Posts made by Arkandel

@Thenomain v1.12.0. Pretty soon I'll upgrade us to v1.13.0.

@Thenomain The name is nodeBB. Go forth and research

@Sunny Did someone say spreadsheets? Bahgawd, that's EVE Online's music!

@Auspice said in Punishments in MU*:

@Arkandel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

No, your punishment is that you're still here all these years later, talking about the same things with the same people and getting the same answers.

I wish I at least played so I had some kind of excuse for it, too.

I even asked you to RP with me this week.

Elves

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

No, your punishment is that you're still here all these years later, talking about the same things with the same people and getting the same answers.

I wish I at least played so I had some kind of excuse for it, too.

@Coin said in Punishments in MU*:

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Coin said in Punishments in MU*:

It was, after all, just a joke.

At your expense.

But a joke. >.>

If you have to explain it as such, perhaps it wasn't.

Maybe not a good one, alas.

Is this thread tangent my punishment in MU?

The monolithic setup of all-powerful Princes is as much a leftover from most table-top setups as anything else. You can absolutely run a Praxis with someone in charge only because other, more influential powers are propping them up for their own purposes, hostage to their whims or desperately trying to keep themselves afloat.

But @Coin is right (in this case, obviously, not usually) in that there are a lot of arbitrary decisions made by staff which are not applied universally and that creates discrepancies or the perceptions of favoritism which is almost as bad as the thing itself. A common phenomenon for example is for one sphere to apply different standards for shared stats than another on the same game; I recall in HM someone had denied Medicine 4 for Werewolf because they were 'only a medical student' when there were literal Medicine 5 nineteen year olds in other spheres.

@Ghost said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@Arkandel My answer remains the same. I don't care so long as it's for story and not for focusing on private RPed kink. I think it would be a serious waste to take on any meaningful canon character only to have 90% of their activity be on the hush.

How do you know if it's for story and not kinks?

We don't need to limit this discussion to only comic book characters since, after all, they are often... flexible background-wise in the comics due to their canonical constant reboots over the years.

What about other kinds of canon? Harry Potter hooking up with Hermione? Ron played as gay? Things that change the sacred original works and would have have a huge effect on how characters end up - does a change of material change your approach at all?

So let's talk romance/TS involving canonical characters. Are there boundaries involved and, if so, what are they? To get us started:

• Is it okay to create couples out of characters who are canonically with other people? Can (adult) Peter Parker date Captain Marvel?

• Is it okay to change sexual orientations in any way?

• After any of this happens and a character changes hands is it okay to revert them to the defaults in the same game?

@Ganymede said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

To be fair, I was making a move but kept on getting my head cut off.

<Connor MacLeod disapproves>

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff’s Job?:

@Seraphim73 I think you're on to something very important here. Story telling, from the GM's perspective, where the point is not just writing the story, but making every bit player feel that their input mattered, that it affected the outcome.

It still comes back to somehow getting your players to buy-in.

It's a delicate balance. Give too little attention and the world is a sandbox which, as we've seen in countless nWoD cloned games that spawned and died a quiet neglectful death, doesn't work. Give too much attention and the world is being micromanaged, the players only stick figures unable to impact it in any meaningful way so they lose interest and move on.

Staff are an extension of what GMs are for table-top; they host the game and run the plot but the best laid story, the coolest GM screen or fancy dice won't mean a thing if the players are yawning and staring at their phones the whole time.

What GMs (and staff) want is players who contribute and share the creative burden of authoring this collaboratory fiction. If they don't then there's trouble in the horizon.

@Derp said in Staff’s Job?:

• Competence - Slightly less important than passion, I want someone who knows the system. Code and commands I can teach. Someone who has actually read the damn materials for the system? Invaluable. I'm willing to hand-hold a bit, but really, I expect you to either know what you're talking about, or at least know where to find it when you inevitably need to go look it up, and not make more work for me by chasing down rules errors.

Different qualities are important to different people but honestly systemic knowledge is so far down my list I don't even know if it's there at all. So I'm not going to say this is wrong, just that it really isn't a major factor.

I've worked with some incredible staff members in the past who genuinely didn't know how to roll for initiative. I've been in plots ran by STs who understood theme intimately, and who designed themes that made me truly want to roll a character just to give them a spin yet they couldn't tell you how a grapple should work.

This is how I look at it - the reason for all this isn't that mechanics or systems shouldn't be in the toolkit because of course they should. It's that they are very, very teachable. Most systems are meant to be easy to learn, they were created in the first place to be something players can pick up.

Most of the items on the list that make staff good aren't teachable. I don't know how to teach someone to be a better decision-maker, to engage people or to be a better communicator; these are valuable real world skills businesses, organizations and militaries actively recruit, and we're trying to find them in volunteer positions for text-only games.

I'd honestly focus on those. If someone has them and knows how to roll strength+brawl versus defense it's a bonus, I guess.

@mietze Oh! Oh, one more thing.

As a player ST I feel I get to choose who I run things for. Is it my own friends that I enjoy playing with? Although the funny thing is it never turns out like that because soon enough I'm running one-on-one scenes for people I've never met before, at least I still have the liberty to say no and not have to explain myself.

As staff I'd feel really awkward and probably for a reason - after all it's my job to spread plot around. If two people come to ask me to run a plot and one sounds way more fun than the other I'd feel inclined to run both or neither. I can't play favorites.

@Thenomain said in Staff’s Job?:

@Arkandel said in Staff’s Job?:

Either way I think @Thenomain wanted us to debate more what staff's job is and not what it isn't.

More than that.

What makes someone a "staffer" and not a "player"? Is there anything special? Do players get any advantages staffers do not?

Okay, let me take another stab at this then.

There are several skills I consider essential for staff that are not necessary for a "player". I'll list them again: managerial ability, communication, decision-making, time management. You can get away with not having any or all of them (possibly not communication) and still be a good or even great player.

There are also several skills that aren't needed to be staff but are mandatory for players. Roleplaying ability is almost unimportant (unless they want to be running plot) as I've legitimately worked with great game admins who were very average as players but had a great work ethic, they could build, code, answer questions, create wikis and helpfiles very well and their grasp of theme was excellent; you can have all those things and still not be a creative poser or breathe life into your characters after all.

Above all I think what differentiates staff from players when it comes down to it though is perseverance. There's a little bit of madness in staffing and to do it in the long term you simply can't have a thin skin. You can't let negative comments or criticism get you down. You need to be able to listen and adjust but not be a pushover. And you need to do these things for a long period of time; there's no such thing as a great staff member who gave up a month in.

For bonus points... having your players' respect is such a treasure. Being able to say "guys I know this is weird but trust me..." and have them give it an honest try is fucking gold. It's so easy to lose this yet if you have it you can run My Little Pony By Night and it can turn out to be amazing.

Half of staffing is getting people to buy-in after all.

@mietze I've been on games where I STed more (as a player) than I played my own PC, and it wasn't even close. I was quite happy with that, too.

What bugged me a little though was that in the long term running things for my immediate group left my character a bit detached. How do I explain that he missed out another hunt in the Shadow (again) because I was running it? How do I get him out of signing up for the next one? I'd never play my own PC in a PrP I'm STing which just left a bit of a mess behind.

@Auspice said in Staff’s Job?:

And I think that may be where Arkandel is coming from. And I get it, 100%. I want people who are enthusiastic for the game and what it needs... not people who are enthusiastic just for the staff title. The latter often end up hanging out just to hang out and don't even do the busy work, causing the rest of staff to end up shouldering the burden anyway.

There are usually two kinds of 'bad staff' in that context.

Some will want to do nothing and are just after the 'prestige' of a colored name; they might even be mostly harmless other than in trying to set a different culture.

Some of the worst staff will do work and use it as currency to buy what they are really after; that's much more dangerous.

Either way I think @Thenomain wanted us to debate more what staff's job is and not what it isn't.

@Derp said in Punishments in MU*:

You're never going to find anyone banned "from the community" because nobody in "the community" has that kind of control over anything.

Punishment isn't about control. No one controls everything; hell, most people (especially trouble players) barely control themselves.

To me it's a primarily a message: "This is what we will not tolerate. This is how much we're prepared to do to stop it."

@Pandora said in Punishments in MU*:

@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:

And the second sounds like public shaming, which I am generally against.

Banning someone is a form of public shaming; just because they're off your game now and you don't have to look them in the metaphorical eye afterwards doesn't mean they haven't been shamed and that they aren't going to suffer negatively within the wider community as a result.

Also shaming is in some cases the ultimate deterrent. Some people you really can't discipline due to different reasons; they may be staff, they can reroll or even go from game to game once they get what they want from yours.

In many cases people otherwise unassailable are very much prone to criticism. They'll claim otherwise, most vigorously, and provide long paragraphs' worth of explanations of exactly why they don't care at all but they do.

Sometimes not just the best but the only deterrent is publicly pointing a finger at someone and telling them they are assholes.

@secretfire Yeah, I wish Arx-code had something as simple as the +meetme command, but that's a different issue. I agree.