I will watch The Mandalorian to the end of time if they keep this up. The companion alone is well worth watching it for.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: Good TV
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RE: Favorite Minigames
@apos said in Favorite Minigames:
@arkandel said in Favorite Minigames:
@testament Yeah, and for reasons I won't mention here since it's probably out of scope for this thread unless @Apos thinks otherwise.
I don't think it's a big deal to talk about the pitfalls of features or minigames either, and it can be productive. I mean I know I'm going to get a lot of shit when I implement like equipment damage eventually.
Well, it's a good idea to not allow legacy items from being passed down to newbies, which games like WoW figured out early learning from the experience of EverQuest, etc.
The main mechanical reason is their presence introduces inflation; when the game starts a steel sword might be the shit, but six months down the line it's not worth the bytes its ID is stored in. This has various systemic cascading effects, from the fact your game's balance has to be part of an arms race and keep evolving to keep up with the raised bar, to casual crafters being prevented from learning new skills since there's no demand for their lower tier work needed to learn better recipes, etc. It could even mean a stagnant economy since there are fewer actual sinks than it's designed for.
There are also social effects. Not all newbies are made equal (and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, only that it's in fact a thing) since two PCs who create on the same day could have dramatically different power levels depending on who they know - often who they know OOC. Popular factions could perpetuate their popularity since they have more stuff to pass down than smaller ones trying to recruit, and of course the gap between the have's and the have-not's tends to broaden without a 'middle class' buffer in between bridging the two.
It also effectively removes the early carrots from your game - you're a nobody, but if everyone around you is geared in magical full plate it can leave you wondering if it's worth striving for those newbie goals the game's designed to dangle in front of you, especially if begging for gear works so much better.
As for plots, such disparities have an effect on plot as well. One of your newbies wielding a stick with a nail in it struggles to fight the goblins, but the other newbie with a flaming double-axe makes them explode on contact; it's tough for STs as it is to run things for mixed groups, let alone for the same part of the theoretical leveling curve. Also it affects how players can be rewarded; if your prize is a steel sword (or the resources to make one) not all will want it, since connected players will seek out the bigger rewards right out of the gate, which can be discouraging - you just barely survived the goblins, and the other guy just tossed you his pouch without even looking at it since it's not full enough.
Note that these aren't Arx-specific notes but just overall ones.
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RE: Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff
@Kestrel Look at the bright side. Now you know your neighbor is a nutjob and it cost you nearly nothing to find out. You could have paid a much steeper price.
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RE: Travel Times - Enforced?
@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
But OOC inconvenience is definitely a thing. @RnMissionRun brought up folks who wouldn't tolerate a 40 minute travel time. I would assuredly be in that group myself. I have a limited amount of time to play, and I'm simply not going to burn 40 minutes of it twiddling my thumbs waiting to play.
Any OOC delay is absurd, IMHO. Either you are IC able to be present for an event, in which case you should just take your PC to the room it's taking place in and that's it, or you are not. It's one of the issues I'll both agree with you on and bring up a point you've raised an objection to in the past in my WoW-to-MUSH analogy, as Blizzard made the deliberate decision to not have their world shrink down by making travel instantaneous; sure, you could get from A to B conveniently, but you still had to sit on a mount and wait while you flew through all the lands in between.
We can do the same thing on a MUSH but we don't need to use the same mechanism (delays). There are better ways to do so @Coin raised a good point by presenting resources, including time, which you can invest - any 'interesting decisions' offered to players are great, as far as I'm concerned.
Similarly I don't have high demands before something is handwaved. If an +event is supposed to be, say, a day's horse ride away from a character then dammit, be there. But if it'd have taken a month... that's different. And it's an essential difference, too; a borderland can't be lawless if every PC with a zip code in the well policed capital goes back and forth constantly unless there's a damn good IC explanation for why they get to do it, but the police/army can't do the same thing.
How come PCs get to fight White Walkers with Jon Snow then show up for dinner at King's Landing but the Watch is always undermanned? As much as I'd love to have my cake and eat it, at some point theme begins to break down because everything feels like it's next door to everything else.
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RE: RL things I love
Up's first five minutes are er, up there with any romantic movie ever made. Change my mind.
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RE: Travel Times - Enforced?
@lotherio said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
@firepuff said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall.
The key here is freedom of choice. You should be able to roleplay being en route, but when it's enforced by any outside force then there is no way for it to fit any narrative of absolutely essential gameplay elements such as timezone compatibility, story narrative.
If I, as staff, force you to stay out of general scenes for 3 RL days 'so you can RP going from Waterdeep to wherever' then I better be on the ball about providing you with stuff to do during those days.
If I don't then I'm bad and I should feel bad.
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RE: Roleplayer's shower thoughts
@goldfish I think it was an interview on Wizard magazine (yes, that long ago) by Ed Brubaker for a then upcoming Batman run that's stayed with me for a long time. He said that one of the writing tricks he uses for characters is to know a menial couple of things about them no one else does, and which don't need to be ever brought up. It's just a way to get into their head.
Whenever I've done it over the years I must say it works. I'm talking about stuff like... grooming habits, what the PC does on his 'true' downtime (i.e. not during bar scenes); does he donate to charity? How does he pick clothes, and where from? What do his interactions with his neighbors look like when he takes the garbage out?
It's weird but it works.
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RE: Heroic Sacrifice
@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
I don't see why it has to be this way. If you fail and your character ends up in jail, they could still have a very cool scene where they're brought before the high council and interrogated about their crimes, who they know, etc. They could be bribed to betray their friends, thus being turned into a double agent who has regular meetings with important NPCs trying to blackmail them or extract information.Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance. You can't get as much leverage to negotiate, you aren't invited to as many of those decision-making scenes, and this loss of agency means you are reliant on other players coming up with ways you can stay relevant.
Successful PCs have more agency. It's just how it is. To give you an example on HM I played Theodore. The number of scenes I had as a lowly Sheriff's Deputy, as fun as they were, didn't compare to the access I had for RP after he rose to Dictator; suddenly I had people coming to me, asking to set up audiences, I had the luxury of sending others into side quests... my character's leverage increased my level of involvement to "at will" rather than "what I can get today", which makes an enormous difference.
His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.
He was a successful character on a TV series. You won't see him played on a MUSH nearly as much, and what's even more important, the way games are set up he wouldn't get as many opportunities to shine as other characters, built for 'success' would.
I'm not saying you are wrong in what you want, just that there's a reason there's a mismatch between what people like to watch and/or read about, and what they then play. People want to win because one way or the other, they always get something out of it and nearly nothing when they don't.
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RE: Religion
Beheadings do tend to discourage wide use of the scientific method, yes.
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RE: Heroic Sacrifice
@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:
It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.
A while ago I had proposed a 'nemesis' system. It was basically part of a social mechanics thread but it could be converted to fit this objective.
So basically the idea is to entice players into valuing their opponents. Each time you do a contested roll against someone you get a small reward (XP, status, whatever) whether you succeed or not as an IC demonstration of being challenged. It also begins increasing a counter showing how often you've been challenged by that person, and over time the higher this counter the better the reward; after all opposing a Fett in a negotiation, as long as you walk away from it, is more significant than being roughed up by some random thug. The fact the two of you are opposing each other makes you peers, and as one rises so does the other.
I think by systematizing this opposition and ensuring friction is always a positive would result in people treasuring their long term enemies on an OOC level. Every time you clash with that Primogen, each time the Elder spits vitriol your way, your status increases alongside their own; you are antagonists, but now it's a symbiotic relationship instead of a zero-sum one.
So that's my pitch. Remove the zero-sum part out of encounters, social or otherwise.
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RE: RL things I love
A few friends from work and I joined a basketball league together (4 of us and 6 randoms).
In our first game we played last year's champions. These guys had their own custom jerseys. They had a coach. We didn't even know each other's names, and the pace compared to our pick-up runs was insane - I played like 28 minutes and got gassed. We turned the ball over so much!
Oh we also lost by fifty points.
It was amazing, I can't wait for next Sunday.
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RE: How did you discover your last three MU* ?
@kay said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Re: recruiting new people, I think it's easier if they've already had their "gateway drug" to the realms of text-based multiplayer RP. I went from playing Infocom games to playing in the old AOL Red Dragon Inn chat rooms to someone then recruiting me to try a MUD. I ran from that, but was curious if there was more, maybe better? So then I searched and found non-MUD MU*s and, well, 13 years later, here we are. These days I'd guess maybe the gateway drug would be play by post? IRC? ... I'm so out of the loop.
Possibly by I doubt it, since there are no gateway games any more for MU*.
Back in the day chat and text-based games were really all we had so there was always some degree of familiarity with telnet'ing to some weird port somewhere, or using a command line IRC client or... something. Our expectations were also pretty low since even if we had some experience with rudimentary web pages whistling over our modems to Mosaic it was infrequent, and never that far from some black window somewhere that we had to open and use for almost everything else.
I'm not a 17 year old kid about to hit college but those used to be MU*'s bread and butter; young folks going to college where they had internet access for the first time and a lot of time to use it which they really couldn't do in that many different, fun ways; we grabbed ton of those - many of us are among those who were grabbed back then.
But now gaming is different. We are not gonna be taking players from Fortnight, you know? Hell, I don't even think we can lure them from Snapchat. I don't know there is any gateway services remotely relevant to young folks and MU* - the way MU* look and feel right now - at the same time.
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RE: What is your turning point?
It's perfectly acceptable (and from a certain point of view, a positive thing) to realize RP just isn't working out between you and someone else because you're looking for different things.
This could be anything; emphasis on TS/romance, playing together more often, posing style, type of scenes, pace... anything. It's fine to just go find something else to do, it really is.
The issue here is how to communicate this. It's no surprise most of us aren't very good at communicating what we want to do. Notice the difference here:
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Hey, I was looking for more of <X> in my RP. Is that something you're also after and to what degree?
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Hey, you're not giving me enough of <X> kind of RP and I want more.
It's easy to mistake one for the other, but I don't like the idea of just cutting someone off without giving them a chance to even know there's a problem first. For all we know the other person would be into doing more of that sweet, sweet <X> or they haven't realized it wasn't happening because they've been busy doing <Y> instead.
But as usual how to bring it up requires trust, and that's not a common commodity. Hell, even the timing might matter; catch the other person at a bad time with something that sounds like a demand instead of a prompt to chat, and you can bring a good playing relationship to an end.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
@Aria Pet peeve: Couples sharing their social media accounts. The "Nick and Laura" Facebook page kinda deals.
For some reason it irks me so much. Like aren't you people separate beings! Don't you have more than one device connecting to the interwebs?
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RE: Random links
Not a link, but something I liked - from Slashdot, regarding adblock and the necessity of advertisements online in general:
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
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RE: Let's talk about TS.
@surreality said in Let's talk about TS.:
Think about this realistically for a moment and you'll likely begin to see the real scope of the problem: "I am feeling gross and pressured, I went to staff to ask for help, and instead of helping, they called me a bad player and enabled the creeper who has no respect for my player-side limits."
Oh that's true. But as you already pointed out, if you can't trust staff on a game you are screwed either way.
What I'd like to try and do is, assuming we're neither dealing with assholes or bad staff, to try and figure out how to systematize these things. I'll even risk @Thenomain's snicker and ask, naively, whether this is a social problem we can solve through code.
Maybe we could apply a Tinder approach to this? The left/right swipe thing.
So I meet Jane IC. I don't know if her player wants to TS.
I type something like "+interest/ts Jane". There's no notification unless Jane has done the same from the other side (+interest/ts Arkandel). If so we both get a message we want to e-shag!
And so from that point on all the other boxes (heh, sorry) can be checked the same way (preferences, inclinations, kinks, whatever) without people having to broadcast their TS related whitelist since that might attract the wrong kind of attention.
Squicks can and should still be public and not subject to this system.
Thoughts?