Posts made by Auspice

Okay, here we go since I'm using it this evening. An example of the scene summary in use on Ares (since it was being discussed earlier in the thread:)

@faraday said in Looking for an Ares Coder!:

@observer3000 In case you hadn't seen it, I have a program where I will install an Ares game for you. The install scripts are also pretty copy/paste automated if you choose to do a self-install.

There aren't many experienced Ares coders out there at this point, but if anyone is interested in learning there is a whole host of tutorials to get started.

Faraday is lovely if you run into any problems with installation. She really is.
I hit a snag recently that had to do with the droplet being really silly, in the end, and she was amazing about helping out.

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

but my two are almost exactly two years apart (two years, four days)

That's similar-ish to me and my brother, except it's 8 years and 2 days.

My parents' solution: 'You're 8, that's old enough to not have parties anymore.' So my 8th birthday party was ... actually both the first (#growinguppoor) and last I ever had. So good on y'all for struggling through getting it done when you have twins or kids with close birthdays.

Because it really sucked to get the sort of things I did. Every year that followed was stuff like: 'we'll take you out to dinner one night.' (I'd have even enjoyed just having a couple friends over for a sleepover) 'The family vacation this year is your birthday gift!' etc etc.

Seriously, pro tip: don't ask an older sibling to 'give up their birthday.' They will, out of love for the younger sibling, but it sucks and eats away at them. I know it did for me and anyone else I've ever met who got similar treatment felt the same.

@juke said in Incentives for RP:

For the thing I'm working on, I've been looking at ways to reward people who ST for other people...with plot that's run for them. Because, speaking as someone who loves to ST...sometimes, you'd really just like to get embroiled in a plot mystery that you don't hold all of the cards to, for once.

How to do this in a sane way, without burning out staff responsible for doing that (in the event you wind up with a glorious abundance of players STing for other players), is an important question. It's possible that a player may not even like the plot that gets run for them, because in MU*ing the one universal truth is that you can't please everyone...but I think communicating with the player about the kinds of things they want/enjoy solves a lot of that.

I've always liked games where fun little mcguffins were part of storytelling and plot, too. Objects or information that did stuff.

Getting people to run plot is one of those things that has been long evading me. It's like the majority of people who MU are actively repulsed by the idea of running plots for other people at this point in time.

@Derp said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@juke said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I loved Faraday's 'RP wish list' on BSG

For those of us who didn't play there, tell us more.

Hi!

This was actually a player effort between me and @Seraphim73 that faraday kindly put into action. We wanted a way to be able to share things we wanted to see happen. Either scenes, plots, etc. So we got faraday to put a page on the wiki that we could edit and add our own lines onto. Stuff like:

Susan - Making a beer run on Caprica.
Bill - Getting shot in the leg.
Jamie - Getting into a bar fight.
Georgie - Firing on Centurions with makeshift weapons.

Then, people could add their names in to ideas they liked:

Susan, Bill, Jamie - Making a beer run on Caprica.
Bill - Getting shot in the leg.
Jamie, Georgie - Getting into a bar fight.
Georgie, Bill - Firing on Centurions with makeshift weapons.

...and us player STs had a ready-made-list of ideas we could roll with (and the easier ones like 'beer run on Caprica' worked well for quick and easy RP ideas).

(I think a lot of why ideas didn't get run was that most of the things ON the list were @Seraphim73 and I trying to populate it and thus it was stuff he and I -- the primary player STs -- wanted run for our characters and a lot of other people didn't really add to it. Once again, it was something that was awesome in theory, but didn't get used as much as we'd like.)

What we are discussing is something that game designers discuss when they approach a new game. What designers discuss when they work on updating interfaces on cellphones or Facebook or YouTube. This isn't 'just' a tool.

This is a meeting between psychology, game theory, and user interface (UX) design. It's a meeting of three branches. There have been so many books written on this topic and none of them are 'the' final word. Because there is no perfect answer. Because there is no 'one size fits all.'

The best you can do is find something that works well and try to adapt it as best you can for 'most.' That's really where we're at right now.

People vastly smarter and more capable than any of us spend their entire career trying to answer these questions and the best they have, really, is 'we're still working on it.'

@krmbm said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

ETA: However, I did envision the scene system being used for this end.

+scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=open/Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible

That shows up both on the web scenes list, the in-game +where, and the in-game scenes list. I don't really know how to advertise any better than that, but I'm all ears if somebody comes up with something.

I think the thing that's missing on this is some sort of announcement about the open scene. Right now, at least on GH (and on SL, when I played there), the trend is to start the scene, then note on the RP channel that you started a scene.

Just spit-balling - If there was some kind of announcement option (e.g., - +scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=announce/Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible) that pushed a little "[RP Requests] Bob started an open scene: <Details>" comment...?

So I just went digging around because I have been mulling this, a lot. Because I've been like 'I swear to god I remember this being a thing on BSU.'

I wonder if we just had 'announce' permissions as players and that's what I'm remembering.

@Lisse24 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I was going to write a snarky response, but I absolutely agree. People take time to adjust to a new tool and you have to teach them how to use it, and you have to remind people that it's there, by CONSTANTLY pointing to it. By constantly, I mean big huge letters on the wiki: THIS IS HOW YOU FIND RP, daily emits on the game USE THIS, and periodic reminders. But if people know the tool exists and they try to use and STILL have the same problem, then it's not them, it's the tool.

But this is part of what @Sparks and I are trying to say: scene/summary, for example, does work! It's just still new and we're still adapting to it. I think it needs to be given more time before it's declared something that doesn't work.

@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@A-Meowley said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Ares is meant to be full web portal, client is for holdouts and older players.

Wait. It's supposed to be full web portal? How can we idly chat on channels on the web portal and stuff? Asking for a friend, because obviously I'm not so old that I can't immediately figure out a new system, that'd be absurd...

All ares pages have a 'chat' page that has the traditional channels. You can chat on channel (and read mail and bbposts and soon PM) all on the web portal.

And for people who don't know:

This is an example of what it'll look like for the PM option on the web portal! (Notion updated a couple days ago)
'New Conversation' lets you start a PM with someone. The others on the left are PMs that I've had since the update. The flagged one is a PM I received while offline that I haven't read yet (and you get the 'New private messages!' in the right-hand bar same as you might 'New activity in scenes!').

It's super awesome, esp. if you have friends who you often try to chat with while at work.

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I've had +wantrp or +rpok tools on prior games and, in my experience, almost nobody ever used them. The RP Requests channel worked the best for connecting people. With Ares, I think it works even better because you can see prior requests easily on the web chat (or channel recall if you're using the client) so you can see that @Lisse24 was looking for RP twenty minutes ago and mights till be.

I'm not opposed to adding a "looking for RP" flag/list if a bunch of folks want it, I just haven't done it because past experience tells me it's not a good solution to this problem.

I just think it runs into the same problems. It's just passing the buck:

'I don't want to page anyone because it makes me uncomfortable, so..'
'Asking on channel is awkward, so..'

'..I'll set this +wantrp and wait for someone to page me!'

I know that's probably not everyone's line of thought, but the issue persists that when you have that +wantrp flag set, you are relying on people to page you and guess what: they have the same hangup as the rest of us. Paging out of the blue is scary. It's uncomfortable. It's 'I don't know this person. They don't know me. I don't know if that blurb is still valid. I'm just gonna go ask on channel instead because this is too anxiety-inducing.' <- how I've felt about every single 'wantrp' type flag I've ever seen.

But if I see an open scene on, say, an Ares game and I can either go on the web portal and see the last few poses? Or it has a summary? (And honestly, this discussion and what @Sparks was talking about is encouraging me to Git Gud about setting those summaries at the beginning of my scene) I am gonna be a lot more likely to drop in. Because it's an active scene. Because it's already giving me the feel right then and there for who these people are.

@Lisse24 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice.
I agree. +Scenes does give you some of the info you need, but not enough to be able to find RP reliably. It tells you point 1. Who is already RPing, and whether or not you can join that scene, along with a sense of what that scene might be about.

It does not tell you 2 - 3. In other words, you have no clue who's on and isn't RPing but wants to be and what those scenes may be about. So on Ares you need another tool to work in conjunction with +scenes to fill that gap.

It does tell you what those scenes are about (/summary) if people fill it in. The details in scene info can be filled in at any time, but most of us only do so at the end because we aren't yet conditioned to do it sooner.

The same issue would come up of the +scene command you're proposing. It's still new. The more we get used to it ('scene/summary <whatever the scene is about>' at the beginning of the scene), the more that will be useful to anyone looking at scenes. But it'll take time. It's still brand new!

You are correct that there isn't anything there to provide for someone LOOKING for RP. But the other issue (summary) is resolved by Ares' scene command, you just gotta give us old dogs time to learn the new trick.

Ares does provide these tools, to an extent! The scenes code lets you set the type of scene (/types has social and event by default in the system and you can add more: Notion added 'duty' as a scene type, for example). Then, you can also set a summary of the scene.

Then, when people type in 'scenes' they can see: who is in the scene, the location of the scene, the scene type, and a summary (if the summary is set in advance: I admit I'm not yet used to doing that and am remiss in doing so a lot of the time). So a lot of what @Lisse24 is talking about is something @faraday was thinking of (I think!) when she designed it.

@Coin said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Seraphim73 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

there's very little more annoying than someone coming on RP Requests to say "Hey, anyone want to RP" and then when you say "Sure, what did you have in mind," they say "Oh, I don't know. You want to go to a bar?"

Yes, I honestly hate this v much.

Person: 'Anyone wanna RP?'
Me: 'Sure! What did you have in mind!'
Person: 'I dunno. What do you wanna do?'

...Please don't put the onus on me, Person! You tossed out the idea to RP. Gimme a hook. An idea, a place, something. This is the entire reason why I'm hesitant, sometimes, to respond to such vague queries, because these days it's become more common than not that if I reply...... I'm suddenly the one who has to come up with everything. The location. The idea. The scene set. I feel like I'm their sole source of entertainment rather than a collaborator.

Also good:

A: Anyone for RP?
B: Yeah, what did you have in mind?
A: Not sure, let me check your wiki and see if there's something that could be fun for both of us.

I mean, you don't have to have an idea right away, but be willing to put in the effort once you have full context.

Right. If someone is willing to put in the effort? Awesome. Even work with me. But how often have you had it go the following:

You: What did you have in mind?
Them: I dunno, what do you like?
You: Well, we could go to the park?
Them: Oh, no, my character wouldn't do that.
You: What about the cafe?
Them: Nah, that's not really my character's style.
You: All right, what about <local splat hangout>.
Them: I don't like going there, it gets too big.
You: Well, uh-

Times when they offer to check out your wiki, work with you (via pages, chan, whatever) on what locs might work for you both... Those are awesome. But when all they do is shoot down anything you offer because you aren't naming their Goldilocks location? BOOOOOOO.

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

I dunno, man. If any of you invited me out for an all-expenses paid cruise, I would assume that I'd be murdered at some point...

There go my summer plans.

Is anyone else inspired to start watching America's Got Talent just because Terry Crews is the host now?

@Ghost

@Ghost

Whaddya think of the coat?

@Ghost

...so uh, Satanic Temple gear + MAGA gear.

I could do things with that.

@Ghost

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Tinuviel That guy looks like a prosthetic. Like a blow up doll filled with the mind gem and sentient enough to make thoughts into mouth words.

STOP SPOILING ALL MY FUTURE PLOT PLANS GHOST

@Ghost said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice