Drifting Pollen

Arena Chat Thread

To @MelonHead, @Drifting Pollen and anyone else who is thinking of participating in Darth's league: what do you think of crashing in not as an assembly of a few off-site individuals, but as an actual team, with our characters having a few IC ties between them as well?

@Vordak

Maybe? It's definitely a fun idea, but I think we all have our characters more or less set up already... so it might be hard to have ties between them make sense if they end up being completely different. We'll see, though.

Black Mountain Tournament: Sigurd vs Gigue

Welp, we're on the same wavelength man. Smokebombs here, with a slight pressure blast that can unbalance an opponent if thrown under their feet.

@Vordak

*High fives* Flashbangs and tear gas for me.

Black Mountain Tournament: Sigurd vs Gigue

<Snipped quote by Vordak>

I'm really divided on the GCL thing, on the one hand Darth seems to know what he's doing and has a good system (for the most part, some things are stupid like the obvious advantages for ranged magical combat over physicality and some other funky spell effects) but on the other hand I don't like the ethics of that site and some of the participants seem like grade-A douche-bags, even by combat-RPG standards.

I'm still heavily tempted though, just to see how far I can get with a character who is quite literally just amazing at throwing stones.

@MelonHead

You should try it! I used stone-throwing as a weapon once, and won a tournament with it. You can pull all sorts of stuff like ricochets, fake throwing motions to threaten your opponent, sliding larger rocks across the ground like balls or hockey pucks to knock people off their feet, targeting terrain to do shit like knock branches off trees onto opponent's heads... plenty of fun options.

Definitely some a-holes over there, but you'll find those wherever you fight. Plus, over there you'll have competent judges to help deal with them (unlike over here, where right now it's just me doing my best).

Arena Chat Thread

No.

@Rilla

Okay.

But have you considered:

YES?!

Arena Chat Thread

It got started, but it never actually went anywhere. If you'd like, I could host a new one so we could get the whole personality and story thing going.

@LeeRoy

Seems like a pretty fun idea. If we could get enough people interested, it could be just the kind of thing I was talking about... Hard to predict whether it'd work or not, honestly, but if you want to try it then I'd be happy to help out however I can.

Arena Chat Thread

The key might be to advertise in other sections.

Not that many people come to the arena for the reasons you all described, but one good thing to try might be making a setting, and then advertising a tournament there in "General interest checks" or somewhere that gets a bit more traffic than the arena. People would be able to RP in the tourney thread within the setting, and also fight each other... but losing wouldn't mean getting kicked out of the RP, only not going on for more matches.

I was in a thread like that on another site a while back (it wasn't in that forum's 'arena' section, but was still effectively a fighting tournament), and it ended up attracting loads of people who'd never fought before- including me. The thing ended up being hugely popular, and our characters spend as much time dicking around and bantering as they did fighting. Some of the final matches ended up being really intense, because the characters involved had become close friends IC, and yet were forced to go against each other for the sake of their goals.

So maybe if we tried kicking off such a thread and advertising it to people in the other sections... IDK. It would take a lot of time to manage something like that, and I don't have much to spare right now. Maybe sometime later, though... a forum I post on looks like it may be dying, and if it does kick the bucket, sad as that would be, I'll have more breathing room to maybe start working on something like this.

Arena Chat Thread

Gr8 deb8 m8s I r8 it 8/8.

If nothing else, I think we can all agree that this election has been pretty fascinating to watch, ugly as it is. You've got all this anger with the way of things being channeled by candidates like Trump and Sanders, with extremely impressive results delegate-wise.

I just wonder what's going to happen when whoever gets elected ends up not fixing things. Maybe people will get so fed up they'll actually elect Vermin Supreme...

Arena Chat Thread

Just because your skin is a slightly different color doesn't mean you're a different race. It just means you live in a different climate.

@LeeRoy

You're exactly right, of course... but the people who discriminate against others based on the color of their skin? They don't think that way. They couldn't care less which precise country someone comes from, only that they're obviously different and are therefore somehow bad or inferior.

He's a blunt plain spoken man, and yeah, of course he's riling up tension. Tension gets votes, once he's in office you'll notice he suddenly stops the sharp aggressive speeches.

@LeeRoy

You say he's blunt and plain spoken, and then in the next sentence you admit he's lying through his teeth. One can claim he'll drop the rhetoric if he gets elected- and yeah, it is probable. But what will he do? His campaign has basically shown that he can do or say whatever the fuck he wants and still get away with it, and that's not the kind of candidate you want running one of the most powerful and well-armed countries in the world.

TBH I probably shouldn't care that much, since I don't even live in the US now... but it's a big country with a lot of influence, and as distasteful as I find some of its denizens, I wouldn't want to see them suffer more than they already are.

Arena Chat Thread

Illegal Immigration is kind of problematic. We get it, like, everyone gets it. America IS BETTER THAN MEXICO, pretty much all of Central America is run by cartels and violence. So coming to America is an opportunity that they can't get down there.

@LeeRoy

So basically, 'all their countries are shit, and all the people are shit too if they don't get here legally.' Maybe you don't think that personally, but it's a growing opinion among your countrymen.

Let me tell you, as a British citizen with all the right documents, getting into the US was a massive pain in the neck. For someone from a less well-connected country, perhaps without money or the right documents, entering the legal way might be truly impossible.

But anyways, that's not my point. I know people from Southern and Central America, and they're fucking scared of Trump. Not because they're illegal immigrants (they're not) but because of the rhetoric he's spreading. He may phrase it in vaguely political terms (and yes, it is true that illegal immigration causes a multitude of problems), but the overall message he's spreading is one of hate, one of racism. These people I know? They've experienced that personally. One of them actually left the fucking States and moved up to Canada because he couldn't handle the constant harassment he was getting.

So fuck Trump. The president can't get shit done anyways (as the recent years with Obama have proven), so electing an established politician like Hillary isn't going to hurt the country too much. Not as much, at least, as the guy who is utterly loathed by the rest of the planet, because he says whatever he needs to to get the crowd riled up and on his side, even if that means turning them against a whole demographic. If he gets elected, people are going to get hurt because of his false ideals. At least with Clinton you can see she's just going to continue the same old bullshit.

Arena Chat Thread

Your food stinks of violence, ours smells of victory.

@LeeRoy

Is it that wonderful smell that makes you lot eat so damn much of it then? Perhaps there is some rather distasteful history behind our own food, but it's also extensive- and we've learned the art of proper portion sizes! While the world mocks you as rotund, we are the pinnacle of elegance!