TakunuvaC01

Just a quick update from me: things are relatively hectic right now (mad rush to the end of the semester), so I'm not sure I'll have time to repost the old draft (well, I could repost it now, but I also want to edit it a bit to make the character limit thing make much more sense, actually write the missing faction pages) until Tuesday- i.e. Thanksgiving break. Assuming there's still interest in that game, and assuming I haven't managed to alienate everyone with petty arguments about vehicles and so on in this thread... I'd be able to start it running anytime after Thanksgiving. (Depending on when we reach a rough consensus on it probably not being terrible?) Now... we are down to two active RPGs at the moment, and I know there were people with other ideas even though the development of Mars Mission dominated the last ~2 months of the channel- there was an aquatic-themed RPG being tossed around that would combine all the ocean-based themes? Any other ideas, or people interested in developing / running games?

Dimensioneer and I talk regularly. We don't have any comments regarding those topics other than that we feel the security vulnerability used in this instance has been patched. One thing often done after such incidents is to release a detailed post-mortem of how the attack happened, how it was noticed, what was compromised, what is being done to fix the issue, etc. (The Ubuntu one I linked impressed me for its honesty and thoroughness at the time).This sort of thing goes a long wait to maintaining faith in security after such an incident, and also helps to reassure users that the same thing cannot happen again.I would highly recommend this- being open and honest about what exactly happened can only be a good thing*.* Unless, of course, it would reveal details about the site that might allow an attack. But honestly, this would mean that whatever vulnerabilities used to gain access potentially haven't been patched, but you've said they have been. And in general, trusting security through obscurity is a really bad idea.

I understand the basics behind how security works: namely, that it's always easier for someone to penetrate the system than it is for you to keep the system secure. To put it in terms of statistics, a black hat hacker / attacker only needs to be lucky once, but the site staff need to be lucky every time. It is always easier to break things than to keep them safe.So I understand that, of course, and I understand that you guys are hardly professional sysadmins doing this for a living, so I can sympathize with your position... but, with all due respect, none of that excuses things like:-Not keeping software up to date that runs the site-Having an automated system to make regular offline backupsFrom other comments in this thread, it sounds like you're not doing the former; from your own post, you don't have the latter.With an automated backup system, you would be able to spend those twenty hours a week doing other things (like keeping the site up to date?), because backups would be taken care of. Meiko already talked about this a bit, but let me add the following statement: you don't need to store years worth of backups if you don't have enough space, you just need to keep your backups isolated from the machine that the webserver is running on, so if the server gets penetrated the attacker does not have access to the backups. Automated, regular backups are more important than years worth of backups made irregularly over month-long intervals (assuming you can protect the automated ones).I'm sure you know this- after all, we recently suffered from the deletion of the old database precisely because there were no offsite backups. But I feel the need to say it anyway...Disclaimer: I'm a hobbyist programmer and university student. I rarely have time to work on any of my projects, so I completely understand the staff's position. I don't mean to lecture you guys on security, or try to take the moral high ground, or anything like that- other people have already done that in this thread. And I completely understand the impossible position that is maintaining the site against attack- people are going to be angry when something goes wrong, but it's unrealistic to expect that you can stop everything from going wrong.But I confess to being a little frustrated, perhaps even more so because I'm aware of some of the underlying technical issues- I don't expect perfect security but it honestly sounds like there are some fundamental things going wrong (if I believe all the comments in this thread, at least).Apologies if I've crossed a line. I'm grateful that the staff does keep BZP running- for fun, as you said- because I do still enjoy the site (after, what is it now, eight years?) but without new Bionicle content I now primarily see the site as a place to produce, showcase, and collaborate on content (RPGs, stories, etc- I'm not personally involved in art or other media or MOCs or anything like that, but all of that too), and whenever a significant amount of data is lost it means that content we worked on or showcased is (partly) lost, which is painful. Hence my frustration.

A full discussion about this probably would belong in another thread (and I'm sure it has been the subject of many), but- I did not know most of the city was automated with a minimal staff of caretaker Matoran. Not that I'm doubting you or anything, but I assume this comes from Greg quotes? For most of the Metrus I suppose it makes sense that either everything is automated or a lot has been accomplished over a really long period of time by a small team of workers. (The Sculpture Fields might be an example of the later). The only thing that I still am uneasy about is the Ga-Metru school system, but even that I guess I can explain away if there are enough subjects of study and enough possible degrees that take sufficiently long to achieve. I mean, if you wanted to get a doctorate in every possible subject in this world, it'd take you a very, very long time. You're right about the phrase "bustling city", I probably made that up.

I've actually always thought a thousand Matoran was rather small- the scope of Metru Nui seems really large, to me, at least based on the books and pictures in the movie. The sheer size of the chute network, the number of knowledge towers, furnaces, the whole existence of the school system in Ga-Metru- it seems like there should be more than a couple of hundred Matoran in each Koro. I'm sure the same is true, that the size of Metrui Nui is just scaled up for dramatic reasons just like it's scaled down in the games, but it's mildly disappointing for me that the city must be small enough that a thousand Matoran can make it a bustling metropolis.

This sounds like it could be a pretty interesting game. I probably wouldn't play (haven't touched a forum RPG in ages- though you never know), but I'd definitely support its creation.One general thing to keep in mind (not for this, as it'd replace an existing game, but for other people considering designing RPGs) is that LGD was never really able to support more than 6 or 7 RPGs at a time... and it seems like we're kind of at that cap.Though maybe things will be better now that we have our own forum? And I've never really liked the idea of artificially imposing a limit on the number of RPGs that can be around at a time anyway.

I suppose, looking back on it now, MNOG was probably a "better game" than MNOG 2.But at the time, what I enjoyed about MNOG 2 was all of the chores and so on, the fact that it felt more like you lived in the world than you were just the hero on an adventure. The rest of Bionicle was "the hero on an adventure", and I didn't really want more of the same, or to be the hero, necessarily- I wanted to know what life was like on the island. Which was what MNOG 2 offered.MNOG 2 tried to be an open world game, and I enjoyed it because of that. I realize I'm probably the exception though, since it seems most people in this thread would rather have been the hero.Not saying it was perfect though. Others have already pointed to various flaws, and it is true that even though I enjoyed the chores system at the time, it might get tedious quickly for me today. But I liked the overall idea.I recall my biggest disappointment with MNOG 2 was that every village outside Ga-Koro and Onu-Koro seemed very lacking in stuff to do. In Ga-Koro at least I could contribute to the economy in a fairly significant way. But it seemed like more and more content was cut as the other Koros were added over time. Which hurt the game a lot, I think, and reduced the "open world" feel of it.Still though, one of the things I preferred about 2001-2003 (and 2004, I guess) to later years was the emphasis on how the Matoran lived and how their societies were structured, and it occurs to me that it's thanks to the MNOGs we got to see a lot of that (even if they are semi-non-canonical). The second one just seems to try and emphasize those elements more.

...maybe we could get a backup copy of the database from "them"?In all seriousness, though, this is very depressing. I understand not caring about discussions and so on- frankly, I don't either- but what about content that was produced by content-producing members and posted here? Epics, stories, comedies. RPGs. Games. Stuff we didn't think to back up ourselves, or stuff from members long gone. Most of my newer short stories I have saved on my own computer, but how many people really write and archive all their posts to a forum RPG or something like that?I understand that there's really nothing you can do if the data just isn't there anymore, though.

So I know nothing about Ninjago, as well as many other newer themes, but here's a few thoughts:-Is there a reason you are forcing players to restrict themselves to one weapon? I mean, yes... a warrior who favors the bow over the sword is going to primarily fight with the bow, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't switch to a sword, or dagger, or something else if someone charges them. (Just as a general example).-If you do want to restrict players to one weapon, you should have a list of possible weapons they can choose, rather than saying "whatever is used in the sets is acceptable".-The perks section is a little confusing to read, although I'm not entirely sure how it could be made better. Links to the actual sets would be one thing. Maybe break it down by elements -> ranks rather than ranks -> elements, and use a bulleted list or something?Jacks sorta already mentioned the main thing I noticed, but from a different angle- from a brief perusal of your RPG, it seems like there is only one faction to join, yes? What's the point of letting people have two player characters, then, if they can have ten NPCs? (Unless you are allowing players to join "The Enemy" faction- in which case this should be expressly stated).When Peasam and I did the Alpha Team (Ogel's Last Stand) RPG a while back, we allowed two characters, but that was so one could be in one faction and the other in the other faction.Also, and this is a bit more general- on placing limits on the number of NPCs one player can control / create- I'm not really sure I like the idea. I mean... in general, yes, you don't want to have too many NPCs running around the place. But what does that limit actually apply to? NPCs who are common members of "your squad", characters who generally go on missions with your primary character? Or any and all NPCs you need to create for the purposes of storytelling?By "for the purposes of storytelling", I mean cases like: let's say I want to add a conversation between an engineer servicing my vehicle and my main character so I can hint at some detail or another, or I need to introduce a redshirt NPC so I can kill them off later, or I want to write about a character in some other organization for some story (this may not be an issue in this setting, but it would be in, say, Dino Attack).So... onto what class of NPC does this restriction actually apply?Also, I can't tell from the rules, but are you expecting people to fill out the character form for their NPCs?

There are main-page news articles for the Bionicle RPG contests, right? (Or at least there were, once upon a time).Perhaps the creation of new LGD RPGs could be submitted as news.

I guess, since XERRD wasn't something you created... in this particular case, yeah.On the other hand, you could probably do something with a splinter group of them, or something like that.

[endquote] I thought I'd chime in here, with some other historical perspective: DA was written deliberately to be set in the same universe as MDF- or more specifically, PeabodySam used everything he'd come up with MDF to get DA up and running. The return of familiar characters (PBB, Frozeen, etc.) made it obvious the two RPGs were in the same universe, so it was natural for other people to import things as well. This only worked though because Victor Draven was long gone, and so wasn't in a position to do anything with MDF that contradicted what was being done in DA. Also, I don't really know whether he had planned any kind of overall arc for MDF at all- I suspect he hadn't. Then again, I could have said the same about the DA up till about page 40 or 50 or so. But the point is that after not too long a time most of the canon in MDF was written by Kotua, CoKK, PeabodySam, and probably a few other people whose names I can't remember anymore. So it was natural for DA to continue their work. What I think I'm getting at here is- if this is an RPG being run by a lot of ex-DA veterans, it's natural to pull a lot of canon from DA and set this in that world. On the other hand; you may only want to pull things that you yourself came up with or had a large hand in developing.But I don't know that this is something that should be done in general, because if someone new starts an RPG and has their own ideas for a story, they may not explicitly say their RPG is not in the same universe of some RPG they never played, and while at first it probably won't make a difference eventually it might. It's better to say "all RPGs written by the same people (broadly) are set in the same universe unless otherwise noted", I think.Alternatively, you could always do what we used to do- which was not worry about it and reference whatever. Though this ended with the whole "portals to Metru Nui" thing so maybe that's a really bad idea...

OOC: Now you've just inspired me to write a story where Magma and his companion steal Time Cruiser technology and install it in the ship and use it to go around all of space and time fighting bad people wherever they appear....I don't know if you've casted an actor to play Magma yet, but if you haven't, he's Christopher Eccleston. And Covert is Alex Kingston. Or... well, any of the other actors who've played a companion over the years, I suppose. But Magma is definitely Eccleston-as-the-Ninth.(Not because I specifically liked the Ninth Doctor- I'm a Fourth + Tenth fanboy- but because the Ninth's angst and depression and violence and all that is a crucial part of Magma's character. Plus he kind of looks like how I imagine Magma. I guess alternatively Magma could be the Seventh, who was manipulative and could be cruel as well... nah, the Ninth it is).And don't be surprised if I actually try to write this story now.

OOC: I suppose when I said "I'd never really considered" the design that wasn't quite accurate, but you've mostly hit what I've imagined- I like the general design. Kind of aerial Star Destroyerish, just as Peasam said.The only thing is I've always written the ship as being a bit bigger than that*. For instance, in the final battle it deploys a wing of 6 or so Blue Eagles, and Magma and Zed commented that they haven't had time to fully rebuild the cargo bays and so are sending this ship into battle with less than the usual complement of vehicles, and I know I used to have her fly around a small attack force of Fire Hammers and maybe even an Iron Predator.Even revising some earlier ridiculous size estimations downward, she should still dwarf the T-1 Typhoon model by more, I think.Alternatively, the fact that the ship was rebuilt from ruins by AT without the full cargo bays provides a nice cop-out. If all the ship could hold was 6 Blue Eagles, that's not too much extra cargo space, so then we simply say that it's a bit bigger than suggested by the scale model, has more cargo space, and is is a representation of the ship as it most recently appeared in the Final Battle, before Magma stuck a warp drive on the back but after the original larger cargo bays were blown up.I like this idea. It's canon!*The only size benchmark I'd come up with and tried to stick to, over the years, was that it was around half the size of the Voltage. Which raises the question of how big the Voltage is, of course. I do know Kotua used to deploy large swarms of his robotic Ice Blades (I think they were called Voltage Blades? Vulture Blades? My mind is failing...), and they were housed in the airship. So I always assumed it was really, really big.

OOC: I do still vaguely frequent this thread, so if you want to just post the link here I'll notice it.Or PM me instead, if you prefer.