Best posts made by Derp

RoS was awesome. I have no idea what else you wanted from it.

So, I've noticed things about 'getting RP'.

'Does anyone want to RP' sounds like 'someone please entertain me'.

There are better ways of doing things.

For instance, I rarely have a hard time finding RP, because my RP requests usually look more like 'I am gonna go do this thing, and am willing to ST for it. Anyone down?'

At that point, you are offering to entertain them, which makes it sound much less like a chore. And others will do the same, because that's how this tends to work.

@Meg said in Armageddon MUD:

'it didn't happen on the game' is the worst excuse ever not to do your job as a staffer.

doubly so if you are running an official discord for your game.

Except I delineate explicitly what my job as a staffer is, and what areas I'm willing to police. "My job as a staffer" isn't to protect you from every bad person out in the world. It's to enforce the rules of the game. You can take some damn responsibility for yourself, too, and do shit like -- not give people your personal contact information, which we explicitly advise against.

I draw my lines in the sand, and tell people where my job as a staffer ends. You're a goddamn grownup, and it's almost 2020. If you can't be bothered to ensure your personal safety in the online world, it's expressly not my job to do that for you.

I will police the areas of the game that we control, including game-specific social media spaces. If someone is harassing you via MSN messenger because you chose to give that information out to them, 1) I have no way to verify that, 2) I will not simply take your word for it, 3) I explicitly advised you to NOT do that, and 4) it is clearly delineated as being outside the boundaries of my job.

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

@Auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

The video implied force heal as a super brand new 'just for the movie' thing... except it's been in Star Wars for a long time!

COUGH inTheEU COUGH

No, even in the main movies. We've known that the force can heal people and stave off death for like a decade now. Wtf do you think Anakin was even trying to learn?

The other part of that is:

Concrete is better than general.

Don't just offer random social RP without a purpose. Offer social RP in a specific venue for a specific purpose. 'Anyone wanna meet at the coffee shop' is much weaker than 'Who would be down for karaoke night?'

Always have an actual plan when it comes to RP, and don't make others pick the venue/purpose. Offer concrete examples. Be flexible to negotiation. You'll find that this isn't nearly as hard as it seems.

@sunny

Oh, I'm safe. Believe that.

@Macha

Apparently talking about how all of her backsliding is due to her ungrateful children, in classic How to Win Friends and Influence People style.

I'm with Ghost and Faraday. Outside of MUDs, this hobby is a couple hundred people, tops, not the thousands that we'd like to believe, as many people connect to different games at once and thus skew those numbers.

And I very much disagree that most people in this hobby don't know of MSB. Some people will play ignorant because of social stigma dating back to WORA, and others will give snider remarks about how they don't follow such things, but the population that hasn't heard of this place is almost assuredly in the minority.

@groth said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

In terms of losing weight it works and I can vouch for it working.

And this is another problem: People relying on anecdata. This worked for me, or for someone I know, so it will work for everyone because all bodies must be the same and respond the same.

But again, research data largely doesn't support this. But we're so ingrained in this idea that confronting people with this information causes this knee-jerk, reflexive thing.

It works for some people. But not most people. And the anecdata 'it really works' stuff does more harm than good, in many cases.

@Thenomain said in X-Cards:

It's fairly easy to tell if someone is abusing a system to manipulate a scene's outcomes. Not everyone, of course, but most people are terrible at making up believable lies. And even if they're not entirely believable lies, if the outcome is a matter of still coming up with a realistic IC situation then so be it.

But this system is no-questions-asked. There's no need to lie. They just slap the veto card down and everyone is expected to change course.

Nah. Still not a fan.

@il-volpe

Honestly, this isn't just disability. There's a lot of stuff you should leave off of the resume if you can carefully disguise it. Age discrimination is also a very real thing, in both directions, so never include anything like date of birth if you can avoid it. Include degrees and where they were conferred from, not necessarily when they were conferred. Etc.

Also, despite what people tell you to do, don't include a picture. It only gets attention if you're photogenic by the standards that society considers acceptable.

There's a lot of bullshit they tell you to do in resumes that really only works toward a select privileged few.

My big thing is, I used to think that players should have more say in how things go on the game. That they, as invested citizens of a MU, should have a much larger voice in how things go down.

Now I don't. Or at least, not nearly as much as I used to. I realize that was a dumb way to look at things when I repeatedly saw the consequences of that.

I strongly feel that many of the staff on games are incapable of just telling players 'no' in the face of popular-but-terrible ideas, but sometimes there are very good reasons to do so. Because it's against the rules. Because it's against the theme. Because it frankly interferes too much with the story that you're putting in a ton of work to tell. You have every right to tell players 'no', and they can either accept it or move on to a different game. (Yes, there are some times when negotiation is probably the better answer, and I engage in those too -- but frankly, I'm not having a three-hour argument with you every time you disagree with a decision I made. Deal. We both have better things to do with our lives.) Sometimes, you just need to say 'no'.

And that includes things that players think that they're entitled to, and I used to agree with. Like -- leadership of entire groups. You think that your characters should be able to get there to give them something to 'strive for', or whatever. Except, in almost every case where this has actually happened, they sit on those positions and do nothing and enforce nothing, and everything goes off the rails and dies, and you can't do jack about it because you've effectively neutered your own staff bit by ceding power to the players in the first place.

So now? Now I care much less about 'what players want'. I'll listen, I'll take suggestions. But the ultimate decision is mine, and if I think that an idea is destructive or counter to what I'm trying to build, I'm going to tell you 'no', regardless of how popular it may be.

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

you're gay, but you don't cram it down his throat

Quoting because I'm twelve and my mind went bad places.

You're welcome.

@Ghost said in Carnival Row:

There's a lot of "Racism isn't fun, oppression isnt fun, I want my game experience to be fun", and I dont think that you can have Carnival Row be Carnival Row without some of these elements.

Then they can play in a different game in a different setting where those elements don't exist. Why would they be interested in this setting in the first place if they find those things so offensive? It seems like they'd be put off by the IP in general.

Protip: If you want to have fun on a game where there are elements that you find distasteful, don't play on that game, or learn to ignore those elements. It's very unlikely that the entirety of the game is going to change to suit your social mores.

@too-old-for-this

I think you underestimate the amount of influence students have on other students.

In either case, STILL not how separation of church and state works.

If I were @Wizz I would definitely be making some noise. Harassment based on atheism is harassment based on religious beliefs, and is unsupportable in a religiously neutral environment. If they had told a kid they couldn’t be friends because the kid was a Jew we wouldn’t even be debating whether intervention was appropriate.

Atheism is just as much a protected religious belief, and teachers are just as obligated to ensure that students are free from that kind of harassment. Period.

@Arkandel said in Carnival Row:

Theme might eventually get there in season 3 for the show or after a certain point due to RP on a game, but that's a separate conversation - and essentially a different game.

I think the problem is that too many people expect to say one thing, or have one scene, and suddenly a GRAND REVELATION happens and everything changes, social progress is made, tada.

And if it doesn't they get the fires of their rage fueled and start talking about OOC biases and whatnot, until it becomes a wholly different problem. And then what do you do? Show them the door and wait for the ranting about how there's discrimination and everyone is a bigot? Or give it and change the theme of your entire game to suit them?

@Lithium said in RPG Percentile Mechanics:

See this right here is a problem. If I am able to throw 100 tons around without a problem, there shouldn't be any /swinginess/ when I connect. It should do an immense amount of force on impact and there shouldn't be a feel of 'anything can happen' in super hero's in my opinion. If 'anything' can happen, then what is the point of having super powers if they end up being worthless due to a swingy dice system just screwing you over all the time?

Because there's never been a comic book ark where the characters punch at each other and miss repeatedly, but nevertheless end up hitting walls, cars, lamp posts, etc...

Just because you don't connect with the target doesn't mean you don't connect with -something-. Dice are against you and you're having bad luck? Talk about some of the collateral damage that happens in the wake of that. Superhero fights are almost never neat and tidy. Look at Hancock for an example of how batshit that can get. Not connecting doesn't mean both characters are bad, either. It can just as easily signify that both characters are highly competent combatants and are totally on their freaking game today, dodging deftly and returning masterful counterstrokes that are dodged equally deftly.

Dice don't have to come up with big numbers and huge wins to make cool story.

@Arkandel said in How can everyone play the same game?:

I like the conversations we are having here lately as they are quite constructive and the combined experience and wisdom and differing points of view are really interesting

One of their tangents was making sure everyone is playing the same game. That got me to thinking - how does that work? Once you have an idea, a vision for the kind of MU* you want to create... what needs to be done and what are some good ways to effectively communicate something locked in your head first to other potential staff members then to (heavens forbid) your players so everyone on roughly the same wave length?

One thing that I decided to do was make it as absolutely clear as I could what I expected and what they could expect from me, on an OOC level. This is why I have an going FAQ section. It's not house rules, per se, but it explains what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and how I think it should work. More importantly, it explains what we do not want to see, and the why there.

The clearer your OOC communication on these matters, the better.

For example:

• Is compromise a valuable principle at each stage of that process or does it dilute the vision? Do you need to draw lines in the sand ("my game will NOT focus on politics") or is it better to get buy-in from amalgamized contributions?

To a point. Compromise is fine when you can find a way to work it into the idea that you're trying to sell. Compromise is bad when people try and browbeat you to surrender, and then people learn that if they whine loudly and hard enough, they get whatever they want. We've seen it happen countless times.

I'm always willing to listen, and if we can reach a mutual agreement that's awesome. But my default answer is 'no', or at best 'maybe, if you can sell me on it'. If, for whatever reason, you cannot accept that -- then we have an entirely different problem.

• How useful are wikis? Do you find the information is read? How hard is it to keep it from being stale? Can it serve as a 'true north' of the MU*'s mission statement or is it just words just read over once or glossed over?

I've found that most people don't read wikis. Many people gloss wikis. But they're still useful. They're useful as a respository for the stuff I've done previously. They're useful for not having to answer the same question a thousand times (usually). But most importantly, they're useful to show that, yes, in fact, this policy has been in place since god was a boy, and it was right there the whole time, I didn't just make this up to screw you over. There is a design and a plan.

• How important are in-game channels for the purpose of defining the game's goals and theme? Do they serve a purpose or is that lost in spam or read only by the players actively reading them at the time?

Game channels are useful for facilitating RP, but they can also go too far. Channel for every sub-group out there? You can bet that most people won't be on the main one. And most people won't be on the sub-channels either because then there are just too many channels on.

I'll make channels for things like packs and cabals, and channels for spheres. More than that and we have to have a really good reason for doing so, or else people just use them as an extension of whatever IC/OOC hidey hole they prefer to be in.

• How critical (if at all) are the first PrPs ran either by staff or players? Speaking of, is it important - or possible! - to monitor the latter, and how can it be done efficiently without coming off as micromanaging them?

I do ask that logs of PrPs get posted. This is a pretty effective way of looking over everything and making sure it doesn't go off the rails. I also ask that people give me a thirty-second elevator pitch on the plot that they want to run before they run it. I can usually offer feedback and ideas on what sorts of things would be cool to include, and be on the lookout for pitfalls.

Logger objects make posting logs painfully easy. Making scene xp contigent on the log getting posted makes these easy enough to track. You don't have to read-read it. Just skim for content. It's easy stuff.

Standardized testing feels like such a sham. Like, there's a mountain of research that says all of this is crap and yet we just keep chugging along.

@L-B-Heuschkel

Our policies so far are about -- eightish pages in google docs. Maybe on the long side, but they cover a lot of ground.

On that note, as a staffer, here is my thoughts on 'have the ability to see everything':

• Probably a good thing for various purposes BUT man, I really have better things to do than to paranoid micro-manage every little thing.

If someone is doing something grossly unthematic, I probably want to be aware of that so I can correct it a bit. If someone is doing something grossly unthematic in a private space that doesn't actually make it onto the grid? Meh. Whatever gets your rocks off. So long as you aren't trying to bring it into the rest of the game, I have better things to do than police the sarlacc pit you wanna pretend is on the Dune game because it makes your TS hotter and riskier. You might as well have dreamed it, for all I care.

You bring that shit somewhere on grid, or try and claim some kind of in-game benefit from it, and we're gonna have a chat about it. Because it's gone from 'personal fantasy' to 'canonically problematic'.

ETA: But if you wanna keep it to yourself and do it on your own time, I'm not gonna go tracking you down, either. Good lord, that would be a full time job in and of itself, and I already have one of those.

@Nymeria

Which just reads, "Ignore the fact that licensed materials depict some of these noblemen as non-white, we're going to ignore that to stick strictly to rules that allow us our very strict idea of racial purity."

You're still not looking great here.