Posts made by Arkandel

@Sunny said:

Brilliant. Thank you. I wish I had some big long reply, but just thank you. I'm going to chew on it for a while. If you have any other brilliant ideas, I am all ears.

Well, the bitch of the matter here is making it in a way that scales up so you don't either burn out to a crisp trying to keep up with the requirement of all those people wanting those background tidbits to mean something or making them be some inert piece of trivia in their +bg somewhere that barely does anything for them. After all if it doesn't generate RP what good is it?

You probably want to crowdsource this shit. Like, let people pick their poison from a list ("this is what's available for you guys"). Some of them will pick individual tidbits ("sure, my PC spent two years in that ultra conservative catholic school") waiting to be paired up with others pretty much at random and others might create as a unit ("we got really drunk that one night and broke into Native American museum"). Then try to organize - but not run yourself - that unicorn of all PrP arrangements; plot trading.

Plot trading is ... hah. It's not easy. I very often see people offering but it very rarely happens. So you'd need to be on top of people, motivating them any way you can at all - XP, recognition, extra access to staff plot, anything - to run stories for each other. Basically the idea (in this context, pending further refinement) would be to give players control over another unit's metaplot; that'd include a write-up of just what it entails (what did those drunken idiots steal? what did it do to them?), some loosely defined NPCs they can use (the now-retired teacher with a worm inside their skull, the former school janitor now working for an asylum) and let them go to town. Hopefully.

Basically you can't do too much to encourage plot on this level. Player-ran plot is the only thing here that scales up, where almost everything else does not.

Running plot is a lot of work. It just takes so long and there are so many bored players around. If they take care of each other that's great, but if you need to do it for them... well, you might as well book a spot for that asylum, too.

@Sunny said:

Does anybody have any thoughts as to how we might be able to manage the overhead on this without insanity? Totally just brainstorming here. I want this to work, but I suspect my game might not stay tiny for forever. -.-

Thoughts are easy! Actually doing it is hard though. It does scale badly no matter what you do though, as it's not so much the initial burst of activity that kills you (although it will) but the maintenance over time, keeping track of everything, not being terribly repetitive with plot hooks, not telegraphing your whole metaplot right away to players who're really good at reading it anyway, etc.

Just for starters... break your metaplot into units. Then hand characters pieces of those units.

For example:

The orphanage (slots: 10 PCs). These people all grew up together at the same place but during different ages. What did they see/dream/experience during those years?

Goonies (slots: 5 PCs): These people all had an adventure together. Where did it take them? Why don't they talk about it any more?

Catholic highschool (slots: 10 PCs): These characters went to an ultra-conservative school together. Who was really in charge of it? What kind of trauma do they share?

And so on. Obviously with more detail, but this way you can quantify your seeds and, at the same time, create links between characters. It works for some spheres easier than others (with vampires you'll need to get creative, for example) but it gives you a launching point and it allows you the flexibility of ripping off countless of coming-of-age movies. You can put anything in there from Buffy to freakin' Ocean's Eleven and it'll still work.

... If someone busts their ass and pours a ton of work into it. Creativity is the easy part, maintenance is the bitch that gets you.

Sharknado!

I hear some people even run a clone game on a different port for development/experimental purposes! Of course such practices are just crazy.

@Coin said:

This is essentially the hurdle on Eldritch as far as plots go. I am happy to run things for people, but it takes effort, time, and commitment. I can't do all the things all the time, and if I don't run something big and inclusive, people will think there is nothing going on (not necessarily true) but at the same time I'm letting those smaller plots stall a bit.

This is why more storytellers is always good. I can and will hand out plot stuff for people to run for others.

What you are experiencing on Eldritch is an early lack of task delegation. On one hand you guys have the advantage of a small staff team with fewer politics and administrative overhead than other MU* but the flip-side of it is that too much is bottlenecked in your hands. To me it sounds like a recipe for burning out to a crisp, especially in the long term, and even more so if one (or more!) of you happens to go AWOL at the same time due to real life.

Plot will help of course since running scenes is a hardcore obligation (you can't tackle it at your own pace, it lasts for hours in a row, you can't take breaks to do something else at the same time without risking losing momentum due to such delays, etc) but even the rest of the non-administrative overhead seems like it's a lot to handle for 2-4 people.

@Pyrephox said:

I think that sounds wonderful. The biggest thing to make sure of, though, is that there's follow through on the part of staff. If you set up the expectation that hey, here's a thing that will help you get involved in the plot, and then don't follow through, players will feel more put off than if you offered nothing at all.

Yeah, this. Very often staff vastly underestimate the amount of work things like this take. The idea is sound but scales up very poorly.

@tragedyjones <fistshake>

I know it's not TV but I can't be arsed to make a whole new thread for movies.

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/08/04/2018213/dungeons-dragons-is-getting-a-film-franchise

You heard it here first!

Completely irrelevant to The FUTURE but still, I happened to be reading about it recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March

Justice, like lightning!

@ThatGuyThere said:

If a game has the stated goal of wanting to avoid PvP why should they worry about supporting it?

If a game has avoiding PrP as a goal then they would most likely be consent-only.

However don't think for a moment that takes staff intervention out of the equation as I suspect anyone who's played on Shang could attest to that. There is more potential for 'conflict' whether there is 'PvP' or not.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

Has anyone noticed any appreciable improvement in their gaming from having DirectX 12?

I remain a very happy Windows 7 user, but that in particular is making upgrading tempting.

I had been using Linux before (and will again once I've gone through my queue of non-wine runnable games ) so I can't compare empirically, but you could look at a benchmark comparison chart such as the one here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/gamers-its-safe-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ .

@ThatGuyThere said:

Not really tell the folks who can't get along to play in separate rooms. If they refuse that boot them both.
Now that was a bit flippant but really staff shouldn't have to play baby sitter if two adults really cannot get along and won't separate peacefully your game does not need either.

I'm not sure how your answer relates to the examples I used? None of them are about people who're unable to get along.

For instance the first one has to do with different interpretations of a game mechanic, so that an impartial judge (typically staff) has to settle the matter. What does that have to do with playing baby sitter?

@Ganymede Do you have a reason to prefer machines over free weights?

I'd much rather take free weights for many reasons ( http://www.builtlean.com/2013/06/11/free-weights-vs-machines/ ) has some. But my main reason is that machines tend to isolate a single muscle, which is inferior - and somewhat dangerous - compared to compound exercises which work out and strengthen more than one muscle group at a time.

@ThatGuyThere

"I want to use SetThingsOnFire to set you on fire!"
"Nah-UH, I'm not a thing, so SetThingsOnFire doesn't work on me!"
"Sure it does!"
"No it doesn't!"

"I want to kill you because you murdered my ghoul."
"You don't IC know I murdered your ghoul."
"I do, but I won't tell you where from since I don't want you to know OOC."

"I want to kill you because I'm playing a psychopathic serial killer."
"That's not allowed!"
"Sure it is, staff approved me, didn't they?"

Just some examples where staff intervention is needed without any OOC conduct issues.

Well, you beat me this week so <fistshake>.

@2mspris Most I've ever done in a week was 104k steps, with 23ish thousand my max for a day. It's not easy after a while unless you jog rather than run, I've found, since the delimiter ends up being time and not endurance.

Like, it takes hours to walk far enough to get that many steps, so unless the hike itself is worth it it's hard to be convinced to do so for the exercise/challenges alone.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

The best thing about the Rowdy one was that even when something was completely choreographed you had no doubt, looking at him, that he was among the last men you would ever want to fight.

This is a match with Golddust from 1996. Keep in mind that by this point Piper was well past his prime and all but retired, if memory serves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedDn72DFQs

I guess I don't get wrestling, at least from that video. It looks like really fake to me. I mean I know it is fake, but it also looks the part.

I've been running Windows 10 for a few days (thanks to @HelloRaptor for lending a hand) and it's pretty solid.

I'd say better and cleaner than Win7, which used to be my most acceptable version so far, and by far an upgrade to anything 8.x.

@VulgarKitten I like videos like that. What I dislike about videos like that is all those people standing around with their cellphones strapped on their foreheads.

@Derp said:

@Glitch

How would you change the front-end experience? I mean, there are only so many options for text-based gaming. It puts letters on a screen, and you utilize a specific set of commands to do specific things, many of which are flexible enough that a simple button press isn't gonna cut it. So how would you replace the versatility of the command line experience and the flexible things it offers into a format that offers the same, but different?

Oh, the potential is enormous.

For starters its rich text versus plain text. Or being able to have common functions straight out of the UI we now use clients for (such as pasting a log into a wiki page). Or spell-checking while you type. Or a Hangouts-like tabbed interface for OOC chats instead of spammy channels and pages. Or having a point-and-click interface for sheet setting instead of the arcane commands we use today. Or being able to display an image with the room description as an option.

I could go on.

Not all of these are universally desired, of course. But they would be options, at least, whereas with telnet they are simply not.