Best posts made by Arkandel

As someone who's considering a career move in the near future, these two articles are excellent:

http://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/
http://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer/

@sunny said in Managing Player Expectations:

Managing player expectations is one thing. Dealing with the VERY SMALL number of people who are interested only in X type of RP is another.

I agree with the general principle but with this caveat; it's usually the edge cases who represent a lot of the work needed to put those expectations at ease, so by bringing them up we can perhaps discuss the traits that make them edge cases, and whether they have a point or not.

Or to rephrase with a non-TS example, the number of players who complain about STs not custom tailoring plots for their specific needs, or who go to staff to protest they're not allowed to invent the asphalt and lay roads on their fantasy game, is small. However those are often still the ones who cause headaches and burn people out, so I thought it was fair to bring them up even though they're a minority.

Does that make more sense?

@Darinelle Usually I'm Guardian for world quests just in case I get adds, but really as my gear progressed over the 830 ilvl line I found even in resto I could hold my own anyway for most of them. My only problem with forms is ... well I can't see my transmogs when I'm a big bear, can I.

Healers do get freebie satchels on demand though which I find is already adding up. I just wish they worked for Mythics.

@surreality said in Respecs.:

Like, somebody stuck with a permanent leg wrack tilt in CoD might want to drop that Expression.BallroomDancing spec after a while. Yeah, they still know how, and how they became unable to use it is IC, but it's still now a waste of points that's additional OOC suckage for the player on top of the IC suckage of the tilt.

I think that is different though, and would classify it more under a sanctity-of-merits clause - where you never spend XP on something that can be simply taken from you and waste those XP - than a respec.

It makes sense from a wider perspective of not punishing characters for accepting in-game setbacks, too; sure, I might be upset my SL4 model had a glass full of acid thrown in his face, but I could get excited about the possibilities for growth and RP from that, and it sweetens the pot if I had the XP back to invest in something else.

A common case for respecs was the nWoD 1.0 CGen freebie points. Someone who knows how to use them could save obscene amounts of XP by using them to max stats compared to another who'd try to make the exact same PC but 'misuse' those points then have to buy up the traits with XP in game.

Another, using that same system, was people who didn't realize how powerful fighting styles were - if you and I both made gunslingers but you bought CM5 and I didn't, your character would be waaay more effective than mine. That's easily something a newbie wouldn't realize until much later, and 30 XP aren't easy to just come by.

@Ganymede I don't drink alcohol almost at all because... well I don't like beer, which apparently makes me a monster.

Once in a while I indulge friends and have wine which I do enjoy, but not enough to actually go out just to drink.

@lithium said in Respecs.:

Any game, of any Genre, needs to have limits otherwise there is no point in even trying to have anything remotely resembling game balance.

Why do all games need to have limits? Why must they all be balanced?

@Ghost said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

The sheer number of people who MU that treat their characters as an extension of their OOC selves, one-upped a step further to be assumed sentient friends with feelings and human emotions, then inserted into fictitious settings with monsters, character death, and romance?

I don't know about the number - it's possible we suffer from selective bias since we obviously notice only the weirdo cases.

However you're quite correct in that it's the lack of awareness regarding the OOC/IC line combined with a complete disregard for the fact it's strife and challenges that make characters fun that's causing a chronic issue in games, lack of good ol' fashioned IC antagonism. I am not even talking about player-versus-player, and not even about the non-violent aspect of it, but any antagonism as expressed in the vague possibility bad things could happen to someone's PC, or that the PC might be taken out of their element, derailed from the path they were on or diverted from one course of action toward another.

None of us would probably keep read a book or watch a movie about people whose lives are perfectly functional and who're quite happy with their lives but it seems some want to play Mary Sues of exactly that kind, and who'll respond very negatively to staff, STs or heavens forbid, other PCs from messing up their perfect existences. Which means the rest of the players get conditioned to tread very carefully indeed just in case we invoke someone's wrath since no one wants to have to deal with that; run a plot about a sub-faction trying to block the Consilium votes that's being roleplayed about or an NPC pack entreating on a fresh PC pack's territory and suddenly it's flame on.

I don't get that. Dude, if your pack's stuff is never threatened it's literally worthless.

After watching a PrP a few days ago take a bit over six hours to complete I wanted to see what you all thought about plot duration, and specifically cover the following issues:

1. What duration - as measured in hours - is ideal, acceptable, tolerable and (if there's such a thing) 'too much'?

2. How easy is it for a PrP runner to predict how long a scene is likely to run in the first place? What are some good ways to make rough estimates?

3. Should a projected duration be advertised as part of plots?

4. What's the proper way to break longer scenes down? For example if IC it's a single uninterrupted adventure that gets broken down into two parts for OOC convenience how do you best handle concurrent on-grid RP taking place between those PrP sessions?

5. How do you handle players having to go in mid-scene due to RL; are they fading to black? Do you force them to use an IC excuse ("Arkandel has left the fight to uh, guard the party's flanks!")? Assume the person is there all along doing generic things? Should there be IC consequences for having to drop out of a PrP? ("Arkandel left the session with the Prince early, which offended the monarch!")

Thoughts?

@Derp said in Issues with SimpleMu:

Why do people still use it?

The combination of as-you-type spellchecking, spawned windows is my main reason, which no one else seems to have. Plus the fact no other client has a killer feature I want enough to switch.

@sg said in Plot session duration:

1. This is tough. I think it's more about pose wait time than the length of the plot. Like, if one player consistently takes 10 minute to type one line on their turn in combat, that's too long, especially when they had 4 other players each taking 5-10 minutes to do their turn.

I consider short pose rules (1 or 2 poses before someone can repose) to be absolutely essential when dealing with unknown participants. It's also one of the reasons I dislike running small scale PrPs with players I don't know - because if I have three players in my scene and two of them are super slow, I'm screwed. Unlike normal on-grid scenes it's more awkward for a ST to just go "uhm, sorry, this isn't working for me" then walk out.

So either I'd play with people I know and trust to be considerate or I impose limitations and adjust as needed.

Anyways, in most systems, if things keep going at a happy clip, I'm pleased to put in about 4 hours before my back starts aching.

Hello, fellow back sufferer! <sad high five>

2. I think if you're doing a combat in a non automated game, you can count on one hour per player. If you're throwing a plot twist at them, double it. FS3 throws these estimates out the window, because things go so smoothly, and you don't really have to wait on Slowey McBrokenfingers typing 1 wpm to keep things going.

That's a factor I hadn't considered. People in automated combat games with experience playing in non-automated games as well, how big a factor has this been for you?

In a perfect world, a plot would be designed in a way that people could exit without it breaking the scenario, like don't have people in an escape room or something like that, have them driving/running/riding to the next scene in the plot, someone could get stuck in traffic or something.

One of the biggest issues I've had designing PrPs is portability - being able to tag in newcomers for Scene #2 - because up to a certain point I don't want to rely on my existing players to be proactive, both because it's uncommon for that to happen but also because such new players come to me, not them. I've given it a shot with delegation before but I think it's felt like I was passing the buck, or I wasn't interested in helping fresh faces get in ("yeeeah, just talk to Bob, maybe he can figure out a way to bring you in or somethin'"), so I typically try to hook them in myself.

Or, you know, they step on a waterslide pit trap and are gone all of a sudden. One time in a star wars mush, someone said they left their iron on or something and left a scene where we were shooting stormtroopers, I thought that was pretty funny.

I think the key here is to never place characters in IC disadvantage because their players' RL made it so they had to go due to RL. No other factors are as important; I don't care if the group is facing dire odds, half of them are unconscious bleeding out with the fate of the universe rests in their hands, if one of them needs to go to sleep because they have work the next day, they get to vanish gracefully into the aether.

Now if that happens in a deceptive way and I see that person hanging out on OOC channels or a different scene for another hour after getting out of danger then I'd have a chat with the as well as staff. But that's yet to happen.

@mietze said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

3. I do not know them on a personal level, just a "professional" one.

This is something I've had issues with in the past.

While I played on The Reach I didn't want to approach @EmmaSue about issues because I knew her personally. It felt... awkward, like I was going to be leveraging a personal friendship in order to get some kind of preferential treatment out of it, and even if no such thing existed or the problem I was having was pretty clear, it still didn't sit right with me.

It's easier when there is a more formal relationship between me and staff so I can go, present the facts as I know them, make my case and see what comes of it. In some ways it gives me the opportunity to gauge staff's ability to handle larger issues by observing how they handle smaller ones.

@Griatch said in Issues with SimpleMu:

Without having used SimpleMu, what does "spawns" do and what makes them essential?

To answer the last part, since you can spawn anything based on a regular expression away from your 'main' window it's a sanity preserver.

On most MU, especially if you're staffing, there is a lot of spam coming in and you can't always leave channels (or if you do it's easy to forget them off, can't check them between poses when you do have the inclination to do so, etc). By spawning them you spare yourself all of that, and get keep your main window clean.

@faraday said in Plot session duration:

That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody() does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody() can be bothered to engage.

I think sometimes games unfairly categorize player issues given the rest of their setup.

As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.

But why is no one interested in politics!

This isn't a dig at any current games, by the way, it's more of a sideeffect of using and adopting mechanics meant for table-top in which social situations are really meant to be handled swiftly by an ever-present GM, and if you flip through their rulebooks 80% of the mechanics are about combat.

@Tempest You earned that upvote.

@Darinelle The only thing I don't like about Druids so far is common the class is - I was used to my Monk for the last two expansions, and when I signed up for a guild raid I realized how overplayed this class is.

But I love the toolset; proactive setup (you have few oh-shit buttons, usually you need to have prepared for emergencies in advance), a combat rez which has saved many a 5-man bacon and stealth is so great for world quests.