Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Iituem]

On balance, I think the cellphone thing boiled down to a couple of points.

1) Cellphones are so commonplace, we would not instinctively imagine them as being that special, even in a world where they are.  Which is really damn annoying, when you think about it.  On the other hand, we are only culpable for being ordinary humans, and not actually taking the time/having the idea to stop and formulate everything we actually have in the context of the world we are in.

2) Cellphone, not smartphone!  I literally imagined a machine capable of doing nothing more than calling, texting and telling the time, although frankly that's because I have a really basic phone myself and that kind of informed my thought process.

Hrm.

[Dermonster]

I don't really remember what I contributed in the quest. Maybe something in the science conversations with... dwemer guy.

I don't actually know anything about Morrowind. Even now.

I hope I get a mention here and there~

[birdy51]

In agreement on Cell Phones. Granted, we never asked what type of phone we had. But I had assumed it was basic as well, like one of those old flippy doodads.

[IronyOwl]

Flippy doodads can be surprisingly sophisticated, though obviously that doesn't help you if you aren't aware of it.

Also I think we had one or two early "collect the loot" attempts that ended poorly (somebody already snagging alchemical gear?), which may have convinced a lot of us that it wouldn't be that easy. Not being able to take kwama foragers also put a number of "easy" scores out of convenient reach.

[LordBucket]

I don't actually know anything about Morrowind.

Right, a few of you didn't. But we also have a couple people who've played it extensively. Remember at once point a couple of you pulled out a secret treasure stash in Seyda Neen I didn't even know about. Always seemed strange to me that you guys pulled out the obscure little treetrunk stash, but you didn't...for example, raid the Vivec Arena storehouse. There's more stuff in there than you could possibly have carried even in 2 or 3 trips. Armor, weapons, a full set of alchemy tools, ingredients, furniture a sleeping area, crates and crates of misc stuff divided over multiple rooms, and the big chamber is guarded by a single rat. That you could have stood on a crate and killed without it being able to reach you. Or simply opened the door, lured it out and then closed the door behind it. Or lured it out and run down the hall and let a guard kill it. You had options.

Or the Seyda Neen warehouse, for that matter. It was right there in the starter town, and it wouldn't have been complicated to get in through a window. "MorrowREAL" was established very early on, and you guys made use of it from time to time. You slipped a note under Vivec's door in episode 9 for example, so clearly you knew you weren't limited to pc-game actions.

2) Cellphone, not smartphone!

In my part of the world the terms are interchangeable, and the only people who go out of their way to specify smartphone are the people who work with them. I didn't even know they still make phones they don't do anything  other than make calls.

In agreement on Cell Phones. Granted, we never asked what type of phone we had. But I had assumed it was basic as well, like one of those old flippy doodads.

You did eventually, in episode 51 get around to explicitly asked whatthe phone could do. But even within the first ten episodes you knew at a minimum clock, and text and camera features. The clock was regularly mentioned for the first dozen or so episodes while you were still trying to figure out the timescale mismatch. And you guys tried using the text features a couple times to access the Morrowind command console. And the camera was explicitly mentioned in episode 9.

You check your cellphone. It seems to think it's 1:25pm. You've only been here, what...10 minutes and the sun is already setting?

Clearly time passes much faster here.

Take out your cellphone, place your hand on the door. Type
'unlock', no quotes into the phone and then send.

You take out your cellphone. Cautiously you put one hand on the door and use the other to type:

-- unlock

You click send. Nothing happens. You try touching the cellphone to the door and type it again. Still nothing. You briefly experiment with camera mode, but can't figure out a way to be viewing the door and type at the same time. Wait...maybe the door is unlocked now. How would you know? You don't really want to try opening it to find out. On a whim, you type:

-- player->SetStrength 100

You click send, but still nothing happens

Also I think we had one or two early "collect the loot" attempts that ended poorly (somebody already snagging alchemical gear?), which may have convinced a lot of us that it wouldn't be that easy.

In Episode 5, you discovered that SexyWithers had taken Fargoths'r ring from the barrel, and cleared out one of the Census office rooms, but skipped the storeroom. And you did loot that. And you did loot the lighthouse, and the secret treetrunk stash in Seyda Neen. You guys also checked the other treetrunk stash, the one related to Fargoth's quest, but that didn't work out for various reasons.

The only other looting attempt I remember that didn't work out was asking the fighter's guild to empty their guildchest for you. But even there you ended up with a pair of potions, not nothing. Which incidentally, bewildered me that you guys never went to do that again. There were four fighter's guild halls you could have picked up freebies from, and you could have gone back from time to time to get more. Plus the mage guild chests. You never even checked those after Edwinna enlisted you.

Even after all the whole fiasco with Fast Eddie wanting potions, nobody suggested going and picking up freebies from the mage guild.

: "Ok, how about some healing potions?"

: "I can do that. Here you go, two standard healing potions. Sign here, please."

You take the potions and sign for them. You paid 25 gold for guild membership, and Fasile basically just handed you 70-80 gold worth of potions, so really this was a good deal whether or not you do anything later with the guild.

Four fighters guilds, 70-80 gold each, minus transport costs and plus the, checking...324 gold you already had, as of episode 38 you could probably have afforded magic training just by running around and scooping up and selling freebies. And even if the sale price wasn't enough because of your low merchant skills, it still would have been a big pile of useful potions. But nobody thought of it.

[LordBucket]

MST3K Episode 2
Marooned in Morrowind Episode 2: Wherefore art thou, mudcrabs and stars?

Episode 2: Wherefore art thou, mudcrabs and stars?

3

: "In an episode title, no less. The episode title is, of course, a reference to Romeo and Julet. "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Juliet is asking why Romeo is Romeo. So the episode title here is asking, "Why are you mudcrabs and stars?" with a nice Luna-esque flair as a bonus. Remember, our protagonist is Celestia's spell having grown self aware. The game Morrowind being played by Luna is sentient. Mudcrabs are part of the game. The game is running on solar-goddess-magic. This episode title is literally asking why Michael is what he is. THough since both this and the previous episode featured mudcrabs, and in this episode you do some star gazing, the title didn't stand out as unusual. Nevertheless, it was a deliberate reference to Michael's situation. Information in episode titles wasn't uncommon. On occasion it was completely blatant. Towards the end I was really trying to whack you guys over the head with things. Dashing through the Ash, in a onehorse open sleigh" in an episode about Awesomicus being the most blatant examples, but there were others."

"Sexywithers, meanwhile, is probably getting off the boat right about now."

: "Indeed. We skipped over the narrative background story nonsense."

You're not particularly hungry, thirsty or tired. Though it occurs to you that the $30 you have in cash probably won't buy anything here, so while there's no huge rush...food might become an issue at some point.

It also crosses your mind that in vanilla Morrowind, it wasn't actually necessary to eat, drink or sleep at all. But you're not ready to assume that you won't have to. In fact, you're guessing you probably will. This feels very real.

: "Michael didnt' know a lot of things. Neither did you. Stuff like this had to be figured out. Sentient spellform Michael didn't need to eat because he was a spell. PC Morrowind Michael didn't need to eat because that's how the game Morrowind works. Food, drink and sleep are all optional. Bay12 hivemind you didn't need to eat or sleep either. Each of you individually might, your collective presence here on the forum doesn't. Clearly the trend is that the various yous are in uiverses where that kind of thing simply isn't necessary. And presumably either the physical flesh and blood Michaels in physical Morrowind univeress either didn't need to eat either, simply because that's how those universes worked, or as Yagrum might put it you were "far enough away on the 'do I need to eat?' axis" that their experience of needing to eat didn't come through in your experience here."

"A lot of the time, I knew the details about uncertain things like this, but I always made a point of not giving away information you wouldn't know. Michael didn't know, so he said he didn't know rather than 'magically knowing' something he wouldn't."

Your cellphone seems to think it's 1:17pm

: "The time difference was another thing I established before the game started. It came up a few times, then pretty much got dropped. Though I'm kind of glad, since I stopped keeping track of time and date early on and it would have been a terrible nuisance to go back and figure out exactly how much time had passed at every point in the game."

the sun is fairly close to directly above you. Holding one hand in front of your face and looking straight up, you can see that the sun is clearly a bit "that way" off of center. But very obviously, the sun is much bigger than it seems like it should be. 

6

: "I used to edit novels for a publishing firm. Above, I'm deliberately engaging in what is typically considered to be bad writing. I'm refusing to use subject pronouns. Rather than saying 'The sun is over there, it's bright and shiny and you're glad it's not melting your face off," I'm saying "the sun is over there, the sun is bright and shiny and you're glad that the sun isn't melting your face off."  Now that I'm pointing it out, I'm sure it's obvious, even if it wasn't before. Not that I really expected anyone to say "DUDE! Why aren't you using pronouns?!?!!?" At least not this early on. But I really thought that eventually somebody would notice."

"Also, early establishment here that this is definitely not earth and that celestial mechanics are a bit different. That had the potential to have been a significant piece of information, but it never really came up except during conversations with Divayth and Yagrum about dimensional travelling much later."

1

: "And now, in addition to the sun reference counter, we introduce the "gratuitous pictures of the sun for no particular reason to see if anyone would notice" counter. This particular image made sense in context, because you'd asked about using the sun to determine cardinal directions. But later on, yeah...I was cramming the sun into screenshots at every opporunity. Marooned in Morrowind has over 300 screenshots, and I'm guessing fully one in 4 or 5 are just pictures of the sunfor no obvious reason. It was supposed to be like the 11:11 phenomenon. I've been wearing a Celestia avatar for the entire nearly 3 years this game was running. Really surprised me that nobody ever noticed the sun imagery."

"Let's see," you state out loud, "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west." That's the expression, right? But you're not entirely sure how to interpret that. Is the sun still rising right now, or is it setting? If it's rising, then that way is east. But if it's setting, then that way is west. Your cellphone says it's 1:19 now, so if the two worlds are the same...then presumably it's afternoon so the sun is setting and that way is west.

But...doesn't it also depend on where on the globe you are? The sun rises in the east where you live back on earth, maybe...but how do you know that you're in the same hemisphere here? Even if the general east-to-west progression is the same, doesn't your position on the globe change the relative angles involved? You're pretty sure Morrowind is in the northern hemisphere of Tamriel, but...does that necessarily mean it's the same as on Earth? Or, for that matter, how do you know if the orientation of the sun to the planet's rotation is the same as on earth? From it's size in the sky, that star is either much bigger or much closer than you expected it to be. But the temperature isn't hot at all. In fact, it's a bit chilly. You're pretty sure that's not Sol and this isn't Earth.

13

: "Also, as mentioned in the story, figuring out cardinal directions on a totally different planet under a different star really wasn't realistic. I'm giving myself a cookie for not letting you guys get away with that.."

You tap it, hard, with your knuckles and it makes a solid thunk noise. Right as you do, the mudcrab comes up on its hind legs and tries to bite you.

: "Ok, so I didn't expect that you guys would want to play with the mudcrabs, but hey...I figured you were the ones playing it, so why not? I didn't want to railroad the game at all, and if you wanted to play patticake with mudcrabs, that was totally ok."

The 'no railroading' thing kind of ended up being a problem later on though. Early on, in the first 15 or so episodes there were several players who really 'got' the premise of the game, and understood the underlaying philosophical ideas. Frumple, Nivim, etc. When those players left, game progress stalled for a long time, leading eventually to the Imperial Legion arc. In fact, at one point Nivim even called you guys out for not getting it. We'll get to that quote later around the Vivec episodes. If it hadn't been for IronyOwl, I'm not sure you guys would ever have figured out...well, as much as you did. And Sparksol. Pity he didn't show up sooner. He had some good ideas, but showed up to the game a bit too late."[/i]

Each panel of the sign seems to have two scripts on it. The one on top you don't even recognize the characters, but the one on the bottom is plain english. From top to bottom on the left, the side reads "Ald'ruhn," "Gnaar Mok," "Hla Oad.", and on the right you see "Seyda Neen."

: "I don't understand why such a big deal was made over figuring out cardinal directions when there are signs all over Morrowind. I'm not sure how it would have helped you to know which way was south anyway. It's not you ever had any reason to go south, instead of going to towns which were all  since you'd generally want to go things like towns rather than just 'south.' Interesting locations in Morrowind don't usually exist at direct cardinal angles from one another, so going south from one location would generally just take you into the jungle rather than to anywhere useful."

"Also, if you check the actual signs in-game, all the images really do have two lines of script. So it fit pretty well to suggest that they were written in both native Dunmer and occupation-Cyrodil, which ended up being english."

Looking back at the sun...it appears that the direction you thought was west looks kind of like it might be more like southeast.

14

[Dermonster]

I have the feeling that even if people picked up on the sun thing, they either didn't care or thought you were having difficulties writing stuff, maybe? I sure as hell don't remember seeing it. I don't associate the sun with Celestia, I just associate Celestia with Celestia and when Celestia gets brought up the sun comes with her as an afterthought, but when the sun comes up it's just the sun.

Also we were more focusing on the Morrowind bit than the puzzle based only-existed-at-this-point-as-a-referance MLP bit, maybe? I haven't reread this thing but that's a sensible assumption to make.

[LordBucket]

I don't associate the sun with Celestia

we were more focusing on the Morrowind bit

: "Neither do I. If only there was someone else associated with the sun who was relevant in a game about Morrowind."

[Dermonster]

It's almost like nobody expected to interact with daedra nigh immediately when we thought we were still just some guy!

We're all idiots, but from retrospect it's readily more apparent.

[Arcvasti]

I'm PTWing this. I only started participating in the game 4-6 updates before it ended, but it is one of the better forum games I've seen.

: "I used to edit novels for a publishing firm. Above, I'm deliberately engaging in what is typically considered to be bad writing. I'm refusing to use subject pronouns. Rather than saying 'The sun is over there, it's bright and shiny and you're glad it's not melting your face off," I'm saying "the sun is over there, the sun is bright and shiny and you're glad that the sun isn't melting your face off."  Now that I'm pointing it out, I'm sure it's obvious, even if it wasn't before. Not that I really expected anyone to say "DUDE! Why aren't you using pronouns?!?!!?" At least not this early on. But I really thought that eventually somebody would notice."

Ironically, as someone who regularly tries to impart hidden meaning by fiddling with names and pronouns, I never noticed that at all.

[gordy]

PTW! Sad to see the game end, sorry I couldn't have helped more
 
Good game.

[Sparksol]

The 'no railroading' thing kind of ended up being a problem later on though. Early on, in the first 15 or so episodes there were several players who really 'got' the premise of the game, and understood the underlaying philosophical ideas. Frumple, Nivim, etc. When those players left, game progress stalled for a long time, leading eventually to the Imperial Legion arc. In fact, at one point Nivim even called you guys out for not getting it. We'll get to that quote later around the Vivec episodes. If it hadn't been for IronyOwl, I'm not sure you guys would ever have figured out...well, as much as you did.

Reading through that whole session was...augh. I was irritated that the forum hivemind was so - for lack of a better term - scatterbrained, but I suppose if it hadn't been then I wouldn't have been able to get involved at all; it'd have been over instead. Even though my involvement turned out to not be enough. I suspected a lot, (and was reasonably close on probably half of the things, as it turns out) but I didn't feel like I had enough solid links to call everyone's attention to things.

And Sparksol. Pity he didn't show up sooner. He had some good ideas, but showed up to the game a bit too late.

My own fault for letting myself be absent from Bay12 for over a year.

Anyway, multidimensional ponderings and alternate dimension rules and setups are hobbies of mine. Kleinbottle corkscrew drainsnake thinking is a habit I have trouble breaking, which both helped and hindered here. Also a pity I'm not so good with groups, even in a forum board setting.

: One more thing.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Azura

"The Winged Twilights are her servants"

I was wrong on this point. I did see a connection there, but I'd dismissed it because it seemed too obvious. (Hilarious, though! I'm keeping that picture.)

[LordBucket]

MST3K Episod3 3
Episode 3: We're off on the road to Seyda Neen. We certainly do get mushrooms. (boomp ditty boomp ditty boomp)

: "Episode title is a History of the World, part 1 reference. The elder scrolls Imperials are patterned after Imperial Rome, and the episode line is a play on the song sung by Mel Brooks and company during the Roman sequence: "We're off on the road to Judea. We certainly do get around. (boomp ditty boomp ditty boomp),"  which was itself a reference to the Road to Morroco comedy series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby."

"Nothing deep going on there, just a shoutout."

Tree mushrooms! Bungler's Bane and...what was it called? Hypha something? Hypha facia? Yeah, that's it. And, as expected, walking around the bush you see more mushrooms on the other side of the tree. But...which is which?

: "This was early establishment of how the game was going to work. No tooltips, no top-view map, etc. No "game interface." It was certainly a problem you guys had to deal with, but overall you coped rather well. I've run high realism games before, and a lot of the time people have a very difficult time coping.

"Only time it really became a huge issue for you was the trip to Tel Fyr, where I tried navigating without looking at the radar map, and you basically got lucky. I made two major mistakes that happened to cancel each other out and stumbled on Tel Fyr completely expecting to end up in the Ashlands instead."

But that introduces another problem. The mushrooms are big. Fully 14 to 16 inches across each. They don't weigh much, but sheer volume is likely to prevent you from carrying too many.

: "Real world volume rather than game physics. I expected that you guys would try a 'pick up everything not bolted down' approach, which wasn't going to work. But you guys adapted to this pretty quickly. Over the entire course of the game, alchemy tools were the only time it was really a huge problem."

Violet Coprinus, or...what's the other one? Luminous Russula? Yeah, you're not sure which but you're pretty sure it's one of those two. They're all needed for Ajira's quests at the mage guild

: "Was trying to help you here by giving out a casual reminder that yes, you can use your knowledge of Morrowind to game the system. This was both a general reminder, as well as the GM trying to hand you a specific solution for a specific problem, hoping you'd take the idea and run with it. Every game of Morrowind I play, I always join the mage guild and always end up doing those quests for Ajira. But the mushrooms and flowers she needs can't be found in Balmora, so it's convenient to pick them up in and around Seyda Neen first, so you can walk in and immediately complete a couple quests. In your case you werne't able to join the mage guild, but in context it doesn't make any sense that Ajira's quest be mage guild quests. Not only does Ajira have no reason to care who helps her, one of the quests in that chain involves breaking the mage guild rules so it makes far more sense for her to have somebody who isn't a member do them. And no sense at all for the guild to give membership ranking credit for breaking their rules and helping one of their members cheat on their own homework assignments. So in keeping with "MorrowREAL" I was going to handle that whole thing more sensibly. No membership required, no mage guild credit, but Ajira would personally appreciate your helping her, and I figured having a contact in the guild would end up benefiting you somehow or another. Maybe it would result in you getting guild admission, or training, or personal references, or whatever...but without really planning out it would play out I just figured that it would all work out and Ajira would be your first contact."

"Surprisingly, not only did you never pick up on that directly dropped hint that you could easily do quests immediately for Ajira, even long term you didn't make much use of your quest knowledge at all. Simply by looking up quest requirements, you could have accomplished a LOT by simply identifying what people want, then showing up with it. You guys didn't ever really do that. I never understood why. Once in a great while people did suggest it. For example:"

The Vassir-Drindat cave, a lost Ebony mine. We know it's location, we could've Ondusi's Unhinge'd the door in the abandoned mansion and talked to Dram, and gotten a handsome reward for telling him where it is. Oh well, I'm sure there are others who'd find the info valuable.

: "Reward for that quest was your choice of 2000 gold or a daedric weapon worth up to 4800 gold. You wouldn't have even needed to show upat the mine first for the quest trigger. The counsilors only cared about knowing where it was. All you would have had to do is show up and talk to Velanda, then she'd have dispatched a team to confirm your claim. You could have had 2000 gold at level 1 having never picked up a weapon, or with a bit more effort you could have taken one of the daedric weapons, with great difficulty dragged it to Creeper, and sold it for 4800. All within the first few episodes you could have had far more gold than you picked up over the entire nearly three years that this game run. And that was from only a SINGLE quest, out of quite a few that would have been just as easy."

"I expected that within the first dozen episodes you'd have more gold and magic loot than you could carry, simply by exploiting things like this. But over the entire course of the game there were only ever a handful of suggestions like this, and they tended to be heavily outvoted."

checking the sky for cliff racers

: "With death a larger concern than in game where you can casually save and reload, I wanted to remind you that there were dangerous things. Didn't want you to go trapising off into the woods first thing and suffer losses for it before the game was very well established."

You briefly wonder at the implications of not having seen Tarhiel on the way, but for now, you just don't have any answers. Maybe you just...missed him somehow? Yeah, that must be it. Obviously.

: "The phrasing of that really should have made it clear that something was going on. As for the what...this was something I originally intended to do more with, but it never amounted to very much. Remember that as of this moment, in Equestria-universe, Luna is the only pony in Celestia's game spell. In fact, at this point she was the only pony even PLANNED to be in it. Awesomicus and Clover and all the ponies, they hadn't even been conceived of by this point. It hadn't occurred to me as a possibility that other ponies would join the game. That all came later."

"So, as of right now, since in that particular universe our protagonist is an avatar of the game world itself having grown self-aware, Luna is the only actual player in the game. Our protagonist isn't a player. He's a manifestation of the game. So the idea was that, like NPCs, he wasn't able to trigger world events. Tarhiel's event script requires a player to walk in a certain spot. You can even go around it and come from the other side and Tarhiel won't fall. So Michael walked through that spot, and it didn't trigger the event."

"I had plans and ideas for that...but nothing ever really came of it, and the whole idea was mostly abandoned. Though the difference between Michael and "the player" did come up a few other times, like for example the recurring theme of the "gamey player aura" where "PCs" were able to get merchants to do dumb things, because game mechanics. And Michael wasn't able to do that."

[LordBucket]

I will only continue this if the thread remains active.

[Dermonster]

But I don't have anything in particular to say, or if I did, no way for me to enunciate it in a coherent manner!