Best posts made by Derp

@faraday

Good points! I don't interact with some of those so they aren't really on my radar, and none of my close circle really does either. At least not where I can hear about it, anyway.

I don't know if any of those serve quite the same function as MSB/BMD, but you're right. There have been alternatives.

Whether one or both of the current forums thrives, or whether more options spring up, remains to be seen. From what I've seen so far, lots of old faces are starting to pop back up again, so I'm confident that everyone can find a 'home' they're comfortable with, so to speak.

@sixregrets said in Don't Join Discord Servers!!!:

This sort of uninformed fearmongering doesn't really help anyone.

"Uninformed fearmongering?"

It literally happened to a bunch of us today, so it's not "uninformed fearmongering."

Also remember what part of the forum you're in.

@Hella

You say this and then you end up with Dirty My Little Pony. Careful what you wish for.

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

Beginning from the assumption that a victim's story must be litigated is indistinguishable from beginning from the assumption that victims are liars until proven innocent.

And yet it's strange how almost every society in the world has structured its systems of justice around the premise that an accused is innocent until proven guilty, which requires, you know -- proof.

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

Yours is a very easy perspective to have when you're not the subject of regular dogpiles nearly any time you disagree with someone in any given circle of friends, are not being chased all over the forum (including outside of the Hog Pit) being bullied, or having completely irrational attacks slung at you, which are things more than a few people around here have experienced and are experiencing here.

This is one of the things I was talking about, yes. There is a very real circle of people that gravitate around a few key figures, and will attack any who dare to disagree with a barrage of attacks whose magnitude is simply unwarranted, both inside the Pit and out of it. While some of this is petty childishness, a lot of it is not-so-borderline harassment. I think it's easy for people who are used to heated argumentation to overlook stuff like this and mentally diminish its scope. But it is a very real, and increasingly frequent, thing that had been happening. It drives people away, or into silence, and I know that the administration of the boards are just as aware of it as others, which is why I really question the 'hands off' policy. Moderators definitely need to make sure that kind of asinine behavior doesn't happen. And in case anyone thinks that's overstating matters, when down votes were still enabled, people in this group would follow those who often get dog piled on just to downvote every single post a person made, no matter the context or subject matter.

It really needs a more active hand in ensuring that jerkass behavior isn't allowed. Tolerance isn't substantially different from approval, in that situation.

My amazing professor, who apparently is some manner of divine being with keen omniscient abilities, paired us off for research.

She paired me with the hottest guy in class.

Who is also the only other gay guy in class.

And we are the strongest writers.

Bonus: She has decided that this grouping system shall remain for the advanced class next semester.

I have made a new strictly platonic awesome friend who also happens to be very fun to talk to. And stare at. (Don't judge me).

I think I need to buy her a present.

@Auspice
^
What she said.

Telnet is just an Internet protocol. It has zero to do with the culture of things. It isn't some digital disease that is keeping people out. Even if we did this in a browser format we're not likely to see a huge influx of new people. It's not the tech, it's the lack of appeal of this type of play.

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

What can we do as a compromise between censorship or the appearance of clique-ism by the admins, yet keep cliques from doing their thing to their enemies of the day?

Simple: You set clear boundaries, and you enforce them. If the purpose of the Hog Pit is to be an unmoderated free for all, then everywhere else needs to be moderated. The administration cannot be afraid of 'oh god what about censorship and free speech' in the rest of the board.(1)

I understand that's a real concern. But that's also part of what it means to take responsibility and run the show. You can't do that hands-off. It requires you to actively put hands on it, enforce rules in a clear fashion, and not be afraid of looking like a censor. There is a difference between an unpopular viewpoint and an unacceptable behavior that just happens to be tangential to an unpopular point of view. The behaviors need to be moderated.

(1) Purely Opinion, as additional commentary: Hell, you shouldn't even put up with the jerkass ad hominen attacks in the Hog Pit, either, because they're just doing more damage than good. Nobody here should ever be made to feel unwelcome or attacked by some of these groups, PERIOD. You wanna shit post about a topic, a game, current events, cool. But MSB members themselves, at a bare minimum, should be given at least a modicum of respect even if they aren't being called something racist, sexist, etc.

See, for me, most WoD games are rarely dark at all, and I can't wrap my head around why people say the games are too grimdark when the vast majority of the RP that I see is slice-of-life with magic monsters. It's basically the lovechild of Supernatural and Friends.

I think that the games would be more interesting if the darker themes were -actually- explored, and we had -less- of the above. Most of the burnout I see is just people getting tired of the Eternal Holding Pattern of let's chat/party/have some babies while we are Waiting for the Darkness to Finally Start.

Seriously. Where are these Too Dark World of Darkness games that everyone is so tired of? I wanna do -that-. I'll trade you almost every other game I have every played on, where the campy adventure shit is just done to death, and nobody wants to even think about dark themes.

Once I see these Too Dark games, I may finally be able to reconsider my opinion that it is the campy adventure shit that actually drives these games into the ground for lack of Darkness content.

That, or we have veeeery different thresholds for grimdark.

@arkandel said in General MSB announcements:

I upgraded nodeBB to v1.18.5.

Please report any issues to your local cat-authorities.

THERE'S A NEW LINE ON THE LEFT AND I DON'T LIKE NEW THINGS RAR.

(Kidding obvi)

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

I'm doing a tech screening for a possible job.

One of the questions:
'Describe to a non-technical friend how SSL works.'

'No. Just no. Don't do this to yourself or anyone else' should be a valid answer.

For my last IT job, we had a similar question:

"Describe how a modem and router work to a person who has never used a computer."

My answer was: "If they have never used a computer, then they wouldn't be a student here, and since my job would literally be to offer support to IT students, this would be working outside the authorized scope of my employment."

I got the job.

ETA: Most frequent complaint?

"I think so and so is watching porn in the computer lab."

Answer: "Thank you for your concern. However, as explicit materials are frequently assigned as required homework in a number of Kinsey Institute classes, this is an acceptable use of University equipment."

So satisfactory.

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

This "just play by the rules or play a different game" argument is getting tiresome.

So is the 'the rules don't adequately account for every trivial exception I can think up to avoid adhering to the outcome of a contested skills roll, so we need to scrap and/or change the whole thing' arguments on the other side.

Look, do you really think that you're going to be able to find a set of rules that is:

1. Simple enough for people to easily understand and implement

and

2. Complex enough to match every little quibble that comes up in the system?

Because I think that's a pipe dream. Everyone can invent some reason why the stupid rules didn't take into account this SUPER IMPORTANT thing of theirs that would have made all the difference in the roll if just the rules would see how brilliant their argument is.

But on the other side of that, I would ask: If this super-important thing to the character is so SUPER IMPORTANT, shouldn't it already be reflected in their attribute/skill levels and or merits? And if the sheet doesn't reflect a high enough rating in that, do they even really have it, or are you just wishing that they did?

@Ganymede asked for a discussion about social stats in the World of Darkness, and while I'm sure many people would love a more robust system, I keep coming back to the same idea, which I don't think has gotten enough merit so far -- maybe the system isn't broken, and maybe it's just the way we've been allowed to play it so far that's the problem.

Either way, she'll do what she needs to do for her game. I'm just saying that, maybe, at some point, someone needs to say 'Wait, woah, hold up. We aren't going to completely overhaul the rules just because you think your character should be more resistant to this, but don't have the stats to back it up.'

@saosmash said in Review of Recent Bans:

@macha I really thought, genuinely, that since more than ten years had passed your behavior might have changed and that you might have grown out of some of your patterns. But we really should have banned you from our game when your player management thread reached the end of its second full page.

I can only hope that your demonstration of yourself to the community over the course of this contretemps has showed the gaming community enough of who you are that, in the future, you won't be able to manipulate other staffers and hurt other games the way you hurt ours.

Bye!

You asked a question. She answered the question.

There are ways of engaging in this conversation that don't require directed personal attacks. When we updated the rules, we meant it.

I get that you have strong feelings on this, but this kind of stuff isn't going to fly. Especially not in this part of the forum.

Knock it off.

You know, for a hobby full of socially awkward people, we sure do nitpick at social awkwardness a lot.

I know that I am probably in the minority voice here, since so many people have expressed their dissatisfaction with the system, but:

There is no problem with the system, as is, running on a MU.

The problems that happens with Mage on MU is twofold, but due to a common source:

1. XP is gained far too quickly, leading to multiple high-level characters in a very short amount of time, all of them with competing interests and with enough power that they have no need to work well with others.

2. There is very little in the way of active antagonism or storytelling, as Seers of the Throne and other external threats are almost entirely nonexistent, so they have little choice but to try and get into other active things.

Both of these are frankly just due to lazy staffing. Mage staff on a number of games now have been of the opinion that the players will find things to entertain themselves with. When other staff come in and suggest changes, especially increased antagonists, those in charge have traditionally made a hullabaloo about how it doesn't make sense for antagonists to be there, or if they do show up they are only allowed in such small numbers that they are easily crushed. ETA Or, you get the 'mage war' kinds of things that Fallen World tried, which equally doesn't work. You need them to be in a constant cold war, worried about exposure and retaliation. Changeling is not the only game where a sense of constant paranoia is supposed to be the default.

So the system itself doesn't need a single change to work correctly (in 2E the only change I would make is giving Proximi free Reach so that they aren't always risking Paradox, which goes against their prior theme).

You just need a better class of staffers who recognize that mages need things to do and cannot advance so quickly that working with Orders/Consilium Officials/Other Cabals becomes optional.

Nerfing the system just supports lazy storytelling, and doesn't actually get at the root of the problem.

@il-volpe said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@derp Huh. Aside from my own, I've never seen a MU with anything like, "You can tweak your sheet for the first few weeks if the character doesn't turn out quite as you expected or whatever," announced anywhere.

I did it mostly to reduce chargen anxiety, prevent people from feeling like they needed to give thesis-level thought to statting up, and thus get players out of cg and into RP as fast as possible. (I firmly believe this is a priority, and while it might seem counterintuitive for a quick and lower-effort chargen to be a positive factor in player retention, I am convinced that it is. It's "charging the clicker" in trainer-jargon.)

I mean, really, it's been on so many games I've played that it feels like one of those common conventions, like -- poses should be in present tense and go in order. You rarely see them written down but people just kind of know that this is a thing, and everyone tends to go with it.

I've never had a staffer deny me any tweaks I've needed to make in the first 30 days or so. I mean, once you've been there a month or so you should be well settled enough that further changes should get some side-eye or require some real justification, but up until then almost everyone has been happy with make a tweak if I say something like 'Hey, I think I overspent on Academics, can we take that down a dot and put in in some other stuff that he'd likely have needed before now?'

Most staffers that aren't total jerkasses understand that you don't know a character until they've been subjected to their actual environment.

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

Me: “So, I did all the errands, but they were out of brownies. So I got cheesecake.”
Her: “Oh.”
Me: “ ... “
Her: “I told you to get cupcakes if they didn’t have brownies.”
Me: “When?”
Her: “When we were at the Christmas show with the kids.”
Me: “ ... “

Being in a committed relationship is like death by a thousand fucking paper cuts. I want to scream and shout, but the fuck I’ll take some karaoke and bourbon.

Requesting cupcakes over cheesecake is grounds for divorce.

@Pacha

What is the context of this interaction? Or who was it with?

@josh said in I want to code for a V5 MU*:

picking up MU* coding shouldn't be too difficult.

I think that you would probably find more luck with Evennia (which uses Python) than with MUX if you've never poked at MUX code before. Even for professionals it can be kind of a nightmare.