Posts made by brent

danger: original content

On the one hand, you do want specialists to be have some distinct advantage to specializing (i.e. the old 5/5) -- otherwise there's no real point to actually going and getting one and you have the one character doing All The Things problem.

On the other hand, giving specialists LOTS of oomph on the far end leads to a perception of obligatory min-maxing. Like, if the net system effect of going from 4/4 to 5/5 is as big as the one going from 2/1 to 4/4, that's not very good either.

I tend to think optimally 2 to 3 (on the 0 to 5 scale) ought to be your biggest hop in terms of numerical effectiveness when you're basing calcs on straight up skill points instead of the results of rolls, with the subsequent 3 to 4, 4 to 5 (and 5 to 6) being progressively smaller improvements.

@derp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I guess this depends on what you mean by 'nicely'. Potato handles spawns just fine.

At the risk of of being outed as a filthy self-quoter...

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

Why Potato's spawn UI is garbage, courtesy of 5 minutes in paint tool SAI

I think another contributing factor was that condemns were on the X per week system, which leads to the mindset (similar to other systems) that if you don't use X condemns per week you're "wasting" them, so use it or lose it right?

That said, even if you "fixed" this mechanic by, say, instituting some sort of system where you could say, condemn somebody at the cost of 3 praises (and not have a condemn be 3 times as effective, just make it have the opportunity cost of cutting into your ability to praise people) I tend to think these kinds of systems are in the end more trouble than they're worth for the reasons already mentioned.

So I've had the King for pretty much a year now. I've got 66 clues, which probably puts me in the bottom quartile of Arx players. (minor anecdote: over 10% of them came from a deal where somebody was like "come to my thing!", and I was like "okay I will come to your thing!" because I try to say yes to that as much as possible when people ask, and when I got to the thing it turned out to be basically a @clue-sharing meeting, and I was like lol I have zero actual @clues to share on this meeting topic, and a much of people were like yay! I get to help the king!, and then I got a bunch of clues about semirandom stuff, the end. Anyhoo)

I would say for me, theories and RP about them are way more important than the clues. I don't need to get lost in the weeds, I need the Big Picture more than anything. And the Big Picture doesn't come from clues; the clues are too zoomed-in on the details. I do feel I'm swimming a bit against the common player cultural stream on this one; some people are a lot more than others when I'm OOCly like 'yeah, I don't have any @clues about this stuff, sorry!' in an IC discussion about Game Topics and such.

I think the big thing about @clues is that, despite the name, the great majority of them are not discrete clues in the "Mr. Boddy was killed in the conservatory" sense. They are little vignettes, fragments of bigger documents, accounts, events, and such. This makes them pretty cool to read and collect, but what this also means is the point of them is to include lots of extra world details as much as the actual hint the original investigation was trying to get. Moreover, once they exist on their own to be shared about the context, circumstance, and so on of that original investigation is generally lost. And then all these factors put together leaves you with this old RPG saw in semi-fresh memetic form:

Now take a big pile of self-service @org clues (or any sort of bulk @clue dumping, really) and you get this times 50.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

You're probably not going to need a rape policy on a My Little Pony game.

I regret to inform you that you're massively underestimating the remnant brony fanbase's capability to be totally, dismayingly awful right there

@apos said in What is your turning point?:

@packrat said in What is your turning point?:

Weirdly I have a kind of hard mental cut off for scheduling RP, outside of specific events. If somebody say asks if I will be free 7pm on Tuesday to RP?

The internal response is almost immediately a kind of mental FUCK NO! NEVER!

Even if I was originally probably planning to be around and RPing at that time.

I dunno why, but as soon as RP is hard scheduled with a date and time I just don't enjoy it. It carries a feeling of obligation, and it's no longer fun. I'll do it for people because some people can't RP otherwise and need me to help move their stories along, but I just think of it as work. I'm glad they enjoy it, but I often am so dialed out that when people talk up about how they loved the RP I have no idea what they are talking about since I don't remember the scene at all. It was a job that was taken care of.

I'll preface this by saying that my situation is a little non-standard (as far as playing the head of state on more or less the biggest game around these days goes), but in my experience scheduling is an absolute necessity because in a very real sense I am the event. (Super modest, I know.)

I like spontaneous RP as much as the next guy but if we're talking about something that feels like work, try juggling constantly having a list of seven or eight people who would like to have a scene sometime with differing degrees of unspoken necessity. I tried to freewheel it all the time when I started. IT SUCKED. Paradoxically, it was horrid for freewheeling because in the event I did go through my list without making a now connection, I'd go IC and find a thing to do and then thirty minutes into it somebody on the list either logs in or frees up and now either I ditch the person I've just started a scene with or tell them we'll have to try some other time later (again).

Needless to say, both spray-firing 'is now good?' requests and apologizing for being busy several times each day is draining at best. So for my personal sanity, I started scheduling.

tl.dr If I schedule you for next Thursday it does not mean you suck and I want nothing to do with you as a player, it means I am trying to get you a scene as quickly and reliably as I can without blowing off other people to do it.

Why Potato's spawn UI is garbage, courtesy of 5 minutes in paint tool SAI

@surreality I kinda meant the whole "going straight to calling stuff dumb" bit when the general thrust of the whole thing recently was acknowledging stuff like that wasn't helpful tbh

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

(No, really, that's so dumb a gif is the only appropriate response. )

11/10 irony right here

@lithium Didn't Griatch say 'idle' was basically the Evennia equivalent of @@ in the arx thread?

@fortydeuce said in The trappings of posing:

I will avoid a person who doesn't pose tenses alongside the rest of the players. It's rude and distracting, and there's no excuse for it, unlike a metapose gone terribly wrong. It strikes me as a gambit for attention.

Saying there's no excuse for it is a bit off because MMO RPers are anecdotally in my experience majority past-tense posers (possibly because of the crossing between RP on game forums, where forum RP in general is also historically a majority past-tense thing). So if you get somebody who got their start that way, past tense is likely going to be one of those habits in the same vein as pick-your-favorite-die-hard-MU*er-habit-here.

I've seen a few past-tensers on Arx (we get people from eeeeeverywhere) and just mentally rewrite it and move on, myself.

I think the thing I coded that overall people enjoyed the most was the Texas Hold'em deck on Firan, which was basically 100% fluff but let you use IC money and had a few minor tweaks to take into account IC stats (e.g. if you had a great luck stat, you had a tiny advantage to drawing good cards over somebody who had an average luck stat).

But essentially it was just a widget that let you OOCly play actual poker and didn't really facilitate RP in and of itself besides being kind of a prop to social RP around (although iirc there didn't tend to be much actual posing among players apart from quick short ones because it slowed down the hands). It mostly existed (a) just to see if I could actually get it working and (b) to get me out of having to come up with another festival event to run again.

Since it's been about a year since I was dragged out of my nice and comfy 8-year retirement from pretendy improv writey games by certain people who wouldn't stop talking about Arx and I'm apparently sticking around for another spell now, might as well scribble up one of these.

CHARBITS OF THE NOW

• Arx: Alaric, Ferrando

CHARBITS OF THE LESS NOW

• Firan: Aldrikos, Mateo, Brent (staff), Tanosa the owl (bird)
• CotA 2: Cannonball
• 2k5: Brent (staff), Galvatron, Soundwave, Sandstorm, etc
• TF1: Skywarp
• Obligatory vague allusion to other characters on rando places I've long since forgotten offhand because I played them in maybe like five scenes, max

@auspice

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt

I am going from 3.615 (47/13) to 3.357 (47/14) just by posting this.

Losing .258 seems appropriate.

Edit: now actually up +.027 thanks to the magic of trawling for cheap forum karma

@Lisse24 On second thought, that's kind of a spoiler. rip joke

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

massive casual vs. normal vs. tryhard XP rates

I think this is more of a perception issue than is supported by the actual math, though. At the top of the votes list is usually going to be somebody new racking up the new character randomscenes by getting like 15 or 20 of them in a week. But that's only active for the first 14 days after approval. When you get into the top of the 'regular' players you're usually looking at high 20s to low 30s.

You have to also remember that the first couple of votes and randomscenes of the week give you a LOT of xp and it tails off very quickly. Like, get 2 votes and do 2 randomscenes and 3 journals and you're already at 20 xp. Meanwhile it takes 14 votes and 10 randomscenes to get to 30. It's not a linear system at all.

The new firstimpression thing is actually more damaging in that regard in that the tryhards will have more opportunity to meet more different characters, but it's limited somewhat by that you can only firstimpression an individual character once and the awards are disproportionately pointed outwards.