Best posts made by Arkandel

@sunny said in Armageddon MUD:

Good show at being an unrepentant asshole.

Please don't resort to personal insults. This isn't the Hog Pit.

Official logo of the Hog Pit:

@faraday Hell, we saw a recent example right here on MSB. Without any changes to the configuration or upgrades, and in fact because there were no such changes, the templates all over MSB broke and the site became basically unusable.

The fix was trivial but it could have gone wrong, and it could have taken me considerably more than my lunch hour if the upgrade script somehow blew things up. That's a pretty typical case - not all code that breaks is your own.

If you do such work for hire and you're called in by a panicking employer months after the fact when you're already busy doing completely different things, you have to know how to respond. Not having worked that out ahead of time is the worst possible outcome for both parties. Just because it's not your fault it doesn't mean it won't fall on you to do something about it.

@evilcabbage said in Armageddon MUD:

sure, but by that same token just because you roll into the game as a 40 year old veteran of hunting does not mean we should have to give you knowledge, because you the player haven't even done anything to earn that.

You (which I assume means 'staff') don't need to give anyone anything. What players have 'earned' is up to the game; some allow more experienced characters to be rolled, some not so much. The one caveat here is that it needs to be universal - if you went and told person A that they haven't earned their stripes so they can't be a veteran, but went ahead and approved person B's veteran character then it'd be a big no-no.

Either way you have got to make it clear what expectations are from newly rolled characters' skill level. It shouldn't be trial and error (especially if your players will get the impression it's subjective, erroneously or not), this sort of thing ought to be clearly stated ahead of time.

you just jumped into a world that you are unfamiliar with, in a land you don't understand yet as a person, and you want to start at like, the height of a career.

By nature newcomers to games don't know much about what's going on, but unless you only roll newcomer characters as well then the latter's IC experience will be greater than their players. For instance if I rolled a peasant on Arx, knowing nothing about Arx OOC, my character will still know way more than I do about the world. You can't escape that fact, even though a well documented friendly web site for your MU* can certainly help.

but i'm personally not going to tell you where to find ginka fruits or where to get such and such shell that sells for like two thousand coins because it's so ridiculously rare. there's things you have to do yourself, you have to make mistakes and learn from them.

You get to choose what you tell players, sure. It's your prerogative.

if you roll in as a new player into the game, you have to take into consideration this: can i, as a new player, believably portray that i am, in fact, a 40 year old hunter?

A better expectation to have is this: "Am I, as a new player, allowed to roll a 40-year old hunter?" If you make your game's rules what they need to be, ensure they are visible and keep them fairly applied universally then no one gets to complain; they might choose to not play there, that's their prerogative, but you'd have done everything from your end to help them make an educated choice.

@derp said in RL Anger:

Also, they don't run stories about suicides after the CDC found that running stories about suicides caused teens to try and copycat the dead one so that they could be dead and famous too.

Ugh, 13 Reasons Why's second season is trying so hard to cover their asses about that. Warnings before, disclaimers after, I'm surprised they don't have breaks in the episodes to alert the audience.

@ghost said in Bad Actors, and Bad Behavior (extended):

If we're going to define, or discuss "BAD" behavior by players, and if it's defined by very specific things such as sexual harassment, stalking, doxxing, etc, then I think we should take a moment to acknowledge the amount of hell some people have gone through on these boards for things like:

Some things are fairly universal. Those are the only ones we can really address in a generic post - sexual harassment for example is a pretty damn good bet for what constitutes a no-no.

Everything else depends on each game's staff. Maybe I am more SJW than some and would ban you for calling someone a bitch; maybe you are a real elitist and would condone someone being derided for too many typos in their posing. But we can't possibly apply any rhyme or reason to such things, as they are just too game-specific.

@seraphim73 I was very torn about the game. For starters it was clear this was a labor of love - there was an immense amount of detail, obviously staff had worked hard on setting up the pieces, and the code was cool.

Two things did it for me.

The first one was that old catch-22; there weren't enough people to play with, which makes it hard to get people to play with. At times I looked around and the who list was nearly empty - maybe you guys need a bit more momentum, inviting groups of people who come in together, more advertisement, etc.

Bursts of activity work better than trickles of it, IMHO, especially since you can then coordinate running events at the time these people are around - then if you keep them, you're back in business.

But the second factor was that I think I was looking for something different than what it was. I was kind of looking for carrots to work towards and couldn't find any; a gear or skill progression, a political ladder to climb, something to aim for. My character felt already... done. It's probably a personal thing, but I really like having stuff to chase in games - if a MU* gets me to make a spreadsheet planning out my spends, it's got me by the short hairs.

However that second factor is definitely not something you can do much about. It's only a personal preference.

@derp Since it's been a year+ since Season 1 came out there's no need for spoiler tags. It's about a girl in high school who gets bullied, commits suicide then sends out tapes about why she did it and who contributed to it... and the fallout from that among school faculty, friends, etc.

S1 was good. S2... I felt it stretched things a bit too thin to squeeze another series out.

After being burned by a bunch of nWoD game clones ran using the least effort possible, I can confirm this one looks different - staff seem to be taking it seriously, placing more work into the setup and challenging themselves with the setting type and scope.

Here's to hoping, we've been needing a good MUSH of this sort to come out ever since Eldritch closed its doors.

@ganymede said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

I definitely second this. The folks are reasonable, and by that I mean they are helpful to newbies and quick to address problem players with prejudice.

Agreed. I'd definitely give this game another chance if some tweaks are made, because they really do have a lot of potential. Everything is in place for the MU* to succeed - staff, code, wiki... it just needs a little more oomph.

@tinuviel One thing I did like from both seasons is that it gives us a compelling reason for that oldest of gripes about highschool movies/TV shows in general: "Why doesn't she/he go to an adult? Why not tell a teacher or go to the police?"

Well, that's why. The whole series is very consistent about how much leeway and benefit of a doubt is given to certain kinds of people compared to the burden placed on everyone else, and the extent they are punished even when it's shown they crossed the line.

@lisse24 The one thing that stands out is, if you want to crunch numbers automatically, you might get people referring to games with different variations of their name.

I.e. "The Eight Sea", "T8S", "Eight Sea".

If you do them by hand then yeah, I guess it won't matter.

@roz You are the anti-Arkandel. I hate large grids. I get lost.

@coin I haven't read the books so I don't know how interesting the source material is. But Peter Jackson seems to go either way... either he's inspired to greatness or he gets distracted to visual oblivion.

@selu said in Fading Suns 2017:

Will there be sex in this game?

I don't know anything about anything but the answer to that question is basically always "yes" for all games ever.

@seraphim73 said in The Eighth Sea - Here There Be Monsters:

@bored I hear you on the bait-and-switch between pirates and monster-hunters. It wasn't our intention, and we're definitely going to try to course-correct back to more pirate-y stuff. As for the combat-of-the-week... yeah. You've got some valid complaint there. We've been pushing several more non-combat plots, but a lot of the plots are currently combat plots.

That's one way to look at it. The other way is to figure out what the hooks are for non-combat plots to plug into; if I'm playing a diplomat, a shrewd investigator, a fast-talking rogue... what am I going to be useful for?

I think this is the case where you might need to create a universe before you can make a tree in it - which isn't to say the structure for such a thing doesn't already exist in your notes, because I'm sure it does, but because it has to emerge through daily play as well. The world needs to feel like there's a place in it for characters of different alignments before plot-runners will feel inspired to go "oooh, you know what would be cool to throw at these guys right now?".

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

@selu Anything that requires actual research is going to be a hard sell to many.

Yeah or worse, that research will yield different results (some people will go to wikipedia, others will watch a movie, or have read a book) leading to some pretty funky inconsistencies across the playerbase.

@lithium Agreed. Guys, if you want to talk about OC vs FC do it in your own thread.

"I grew up so poor we had to play Dungeons OR Dragons."