Best posts made by Derp

@lotherio said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

So, I guess thanks for the snobbery about what's so hard and making me feel dumb today.

I can appreciate that you're affected by the topic, here, and I'm sorry that you felt it was belittling to you. But what you're describing (coding in general) is absolutely not what I'm referencing.

At least three people in the past -- two, maybe three weeks, have made it a point to talk about how Ruby specifically is hard to code in (versus something like python or Mux code).

And I'm asking why Ruby in particular is harder to code in than other languages as part of a follow-up to those comments.

There's no snobbery going on here, and nobody is looking down on you based on any level of coding you do or don't have. It was a genuine question asked in good faith about a topic that has come up multiple times in a (relatively) short span of time.

So I apologize if you felt attacked. That wasn't the intention, and what you're referencing isn't even what I was talking about or asking. I think we're mostly on the same page.

Edited because I was feeling a might defensive and that was unconstructive.

For reference, here are a couple of examples of what I'm referring to:

@23quarius said in Project Gridlock (Temp Name) Matrix style mush:

Mister Johnson Anderson, Ruby is horrible, don't torture yourself with Ruby

@mr-johnson said in Project Gridlock (Temp Name) Matrix style mush:

Going to go with ares in spite of how hard it is to code with Ruby. Just because it's the system I've used for my last 4 games that actually saw a release.

@Roz said:

The only reason we're having this conversation is because she's a woman.

You know, that's probably pretty legit, since so far nobody has talked about how Padme managed to be pretty badass in her own right. Crack shot, certifiable genius, master manipulator, infiltrator, and negotiator. Even if she was perving on a nine year old.

From a book I like, The Star Wars Heresies:

Padme falls off the walkway onto a deadly conveyor belt, and begins dashing and jumping between stomping, crushing machines, the proverbial clashing rocks confronted by Jason and the Argonauts... This [later] opens up into a terrific battle scene, during which Padme acquits herself very well. In a great bit, she even manages to pick her own lock, demonstrating once and for all that she's truly the liberated woman. Crawling to the top of the post she was shackled to, she capably fends off the fearsome, clawed Nexu. Like her daughter will against Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi, she turns her chain of slavery into an effective weapon. Once more proving what a crack shot she is, Padme snags a blaster and takes down a few Geonosians herself, as a massive battle erupts between hundreds of Jedi and battle droids. She even commandeers a cart pulled by a running Orray, successfully navigating the chaos until the beast is killed. In one of the coyest exchanges of the film, Padme and Anakin wind up fighting side by side. Shooting back his own line at him when he asks whether she considers this a "diplomatic solution," she replies, "No, I call it 'aggressive negotiations.'"

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

I do disagree that the exact step-by-step process is irrelevant, however, because the way that physical combat is laid out plainly makes how you get from the showdown to the outcome detail-oriented. What maneuvers you choose in combat will put you at an advantage or disadvantage as to the probability of the outcome.
You don't just roll Strength + Weaponry to put down your target; you are given a plethora of options and moves to determine how to best do that.

Yes and no? At the baseline you're rolling Strength + Weaponry to put down a target, and all of the other options are, well... optional, or at best circumstantial, and really just give you modifiers to the strength + weaponry roll that is doing the brunt of the work, plus or minus a few cool maneuvers you can do if you invest in some fighting styles.

So while I don't disagree that the social systems could stand to be more robust, there is nothing in the baseline system that says they have to be, and even physical combat isn't all that complicated at its core. It's just a roll. And while one of the big arguments against some of the social stuff is there's no clearly delineated way to defend against it, the physical combat system doesn't always let you defend either. In social stuff, there is almost always a counter-roll that could be made, while for your average mortal there ain't shit you can do against a gun but try and run the hell away and get somewhere the bullet can't find you, or hope you can out-shoot them first (i.e., defense does not apply to firearms rolls, so they're literally just rolling Dex + Firearms at you / each other).

So the creation of a more robust social system isn't necessary. It's optional, and probably a good idea, but it's not a 'fix' to the 'problem' because the 'problem' isn't that the two systems have no parity. It's that we don't view parity in the two systems despite the fact that they operate on almost the exact same level, minus optional things.

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

@derp who are these untouchable people

If what you're really wanting to know is whether or not I count you among them? I would answer emphatically, 'yes'.

If you're wanting an entire list of the people I think are among those who frequently skirt the line and seemingly suffer little to no actual consequences for it, that's probably material for another thread not in this section of the forum.

While @Arkandel might not feel that this problem has grown to the proportion of an epidemic, there are those of us who strongly disagree.

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

The reason debates don't stay civil around here is because a good many people around here don't value civility. They have stated repeatedly that they'd rather the whole forum be gloves-off.

For the record, I don't want that. . . people should be reined in.

Ditto. While I don't mind stating things directly when I think they need to be stated (see above), I do think that there should be at least a minimum amount of civility to these kinds of things outside of the Hog Pit.

Note, also, how the last couple of pages of this thread have managed to somehow mysteriously devolve into a series of insults, though. That's not what I would consider civil.

@cobalt

If it makes you feel better, I haven't quite figured that out either.

The actual coding of Ruby I can do.

But I've read the AresCentral tutorials about three dozen times, and right around the time we get into YAML and coding plugins -- something just does not line up.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how the YAML files get structured into character sheet data, or how to represent ranges in YAML files, or even, really, how to create a command that appends data onto old data, like a list of aspirations that can be /added and /completed.

I feel like all the information is there, or should be there, or there should be some way to figure it out. But the 'putting it all into practice' part, to me, feels like 'Alright, now that you know the times tables, let's talk about polynomial equations'.

Like -- it feels there are missing steps in there, somewhere, and that I should be able to piece it together. But for the life of me I have not been able to so far.

THREAD NECRO MWAHAHAHA

I just discovered that Grace Under Fire is on Amazon Prime and fired up the first episode. Forgot how much fun this show was, and how real it could get right out of the gate.

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

There is a ginormous difference between rolling intimidation for "Hey give me your lunch money" and "I've got a gun to your daughter's head, now go in there and rob that bank for me or she's dead".

There is likewise a ginormous difference between 'a five foot ten ninety pound girl tries to wrestle an alligator' and 'a 6'4 250 lb marine tries to wrestle an alligator', but the system uses the same roll to calculate the results of that.

Stop trying to model every real-life scenario in the abstract dice system. It's abstract for a reason. Using that logic, we can come up with flaws in any number of skills -- a boxer with brawl 5 shouldn't be able to do Kung-Fu maneuvers but he can, no can a cardiothorasic surgeon be trusted to remove a tumor from a brain, but that Medicine 5 lets them do that all the same.

This is where people (rightfully) complain that people who refuse to adhere to the levels of abstraction in the dice aren't playing by the rules. Your complaint is that the rules don't adequately model real life. Fine, use a different system altogether, one with much more complexity and nuance than the one given to you in WoD. But if you're using WoD, you should be prepared to have things not perfectly match up every logical gauntlet you can run it through, because it wasn't designed to take into account every real world detail and put in a modifier for it. It's an abstraction for a reason.

Similarly, 'all those weapons and things' are ultimately still just giving you dice modifiers. The different damage types can just be thought of as shortcuts -- enough bashing will fill those the same as agg, agg just does it faster. Shortcuts exist in the Doors system too, if you invest in the right merits. And social dice have equipment just like combat does -- good clothes, nice perfume. There's a whole list. Ultimately, just mods.

The system doesn't care about all the subtleties that you keep bringing up, as if they should have a real effect on the system. THere's subtleties and nuance in physical combat too, but if people try and use those same mazes of logic in physical combat we say they're acting in bad faith because the system is an abstraction and they just want to ignore the dice results.

Same deal here.

It's all an abstraction. The abstraction says 'all of those subtleties are taken into account under varioius skill ratings which we use under this mathematical system which determines the final result'. IF there's a big one, that might be a circumstance modifier, but again, the system ultimately doesn't care about whatever level of nuance you want to give a thing, because the system determines results, not the circumstances which give rise to them. That's up to you to roleplay.

I like the old layout and text size. The current one, that we're using right here. The new one looks dinky and kind of bland, and the text is small enough to have trouble with reading it without adjusting magnification of the browser window.

Not a fan.

@cobalt

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I know that I'm not completely inept at this, I managed to code a functional polyhedral die roller from scratch complete with pretty output templates and everything.

And yet, when we get to updating character objects in the database and how to structure them -- it really feels like there's a missing link, somewhere.

Like, it has to be there because a billion other people have made it work, it seems. But for whatever reason, it's like 'here is a YAML file and here is how to create and update a field on the character object and here is how to create Cortex...'

And still, I'm left going -- ok so if I wanted to do 'Strength has a range of values from 1 to 5 in integers' -- how do I do that?

If I do set Strength = 5 how do I tell the game that the 5 is an integer and not a string?

How do I tell it that Strength = Duck is an invalid value in the YAML?

There are so many questions.

@reimesu

Everything about the brownies was just pure chef's kiss man.

@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

why do World of Darkness players so readily buy into the Violence section (combat) of the rules, but sometimes vehemently oppose any attempt to use rules regarding social influence and maneuvering?

@arkandel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

In many/most of violence there is an arbitrator (ST) present who can double as a guide, answering quick questions with authority.

The rolls tend to be very straight forward and the effects quite well defined. +roll strength+weaponry+3-4 (where +3 is your weapon's damage, -4 the opponent's defense+armor) is a very straight forward thing; if you roll 3 successes that's 3 lethal damage. If the damage brings them to 0, they are dead. It's all nice and neat, prepared in advance, and even most powers that modify it do it in a direct way (you have Vigor? Well, add it).

It's something we do in PvE. PvE is cleaner, there's way less bitching. Notice how violent PvP scenarios very often do need arbitration (staff acting as a ST, basically) and the simplicity described above is thrown out the window - players contesting each other invalidates the element of collaboration, and that's the result.

I would like to propose an alternative reason, using the following scenario:

Arkandel rolls some dice to punch Ganymede, getting three successes.

Arkandel growls angrily and rears a fist back, ducking under Ganymede's arm to deliver a punch square to her kidney, inflicting three damage (in theory).

Ganymede-player reads the pose, doesn't even roll any dice, and writes a pose of her own

Ganymede rolls her eyes and continues drinking her beer. She's a world-class lawyer and has been in more courtroom brawls than she can even count, and that nerve nexus under her kidney has been dead for years, ever since that judge broke his gavel and shanked her for being so snarky. She ignores the roll and decides she takes no damage, because this element of her story is important to her character's background, and she's the only one who gets to decide how her character is affected.

We would instantly call bullshit on that kind of thing, because the dice said otherwise, using the system put in place, and we would insist that the outcome be enforced because the system says it should be.

On the other hand, if Arkandel had tried to intimidate her and Ganymede had just rolled her eyes and continued drinking her beer because she's a battle hardened world class lawyer that's seen some shit, and this dude can't have an effect on her, many people in this thread wouldn't even bat their eyes.

Why?

Because we have come to expect that one will be enforced, and the other won't be, for whatever reason, even though in both scenarios a player is trying to invalidate the system's results using their own made-up information.

Players don't use the system, and it has no teeth, because we've never enforced this scenario, and every time we try and remind someone that invalidating the results of the system based on extraneous information not contained therein is cheating at its most basic level, we allow this violation of the rules regularly, and so players feel entitled to ignore the system.

That's why players tend to so vehemently oppose any use of social combat -- because they've seen this exact scenario enough to know that if they raise a big enough fuss about it, someone will let them wiggle out of it based on meta-rationalization, whereas with physical combat that rarely happens and they will be called out for acting in bad faith.

This gets even more ludicrous when Ganymede's character has a Resolve + Composure pool of like, 3, and the system itself doesn't back up her story of being a battle hardened lawyer with a will of iron.

At the end of the day, the rules don't get taken seriously because of desuetude, essentially. It's not that the rules aren't there, it's just that people have gotten so used to being able to break them that they have come to expect they will be ignored.

@Ghost said in Recent banning:

jb4i48vuHABnw9c8!#34

How did you find my e-mail password?!?

@seraphim73 said in Wheel of Time MU*:

@sunny It absolutely could be run like that. Heck, the game that @Arkandel and I played on for... 20 years? Something like that, ended up having (essentially) 3 stats: Channeling Strength, Channeling Finesse, and Weaponmastery. All you did was compare those things and pose accordingly. That had its own issues (you "tested" with Staff to get and raise those stats, so there was room for a TON of favoritism), but it was nice and simple.

This is pretty much what Dev and I decided to do.

We get that it isn't the super dooper complicated channeling system from the books but also:

1. way before the books and
2. not really focused on channeling anyway

So it's really just treated like another skill with guidelines on what weaves are available and what they end up doing.

Hell, we only barely use the FS3 coded combat and just do more story-based resolutions with custom die rolls.

You absolutely can use FS3 to do WoT but if your major focus is channeling and getting everything absolutely perfect with it then yeah, that's gonna be a lot of overhead.

@arkandel said in Great TV:

I think at this point what I expect (demand?) from book adaptations is very simple: Love the original work. Try to put that on the screen.

I disagree with this premise. If you want to relive the story from the books, then you should read the books. Every video adaptation of a story that doesn't have a LOTR budget has to make allowances and changes to fit the story into the narrative that you have.

Frankly, Wheel of Time would have been hella boring if they had stuck to the original source material. It was a whole bunch of scared dumb kids being scared and dumb, and their mentor figure being distant and unhelpful while they all contemplated the up-to-that-point largely theoretical prophecy and what they might be able to do with their fledgling powers until you get to the end of the thing, each of them lost in their own heads and generally just being judgmental and catty of everyone around them.

If you're going to have to tell a different story based on the medium, you might as well tell a fresh and interesting take on it. Also, there is absolutely nothing to say that this isn't just a different turning of the wheel, especially since

***Book spoilers ohnoes.***

I know that I discussed that theory at length with @Devrex when I finished the books and was left a little 'what the actual f*ck' at the end of it. The show did way better for me.

@tinuviel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

Hey, if we/you guys solve this whole 'solving problems when nobody wants to cooperate' issue, I know a few anthropology and political science journals we could submit to...

Shit, could we just submit that directly to Congress?

@Coin said in Tyche Banned:

@mietze said in Tyche Banned:

@Coin you can scroll back on discord though, right? It's a little better than skype groups at least though maybe that depends on the volume.

Either way, my cognitive inability to keep up with that kind of thing now really gets to me/makes me frustrated too, so. Not the medium for me, I definitely find it easier to be a contributor to a board than something like that. Might be just a matter of spending my time in it though.

You can, but conversations in chats tend to have a much shorter lifespan of acceptable input. If you're scrolling back on discord and pitching into a conversation that's four days old, people are usually done and on to other things; not so much on a forum.

That and I find that Discord doesn't offer the same sort of robust conversation that this forum does, in that you have much less time to construct a deliberative post about a thing, and really much less space to do so. Discord's posts limit to something like 2000 characters, and the immediacy of the medium means that people engage fast and hard about a topic and it's probably well moved on to several other things by the time you even read the first, if you read the first.

That said, I kind of agree with @Ganymede's post, which is likewise why I find the prior set of rules linked to for a Discord community somewhat objectionable, really. Among other reasons. But I think that the forum is a superior medium for this kind of chatter.

@girlcalledblu

@Ganymede

Will second Nimona. So cute.

This thread seems to have taken a hard turn at some point.

Seems like if we're going to try to preserve/archive things and not lose any data, figuring out a way to migrate the DB from Redis to Mongo is the way to go. If we're gonna set up funds to do that, I'm relatively sure that the people here would pitch in and put that together relatively quickly.