems you have an idea in your head, the proposed audience interactivity means that its an lp as opposed to PbP and does belong here, and it may work out fine in practice.As others have said a system lighter on or more naturally narrative about combat may work better for this idea. 13th age has been floated by you, you could also try Fellowship or Dungeon World which are both fun systems and lend themselves better to you being able to translate combat (and rolls in general) to a story. Good luck
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Apr 22, 2019 12:33
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For a blind LP, is it breaking the rules if a guide is used to consult at any time?
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Apr 22, 2019 13:43
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Rocket Baby Dolls posted:For a blind LP, is it breaking the rules if a guide is used to consult at any time? No, it's insanely preferable to unedited fumbling around while the lper struggles to fill dead air
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Apr 22, 2019 13:46
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Rocket Baby Dolls posted:For a blind LP, is it breaking the rules if a guide is used to consult at any time? There are no rules for what an LP should be. I don't typically watch blind LPs, but my impression is the audience for them wants to see a certain amount of discovery and unspoiled interaction with the game. But yeah, like Namtab said, spending even five minutes being completely stuck would be pretty flow-breaking. One approach I've seen done in the past is when the LPer has a copilot who has played the game before, and can drop hints if the pilot gets stuck. A big advantage there is that you have a built-in co-commentator.
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Apr 22, 2019 14:46
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Thank you for the replies. I'll keep the co-pilot in mind, I may have trouble finding someone with experience with this game though. I still have some time to decide on how to approach it. Either way, a guide is never a bad thing.
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Apr 22, 2019 15:50
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There are no rules for what an LP should be.
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Apr 22, 2019 23:11
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It's recorded on a vinyl record. You know, an LP.
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Apr 22, 2019 23:39
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Xander77 posted:Lies. There's a secret LP codex everyone but you knows about, and if you stray from it, the LP police will arrive and taken away your expanded smilie limit privileges. More truth than not, tbh.
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Apr 23, 2019 03:32
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Is there a SA LP Discord server?
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Apr 23, 2019 04:37
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Oheao posted:Is there a SA LP Discord server? Yes, the link is in the OP.
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Apr 23, 2019 06:17
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Carbon dioxide posted:Yes, the link is in the OP. Welp, I'm a loving idiot.
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Apr 23, 2019 07:18
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Anyone know offhand what the max character count for thread titles is?
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May 1, 2019 14:15
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Danaru posted:Anyone know offhand what the max character count for thread titles is? code:
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May 1, 2019 14:28
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80 for mods iirc
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May 2, 2019 02:45
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Artix posted:80 for mods iirc 85, actually  Regular title limit is 75 character, including spaces. Mods can change the title to an 85 character one after the fact, but everyone, including mods and admins, are limited to 75 when the thread is first posted.
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May 2, 2019 09:41
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IGgy IGsen posted:I'm glad that we no longer enforce outdated, defunct or ill-advised rules that have been changed long since to be more reasonable or removed entirely. What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that SA, especially SALP is now much better than back when I joined. And even then it was much better than when it started, y'know, when there was this firm belief that there could only ever be one LP of any given game, even if it sucked complete rear end. Like a lot of LPs back then did. Not even in the "aged poorly from a technical standpoint" sense. Just go back in time and on the archive and see for yourself. I think I'd just like to add something. Up front, I do agree that if things are better now, that's great and there's no reason to go back. But to be clear, these weren't rules we made out of the ether - the forums are in a much different place than they used to be. The big thing I think is people forget how much people on SA hated Let's Play. It crowded up the Games forums, and people were openly advocating for banning it altogether. In fact, a lot of people considered the subforum a punishment. This included Games mods (qirex, notably) which was a problem because there was a lot of open talk about banning LP altogether. The forums didn't do stats for a long time into their lifespan so no one really knew how much or how little people were visiting LP. It turned out to be a lot - LP was a huge traffic driver but no one knew until years and years in. To that end, you'd not only get qirex talking about shutting it down, or even retitling LP threads he didn't like, you'd even get YCS users having to post LP threads as mod punishment and you'd get a thread where people openly talked about how lovely the users and the subforum were - in Let's Play. That's really lovely for people who liked this "pseudohobby" (a term I do regret, but can also explain). The notion of "quality" did go too far, and too long. But it seemed to work - SA LP got a reputation for being best in show (deserved or not) and you'd get other mods defending certain LP threads ("well the forum sucks but this one is why we keep it around") I think once I got to the mod forum and could at least talk to people, we lost the actual danger of losing the subforum entirely. Fragmaster was, it turns out, pretty amenable to LP even though he thought it was silly at the time. Lowtax, it took me years to talk to, but I was honestly shocked to learn he didn't hate it. Eventually the admins warmed up. (In fact later, when Dangan Ronpa 2 spoilers got posted as an ad, someone removed them. I don't know who, but I didn't request it - my only guess is someone on high (Lowtax?) realized how much LP and that thread in particular was bringing in in terms of revenue and did it. This is notable because Game of Thrones spoiler troll ads weren't taken down. My point in this anecdote is that LP went from "we should get rid of that stupid subforum" to "hold on a moment, this is good for SA" - and in that period before we had stats on SA, it was important to show these were effortposts and not just people deciding to record videogames while playing them because they wanted to be e-celebs.) Again, it went on too long and went too far. Even back then, there were fun shitpost threads that were discouraged even though they probably shouldn't have been. I'm really not writing this to dispute that, but I do think there's context to why some of these decisions were made. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense now but worked then. Even with hindsight, the ban on Pokemon LPs was a good move at the time. I will also add that there wasn't a rule against single people doing LPs or series. I never really got that, per se, although I did fall into it a bit. What I mean is that I made the master list because without it, the Sandcastle was just constantly inundated with "Did anyone do _____ yet?" and you could tell them "who cares just do it" until you were blue in the face, but it would happen over and over. This was before I was a mod, and LP was pretty lawless outside of qirex yelling at us until Louisgod came into the picture... and even then, he admitted he didn't read the forum (hence me). But new people wouldn't bother to read why I did that, so they'd assume it existed so that no one else could do a "claimed" LP. There was a reservation section just because when you did screenshot LPs, they were a lot of work and it did kinda suck to set up all your equipment, software, etc. and then lose the opportunity. Back then, a big impetus for LP was to show off games people hadn't seen or were unable to play themselves, so it was kind of pointless to have two simultaneous LPs of the same game. Abandoning LPs was a big issue too, and one of the bigger internal complaints from LP. The Sandcastle really did help with a lot of that. I do agree, "get thee to the sandcastle" was lovely and I wish I had done more to fight against that. Well. At any rate, I'm glad LP is in a better place and better hands, and people feel comfortable posting the stuff they do. Again, I don't necessarily want to defend how it used to be, just that there were reasons we did that that weren't blind elitism, even if it did morph into that. edit: Oh wow this went way longer than I intended.
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May 3, 2019 16:29
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Thanks for the history lesson, that was pretty interesting. My impression is that the forums in general are a very different place from what they were when LP first became a thing. Maybe it's just the specific subforums I stick to though.
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May 3, 2019 17:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Thanks for the history lesson, that was pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, we didn't join too long apart really, around at the same time of SAs lifespan. So the SA we know as active members is probably the same. I'm gonna assume that we all knew of SA before we joined, otherwise we wouldn't have joined. In my case I knew of SA for a very long time before I joined (first heard of it in 2003-2004-ish, maybe? Hard to get a timeline for me this early). It's kinda weird since I'm from Germany and "grew up" in the German speaking part of the internet. And yet, in German forums, there'd still be compilation threads for funny stuff linking to SA with the big fat warning of "English only". Some people even translated what they thought of as highlights for people who didn't know English to enjoy. So when people say SA was influential in the earlier days of the internet as we know it, this actually transcends the English bubble. Now, looking into SA from the outside from the earlier years it seemed very clique-y. The "lurk moar" kinda place with a lot of in-jokes that make no sense to you and they got a reputation for being kinda dicks and having an elitist attitude. Let's not forget that there was a subforum dedicated to doxxing people here at one point. So I never thought I'd join it. And for a very long time I did not. Partially because I didn't like the 'tude, partially because SA only takes the archaic payment method of "credit cards" What changed my mind on this was the LP archive I first noticed around 2007-2008. So you could say I was part of that unexpectedly high traffic slowbeef mentioned in his quite exhaustive and also interesting post. Though, I didn't join myself until many many years later. And some of this ~goon culture~ that I feared so much was still alive, but it wasn't that bad. You still had jerks calling LP a pseudohobby and stuff and some subforums were better than others. Now I'd say its mostly mellowed out and is one of the better place on the internet to be. Especially if you can't let go of ye olde time forums. tl;dr: SA was conceived in very early days of the internet as we know it now and much like the internet changed, the site itself changed with it. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Probably a mix of both. IGgy IGsen fucked around with this message at 19:47 on May 3, 2019 |
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May 3, 2019 19:39
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Funny enough while my gateway into SA forums was via the Play by Post subforum it was the LP section that made me into a more active poster. Can't remember what actually got me into that part but I do have vague recollections of knowing about the frontpage way before I knew there was even a forum. In hindsight the best  I've ever spent so far.
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May 3, 2019 19:58
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slowbeef posted:"pseudohobby" (a term I do regret, but can also explain). Yeah, now that you're making money off it you sell out fraud!
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May 3, 2019 20:12
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This post rules. I kinda love SA history. I didn't start posting in LP until around when Dangan Ronpa 2 was first posted so I missed a bunch of stuff. Hell, I don't remember when it was first made its own subforum because I was busy shitposting elsewhere. All I want to really add is that I'd personally rather say that LP is in a different place and different hands. As slowbeef says, the rules didn't come from the ether, and while I wasn't there for the formation, my modding definitely benefits from the foundation laid by the previous mods. The fact that there is an existing expectation for how the Let's Play should run makes it easier to inform our decisions in a way that (seems to) satisfy the subforum. I love the LP now, but I loved it then too--elitism included. If the place is better, then it's only because it has benefited from what came before. I see rules generally coming about as a reaction to what a forum wants and needs. Rules like the Pokemon ban were definitely needed at the time and were rescinded when they weren't. Like a pendulum, rules go back and forth, relaxing and tightening as required. Trying not to be too sappy, but I appreciate all the work you put into this place, slowbeef. You, the other mods, and all the posters. If this place is better now than it was before, then it's in large part due to the work you and everyone else in this community put into it. I hope that when I step down some remarks about how much better the place is than it was in 2019. So thank you!
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May 3, 2019 22:30
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Some good truth above. It's as true that we canned those rules and conventions because we don't need them now as it is that we adopted those rules and conventions in the first place because we did need them (arguably different definitions of "we" for each of those clauses notwithstanding). These things have never been first-principles proclamations about the workings of a perfect community; they're course corrections made because someone didn't like where this thing was going, and dropped once they did. That they'd be bad now doesn't mean they were wrong then. I was proud to announce the Pokémon ban was over and I will insist to this day that it was necessary. And I say all of this as though all of SALP's history has been a calculated gambit rather than a culmination of happenstance and guesswork. It's not like Slowbeef and Zorak did everything one way that was bad and then Geop (and briefly Chip) and Jordan and I came along and said "what if LP was Good instead?" and started this master plan and now everything's great. This whole thing's a community, and a community built around a creative endeavour at that; there's only so much one can manage a thing like this when your most meaningful tool is to briefly exclude people from it. There's never been an LP Rule that hasn't been tastable in the drinking water months in advance, and it's more correct to say that LP as a whole has changed and now it's run differently than it is to say that LP as a whole has changed because it's run differently now. " 'Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. -Francis Bacon' -B.F. Skinner"
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May 5, 2019 00:11
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The rigged rules of the early Let's Play forum were the training wheels that helped us get a handle on what and where we wanted to be. A strong foundation from which a tower was built, large and tall so as to shame God. (Now unban porn games, you cowards.)
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May 6, 2019 03:57
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If SA was so hostile to LPs, I'm surprised that you guys didn't just make a forum specifically dedicated to it at the time.
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May 6, 2019 05:14
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There was one, sort of, at least in as far as it was started by goons. I joined almost exactly a year after it started, which was pretty much on the ground floor in terms of how long it was active, and even by then anyone I would have recognized from the LP archive, excluding the head admin, had either left or got banned. It's funny in hindsight because, rather than being some sort of haven for LP goons to keep doing their thing separately from SA, it ended up as more of a stepping stone for several people to eventually make their way from YouTube to SA, myself included. Knowing how hostile SA in general used to be to LPs now, I personally wouldn't have had it any other way; I can't imagine the me of ten years ago staying with LP in an atmosphere like that, and I shudder to consider what sort of creative hobby I'd be doing today in that case - knowing what I was into right around when I discovered LP it'd be either fanfiction or YouTube Poop.
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May 6, 2019 08:30
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I saw a request for a Cultist Simulator LP, I'm considering taking it up, but I'm not exactly sure how to thread the needle of making it interesting and understandable. Cultist Simulator's a pretty dry game from pure observation, there's not a huge amount to see, just putting cards in boxes basically, so I don't think a mechanical LP can really carry it on its own. At the same time, I'm not sure a narrative LP is engaging or possible to follow in terms of what's actually happening. This is what I've got so far. Is it any good? ---  What is Cultist Simulator? Cultist Simulator is the latest game from Alexis "Great Writing, Questionable Gameplay" Kennedy, writer/developer for Fallen London and Sunless Sea. The essential premise is, you play as a person who founds a cult, and either you go insane, commit suicide, get arrested, go broke, or maybe, just maybe, become something more than you once were. It's set in an alternative universe London (probably) in the early 20th Century (probably). How is it played?  Essentially, you are juggling timers and cards. there are exactly two basic gameplay elements, Actions and cards. Actions are things you can do, like work, sleep, talk, study. The way you do things is by putting cards into them. Put a health card into work to do some manual labour, put a book card into study to read it. Then wait for the timer to tick down for the action to complete. You can be doing more than one thing at once (e.g. you can dream and talk at the same time), so think of these pretty abstractly. Thats it? Pretty much. But the appeal of the game is the lore and the writing that goes with it. Your imagination has to do a fair bit of the heavy lifting in this game to turn the mechanical process of dropping a paint skill card into the work action into a character who becomes famous painting eldritch and non-euclidian landscapes. If you can manage that the game is worthwhile. The LP This LP will have a mix of narrative and gameplay updates. Gameplay updates will explain what's mechanically going on behind the scenes, though you can potentially get by with the understanding that cards go into actions to produce effects. Cultist Simulator is notable for having no tutorial at all, players are expected to learn through trial and error and by talking to each other, and one of the magical things about the game is that a conversation between two players about the game can sound pretty close to the insane ramblings of the mad, sometimes making it a little hard to learn from others. Speaking of insane ramblings, I have found this to share with you, the Diary of a Dr Kate Ravenhurst. She was a doctor at The Institute. The first volume of her diaries are lost, but we can infer from the second volume they contained nothing of interest. But here in the second volume, there is something to be learned. Narrative Update 1 (offsite SSLP tester link) Mechanics Update 1 (offsite SSLP tester link)
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May 6, 2019 12:34
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It looks fine, if you wanted a single update you could use italics to explain the mechanics of what you're doing, otherwise following the narrative with the explanation works too.
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May 6, 2019 13:13
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Jamesman posted:(Now unban porn games, you cowards.) These games were weird. I got burned on an LP of Kana Little Sister - I really didn't know anything about visual novels, and it seemed like a story about a guy whose younger sister is dying of a terminal illness. It goes on for awhile, pretty normal story with pathos and Whoops, it later turns out they're not related and well... I was unpleasantly surprised and stopped reading that. When I did a Let's Play of Sprung, I think a lot of people were turned off because it looked like a dating sim (which I guess you could call it that) but it's honestly very tame and really, really bad so it made good fodder. It was a popular thread and dating sim LPs were briefly in fashion (note: very few though, as I'm writing this - maybe I'm misremembering that), and one guy, Roar did "Do You Like Horny Bunnies." I'd talked to Roar in... I think there was an LP IRC way back in the day? and I actually don't think he was a creep or anything - I think he legitimately wanted to have a thread where people laughed at how ridiculous and well, messed up it got. Hentai LPs were always a race to the bottom in the little I interacted with them (which is not very) - you'd get a crop of people you hadn't seen in many other threads and they'd do this thing like "oh you think that's bad? check THIS out" and it'd go south. This is anecdotal, mind, so I don't really have examples outside of one particular poster who I'm not keen on calling out at the moment. Anyway, YCS caught wind of Horny Bunnies and they trolled the poo poo out of it. AxeManiac agreed with them and basically chided the thread with "you guys should be making fun of this stuff, not posting it!" and people argued that it was like the H-Game Reviews on the SA front page, and others were saying that they went too in-depth. It was honestly humiliating and I asked people in the Sandcastle (again, this is before I was a mod) to please not defend Horny Bunnies or Hentai LPs because I don't think people were realizing how bad their arguments made us look. In the end, AxeManiac instituted the Hentai LP ban and I certainly wasn't going to overturn it when I did get modhood. It got dicey because people would post non-ero VNs and I never really understood (until someone explained it to me) that some VNs really are good and interesting, but they throw in sex to sell copies. You have to understand for folks like me who aren't familiar with VNs, this seemed really weird, so we kinda had to keep an eye on it. I think thread management was kinda the rule and the tough part of posting LPs here. You're technically not allowed to set thread rules on SA, I don't think, but we kinda let OPs guide stuff. At any rate, I think Horny Bunnies was gassed, and Baldurk later decided not to allow porn on the LP Archive, which Roar got annoyed with but it was just a small drama wave in the grand scheme of things. Roar and his wife did a stream where she laughed about it and such so that further cemented the notion that he was just trying to make a "let's laugh at this hosed up poo poo" kinda thread but it spiraled out of control.
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May 6, 2019 16:17
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Rip roar. I used to send him alerts on irc that made his computer make a honking noise that would wake up his baby. The irc channel is still up and will be 12 years old in a couple of months.
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May 6, 2019 18:11
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slowbeef posted:At any rate, I think Horny Bunnies was gassed it actually got moved to YCS, which was probably a worse fate for all concerned. But, yeah, 'let's post this to laugh at it' is a fine concept (or, was in 2007), but too reliant on other posters behaving. e: also, lol slowbeef's comment progression in the Kana thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2417923&userid=76020 (  if you click elsewhere in the thread)
Polsy fucked around with this message at 18:36 on May 6, 2019 |
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May 6, 2019 18:29
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I don't think you have to worry about since all the images are dead. I'm guessing it was that waffle image website.
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May 6, 2019 21:04
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When did the lp subforum start to chill out and get lenient anyway, I quit actively paying attention to it back in uhhh 2011 or 2012 I think
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May 7, 2019 17:22
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FirstAidKite posted:When did the lp subforum start to chill out and get lenient anyway, I quit actively paying attention to it back in uhhh 2011 or 2012 I think I refuse to believe anything as nonsensical as "people grow the gently caress up sometimes", so that should be your timeline of the forums chilling out.
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May 7, 2019 17:34
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