Quadrophenia

Could be the writers might have flubbed.

To be fair, keep in mind the Man in Black is in his 60s and he's fast enough to outshoot and out fight human robots. Might be they're programmed to subtly sabotage themselves, give the Hosts any chance to beat them soundly.

Bruises are fine, but everything has to be non-lethal.

This show has been a real homerun. The performances, the aesthetics, the music, the writing- damnation. An intelligent science fiction story that delves deeply into theology, godhood, sentience and self-awareness, wrapped up in video game language and Western trappings? Complete with a powerhouse cast of actors? Hell yeah, sign me up! This is like if someone combined Ex Machina with Red Dead Redemption and BioShock.

I'd say anywhere from one to two hours. All text, mind you.

@Doctor12 It is certainly an option First we just need to make sure we can all synch up at the same time. Ish. The one benefit to play by post games is that it's easier for players from incompatible time zones to react to one another comfortably. It's a slower process than I'd like, I admit, but keeping in mind an apparent twelve hour difference it will be difficult for me to find an appropriate period where we could run a Call of Cthulhu game smoothly.

Specifically, what time is it for you guys? It's 9PM over here, EST. GMT +8 would be, to this, something like 9AM, wouldn't it?

@Nightbird To be fair, I highly doubt watching a Tarantino movie will influence your vocabulary into something like a particularly vulgar and crass sailor who--in his spare time--teaches truckers. If that were the case, anyone who has ever liked a Tarantino movie would talk like a Tarantino character, complete with a predilection for feet and blaxploitation movies. And even if that were the case, would it "truly" be so awful? After all, you yourself have likely thrown around a few words that---in your ignorance---you likely never assumed were profanity at all! Certain words and expressions we use today would have been considered one heck of an offence anywhere from fifty to several centuries ago. Once upon a time, the reason why Yosemite Sam yelling gibberish words like "dagnabbit" was considered funny to children was because they were scandalous swears their grandparents would have found offensive. Today, it's just cowboy gibberish. Have you ever used the phrase, "Holy cow!" in substitute of any more explicit exclamation? Well, that's a profanity right there. It's a reference to Hindu beliefs about the sacredness of bovines, and a mocking one at that. A cake-walk has its roots in minstrel shows, paying through the nose is derived from old Nordic traditions where kings would cut your nose off if you didn't pay your taxes, cat got your tongue refers to having been beaten so severely with cat-o-nine-tails that you can barely speak, and rule of thumb? Rule of thumb used to mean that men were allowed to beat their wives. We literally say things all the time that have horrifying, terrible origins far more offensive than the c-word or f-word could possibly be. Even after all that? Well, to quote Mark Twain... "Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." The point being, it's weirdly self-limiting to constrain yourself from using words because they're "impolite," as that that invalidates them as a form of honest self-expression... while giving concession to far more horrifying words. Which, yeah, is slightly hypocritical. The whole point of profanity is to express a form of rebellion against polite society, or provide the perfect means to encapsulate rage or frustration in words that'd make a nun blush. Those aforementioned old swears might not mean those things now, but consider this: once upon a time, shut up was considered such an offensive slur by children's TV show standards that it was the g-rated equivalent of a f-you. Today, Pinkie Pie can get away with it. It's worth thinking about. These things can be completely arbitrary.

So far so good, it's the same set up I've got with my usual group.

I'm EST.

Depends what everyone is more comfortable with. We could run the game in the forums here, play by post... Or we could run it on Skype. I'll make the chatroom for it and everything. It'd still be text, though, but for anyone who doesn't have dice I can link you up to a d20 roller. I'll leave it up to a vote.

I NEED MAH FIX

Ha! Well, I'll be.

Right?

He sort of does, doesn't he? But then, I feel that's part of this weird generic fantasy cover art trend currently plaguing fantasy books. You know the one I mean. "Let's just stick the protagonist on the cover in a cool pose, while maybe looking slightly to the side in an aloof sort of way as if this were a Christian rock album. God forbid we use creative imagery that really catches the eye or anything. That'd be too costly." It's a real shame- so many of these books are genuinely fun, exciting and maybe even a little more intelligent than given credit for (from Dresden to Mistborn), but generic cover art has been known to turn off those who'd otherwise find this sort of thing to be exactly in their wheelhouse! I was drawn to Stormlight Archive for its gorgeous art cover, long before I even knew what the series was about. Conversely, I almost dropped Mistborn: The Final Empire for its generic cover art alone; you know, of Vin standing there, glass knives out, just staring off into the distance as if she has a lot on her mind and isn't at all bothered by the red lens flares in the background...

Not gonna lie: I've had a crush on that man's brain for over ten years. And I'd recommend starting at the very beginning: Storm Front. The first two books, admittedly, are a little rough (and structurally speaking, Fool Moon is Storm Front but with werewolves instead of evil sorcerers), but when Grave Peril comes around that's when the series kicks into high gear and finds its groove. "So why not start there?" Because the series eventually drops the stand alone episode style and creates a long running story arc where literally everything that happens to Dresden is connected to a nebulous conspiracy. Everything is connected. There's always another secret. You get the idea.

Nothing wrong with being noobs, fellas! That's part of the fun of tabletop gaming: the learning curve. To give you an idea, I once ran a game with a few friends, all of whom were newbs... And at one point, in their first enemy encounter, the wizard decided to summon an ethereal badger... and commanded it to crawl up an enemy barbarian's britches. And it did. To make matters worse for the barbarian, the cleric then cast a spell that induces raw fear. But no one in the party took account for their environment, and so they both wounded up making said barbarian (with the badger scratching and biting about in his nether region)... run off a cliff screaming in sheer horror. Heh heh! Good times. "OMG I didn't mean to make a guy run off a cliff! ... Is the badger okay?" Me: "... At that height? Uh... no. Badger be gone. Badger be dead." "..." (walks over to his corner of woe) And to be fair, my Malaysian friend, in my usual group chat only a few are in my timezone. We have a guy from the UK, for instance, so he's always several hours ahead of us. We still manage to run great games together.

Nah, not a hypocrite. Though I would see it as a slightly silly arbitrarily self-imposed restriction. If you can read a series where the main hero is implied to be gang raped by vampires when held prisoner (see: Grave Peril) and later commits genocide against an entire race several books later (to say nothing of every other nightmarish thing throughout the series), but a little Tarantino-esque creative profanity makes your skin crawl? Yeah, it's kind of silly. I've honestly never understood people who could rationalize their enjoyment of extreme violence (of which there is plenty in The Dresden Files) yet get prudish and squeamish over language. Again, both horrible and awesome excessive acts of violence are a regular occurrence in Dresden's Chicago, and that's not even touching on subtler humiliations, pains, torments and degradations heroes and civilians caught in supernatural crosshairs tend to suffer through... but you draw the line at excess profanity?

Thomas is wonderful. Easily one of my favourite things about the series as a whole is the bromance between Harry and Thomas, it's wonderful. I'm a sucker for male friendships like that. If you love heists, then I have to recommend The Lies of Locke Lamora (and it sequels, whose collective name cannot be said on this site due to swear filters), by Scott Lynch. It's like Ocean's 11, but in fantasy Renaissance Italy.

There's room in the world for all kinds of stories; even ones that don't especially lift our spirits. Even ones that, quite the reverse, sink our spirits into the mud. It's Aristotle's Theory of Catharsis: we love (fiction-wise) tragedy, drama and horror so that we have a means to expunge certain feelings from ourselves. It's cleansing the palette. We have to be reminded of the darker stuff every now and then so that, in reality, we'll eventually learn how to deal with it properly.

Heh, precisely. Think of it as the fantasy equivalent of BoJack Horseman.

That last one, actually, is nearly beat for beat the plot of R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse series. In my defence, for every Mistborn or Hobbit or other high fantasy yarn, you can't help but think that every regular person must be seen as little more than cannon fodder by the gods or the Powers That Be if only a select handful of people in all the universe are deemed truly important. Sort of the point I want to make, really; it's all a bit unfair for the ordinary person if destiny chooses some bugger for a story because they have the magic ring or genes.

Worst ideas? Aside from fanfiction I wrote as a fourteen year old... Nowadays, I've been writing a novel everyone I know has been begging me to stop, since its premise is too depressing. I call it "The Farmboy." The pitch? It's a total subversion of the Hero's Journey in fantasy stories. You know the type, where the farm boy goes on an epic quest and is secretly found to be a king or something? That old chestnut. In this story, the Farmboy finds literally all of his childhood friends get to go on these amazing adventures or have been secretly royalty all along, but himself? He's just an ordinary Farmboy. No rebel plans fall into his lap. He doesn't inherit a magic ring. He isn't found to be the long lost son of the king. Nope. He's a frustratingly normal boy in a world that, really, only favours Heroes & Protagonists. He is neither. His goal in life, at best, is to be a minor character in someone else's story. Heh heh, it's meant to be an existential dark comedy. Like A Serious Man, but in the fantasy genre. I've been told it's too frustratingly depressing and nihilistic to be a readable, heh heh.

Usually text. I respect people's privacy and some internet buddies of mine are pretty shy about showing their faces online. I'm cool with it.

Heh, one of my favourite jokes from the series comes from Cold Days. "Oh God," Molly said, "We're his lackeys." Thomas grinned, "You're his lackey, I'm his thug. Whole higher rank."