@thenomain said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
And as a stream-of-consciousness person, if you don't want me talking to you then maybe you shouldn't have friended me, no.
Thank god for more sensible clients with temporary 'mute' options.
Except I /can't/ mute them this week. It's a temporary beef, but the same ways of contacting me in case of emergency are also the same ways some stream-of-consciousness people contact me. It's a one-week annoyance but this week it's very hard.
Facebook. Messenger.
If you have sent me 3 things and I have neither seen nor responded to any of them, don't send me 15 more. Wait. Unless you only want me to read the last 2 things you've sent me, and to get annoyed when I see 18 messages from you when I finally have a moment to breathe? It's gonna make me super cranky. I am not your stream of consciousness.
@lotherio said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I'm finding I don't like comment 'X seemed upstanding to me, I would never have expected (really bad behavior) from X' more and more these days.
Feels like it implies that we should expect the behavior of some people or something. It just feel its redundant, we shouldn't expect anyone to be a mass murderer, rapist, serial killer, clown, pedophile, whatever.
Its too much to ask I know, but I'd rather hear, 'I never saw that coming, but glad someone put a stop/stuck up to X's behavior, I feel bad knowing it happened, I'd feel worse knowing it continued'.
I'm dealing with a lot of RL drama about this right this moment. So I'll just say this: If a bunch of people report X for doing something, and you never saw the action? It's because it was totally calculated/deliberate. If someone's just batshit or lashes out, chances are high that EVERYONE KNOWS IT.
The ones who manage to hide it except for their targets? Those are the truly evil people.
@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:
Sadly, on most games, those running plot rarely get to participate in plot and because there's so few plot runners left, they often get overwhelmed until they burn out for a while.
It'd be amazing if there was an ST's ST out there.
This is my MO when I'm running non-gamewide arcs based on specific players, yes.
From my perspective, "Encouraging Proactive Players" boils down to one thing: Take the idea that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, set it on fire, throw it out the window and let it burn down the neighborhood.
Now you have time to find the people who are consistently making plot for other people, sharing the love, spreading information, and doing things that make a RP sphere great - and you can do something nice for them. Whether that's spending a little extra time writing some lore for them, or creating a horrible character that spends months terrorizing them at random (cough) or taking them on an adventure plot or just giving them a chance to shine - spend time to do things for people who are already willing to use at least part of their time to do nice things for others.
@ganymede I. Feel. This. So. Much.
My current partner is of the "what you make is amazing, but also I love Taco Bell" variety so I can never quite trust if he means it or if he's just content to eat so he doesn't die and anything would be fine.
@fortydeuce Oh, I meant "force it to not be those people."
I'll be honest - I very rarely get people I know well and RP with regularly on any alt, and when I do it's inevitably the one least likely to have any reason to reach out to them at all. I think you've been exceptionally lucky/unlucky is all.
I mean, the idea of @rs is to encourage RP, but why would we be so granular as to track who you RP with and who you RP with "a lot" (what does that even mean?) and then force it? It's called @randomscene for a reason, yo.
I do wish I could swap between alts though. Nothing's more awk than Leona's BFF getting a @rs on the Fractal I play. >.>
General spelling and basic grammer - important, so much so that I probably won't RP with you regularly if you can't do that right.
Pose length and detail - Don't care, as long as you give me something to work with. Witty quips and their rejoinders don't need a 4 paragraph post wherein they're hidden, but it also depends on the scene. As long as we have hooks and are interacting I don't care as much about pose length.
Tempo - Also don't care, I can always do jobs between poses if you're super slow.
Personal peeves - accents. Please don't. Will RP but makes me sad and probably not on the regular. %t - I won't stop RPing with you but I will grind my teeth every. single. time.
Pose ordering - eh. Round robin so no one gets left out, but once we hit 5-ish? 3PR works better anyway.
And from @Coin - yes. when a scene is over, let it be over. We don't need a marathon 5-hour session every single time. I promise.
@fortydeuce There is organization to them, in that they are all grouped on our side by keywords? But I know that doesn't help you.
Part of the game is figuring out how all of this fits together, so I'd be leery of something that supplants the @theory system that is player-driven with something GMs do. We know how the lore of the game fits together, but the discovery is part of the game proper, so I don't know how much we'll be automating it and forcing players into one set knowledge path. You can stumble on all kinds of information in weird ways, and connecting things is always a many-to-many sort of thing.
@fortydeuce said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Yeah, I know I have some clues about some things that fit together, but I don't have any @revelations about those things, even though maybe I should. But that's a guess.
I don't think there's a revelation related to the clues you got. I literally gave you all the clues on that topic that exist, to give you a framework and hopefully give you enough hooks that you can talk about things with people, get a few more clues, and get a posse together to help you hunt even more things.
@arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
How do you deal with the (obviously exaggerated) example I gave above though? The House Voice who's a combat-character, and thus has the authority (but not the coded skill) to be part of or even lead diplomatic missions because of their rank?
I mean we have a High Lord who has shit social skills, so it's not exactly an obviously exaggerated example, it has happened in Arx. When he's on diplomatic/social plots, he drags his diplomats to the forefront and says: "I'm shit at talking and negotiating. Here are my diplomats." (I have seen this happen repeatedly in plots I've run)
Part of it is the culture of the game. If we make it clear that diplomats are important, then players realize that too. I don't run a whole lot of "no diplomats only ZUL" plots these days - there's almost always a chance to talk or negotiate.
Part of it is rolls. If someone has no diplomatic skills, they're probably going to flub their rolls and that could mean death or failure for their characters, and players like to live AND win.
Part of it is creating a class of diplomats (Whispers, in Arx) who can be hired to BE diplomats, and social adjusts and public pressure to be more diplomatic.
And part of it will hopefully come from this new social system we're working on.
Well. I mean - yes, I think what we're saying here is that we're putting in considerable effort to keep this from happening, because it's weird to have Combat Joe Who Has No Social Skills And Does Not Afraid Of Anything in charge of diplomatic efforts.
And that even without code in place, we as GMs are willing to put in considerable effort to tell social stories.
Sidenote: I've never run a combat plot with 5 min setup, because if it's just "here go kill this thing" then I'm too bored to run it. I spend a lot of time figuring out character motivations, why they'd be there, and how it can turn into character development or further the metaplot, because combat characters are more than just their swords too.
@kitteh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
And while I am sure staff doesn't consciosuly think of it this way, you do get the subconscious reaction that combat is 'honored' while asking to do something impactful with another skill often gets you side-eyed as overreaching.
This problem, and the way it devalues social-only or social-main characters, is the entire reason the system is being discussed. We want social characters to be able to have something impactful to them, that they enjoy, that has effects on the metaplot/game world.
Which is not to say we don't run social plots. As GMs, we believe social/diplomatic characters are not only important but are important enough to build plot around. We've created systems that tie players together for RP, I know we've run diplomatic and social plots that have a meaningful effect on the world. But we want MOAR for the social characters. Glory that people can refer to. Reasons for houses to stop being shitty about people wanting to buy pretty clothes and not armor, because there's "no coded benefit."
Reasons for combat characters to think - you know, maybe I could slaughter this person but in a social setting maybe I shouldn't be a douchebag because I have a sword and could do anything, because that person will get me laughed out of this party. Or shame my family. Or have some kind of meaningful impact.
I'm not saying all combat characters do this (#notallcombatbeasts) or that everyone is a dick to social characters, but we want our social characters to have shiny things to play with and reasons to feel badass with what they do, and not just "hey, we're just biding our time until the combat beasts take care of business." That's seriously uncool and it's not very inclusive.
@fortydeuce said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
My situation; thanks for any help! New player to the game, too.
I know! Welcome to Arx, it's good to have you!
@deadempire said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
And if there's a specific storyline that intrigues you, ask staff to help refresh your clues with ones focused on that specific storyline
I had no idea that was even an option!
This is really specific to a new character on the grid. If you're an established character and someone tells you about something you've never heard before, we expect you'll contact your friends, talk to them, maybe get some clues or an investigation going, put in an action or two.
A new character with the concept of "information broker" is really dependent upon the kindness of strangers, in that they have nothing with which to broker. So in the interest of getting a new character (or a new player, or a new-to-a-never-been-played roster char) involved and give them enough hooks to RP with, we'd be far more likely to send some clues that way in response to "I'm supposed to be this thing or knowledgeable about this thing and I know NOTHING" than someone who has been in the game and has the tools to discover and people to RP with.
Part of Arx is about discovering information, after all.
@Lithium - The social system we're trying to implement is in part because there are so many social characters who get ignored when doing diplomatic or social things. And it's to take away some of the doubt - so that there are some hard guidelines that indicate social power, the way there are hard guidelines that indicate combat power.
@aria So sayeth the Queen of Endings, Death.
@fortydeuce Re: White Journals and Black Journals - when you choose a character to tie the journal to, these function as relationship updates. It's super helpful for me personally when I can just do a @relationship mychar=theirchar in game and see a history of all the updates I've made, for black and white journals both. It helps me remember little tidbits about the characters that I might not remember otherwise.
And 3 a week nets you 7xp so that's nice too, esp. once your two week @radomscenapalooza is done.
@auspice You might have something like a higher arch on one side, or a lower arch on that side that the sole is pressing into too much, causing a bruise. Or you might have a bone spur (which suuuuuuuuck). Maybe a podiatrist could help (with the usual caveats for "I hope you have insurance" and "omg specialists are expensive")
@auspice Are you stretching before you walk? Alternately, is that arch higher than the other?