Best posts made by Apos

@lordbelh We've disagreed philosophically on a number of points and I always felt you were extremely respectful and easy to talk to, and I never felt discouraged by it even when I disagreed, just from my own perspective. I personally see things as a trade-off between a more powerful narrative and storytelling tools versus a comfort level for players in being reassured that abuse they have experienced in the past wouldn't be possible in a new location, and I think it's a tricky balance. Which is why I say no dark mode, but yes on alts, since I think the types of abuse in the former is much harder to police and be aware of than in the latter, and the narrative advantages in the latter are greater than the former too.

I know what people demand. That they want extremely exhaustive answers on how everything works so they can tell their own compelling stories in the setting. I know that if you say, 'Well that's a transporter' that people are going to ask 800 questions on what a transporter is, and exhaustively ask at length why you can or can't use it to create new life or rebuild anything else at the molecular level or a million other things. I get that every engineer character is going to feel they need to know all those.

What I'm saying is it's wrong for a game creator to try to answer them. That it's a mistake to do so.

I think that you should only go very slightly past the knowledge that any general character would have access to. Just a little bit. A few paragraphs at most. You absolutely will never, ever get started if you try to exhaustively define every aspect of the setting. Let me put it another way:

Sure, you'll have phasers or blasters or laser cannons or whatever in the setting. You really don't need to define them past a sentence or two that amounts to 'pew pew'. That's it. If you make other races, and have diplomat characters, you can't write 300 or 400 pages on the hundreds of years of history between the different aliens, and their cultures. There is never going to be a point where you are 'done' there. If you are drawn into rabbit holes away from the baselines, it will never get done, and no one will ever be able to RP in the setting.

Yes, of course I know people have way different demands for sci fi and fantasy. I'm saying it's a mistake for a game designer to try to -meet- those demands initially. It is impossible to do so. And imo the reason why almost no sci fi original theme games exist is because the designers, excited about their settings, want to try to do so. Don't. Say as much as you need, and nothing more.

@shangexile said in RL Anger:

@Meg Free country bro.

If your best defense is literally, 'Well. It's not illegal' then maybe you should re-evaluate your decision making. Just saying, brah.

@Pandora said in Lords and Ladies Game:

Back on topic, I was just speaking to someone about how it can be hard to get into the swing of things on political games, if you're coming in late, or playing a character that wasn't much of a mover or shaker before you took them off the roster, but your interests lie in the social arena. I'm not a shy player, but what sort of advice would you all give someone trying to get involved without having to poke/prod people OOCly?

I dunno man, the only problem there is other people deciding to shoot pages or tells while trying to keep it IC, and then can just very politely brush that off and focus entirely on IC communication. I find it a mixed bag, I've always been able to get involved in fresh characters, but it is more of a, 'how much effort do I want to invest in this' thing in reaching out to people nonstop to get involved. It's tricky in that I don't really want new players overwhelmed by people reaching out to them by hitting people over the head with incentives to do that, but if the burden rests entirely on new players to put themselves out there IC, a lot of people will just say 'fuck it, this is too much work' and slip off after they fail to gel.

@surreality No, that's not even close to the methodology I was talking about. There's a huge difference between, 'deny data to create a craving' and 'you want to give that data but you do not have time to do so, and if you try to do so your game will crash because you are neglecting more important things.'

People fail at sci fi because they are like, 'hold up ya'll, I can't tell stories for these 50 people, because I need to tell one person how a transporter works.' Sure, they don't think of it that way, but it is absolutely how it works in practice when they spend 5 hours talking to a single person.

So why not an inverse Hog Pit that's also opt in, but extremely heavily moderated and posts have to be in a respectful and civil way, with courtesy and care to avoid starting arguments?

Call it Theorycrafting for Mu Nerds, or Ostensibly Positive, or The MSB Demilitarized Zone or whatever, and just specifically state no snark, vaguebooking, venting, rudeness, shade thrown on the sly, whatever. Moderate it incredibly heavily, and just delete rather than move anything that even is vaguely annoying or could even in the most remote way be considered insulting.

Like the base tone of the MSB is pretty snarky outside the Hog Pit. That just doesn't work great for keeping threads free of people losing their shit because how dare someone impugn their MU honor or whatever. Yeah I mean the last couple pages have been pretty much, 'So Nemesis and 4chan trolls should be banned faster', and sure yeah why not, but it doesn't really do much for the future. Otherwise it's pretty much setting yourself up for some people to say, 'Hey you guys need to moderate people that upset me outside the Hog Pit, but all my own posts are totally fine since I'm an angelic scholar free from the sins of the world. Btw do this flawlessly and for free.'

@emmahsue said in Freelance NPC Offer:

Mz. Cupcake: If I can play it when needed/wanted by others and not have to dive deep on Making Things Happen Myself, it can be done. It's the energy required to get MU-players to act that sounds so immensely tiring right now. I've been the active one, and I'm not in that headspace atm.

ES

To be honest, this is why I push so hard for organic RP and made sure the environment was set up to foster it, because it has a way lower obligations and people can feel free to just jump on and wander into scenes, basically.

@surreality Yeah I understand that's the problem but I just disagree. I don't think that target audience just matters very much, and people only become convinced they matter because of how loud they are. I believe the amount of people that a game would lose is eclipsed by those a game would gain by focusing on story, and if the OT game creator does so then they gain enough time to complete the setting to the satisfaction of those that would be demanding.I think people are distracted by the loudest critics without seeing those that would support the game that do not require that degree of rigor. A game designer trying to appeal to those ultra demanding diehards is imo a terrible idea because it is not an effective use of their time, when they can make their game successful by using their time to focus on other avenues of appeal.

In other words- An OT game with the feel of a babylon 5 game can gain a Star Trek's internal consistency with enough time, but it should start story rich because that's just a stronger way to build a game's base. I think trying to present a full canon of a Star Trek's detail when beginning is not an effective use of resources.

I don't think splitting threads that are going off on long tangents or dominating a conversation is that big a deal. I can only speak for myself but I wouldn't care if something I posted got split into its own thread or whatever.

This list is pretty decent. http://musoapbox.net/topic/2342/a-mildly-complete-list-of-current-games?page=1

@faraday I don't think it would stay that way or that it is unlikely that players would adopt whatever is the norm. That is more what I was getting at.

@surreality said in Social Systems:

Question: do you think it's necessarily relevant whether someone is telling the truth or a lie when it comes to convincing another character about the story they're telling?

No. Only how sincere they seem. Someone that's telling the truth but looks nervous probably seems insincere and are thought to be lying. The actual truth doesn't matter imo. I'd just make a check on how sincere they seem in regards to how convincing the pitch is.

Eh there's degrees. I don't really enjoy canon games that are set firmly on rails because I feel too much like a spectator forced to go along with a predictable plot where I know what is going to happen, and that's not really the same thing as wanting to wildly rewrite the game and change the theme and setting through PC action.

@surreality said:

I get the 'you must be a guy' all the time on Shang. When I ask why, I tend to get, "Because all the real girls around here are sweet and giggly and affectionate!" (I'm not.)

All the actual female players I know there... uh... yeah, they're more or less like me, so I never know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that answer. (Which is the same every. fucking. time.)

That just strikes me as so odd. I can think of a few dozen female MU players, and I'm trying really hard to think of any I would ever describe as 'giggly' and coming up with a blank. It's so different from all the ones I know I just don't even know where that would be coming from.

@ganymede said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

The people I'm currently working with have discussed this, and we simply feel more comfortable narrowing our focus for the sake of parsimony and sanity. We have also agreed that we will not be adding more to it.

I think that's a good call. I think most people when they hear more spheres think, "Oh, more character options, this means that there will be more characters, and more chances for roleplay." I don't think it works out like that.

It seems like the more difficult they are to truly integrate, the more time is spent on resolution of extremely niche issues that would get in the way of staff being proactive and helping to generate activity that is necessary to drive forward any non-sandbox. And the more specific characters are to different spheres, the harder it is for their Rp to be relevant outside of it, making it a lot more difficult for characters to create the kind of self-sustaining RP stories for each other that lessen the load on staff.

Not sure if you were the same Tanya I played Kadikos with, but if you were, I thought you did really well with the character.

@faraday So to be more productive and thinking about system design, what about... a player defines an inclination, defined with a descriptive string and then an integer for magnitude. So 'Total Coward: 10' and then defines a will and won't, for something they won't do because of it, and something they will do because of it, for a vulnerability and defense. Could be a secret, or could become known and publicly viewable due to their reputation. Players could have fun with defining them.

Then in disputes between players, if someone says, 'My character would never do that' for something undefined, that's fine, then add it to their sheet along with an equivalent point of vulnerability. So PCs become more fleshed out over time whenever it comes up and people can show their character's evolution over time in response to stories showing what effects them or not.

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@faraday Ghost isn't the one displaying the entitled attitude at all.

That was in one of Nemesis' posts: "All you need to do is get this $120 router in order to allow this!" (which would allow them to play through the style of connection they are using, which the game owner did not want to do for reasons).

That crosses the entitlement line for me: "I want to use your freely offered thing, but I can't the way it is, so you go spend money so you can let me!"

It's pretty awful, really.

You shouldn't cite YouTube as evidence to contradict an article published by cisco.com and written by a CCNA, but for everyone who actually doesn't understand the technical aspects and why the former is much more accredited:

The admin at SR2064 thought that a perfectly valid IPv6 address issued by Arin to AT&T broadband was a "BOGON" because his router was so outdated that it didn't even know what an IPv6 address is. He and other inexperienced admin are also clearly unaware of the fact that if there were such a thing as a "BOGON" in the actual IT world (which I'm re-classifying as someone simply spoofing an IP Address, as that's what it actually refers to), the spoofer or BOGON transmitter still wouldn't be able to receive any responses back to their terminal because that "BOGON" wouldn't be routed to anywhere at all by anyone at all. This type of network trickery is used in DoS attacks, not in "identity obfuscation," and it takes someone lacking technical expertise in this related field to think that one guy connected to and playing the game from their home IPv4 would attempt a DoS attack using 1 or 2 spoofed addresses at the same time. I tried explaining to this admin, just like I've explained here, that nobody was spoofing IP Addresses or attacking his game - the problem is/was his outdated equipment. To classify this as "entitlement" on my part is unfair as I was correcting technical misconceptions.

Claims have been made about Cisco networking device defaults that are plainly disproved by Cisco documentation - not just in the first paragraph but in the article title itself.

From 2008 to around 2014 there actually may have been devices and even operating system updates providing IPv6 compatibility which left those compat functions/features disabled by default. This was never due to "security concerns" but due to the fact that IPv4 exhaustion was not quite complete by 2010-2012 and IPv6 was a brand new thing that wasn't actually in widespread use yet. Forwarding IPv6 requests to network servers that hadn't yet been updated to support it would have resulted in false connection errors and may have erroneously triggered automated blocking/banning protocols as a result. These false-flag positives in no way represented security holes, only issues that would have been difficult to troubleshoot and might have forced legit IT guys to have to update/upgrade equipment to support new OS features before the agency was really prepared for it. By 2017/18 it's safe to say that anyone who isn't IPv6-ready isn't providing any "services" worth consuming in the professional world, even if it would be absurd to apply the same standards to a hobbyist endeavor with no consistent standards or expectations of service.

FTFY to be appropriate to mildly constructive. It's a psychotic rage translator.