Posts made by Arkandel

@derp Two days ago it was -28. Compared to that it felt warm.

Human beings are weird. Also I like to walk.

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

It is almost noon and it is -5. Why is it so cold? This is crazy.

It's just past noon, the time I take my daily walk at work, which I did with a wind chill of -21C.

Meh.

I love PrPs. I love to run them, I greatly appreciate others running them for me... but it's not hogging that's the issue - from my perspective - but the sheer time requirement as more folks are added.

I don't want to whine how about I don't have as much time as I used to because it's not true, but I don't have as much any more in one block, and I need to be away from my computer by 11PM to get ready for bed. Therefore it's frustrating for me if an +event is set to start at say, 8PM (a common time for EST) and then by 10PM we've collectively only managed 2-3 poses because we're waiting on people to get through their turns. I also don't want to say that was a waste of my evening but... well, that sure doesn't make me feel I seized the day either.

However that... only seems to occur on nWoD games. I don't know why, or if it's anecdotal or... what. I ran a bunch of Arx scenes a while ago, some with 10+ people in them, and things flowed. I ran stuff on a comic MUSH I played briefly and they felt fine. A Star Wars plot with @Ganymede, @Maira and @Autumn? Same thing, progress was made and I never stared at the screen wondering what I'm doing with my life.

So... I don't know if this is relevant to this thread, but it's what I have.

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

Bump In The Night is what you're probably thinking of. It had great players, a great wiki, and a great idea. The setup was a bit janky with the Conspiracies, however, and players lost interest in running plots for each other.

Dammit - yep, that's it. I ran one of my all-time favorite PrPs there too - if anyone here remembers a plot where characters going to talk to an abused single mother in the thirteenth floor of a weird-ass building took them somewhere... else for a while.

In response to @faraday, there is a problem when plots are not frequent or accessible enough, in that players will gravitate to where they get constant RP.

Yep, and you even see it within games themselves. People migrate by rerolling away from inactive or poorly cared-for spheres all the time into more active ones, either as a result of staff changes or just circumstance. A good example is the effect a few new players rolling together into a faction has on existing ones jumping ship - and it makes sense; the best wiki ideas are useless if I'm sitting on my ass unable to find something to do.

The path of least resistance rules games. They aren't causes, they're entertainment. If it takes a lot of unrewarding effort to start something, chances are it won't get started.

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

So I think we're generally in agreement that players need stuff to do or else you lose momentum. Just the execution is different.

Yes, so long as there is an execution. It takes active maintenance to create this momentum.

So for example a nWoD mortal only game could be a blast if metaplot is thrown to spark and maintain interest, maybe with some different factions of characters some trying to redeem the monsters ("she's still my wife!"), and others trying to kill'em all, or dissect them, or whatever the hell.

Simply putting all this stuff on a wiki pages simply doesn't do the trick. I kinda wish it did since it'd lower the bar for new game runners a lot, but historically it doesn't. Games need constant curating, and especially the newer ones; in fact the first month after they open is critical.

A mortal-only game where you're an X-Files or Fringe type of group could work, for instance. One where you've got a motley crew like my MDM game? Notsomuch.

All of these could work if they get players interested in the first place. It's a lot more niche though to ask players to roll on a setting they aren't familiar with and utilize concepts they've no existing samples to figure out the chemistry or subtle, slice-of-life interactions between them and something set in a world either very much like our own other than the supernatural elements added on top or based on well known works such as TV series, books, etc.

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

I don't really believe that's true. There have been countless "successful" (eye of the beholder obviously) games where the only thing filling the time between plots is plot-aftermath or social RP. TGG, pretty much every Battlestar game, most post-apoc games, etc. It works as long as the plots are frequent enough and accessible enough to provide a break from endless BarRP.

That's a pretty big 'as long as' condition though. Especially since the plots in question by their nature don't get to involve everyone, or they're fragmented (as the case often is with sandbox games) which prevents a semblance of a narrative from providing a hook to facilitate socialization.

In other words if we meet at a bar we still need something to talk about. Some common ground, something we both want to work towards or against each other... but there needs to be more than "so, vampires suck... amirite?" because that gives you a topic the first time, but what about the second one?

Momentum is similarly a very big deal. When a game is established and there have been several plotlines already you can dig into the past and mine treasure there, but sometimes new games are dead on arrival because they get locked in this catch-22 of nothing to do and nothing having been done before, which in combination with mostly new characters players aren't that attached to yet... it can deflate interest pretty fast.

For more than the lawbots among us, this will be a very interesting case to watch unfold throughout 2018.

Namely, the duration of copyrights have been steadily extended in the US after their inception, from an original 28 years, extended by another 28 in 1978, and then another 20 in 1998... spearheaded, of course, by Disney who want to keep their control over Mickey and all intact. By this year's end we'll probably see it prolonged by longer than most of us will live.

@packrat said in Um...What?:

He was crying when he described how his family and him cheered as the jews from their village were rounded up and shipped off though. It was not something he was ever proud of in retrospect, just stuck in a fucked up situation for everyone involved but he did end up going along with it.

People change; they gain insights and rethink how the world works and how themselves are part of it. I read an interview a few months ago you might find relevant... but first, some context.

In Greece - my homeland - during WW2 communists (who were very popular at the time) and traditionally right-wing parties fought together against the invading Germans as part of a guerrilla rebel force which fought both on the mainland and Africa with the Allies. The communist factions became pretty powerful, their ranks well trained and armed, led by experienced leaders who knew the terrain extraordinary well and meshed with the local population at will.

After WW2 ended the western powers that be were concerned communists might have too much power and that they might use it to ally themselves with the USSR even though they had stated they had no such plans. Even after they were asked to voluntarily put their weapons down (which they did, even though they were in a position to refuse) they got hunted down... hard. I'm talking death squads and concentration camps here. British snipers opening fire openly in the center of Athens years after the war was over. And once Britain's influence waned, American influence took over from them.

Eventually paranoia became too much and a western-backed dictatorship took over in the late sixties. Things got even worse - people started to disappear and get tortured, that kind of thing. The regime lasted for a few years until, in 1973, a prestigious engineering university's students rose up in a non-violent way, barred their gates and demanded change.

That change happened, but not before a tank drove through the school's gates, leading to hundreds of those students being brutally beaten up or killed.

Anyway, so the interview I read was by the guy who drove that tank back then.

He was really emotional about recalling how it felt, how everyone around him hated 'those damn communist long-haired kids' so much, and how they wanted to hurt them. To kill them. How he wanted to kill them, despite the fact they were unarmed (and said so, it was their actual slogan - 'we are unarmed, free, and your brothers and sisters'). How after he drove the tank and saw the fear and panic in them he screamed in delight, and everyone - all of his friends, his fellow soldiers, his superior officers, everyone congratulated and praised him... how proud he felt for doing it.

He was crying as he said it. He couldn't relate to his 19 year old self any more, it was like a stranger to him. Being in that kind of environment does things to a person, especially a younger one. He talked about how dehumanizing those students made it easy, almost effortless to hate them. He doesn't now, and I believe him.

I don't know if this helps at all.

I don't know how RL this is, but there might be an actual table-top RPG group in my near future - yes, it's 5th Ed D&D, but nothing's perfect.

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

Am I crazy in that I kinda wanna see a WoD game that doesn't have any supers? It would use the game mechanics but it's all mortals (not even mortal+ -- just plain ol' mortals) and have them function within a metaplot scenario. Not just .. here's a city, go make your own stories but that there is an overarching story that is building toward something.

It was done. I of course forget the name right now but there was a MU* where all characters were mortals in a supernatural world, and it was fun while it lasted... but it definitely belonged in that generation of sandboxed games that didn't make a splash and died quietly after a while.

No matter the genre people need to have stuff to do outside of plots, or when no Storytellers are throwing things for them to feast on. That's where a mortal+ MU* would need to prove its worth... what else is there to do than find someone to TS when there are no monsters around? Are there politics? Is there something to meet and talk about other than the monsters?

I'm looking for a new backpack - duffel bags are nice, but my new gym is a 45 minute walk away, and I do like to occasionally walk there when the weather isn't fucking freezing as it is now, but diagonally straps are annoying over somewhat longer distances.

Does anyone have any recommendations? It needs to be spacious since it'd need to fit my shoes and belt, and I'd rather not pay triple digits for a freakin' bag.

Moonman was banned, and yes he was probably Lain but not conclusively. Either way he went too far (as they do).

@moonman said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

That reboots/rehashes + diversity casting = the vast majority of the film industry in 2017+1. Come up with some new shit, and just so you know, pandering to progressives by filling your umpteenth overproduced reboot with womyn and non-whites just doesn't qualify.

You really shouldn't have stepped out of the Hog Pit. Also that's a record for racism and sexism in a two-line post.

Goodbye.

Usually it takes more effort for people to reject me!

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

Player Mage, Telenukes the bad guy.

There really is a tendency here (?) to extrapolate behaviors and trends from the worst people who display them.

What you are saying is that bad players are bad. Yes, they are. The fact that in a different sphere they are more limited in the ways they are allowed to be bad doesn't make Mage a bad sphere; I've had great experiences with Mage players perfectly willing to share, and I would like to think others who played with my own PCs didn't have a horrible time.

Blaming it all on the sphere is taking it to the symptom, not the cause. IMHO, of course.

@auspice If you hear back on new year's day then they want you baaad.

@kanye-qwest said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

I wish I knew how to make people be considerate of each other, and not take everything as a personal slight when there are much more plausible explanations.

It's probably our biggest collective issue as a community. We're not always good about sharing our toys, or not taking things personally. It doesn't help that we're looking at each other as competitors instead of collaborators at times.

In fact that's the key here... trust. We don't have it, as a rule, for our fellow players.

On a tangentI wonder (some of you such as @Ganymede might be able to answer this) if it's the same for theatrical productions. Do actors root for their characters and try to push for them to win? Do they view directors - which I assume is the closest thing to storytellers - as means to get what they want for those characters, or obstacles to their success?

Are there any parallels between the two activities, since that would be a community with some similarities to ours, but unlike it with centuries worth of history we can tap as opposed to this fledgling little hobby of ours that didn't exist two days ago.

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

@faraday said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Given that the current state of affairs leads potential game-runners to "Step 1: Do you have a coder", I would turn that back and ask why the community really wants to put more onus on the coders. I'm not saying it has to be all rainbows and sunshine, but man... it's really hard to keep swimming upstream against a constant tidal wave of negativity.

I've no answers for you. If it helps though it's the same as anyone who steps up to do stuff we all need; PrP runners get bitched at, staff are routinely considered corrupt, strikingly handsome forum admins are told they suck, it's just how it is.

But if it helps, those are only the loud voices - and my unsubstantiated claim is that many of those haven't even MUSHed for some time. Most people just go by their day to day routines enjoying themselves and they're quite glad to see things being done for them; those are the ones you're actually working for.

If it helps.

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

People are getting personally offended by the voicing of opinions, so it seems much less a technical discussion than it is a preference discussion. I have tried to guide both of these threads into some sort of technical planning/dreaming/design direction, and each time people have apparently taken offense.

I don't think it's that bad. We can be passionate in all things, but it's not like anyone's going FUCK YOU while stating their preference, so that's fine.

There are however two issues here:

1. We don't really have a proper example of a telnet-less MUSH at the moment so any criticism of that is premature. Judging its potential by other web games which aren't even trying to do something similar to how a MUSH does things is flawed.

2. It's possible the first example of a web MUSH we eventually see won't be very good. It might simply lack features (and it probably will on Day One compared to codebases which have taken decades to evolve), or the implementation might just suck... but it could paint expectations either way based on its shortcomings rather than its strengths.

And if you don't mind guys, a personal note at the end... it's expected that people will stick to what they know. We're a conservative bunch, and highly critical as things go. There's no way there won't be 'ohnothisiswrong' complaints no matter what is actually done, or (as @surreality has correctly sighed over at times) even over anything that's considered.

That places a higher onus on developers here. Not only do people need to be good with code but they need an extra thick skin to handle all these gripes without wondering too much why they're doing all this extra work for what sometimes seems like an unappreciative community. This is not the case. We are far from unappreciative. It's just that some voices bitch louder than many others praise.