Best posts made by Derp

@Rinel

IOLTA, for those playing along at home, is "Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts." That whole "stealing from the client" thing from earlier.

It's likely the most common reason anywhere.

@clarity said in Online friends:

ubereats an amazing bowl of waffles and icecream

What?

That's a thing?

Where can I get one?

Handful of white chocolate ones + handful of caramel ones.

As someone with a pseudo-allergy to chocolate, it's worth the pain.

Pretty much exactly what Mietze said. Players are going to buy the stats they're allowed to use to make a lasting change around them. If there is no force behind things like social dice, you won't see social characters. You'll see lots of physical characters because people can't opt out of a punch. While there are certainly two sides to the argument, I really wish that games would treat a character's stats as meaningful, even in regard to other characters. Then we'd see more diversity.

@Quinn said in The Art of Lawyering:

Oh oh is it true that they teach you in law school that you can sue a ham sandwich?

It's indict a ham sandwich. And while it's not literally true, it means that in grand jury proceedings, which are done in secret, a prosecutor can generally convince the grand jury that probable cause exists for just about anything -- which is true. The bar is very low there. Juries readily believe almost any theory of the case, with rare exceptions.

ETA: You can sue for damn near anything. You just might not prevail, and unless you state a claim that can be resolved by the court on some sort of legally sufficient grounds, it gets quickly dismissed.

@ominous said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Matrilineal, non-matrimonial society. Political power and titles are passed down solely through mothers to their children. Marriage doesn't exist. No one cares who your father is. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. His children won't inherit his political title all. His sister's children would. The prince, as a king, would not have a queen consort.

This is how I structured my nomad society character. Matrilineal, nobody cared who your dad was, sexuality was open and encouraged.

The particular setup there confuses me, though. How would the prince become King if there were female daughters of the queen who could then become queen? And if there are no female daughters, wouldn't it default to his daughter inheriting, not his sister's kids?

@Auspice said in Separating Art From Artist:

fanny packs

TACTICAL BELT POUCH tyvm. Hrmph.

@wretched said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

@jennkryst I still, after like, so many damn years, loved the haunted Memories version of 'Once you raise this stat, it is x amount of time until you can raise that stat again.' At least for atribs and skills. But I like the slow long game and the insta bulk up because you had xp sitting around just hits my personal suspension of disbelief buttons.

Saaaaaaaaame.

Also, having everyone start with a massive amount of xp just because some other people have been playing there longer is stupid and broken.

@Tinuviel said in The Work Thread:

ETA: Also probably not a good idea for folks to draw Aboriginal people, you know, on fire.

@carma said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

@il-volpe said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

@derp Yeah. So is roll-over XP so Abelard grows powerful, dies, and gets a new PC who's halfway to monsterhood to start with while Millicent, who joined the game when Abelard, Brigid and Camille were all two and three characters in, will never catch up and get to play with the big doggies except as incompetent sidekick.

This is a complete tangent, but where did these names come from? I've started to use them just out of repetition.

I don't know but I just now noticed it too, and I vote we use it as MU-standard. Abelard, Brigid, Camille at least.

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

This is a false dichotomy.

And that was kind of a weak pivot, given that you didn't actually refute the claim. He's not wrong -- various forms of ideology are protected classes under united states law, and therefore it is illegal to retaliate against someone in the workplace for simply adhering to one you don't agree with. You cannot use this as a basis to fire them. You have to either rely on at-will employment standards, wherein you don't have to provide a reason, or find some other (pretextual) reason for engaging in the action, at which point you are simply using some aspect of their job to take action against them for something unrelated to the performance of the actual job. It's not a false dichotomy, it's an actual dichotomy. They are mutually exclusive options. You either refrain from firing them for something under the auspices of a protected class, or you find some reason to take an action against them in another way since you are barred from doing so under the protected class. Suggesting that you are in favor of taking action against someone for a legally protected status leads, by necessity, to the idea that you are attempting to circumvent the very laws which protect them in the first place. Q.E.D.

@il-volpe said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

ETA that it was @Derp who added Darren,

How could I have missed my chance to add Darius to the list of names, instead of Darren!!! Ugh, I will never forgive myself!

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

Except no, because I live in the UK, where we do not have at-will employment laws and I have illustrated it's entirely possible for a better system to exist. So yes, this is a false dichotomy, and saying that I'm in favour of at-will employment laws when I've explicitly said I'm not is, also, another strawman.

We aren't talking about the UK. We're talking about the United States. So what you're actually attempting to do is argue the counterfactual by imposing a set of standards outside of the stated parameters. In the context of 'what options are actually available to citizens of the United States within the laws available to them', which was the actual example given, there is no false dichotomy, and pointing out that your support of one outcome under the given premises necessitates your making a certain set of choices is hardly a strawman.

Do you see why your response is problematic in this context? Someone said 'these are our currently available choices' and you attempted to impose others into a system where they are not available, and then proceeded to try and deflect from that by trying to call out their arguments as fallacious and intellectually dishonest when, in fact, you were the one that was engaging in the traditionally intellectually disallowed behavior.

@arkandel said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

"Damn dude you died again. Have you tried, you know, dying less?"

It's easy. All you have to do is just move more, bleed less. Hit points in versus hit points out.

@RavenGirl

Dammit. Now I want to read japanese.

So, really, it's a question of Power vs. Resistance.

Warriors are strong. They are muscular and can endure almost any kind of physical hardship. They have a lot of physical power and bodily resistances.

Wizards, too, are strong. They are strong willed, and can bend reality to their whims. They're capable of seeing through most bullshit that tries to fool the mind.

Either sort can be charming, or not. Either sort can be naive, or not.

It becomes a question of deciding which things you want to be good at, and which things you want to be bad at. You can't be good at everything. You must be bad at something. And then you set up the system so that the powers and resistances work in opposition to each other. Mental power ignores physical resistance. Physical power doesn't give a damn how strong your mind is.

Etc.

Don't let them double dip. If you wanna play a reality-twisting wizard, don't let them have fireballs. Or create a reason that conjuring a fireball works against you. Sure, you can conjure up a big ball of flaming something, but it has a lot of weight and it has to be thrown like a baseball, which requires the beefy muscles you ain't got. Let them have charms and divinations and things that would typically be considered 'utility' type things.

Anyway, that's the beginnings of how I would do it.

@Auspice

My thoughts -- yes and no.

You would be amazed at what law school doesn't teach you, so 'incomplete education' is really like -- everyone with a J.D. when it comes time to actually practice / pass the bar, and law students will let you know it. Readily.

It could lead to public perceptions shifting a bit negative, but her actual knowledge of matters, depth-wise, isn't really that much of a factor when you look at the reality of how it works. Imposter syndrome is really high in the legal field for a reason. The law is huge, and poorly codified, which is why West and its competitors make money hand over fist charging for what is essentially a low-grade google of legal texts.

But more attention on actual facts can do a world of good, even if she's doing it selfishly.

@greenflashlight said in Balancing wizards and warriors:

I can't be more specific because the only thing I remember about WoT is how very weird it was about women.

It was weird about women.

And weird about men.

And indigenous people.

And poor people.

And rich people.

WoT is just weird about people.

@JinShei said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Macha never done it before! He pretty much said yes, this is this, keep warm, take drugs, keep moving.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

@Bobotron said:

Do you want this limited to only WoD games or can we list games that had metaplot outside those genres?

Yes, please!

This answer is ambiguous. It can be responding to either part of the 'or' statement. That said, since Star Trek was used as an example, I'm guessing that this goes beyond WoD.

However, I would also like to point out two things, which I'll elaborate more on later, but summarized:

1. Metaplot isn't 'a big ass plot.' What I like to call 'The Inigo Montoya': You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

2. I personally feel that the use of gamewide plot is both unreasonable and untenable in nearly every situation.

So, first thing's first. I often hear people talking about 'Metaplot' as some giant gamewide plot that's supposed to be taking place, and it makes me wince. Think of most of the stories that you've ever read, or most of the roleplaying games that you've played on a tabletop. How often does the behind-the-scenes things that help to shape the world actually come to the forefront in a really obvious way? Almost never. Typically, this is done by either a) piecing things together after the fact, or b ) presented as having already been pieced together when the current storyline is occurring. The metaplot of a thing is not the current plot that is ongoing in the larger world, in most instances, so much as it is the plot structure within which all these other stories are told.

And that, to me, is what staff should really be tracking. It's the changes within the world that affect the rest of the stories that happen within it. It's the metamorphosis of the known structure of the game setting. And these are things that happen almost exclusively off-screen, not something that players are going to directly interact with at every stage of its advancement. Pieces of this thing appear scattered throughout random smaller plots, which in turn help to flavor the game world, and progress or failure in those things then goes on to further change the world, which then affects what sort of plots can be told within it, because the structure has changed. The metaplot is not there to be 'solved' anymore than physics is. It's there to help determine what is possible within the game you're playing.

And when you're tracking those things, the changes need to be communicated clearly and effectively to the playerbase so that they can take action on it within the plots they choose to run for themselves. Or not. Maybe they like the changes. Maybe they don't. It's almost guaranteed that two different players will have different takes on it, and that's okay. That is what staff is there to help adjudicate who can make what changes with the efforts that they have, and provide them the information that they need in order to help facilitate those changes that they want to see. That should be their primary duty, full stop. Running smaller plots is good, but staff's main function should be a mixture of administrator and information broker, with players and player ST's taking a much larger part in the plots that get run in the game world.

I prefer to use the term 'Gamewide Plot' for the things that people normally call metaplot for this very reason. Which brings me to the second point -- Gamewide Plot is not a reasonable sort of plot to try and have, in nearly every situation, especially if we're talking World of Darkness.

The main problems with it are twofold.

1. It is far, far too big, to the point of offering serious problems within the game world that you're running.

2. It's often done completely backwards.

Running a plot of that size on any game with 50+ characters (not players -- characters)while expecting any characters involved with it to have a reasonable chance of affecting the course of the plot itself requires an incomprehensible amount of documentation, oversight, cross-communication, etc. And that is how staffers burn out, and burn out hard. Players each have their own things going on, and as long as they're all focused on their own piece of the pie, everything can run along smoothly. But when you put out one piece of pie and tell every player that it's there for the taking, you start to run into serious issues.

Let's take, for example, Demon. Demon is a game that a lot of people have been talking about lately, and personally, it's one of the biggest pains in the ass to try and adjudicate out of any game line ever period full stop. If you're familiar with their power Legend, or any of its multiple variants, then you already see what's coming here, but for those of you who aren't, try this thought experiment. Each player has the ability to change one minor 'truth' of the situation that they're in to reflect how they need the world to be in order to move forward -- and each of these things is, in turn, fundamentally true, even in instances where they would normally conflict. This doesn't even have to be anything major -- they can be relatively small things, such as ties they have to local people. But they can change reality in very minor ways to better suit their situation. Which is do-able for one, two, ten players. But then you get fifteen. And twenty. And not only them, you have the players who are affected by this power, as well, the non-demons. Now you're looking at 20 demons each having this ability which can affect 50+ players, and you haven't even gotten past this one minor plot point.

That is what almost universally ends up happening in gamewide plots. Players do things which could easily affect other players, through mundane might or magic, and you end up with an exceedingly complex nightmare of things to try and unravel. If you don't have that, then you end up with something worse -- conflicts along the way which you then have to try and resolve in a fair way to those who are working toward the same, similar, conflicting, or opposite goals.

It's too big. It's so big, in fact, that anything that's done with it in really obvious ways should not only be obvious to the players, but to every NPC around them, which is often detrimental in any sort of gameline that you're playing, whether it be WoD or Heroes. Normal people noticing stuff means that it's so very, very far out there that not only should your PC characters be doing things to it, your NPCs and probably a few foreign and neighboring NPCs should have taken notice as well and come to poke at it.

What should normally happen to allow for more sustainability is to establish your game world, its location, timeline, quirks, etc, and then establish where your PCs are within that game world, and then just build up from there. Track things that happen in the background, yes, but more importantly, track what PCs are doing so you can see how it changes the world that they're playing in, and then report the current state of the world. Rinse. Repeat. Too often, it's handed down from the top down, which is the wrong way to go about it -- this is what is happening, and you can all be a part of it. Except, oh, you're... well, not in a very good spot to see that, so let me try and change it. Which then complicates you, over here. So I have to change this thing, which conflicts with this other thing that I already told Group Y, but leaving that in will exclude Group X...

Thus, why I think Gamewide Plot is unreasonable on games with more than, say, 5-7 characters.