Best posts made by Derp

@icanbeyourmuse said in New Sphere Playing WoD:

I don't know if it is better to start with te minor version of whatever

NO. God no. Don't do this. It's a trap. And it's also unfun for other players because you will probably eventually want to

go in full tilt into the major one.

Which is what you should do from the jump. Do not, please, go into it thinking that you are going to start o ff with somethig minor and learn as you go, or worse, 'learn it all IC'. This doesn't work. It's been tried a hundred thousand times and ultimately it's the equivalent, RP-wise, of someone reading the book to you because they have a gun to their head because 'IC Duty' and man it sucks. It sucks so much. It really, really does, and every IC mentor gets burnt out and every IC student feels left behind. There are a few cases maybe where it worked better than others, but come in as a fully trained whatever and learn OOC, rather than a semi-whatever and learn as you go.

It sounds great on paper, but the delivery is terrible. Promise.

The second way is the much, much, infinitely better.

@wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Or you realize that you read them and they did not register at all

@23quarius said in Drawin' Characters:

Did I make a comment calling this place toxic I have no memory of this but I also don't know what I ate for breakfast

No. It's the general rumor of MSB. Everyone thinks that we're some kind of toxic cesspool. Things can get heated sometimes but it's largely an eye-roll-worthy comment made by people who are entirely deserving of our criticism or ire. They use it as a way to dismiss the basis of the argument without interacting with it.

"Oh you can't trust those people, they're just a bunch of toxic rabid assholes."

My house smells of ground beef with onion, garlic and ginger, and I think if they sold this smell in an air freshener I would keep it plugged in all the time.

I agree with @GreenFlashlight when it comes to 'encounters have to scale to meet the abilities of Billy Badass'. I'm on a DnD game right now. I play a (fairly) powerful character with a fairly decent build, but I've tried to make him the sort of character that can solve a variety of problems while still being combat-capable.

Save that the other players have hyper-focused on sword-swinging because sword-swinging is pretty much all they care about. Not solving mysteries. Not finding alternatives. Just hit the thing until xp falls out. It's basically Final Fantasy.

Which means that my versatile guy, that has a ton of utility in a lot of ways, is pretty much useless in combat. He can dish out a LOT of damage in a turn, granted, but his saves are absolute shit compared to the DCs these beefed up monsters are throwing out, and it's hard to hit something so scaled up in AC as to keep the Level 20 Paladin of Smashing from one-shooting him.

But more than that --

It's been my experience that the people that hyper-focus on the numbers aren't in it to play the same kind of game that I am. They're in it to win, and get frustrated when they don't win. They will find every excuse in the book why that roll that they failed shouldn't have failed because, see, it's right here on the sheet, he can't ever be intimidated by anything, ever. All that muscle mass makes him immune.

And this isn't limited to just fighters and martial types. The people that over-optimize for a certain thing always have trouble when presented with something else, and will seek to turn it back to what they've specialized for. Diplomatic talks? Good luck, because that fighter is gonna punch that guy, and then just do some Big Stick Diplomacy. Glad you greed to our terms, I hope there wasn't too much concussion.

A certain amount of strategy is good. But if all you're focused on is getting your sword-swinging number as high as it will possibly go, then we're gonna have problems.

@Kestrel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

lol. lmao.

Knock it off.

Is that an un-veiled-enough warning?

@Apos It's almost like people would have to learn how to engage in civil conversation with at least a moderately measured tone. I don't see that as a downside.

@rinel and @gryphter

So, I'm a paralegal. I know how this goes firsthand, too.

Re: imposter syndrome: nobody in the law, outside of very highly specialized attorneys that only practice in one field, know what the fuck they're doing, and even then they're half-assing it most of the time. Today, I got a brief from opposing counsel, and my attorneys were all 'this doesn't look good'... until I went to take a look at it and realized they were citing a version of the CFR that literally hasn't been valid in over a decade, but because nobody actually fucking checks citations, they would have gotten away with it -- if it hadn't been for the fact that I literally just read that obscure little portion last week for another case.

Which brings me to Gryphter's thing -- everyone is getting paid well below their pay grade, now. I have two college degrees, a professional certificate, my CP/CLA (Certified Paralegal/Certified Legal Assistant) and ACP (Advanced Certified Paralegal) credentials in Discovery and Trial Practice, and I make half of the average salary of someone in an entry level position in my field, probably without those last two (which are fairly important) and tend to command an even higher salary. And I do the lion's share of the actual casework, too. The research, the briefs, the filings. The attorneys largely just take what I wrote and go talk about it in court. Why? Because they have a doctorate and took a test and paid a fortune to be able to do so and that somehow means they know more and make a zillion times more than me.

Even though I literally wrote almost everything they're saying. AND I'm the one that tends to catch the major fuckups on both sides.

(UPL is bullshit, by the way. Sidebar.)

But yeah. The only way I'm getting a better anything is if I go and negotiate it at a new company. But I really love this position. It's almost exactly what I wanted to do. I would leave it for maybe one or two others, but only because they're even more specialized in the areas that I'm passionate about.

It's a shitty place to find yourself.

So one of the very first tabletops I ever ran was just for me and a handful of friends, and my at-the-time boyfriend. Well, kid sister to one of the friends was like 12, and wanted to get involved in some of what we were doing. Kid sister was pretty cool, so I agreed to let her play.

This kid, man. She soaked up pretty much the entire rulebook inside of a day, was asking me advanced questions about gameplay by the end of the week. Hadn't even played yet, but I was starting to get a feel for where her mind was going.

Well, I knew that the others at the table were either going to take it easy on her for being new, or try to do the whole newbie initiation hazing thing that they do, and I was starting to get a feel for how her mind worked. So I set her up as one of the villains of the story, infiltrating the group and actively working to undermine them from the inside.

And man, this kid sold it. Every time they would encounter a setback that she had cleverly engineered, she would be the first up in arms, calling for them to mount up and ride off, no time to wait or rest or prepare, we have to go get that son of a gun!. And the rest of the people at the table are just like "Yeah, we can do it, rar!"

And I'm trying so hard not to just lose it because this kid's acting is worthy of Hollywood, right? And she's coming up with just the most devious stuff -- we had agreed that if she had a question she could write it on an index card and I would write the answer back, since she was new and playing shy (this was well before texting was anything like easy or affordable, SMASH THAT BUTTON 4 TIMES FOR S, 25 CENTS A MESSAGE), so nobody else was catching on.

So by the end of it she's managed to sabotage half their efforts and prevented them from resting in their haste to race to the bad guy, and when they show up, she just casually adopts this big, chipper smile like 'Alright, they're all yours now, I'll be in my room!' Grabs a blow-pop from the big bowl, and just straight up walks out of the room with a little skip in her step before the big boss battle.

They still managed to win, but man, it was a tough fight, and they never underestimated this kid again. She was a regular in our group for like four years, and is easily one of the best players I'd ever met. I'm thrilled that I was able to introduce her to the hobby, and I hope that she's carried that torch forward.

@Ganymede @RightMeow @Warma-Sheen

Ah. Then no, I didn't miss that. I get that people think that part is easy.

But what it doesn't take into account is that keeping up that level of anonymity even with good behavior is exhausting. It's easy to make slips about anything that happened in the past. Relationships you've built with other people. Good times that you had.

Friendships can be tarnished based on the old identity, and so going into those circles becomes awkward because on the one hand, you like these people, but on the other -- how do you just come out and tell them that you're this other person that has all of this negative baggage associated with them?

We've seen, on this forum, blowups about people 'flying under the radar' even when they haven't done anything recent, just based on prior history and being outed.

So no, I didn't miss that going into a game under a different identity is "easy." I was countering with "it is harder than you think, exhausting, and potentially unfair if based on slim evidence given the way this hobby tends to work."

IMO it is not the lesser of two evils, and I don't condone it.

@kanye-qwest said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

because it is balls out insane

No, not really. This happens frequently enough that many of us have commented on how very odd it is. But, you know, I wouldn't really expect you to see it.

@Arkandel - While I can respect that finger-pointing isn't really what you were going for here, at some point it needs to be said, and specific people called out on it. There's been an ongoing conversation about this for long enough that it needed to be done, and I tried to do so as civilly as possible. And I'll even note that I only did so in response to someone asking who was on the list, and limited that response to informing them that the questioner was on it.

But as a prime example of exactly what we were talking about regarding inconsistent policies and such, shouldn't the earlier comment implying that someone only made a remark due to a possible genital infection rank slightly higher on the things-to-call-out-o-meter than me answering KQ's question as to who people are with a response that I consider her one of the people in question?

Things to consider, you know?

@Arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Losing fat, barring medical conditions, is very similar to balancing a budget; you find out your TDEE (basically your caloric balance) and then eat under that. Free (or very cheap) apps like MyFitnessPal help track and accomplish the latter.
That's it. If you exercise while you're at it you'll also lose relatively little muscle while you're eating at a deficit, which accelerates the fat loss.

No. It's really, really not. And that's exactly the kind of received wisdom that most of us have to contend with.

For the average person, that might work, but for many of us, it doesn't. At all. Caloric deficits result in a loss of muscle mass before fat mass even when training regularly, and there are conditions like @Auspice's where this wisdom doesn't work.

So thanks, but I've been living with this and researching it for the better part of two decades, and that doesn't actually work for everyone.

@Ghost

May I also suggest:

“EVERYONE’S MENTAL HEALTH IS THEIR OWN PROBLEM BUT IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLE INTO MY OBSCURE TRAUMA IT IS YOUR SOLEMN DUTY TO TRIP ALL OVER YOURSELF TO APPEASE ME YOU INSENSITIVE TOXIC JERK.”

Welcome to the new MSB!

If you're seeing this, then you're on the right site. Congrats! We made it, ya'll!

Here's hoping that takes care of the various crashes and other nonsense that was happening.

If anyone has any issues with the new site, hit me up. You can do it here, or my Discord is Derp#2348.

Happy posting!

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

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

@Aria Make them a mix tape and send it to them anonymously: Music to Fuck To.

Make double damned sure it includes this.

Bonus points: Write a note with the mixtape explaining that the shitty R&B is no longer bearable and there is better music to bone to. Deliver it in person. Say something like "This was left on my door but I think it's for you."

Male them feel like everyone knows.

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

wrongfun

I hate this word. It feels like such a cheap copout on a way to get around something obvious: "wrongfun" is a real thing.

Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong setting. Wrong theme. Wrong feel. Wrong universe. Wrong audience. Wrong style.

Yes, there are plenty of times when the kind of fun you're looking for is wrong for whatever of those above categories, and others, it is conflicting with. But bring that up and people shout down at other people about "how dare you wrongfun me!"

Well, conversely, how dare you expect everyone else to conform to what you want when what you want doesn't conform to the standards?

Yes, there is such a thing as wrongfun, and I think that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if we used it more, especially when it's not 'minor infraction that can be chalked up to quirkiness' and more 'no, you are seriously going way into the weeds with this'.

I've had a couple of players recently that I really wanted to punch in their virtual teeth because they don't seem to get how disruptive their styles are to what everyone else, including the staff, is expecting, but because we're so very anti-wrongfun everyone is afraid to approach them and say 'dude, take a breath and read the room'.

So I get that it's sometimes not staff's game either, per se, in deciding what the culture is, but sometimes? You just gotta have those hard talks, too.

@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

HONESTLY the puritans have so much to answer for.

To be fair, the Puritans had pretty active sex lives and were fairly open about it.

Speaking of ceilings, though, since @Wizz brought it up (although in a different context):

One of my main uses of NPCs is to keep some degree of control over the governance and theme of a game. This isn't a popular stance for many, who think that PCs should be able to hold all the keys to the kingdom.

But honestly, I've seen so many games go off the rails or just idle into oblivion once you stick PCs in the top spots that I'm not a fan of that approach.

The big-league spots will always be held by NPCs, because frankly I know how they'll react to certain things, and I know that they won't overlook various types of breaches of law/decorum because they want to avoid interpersonal conflicts. In this way, they are a ceiling, and a tool that I can use to maintain some semblance of sanity in the game I want to run.

There are many, many uses for staff NPCs, but ultimately, they are just tools for staff to use to tell the story they want to tell. Nothing more.

@wizz said in Good Anime:

All I know is that King of the Hill is the greatest anime of all time

I laughed entirely too hard at this.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

Mushing, like RPG gaming in general, seems to be about a decade or two behind the rest of society when it comes to social issues.

Not... really?

I mean, this has been a frequent assertion by a few, but I've really yet to see any evidence of this. I started in 200...4-ish? (Jesus, we are old.) I've always played openly gay characters. Never once have I had an issue with that. I've always felt supported. Nor have I seen the flagrant sorts of misogyny that people claim to have seen either.

I don't want to discount their experience, by any means, but I think that saying this is a problem 'with the community' and not 'just a few random assholes' is vastly overstating how widespread this is.

The only times when I have seen any sort of pushback on LGBT or female characters is when they're played up as a trope turned up to 11, to the point where it's clearly, eye-rollingly ridiculous. Which is not because they're LGBT, but because they're about as deep as a raindrop crater.