Best posts made by Derp

Mage on Portland is officially open!

Upsides:

There are plenty of beginning Mysteries to go out and explore.
It's a new sphere, so everyone's just as clueless as everyone else!
The players are fantastic.

Downsides:

The wiki is kind of a hot mess right now. I've been doing my best to get information out there, but honestly, I have no idea how this beast works. Mage templates aren't completed, and I cannot tell you when the ETA on them will be. All of the information is conveniently (haha nervous look) on a single page, so you don't have to go hunting for it, though. Even if it's a bit crowded.

Legacies I have writeups for but I don't have them on the wiki because I still am not sure where the hell I am putting them, and haven't even vetted them all really.

Things are basically in a beta phase for the next few months to see if all this catches on fire or not.

If you're interested come check it out.

http://portland.echoes.wiki/Sphere:Mage

Re: exposition in Bright -- be careful here. We are a group of nerds that already know what sorts of complicated social histories we can expect to see from the various races, how they interact, what place they would hold in society, etc.

Your average non-gamer Tolkien-illiterate 'what the hell is DnD/Warcraft' viewer will not.

You believe there was too much exposition perhaps because you are pretty much saturated in it. Me, I had to spend a good twenty minutes explaining to David why they didn't expand upon it more, since it was run of the mill nerd mythology.

So, we've covered the roles of staff some, but now we're starting to get into who makes for a good staffer and who wouldn't. So, here's what I look for when hiring staff:

• Passion - Unlike others, I prefer people who are excited about the theme and the game. Yet, this hasn't been the case for awhile now, and I haven't seen many games that actively look for this kind of thing and recruit passionate people. The first time I ever saw this was in the hiring process for Haunted Memories, who preferred their staff to be lukewarm for reasons I will never fathom. If you wanted the job, you weren't the right fit. That boggled me more than I can tell you. I don't want someone who's phoning it in. I want someone who is actively engaged, and wanting to do more.

• Competence - Slightly less important than passion, I want someone who knows the system. Code and commands I can teach. Someone who has actually read the damn materials for the system? Invaluable. I'm willing to hand-hold a bit, but really, I expect you to either know what you're talking about, or at least know where to find it when you inevitably need to go look it up, and not make more work for me by chasing down rules errors.

• Assertiveness - I also need someone who can interact with players. I don't necessarily need them to be nice. But I need someone who isn't afraid of diving into a conversation, or breaking up a fight, or trying to steer the ship of OOC, or making a decision on a job, or a roll. Whatever. Someone who at the very least carry some water when I'm not there. If you're so conflict averse that you just watch everything drift on by like turds in the pool while you wring your hands, or refuse to say anything, you probably aren't going to be much use to me. This goes both ways, though. I want someone who can call me on my mistakes, or tell me when they think I'm wrong. I might not agree, but I'll definitely have the conversation with an open mind, and respect you for being willing to speak up.

• Miscellaneous - There are other things I look for too, but those are so far down the list that they're almost bonuses rather than criteria.

Sorry for the slow responses, RL has been a beast.

As far as "influx" it depends on how you define it. We are open less than a week and already up to I think 12 PCs with more in the pipeline.

As far as it having a learning curve, yeah, we know lol. My support staffer (who I adore) and I have been working through kinks, too, and we're both seasoned Mage vets. Everyone is learning everything. No worries.

My main thing is -- Mage on Portland is different. It's much more dangerous to use magic, and you have to rely on mundane skills more. Every mage there is risking their life, or their soul, in pursuit of something that overrides their own need for self-preservation. The game is meant to be dark, and the mages here are meant to be desperate, obsessive individuals risking what is effectively the most hostile imaginable environment to find something they desperately need -- or to avoid being found bu something.

We'll see how it goes!

@Coin said:

@Derp said:

Most of them are more than happy to talk to the pubic.

if they have long conversation with it, they might even decide to act as your attorney. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Lol, man, I'm just the king of typos this week.

@Mr-Johnson said in Staff’s Job?:

I always just thought the job of staff was to set up the environment approve applications for characters or deny them and bug fix. Everything else kind of depends on the players.

It's a mutual tradeoff. Staff has to give you the framework, but it's up to the players to make the world move. Staff can build you the nicest hotel with the nicest people there to help you, but if the players never come out of their rooms, it's pretty meaningless.

That's been one of the things that I think is problematic in MUdom in general. There's an awful lot of 'this is my pretendy fun time you cannot ask me to do anything meaningful that might be like work to keep things moving', whereas once upon a time, that was basically the expectation.

Staff can't just feed you continual streams of entertainment without you ever engaging in anything else. It's gotta go both ways.

@Admiral said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

Changelings get thrown forward in time. Every Changeling was wiped out twenty years ago... except they weren't. They were locked in time and suddenly re-appear. Possible threads: What caused the time skip? How do they handle coming back into a world that has changed so drastically?

90's changelings. Oh god.

"What do you mean Mad About You doesn't run anymore?!"

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

Tip your goddamned delivery drivers and waitstaff

@Thenomain

I not only provide a list of questions that I specifically want you to answer, I provide sample answers that are generally about a paragraph.

• What was your character like before they Awakened? Was there always something off about them, or did Awakening come as a surprise? DId they have any prior experience with the supernatural before Awakening? How did Awakening change them?

Example: Selene grew up a normal girl from a middle class working home. Awakening hit her like a freight train at full force, showing her a whole new world that she had no idea ever existed. Although the Mysterium assured her that her soul was prepared, even if her mind was not, the fact that the experience nearly broke her still causes her to wonder if the magic didn't make a mistake, initially.

Example: Shenan was never 'normal'. The voices in his head had been with him since he was a child, and the heroin he used to dull them down only ostracized him further from everyday reality. When he Awakened, he almost didn't even notice. His world was already a shifting nightmare of maddening symbols and strange whispers. Awakening helped him see the meaning behind them.

I don't expect everyone to agree with my philosophy on it. But it's mine, and it's my responsibility to make the sphere run, and at the end of the day, I'm the one that gets to decide what I need to know about your character.

Is it a punishment? I mean, if that's the way you feel about it, I can't stop you, but I would suggest that maybe the game isn't for you if you can't get excited even going through chargen. Yes, it's sometimes tedious, but I also need soemthing to start with. I need to know how your character fits in the world if I'm going to have any way to pull you in with things like plot hooks, or know who to steer you toward to find RP, etc. If you're Faceless Mage #73221 that's just another collection of dots, I don't know you from Adam, and probably am not going to give you nearly as good a time as I could if I knew something about you. Like, where you come from, and what your Awakening was like, and how you view magic. Etc.

I wasn't trying to beat anyone over the head. Simply trying to respond to the points made, of which there were a lot, over a long block of text. Sorry if it came off like that.

At the end of the day, all I was trying to say is that this isn't really all that complicated. It can be explained in a couple of minutes, and after the first time or two you use it, it becomes pretty easy to calculate it.

It's really no more difficult than trying to explain in-and-out-of-clan disciplines and the rates that they can be raised, or how devotions work on xp costs, or how ruling, common, and inferior arcana work. Werewolf's stuff is pretty much all based on Renown. The gifts system might seem complex at first, but you take a good glance at it and it's pretty straightforward, once you get past the daunting step of learning a new system.

Apologies to @RDC if that's how it came across. That wasn't how I intended it. Was just trying to help.

@JaySherman said:

I just started trying to eliminate my paunch last Friday. I think it was doing a weightloss set on a bike in the gym that had a calorie counter that changed my mindset on a lot of things. I sat there and stared at it: 30 minutes on a 6 mile 'ride' and I'd only burned about 150 calories. I can eat 150 calories in seconds with handfuls of junk food.

I find it hard not to start looking at how much energy is going into me on a daily basis now. Wish me luck, I have forty pounds to drop.

A lot of the energy that you take in during the day goes into just -being alive-, though. Building muscle also burns more calories by default (most of them are burned by the brain, however). So... yeah. 150 calories might not seem like much, but it's really quite a bit.

@Auspice said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@Derp said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@Auspice said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@insomniac7809 said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

skrulls

maybe we're all skrulls

No. I don't want no skrull.

Look, I didn't have the energy to make a whole meme ok?

@Sunny

I'm allowed to disagree, and to point out errors that, when corrected, reduce the complexity. I'll apologize if it came across as browbeating. I'm not going to apologize for saying 'no, there are not that many steps, look'.

@SunnyJ

While I appreciate you linking actual research (really, I do, it is a rarity), I'm not sure that this backs up the claim, as almost all of this research was conducted almost 20 years ago. There is not a single article there cited after 2005, while most of them were conducted in the mid 90's.

As @Miss-Demeanor and @Auspice have pointed out, these skills are becoming necessary in the workplace, even when they probably shouldn't be. As a result, more and more people are either learning to do it by either having been immersed in Information Age culture at the advent of personal cell phones and home Internet becoming a commonplace thing, or learning through trial by fire.

At a quick perusal, none of these tests checked to see whether consistent application of those skills resulted in increased efficacy, and most of them seemed to test arbitrary situations wherein the rules of the various games don't apply to real life, or were things we simply would not do normally. They made you do two things you would not normally do, and asked you to do it under a set of strict rules. That is not a very good measure of practical efficiency. It's just really convenient when you need to do the math on it.

It can be done. It can be done effectively, as countless professionals can demonstrate. But it is not a natural talent. It is a skill that has to be trained and utilized to be effective.

@TNP said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora Serious question: if someone is so reticent about making waves that they're unable to type 'Let's fade to black.' do you really think they're able to type +codered to mean the same exact thing?

This.

We've had FTB rules on games for so long I think they were around when I started playing. And this is the perennial issue -- people want things to not happen, rather than not seeing them, and that's just not the way that the games they're used on most work, or are intended to work.

Those things end up in policies, and then when staff directs people to the policy that says 'hey, you do not have to play it out, but that does not mean that it does not happen' we get reports of "bad staffers" "doing nothing" when someone's boundaries are crossed. Even though it's right there in the rules what can be done, and what it means.

I voiced an opinion on X-cards awhile back. The 'no explanation veto' is not a thing that I wish to see on games, and not a thing that I would ever personally implement, because I think that it's too prone to abuse, no matter what its justification is..

I'll enforce a FTB if need be, under the guidelines listed above, but allowing someone to veto a thing is just a step too far, I think.

Ok. Let me try it this way:

• Every time you raise a Renown, you get a free Shadow Gift Facet in a gift you have unlocked. This facet must match the Renown you raised. So if you raise Cunning, you get a free Cunning facet.
• If the Renown is your AUSPICE renown, you ALSO raise your Moon Gift up by 1.
• In the above example, if you already have all of the Cunning facets in your open Gifts, then you have two options:

• Save it for later, when you unlock a new Gift
• Spend it on a Cunning facet of a Wolf Gift

For purposes of the following examples, let's pretend that Iggy the Irraka only has the Gift of Stealth unlocked.

Example 1: Iggy the Irraka raises Cunning. Cunning is Iggy's Auspice Renown, so that comes with an automatic raise in Iggy's Moon Gift. Iggy also gets the free Shadow Gift facet that comes with every Renown raise, and chooses to use that on Gift of Stealth's Cunning Facet, which is the only one they have available.

Example 2: Now Iggy raises Purity. Purity isn't Iggy's Auspice Renown, so Iggy's moon gift doesn't go up. They just get the Shadow Gift facet. Iggy doesn't like Gift of Stealth's Purity facet, so they choose to unlock the Purity facet of a Wolf Gift instead. Legitimate move.

Example 3: Iggy raises Cunning AGAIN! Woo! Iggy's Moon Gift goes up 1 more, but Iggy hasn't unlocked any new Shadow Gifts. Iggy can put it in a wolf gift, if they want, but they decide to save this one for later. Now, the next time that Iggy unlocks a Shadow Gift, they'll get the Cunning Facet of that gift too, since they had one saved.

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

Our 'grandpa/ma on the rockin' chair' stories are going to make the boomer tales about Woodstock and whatnot look like a Disney film, and that is absolutely winning.
It may be a ways off yet, but some day, we're going to be those old farts that have their kids covering their kids' ears and going, "MOOOOOOOOOOM!" before the grandkids rush off to whatever replaces whatever replaces google, which will probably run so fast that the moment the words are out of our mouth, a little readout will appear on the contact lens our grandspawn is wearing.
In other words, by the time we horrify our kids, their kids will already be giggling like mad or starting to cry or scheduling their own appointment with a therapist.

Life goals.

@surreality said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Yes, that is a huge help, but I still wouldn't feel comfortable unless there was a list of 'nope, not happening' (ex: rape, child rape, etc.) listed as 'can't be thrown at people without permission'.

We do have some 'strictly out of bounds' items on the list, but given the nature of the source material, it's probably not as extensive as many people would like. That said, we also put up great big warning flags all over the place about exactly that, make sure that players understand what they're getting into, and have created extensive policies about communication and conflict for exactly this reason. It's not a game for everyone. It's not intended to be. But for those that are playing, we make sure that there are resources available to them to manage their experience.

@surreality said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:

...this would be the ad thread, I believe.

Lol, yep! Surr beat me to it!

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

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

The level of ridiculousness is seriously beyond.

Why, I'll bet they also believe it wise to furnish you with handguns, in case there's ever an active shooter on site.

To be fair, if someone wants to -give- me a gun, I am all the way good with this.