Posts made by Arkandel

Sports massage. It hurts so good.

I've never RPed from a mobile device. Now and then - very sporadically and when I basically have no computer handy - I've logged on to check @mail and catch up on boards, but that's it.

My big issue is typing speed. On a keyboard I am very fast (I suspect most of us here are) but on a touch screen I literally type with my index finger like a grandma. The screen itself being smaller, then having a big chunk of it taken by the virtual keyboard, doesn't help especially if it scrolls.

I don't like large grids. I don't like memorizing routes from A to B and the process of going from A to B adds nothing to my fun; it's just... a chore. My immersion isn't helped in any way, no RP is generated (I'd not join a scene at random just because I walked by, at least without asking OOC, so +where achieves the same purpose but better).

All I'm asking from a grid is to have a few good 'public rooms' available so I don't need to come up with them each time - a few bars/taverns, a couple of meeting hall types, parks and gyms... then... that's it. I'm good with that. So about 30-50 rooms are more than enough for my purposes.

@Quibbler said in Roleplaying writing styles:

@Arkandel

I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.

On the MUD I was on what we had - and I still think is a good idea - is pemote. It's essentially the exact same thing as @emit, but it put [Arkandel] at the very end so it was always obvious who did what.

It was originally implemented that way to prevent abuse (we thought people might use it to fake other people's poses or insult others anonymously) but it kept large scenes sane. Saner.

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

And you were all third person from what I recall of the time! For what it's worth. (OMG that was... 10 years ago now, I think?)

If so I guarantee back then it was because you posed in the third person and I was just going along with it.

And it can't be 10 years ago, that would make me old. Don't be silly.

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I cannot stand second person ("you") posing. I know some perfectly lovely people do this, but it feels incredibly personally invasive. I cannot quite grasp why, when the typical standard otherwise is to use third person, people skip right into this without even asking.

I don't even remember which I used when we played. But see, I first learned how to roleplay on a MUD, right? So we had 'socials' - the same kind MMORPGs use these days. So if I was in a room with @surreality and @Ganymede and I typed "grin ganymede" then Ganymede would see "Arkandel grins at you." but surreality would see "Arkandel grins at Ganymede.".

So the etiquette for us there absolutely permitted the use of second person if the scene was just between two people. You'd pose using 'you' if it was the case otherwise of course it would be their name. In fact until somewhat recently (2-3 years ago?) I hadn't even realized anyone was peeved by it; I simply watched how people posed and used the same convention.

These days I wouldn't simply because it is a peeve and... well, I don't care either way, so why piss people off for no reason?

@Arkandel looks at @Roz with his eyes and snorts with his nose.

@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:

For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".
Because the alternative is...what, exactly? "Bob sits down, grows silent, grabs a beer, and adds fuck all to the scene because edgy loner."

Although I pose like that myself - more often these days than I used to - I think the point is that neither of those things gives you, Bob's partner, something to play about. Sure you know the guy isn't just an antisocial loner but your character doesn't, and you weren't really given something to hook into.

It doesn't need to be much. A soldier dog-tag to go with the grumpiness will do just fine to give you something to ask him about.

What I've found more useful is offering some context to a situation. For example my paranoid mercenary walks in and doesn't put a hand on his weapon, sits with his back facing the door, throws his head back when he laughs... and I explain in the pose these are signs of being at ease - he doesn't feel threatened here. Sure, I can pose just the physical actions and maybe it'll sink in, but some narration doesn't hurt especially with unknown partners.

I've also grown way more verbose in my poses over the years. Lots of fluff. I can cut it down to a paragraph or two in big group scenes, but if that's all I'm writing, I'm probably bored quickly.

Same. As for verbosity (or its absence) I want to stress that neither really means someone is a good roleplayer. I'm more biased toward longer poses with additional detail but the truth is portraying a fun character can't be measured in words and paragraphs.

"Tempest smiles and waves back at Jane. "Hey, how are you?" She keeps smiling. When Bob talks she looks at Bob and laughs. "That's so funny!" She sits in a chair nearby."

I can't tolerate poses like that any longer. I used to be able to 'make do' with that sort of stuff, but now it just makes me want to pull my hair out.

Oh, peeves. Okay, here is mine - please show some goddamn subtlety, don't just parse my pose for keywords. I don't mean being politically or even socially savvy but where it falls just short of metaposing. For instance: "Bob walks into the busy room. He sighs for some reason then he goes to take a seat." "Jane looks at Bob. 'Hey man, why did you sigh?'".

... This bugs me more than it probably should.

Here's one:

In a large scene do you (consciously) change your posing style? For example do you pose less specifically in order to avoid spamming others and not for other reasons, such as being overwhelmed, less engaged or anything of that sort?

(I don't).

@Coin said in RL Anger:

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

@Coin said in RL Anger:

Fucking rear bike tire popped again. Fucking fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck.

Get one of these new generation airless/tubeless tires!

I doubt they're on the market here, and I doubt I could afford them if they were.

Somehow I've only had two flats in two years but I'm tempted to look into that more. The reduction in performance is very minimal (something like 5-10%, which unless you're competing who cares) and you never have to worry about having to push your bike for a few km to get home/to a bike shop.

Else if you're okay with that you can always carry a kit along, but that's obviously a PITA.

@Coin said in RL Anger:

Fucking rear bike tire popped again. Fucking fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck.

Get one of these new generation airless/tubeless tires!

There's a flipside to all this - many people have style quirks which make them identifiable. For example after a player on Fallen World posed once I immediately paged them and asked "are you <X> from TR?" which they were, because of such tells.

Mine is probably excessive dialogue. My characters tend to be chatty - to the surprise of exactly no one here.

@Coin said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I do this all the time. I don't really mind if other players know my character's motivations (USUALLY) and most of the people I play with aren't assholes who will assume telepathy based on it.

Although I've used this before, I know people (excellent roleplayers, in fact) who advocate everything should be visible in your poses, and that you should only emote things others can observe and interpret.

The idea being that anything less is lazy and bad storytelling, the rough equivalent of having an actor on screen display a reaction through his facial expression and body language, and having a narrator's voiceover explain what just happened to the audience.

@Coin said in Roleplaying writing styles:

can make every word count but most people can't get away with it.

[something something thanks something]

Those are the WRONG WORDS. Can you be more terrible?

I think the key to making every word count is to make sure what you're typing has meaning in the scene and is an interaction, not a passive statement. Say something to someone that necessitates a response, touch someone, move, do something. Otherwise, just say 'skip me' and let people play. Being a voyeur is sometimes better than being a slow poser who has nothing to say and just slows everything down.

I think that's my main peeve when it comes to pose length - that people both take a long time to pose and say nothing in the couple of lines they begrudgingly toss out. At least make it only one of the two!

... Which of course won't help if the scene is one-on-one. But it gets really annoying when you do have a decent scene going in a public location with someone and a third party comes in who is extraordinary disengaged and slow at the same time. I never want to skip anyone (even though I will if I have to), and even even if I do it'll have damaged the scene's flow by the time we realize the other person is weighing it down.

I do the former, not the latter (unless the latter is in jest with people who know me and we're being humorous). I especially do the latter towards MYSELF. If my character is doing something particularly mean, I'll often end the pose with, for example, [character] is such a dick.

This reminds me. How do you feel about revealing things about the character through narration and not in any visible ways? For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".

I'd like to remind everyone this is not the Hogpit. Please let's not insult each other here, as I think it might be good to discuss this here in some length.

What's your favorite 'roleplaying writing style'? Do you have any biases either way? Do you consider yourself an elitist?

For example - and I will be honest here - on the MUD I first roleplayed on we heavily favored longer posting styles and ever since then I've been favoring that style heavily; I love writing in detail, and my favorite partners have always been ones able to return this. So giving me ambience about their character, turning their poses more colorful by essentially assuming minor storytelling duties and making the scene's environment come to life with sounds and scents, all those things will make me appreciate them a great deal.

On the contrary I've learned to associate brevity with subpar roleplay. It's largely a bias, I'll freely admit it, and there are definitely players who can pull it off. @Coin, for all he's a blight on this world, can make every word count but most people can't get away with it. There's also a stigma about it being a sign of distraction such as when someone's playing on multiple scenes and just churns out a quick pose once in a while.

What I can't stand is too many typos or spelling errors. Come on, it's 2017, get a spellchecker!

Anyway, there are other quirks I encounter occasionally and I wonder how others feel about it. A common one is plugging wiki tags in poses - I don't have strong feelings about that either way personally but this being MSB that might vary. The use of linefeeds and tabs is also pretty varied.

There are also players who plug OOC bits into their poses. I've seen it be fairly innocuous ("Bob has been silent for a few minutes. That's because his player was AFK letting his dog out. He looks up and...") and way less acceptable ("Bob sits down and stays silent. He hates that bitch Jane and hopes she dies in a fire.").

So, how do you like to pose? What's your preferred style in your partners?

One of the things I'm still trying to figure out if they are cultural differences or perception biases on my behalf is how more relaxed people are in NA about changing careers than they were in Greece.

At least where I spent half my life there is (or seems to be?) some stigma about starting on a career path then switching to something quite difference, it's perceived as having wasting your time or failed to pan out your resume properly. So for example if you begin in IT, go to school, get a job until your late 20s then realize it's not for you and start training to become a paramedic or something? Fail! Because, or so the assumption goes, how are you gonna compare at the same age with someone who's been already doing the job for 8 more years?

It's the whole argument I think... looking at making a living as competition, trying to out-asset the other guys.

No wonder jobs are stressful, right? Not for just this reason, but you're basically a 17 year old trying to decide which school to attend and you're told it's going to make or break your whole life. What the hell do you know at 17?

In Canada at least it seems somewhat more relaxed. Maybe it's all the safety nets if something goes wrong.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

the often confusing documentation was the first thing I asked about on the guest channel (and was called out for on it).

I really wish - not just for Arx but in general - people were more willing to accept criticism without getting defensive about it. Just because your game is good it doesn't mean it's perfect, and just because things can get better it doesn't mean the game sucks.

Don't panic.

Oh! I forgot.

While we're on the topic of other rewards than XP, make sure to also not penalize people for doing cool things.

For example if you're on a +vote system make sure to allow STs to get voted even when their PCs aren't present. Or if there's an IC prestige system present make it so they don't miss out on gaining some for their characters while running the very scenes in which others are gaining it for theirs.

That sort of thing.

From a ST's point of view:

• Proactive players. Your PC isn't in this, it needs to be fun as well. If I need to do all this work and have to also drag people to play, figure out timezones on my own, bug them to act on their own investigations then that's not fun.

• I don't expect players to know what they want (although it happens). I do expect them to give me some feedback afterwards though so I know if what they were served worked for them, and what I could do to make it better. Don't give thanks (although sure, that's good too), give comments.

• Staff. I can't always get help but at the very minimum I'd like them to be out of the way unless they absolutely positively need to be there. Make it clear how much leeway I have and what I shouldn't do and we'll be fine - but don't second guess me after the fact if I tried to work with them.

• PC knowledge. If you want the spotlight on your PC for something you need to speak up; would you like a big one-on-one fight for your moment of glory? Say so, I won't assume you'd love it. Are you a superb medic and would like to save the day? Can do, but I can't always know every character in my schenes. Do you have a tie from your char's childhood I can abuse? I can't read minds, read it to me. But don't let me drag it out of you, and realize what I'll do might not be exactly how you envisioned it in your head.

• Whatever you do, be a little grateful afterwards. I don't expect eternal gratitude and constructive criticism is welcome, but don't act like you hated every moment for a screen's worth of pages then follow it with a quick "... but I had fun, I didn't mean to imply otherwise!" at the very end.