Best posts made by Derp

Double post to answer original question (oops). Neither. Both. It is a lack of cohesion between staff vision and player desire that causes this. Too many games try to keep it squarely middle of the road to appeal to the most players, while we have what seems to be a great disconnect between players who want adventure and not dark, and players who actually want dark.

Which leads to either games where nothing truly interesting or compelling ever happens. Or games where the staff and player visions are so at odds it leads to stife.

Games should be clear about what they are from the start on the darkness spectrum. And players not comfortable with darker themes should learn to exclude themselves from those games, instead of demanding that games be less dark so they can be comfortable there (and, naturally, players who want dark in an adventure setting should self-sort as well - it goes both ways). Some compromise is fine. But trying to please everyone will please no one.

@Selira

And yet you keep bringing it up, despite saying that you're not doing it again, and throwing shade at a dude for doing exactly what we tell people they should do just because the person in question is currently in the good graces of the people that normally call down exactly the kind of behavior. Which is kind of a hypocrisy.

Which was my point.

Runescryer did exactly what he should have done, raising a warning flag. Names were named when the person in question showed up to try to defend themselves of not being DWOPP but still made an ass of themselves.

@Sundown

So you're saying that it's not only unclear, it's applied inconsistently. Winning argument there.

The ideal scene length is however long it takes to accomplish the specific story goals that you have in mind for that particular encounter or meeting.

That might seem trite, but it's true. It can be a few sentences between characters caught between moving parts, or it can be an in-depth strategy meeting, a heart to heart, whatever. So long as you get from point A to B in the most enjoyable way, that is all that matters.

Nor do I think scenes need to strive for any sort of 'resolution'. Scenes are not stories. They are parts of stories. How many times have you read a chapter in a book that moves the story forward a bit, or gives you more of a feel of the world, but doesn't have any kind of resolution to it? I know I have. Tons. Those scenes are the ones that build anticipation and drama. Often, there are a great many unresolved things at the ends of those chapters, or sections of chapters. Things that haven't been answered. Things that didn't get said. But it moved everything forward somehow.

I think we put too much emphasis on everything remaining neatly self-contained, which is why we tend to have scenes of epic lengths where everyone is worried about tying up all the loose ends into a nice pretty bow.

Screw that. Leave loose ends. That is how stories continue onward. Have the quick five minute conversation where the one person is throwing some gear into a bag, while the other is looking frantic and confused, with that quick promise that theyĺl explain when they get back.

Have the awkward moment in the hallway between the two characters with enough tension between them you could cut it with a knife, for good or bad. You might not even need to exchange words in this one, and they can be both sort and intense.

So I guess, for me, the 'ideal length' is whatever gets us from where we are to where we want to be at that particular moment in the most enjoyable way. This can be minutes, or hours, or sometimes maybe split over days.

@simplications

Didn’t you just disavow us with a dramatic exit not even a page ago? Is this one of those “I wish I knew how to quit you” situations? Get in or get out but don’t stand there yelling through the screen door.

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

Look, on most games everyone is so Team Good that sometimes I wanna go on WoD and just like, run around as a wolf and eat people.

They moved the 'you are kind of a fucking monster that no longer plays by the rules of humanity and no longer really even relate to them' from the subtext into the actual text-text and people continue to miss the fact that you are an inhuman monster in favor of playing Twilight.

I move to rename this thread the Marvel Upvote Gif Thread.

@Ghost said in Ruiz:

Also, to add:

Of course, I joke up above with gifts of champagne bottles because the truth, tongue in cheek, is that despite the insistence of many that everyone here (including myself) is toxic, there sure are a lot of forays away from that safe space where we arent to interface with us and subject themselves to this so-called unbearable toxicity.

It's kind of the unspoken truth of the situation altogether

Which is precisely why I’m not exactly bending over backwards to do what @hobos is talking about. Would I like this board to be more positive? Sure. It’s a good goal I think.

But I’m also not an idiot, and people like TNP and Tez aren’t coming here to engage in good faith. They’re just coming here to fling shit because they can, and I have no intention of being so bound up in bureaucratic red tape that I just shrug and go ‘but what can you do? Rules.’

The rules exist to guide our actions and (hopefully) make a better board. But they chose to go a different direction, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend that there’s any chance of somehow winning them back. There isn’t. I know it. They know it. Everyone reading this knows it, and if the the expectation is that the admins are going to just sit back quietly and not call them out on that behavior? Then you’re going to be disappointed.

For the people who actually do want to engage in good faith and build something positive, we’re here. But if the BMD crew just wants to behave like howling shitgibbons and scream about how we’re supposed to be better than them, I have no patience for it. They have a board, they can act like idiots there.

@il-volpe said:

@Jaunt It is outright deceptive in the context of advertising outside of the RPI community.

This. It's pretty much your classic bait and switch, dude. It's only foggy because when called out on it, you tried to shimmy over to the other thing and be like 'Well, in light of the larger criteria, there are certain terms and conditions which exclude you from being eligible from the thing we said you were eligible for on the tin, sorry about that.'

Especially when you come into a community dedicated to MU's and start advertising your stuff as if it pertains to us when you very clearly seem to indicate that it does, but it doesn't, but it really does, even if it really doesn't.

@ganymede said in Mage for Multi-Sphere WoDv2 Games:

@derp said in Mage for Multi-Sphere WoDv2 Games:

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.

I think another problem is the absence of internal antagonism, which can often drive activity in the absence of active storytelling.

In Vampire, the Covenants have reasons to war with each other; in Werewolf, the packs vie for territory in similar fashion. But in Mage, if you keep to reasonable power levels, it is simply wiser to collaborate, and, in the absence of any Seer or external threat, that leaves you with mutual masturbation until something better comes along. And if you don't have reasonable power levels, and there's no need to collaborate, then ... well, it's just self-masturbation.

Not that I mind that, but, you know.

Yeah, I mentioned that in a later post, about the Orders being far, far too kumbaya with one another and no real infighting between cabals, no tested loyalties between cabal and Order, etc. More antagonism across the board is needed.

The problem that I have heard most often in regards to why it is not there is 'the players don't want it, they want it a different way'. This goes for everything from the Free Council having seats on the Consilium to the complete and utter absence of Seers or other baddies of any significant presence.

I mean, players also want unlimited xp and a bedazzled pony, but that doesn't mean that we should let them have it.

@Rook said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Faraday
Shhhh. You've exposed my attempt to bring us back full circle and use the Socratic method to help answer his questions!

I mean, I really think that that's what this discussion is about. Coders already use the simplest possible method to do what needs to be done. No one out there who does code is deliberately trying to make it more complex than it needs to be. The problem is that more often than not the simplest way to do it is pretty damn complex, because you're trying to take something fairly freeform from a tabletop and put it into computer format.

Which is pretty much what @Faraday said.

So I think that short of specific examples, w probably aren't gonna get much movement on this, because there's already a path of least resistance being followed. Not saying that it can't be productive, but just that talking about generalizations isn't gonna get us anywhere.

@popes

I mean, sure, that's one way to look at it. Boo, homework, or whatever.

But that's certainly not the only way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is that the 'homework' that you are putting into 'your' pretendy-funtimes game is a way to ensure that it is richer, deeper, and more accurate than it would have been otherwise. Because at the end of the day, it isn't your pretendy funtimes game. It's our pretendy-funtimes game. And part of that means putting in the legwork to ensure that we are playing the same game, which is where a LOT of games miss the mark. You don't have players playing the same game, under the same rules, under the same vision. You have several different cohorts playing different games under a vaguely similar structure with wildly different results and themes, resulting in an incoherent mess.

Nothing ruins the immersion and fun of pretendy funtimes games like a person coming in going completely against the grain of what everyone else is doing, not having put the work in to make sure everyone is on the same page.

I mean, personally, I get why someone wouldn't want to do it. I really do. It's a lot of work if you're just in it to do something quick and easy or whatever, assuming no consequences outside of your own little bubble. But that's rarely the case.

So I require them. And if players don't want to do them -- I'm not gonna hate on ya'll.

You just aren't gonna play in the space I set up.

You're gonna be writing this stuff over and over again in play in the future, presumably. You can take an hour, or a day, or whatever, to write up an outline of what that might look like going forward so that we can hash it out.

And if that's too much of a hurdle, there are plenty of other games out there, you know?

Again, no hate or judgment or whatever. But me, personally? I need to know that I, as an administrator, am on the same page with my players. That they know what I expect of them. That I know what they're expecting of me. That we both have a shared understanding of where that character fits.

And I put that right up front on the tin. No surprises.

Mutant here, too. My nerd-dom was not created, it was bred. My mom was always a fan of the weird. My childhood entertainment was Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Pet Semetary, It (loved that freakin' clown). And I have always been curious about just about everything, just like she is. I would dive into everything, tear it apart to figure out how it works, and unlike some parents who might have gotten mad about that, my mom encouraged me (while also showing me ways to remember how it goes back together).

Needless to say, I read a lot of fiction. Nonfiction. Ancient stuff from my grandpa's library. When I discovered the hidden language of math and the magic formulas of physics, combined with all the sci-fi I could handle, it was a lost cause. Event horizon passed.

I really don't think the platform is the problem, here. And I think it's less a problem based on code than it is a problem rooted in some of the basic ideas of linguistics, since someone was talking about this above. Bear with me here.

As someone (I forget who you are now, sorry, and I don't wanna dig, but total kudos to you) said: with any system, you're going to have to learn how to talk to the system. You're going to have to learn how it identifies objects, how it identifies verbs, how to give it new definitions for things, etc.

And that's what we're running into here. Graphical things take some of that and make it unncessary, but also cost some things when it comes to robustness. Graphical systems are the equivalent of me just pointing at a thing and hoping you understand, versus me telling you what it is I want you to do with it, what it is, how to do it, etc.

This hobby isn't about shiny things. It's about communication. It's about learning forms of exchanging information and interacting with a non-physical environment in a medium in which you only have a voice. Graphical systems are generally the functional equivalent of beating on things and grunting, as far as input-output exchange goes. Very basic and simple, even if they are pretty flashy.

More robust GUI's give you something like... photoshop. And everyone bitches what a nightmare that is to learn, too, so I really don't think that the problems that we're experiencing with the hobby are going to be solved by moving to shinier, more graphical interfaces, because these two things aren't the same and cannot emulate one another effectively.

If we want to simplify the system, we can talk about various ways to redefine the code we use, but it's still going to be the effective equivalent of learning a language. Right now we're using one way, but there are other ways that information can be exchanged, as multilingual people can tell you. Maybe a system of flags that act as something like particles in japanese, or something like how Bash does it, but either way the system is still going to be complex because of the sheer amount of information you're going to have to learn to convey across the system in a brand new way.

I think that just changing clients without addressing what I feel is the real root of the problem is going to be problematic. As much as studies say that people's literacy is going down, but they're reading less, people consume more information on a daily basis now than they did decades ago thanks to the tools we have. It doesn't matter if they aren't reading a book a month if they're reading a hundred web articles a day. The capacity for learning new things is higher than ever.

So let's try and find a way of communicating that streamlines things in a way that people find intuitive, rather than trying to reduce the robustness of what's possible to use. That's what Call of Duty is for.

@surreality

I have no horse in this race. If Gisa is spider, she is behaving herself, and that's all I care about.

But can we maybe take Spider related anecdotes to a different thread so we can maybe focus on the game as a whole in this one, please and thank you? I'm sure if people really care they can follow it there.

@Tinuviel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

And some people don't appreciate people they're with being in multiple scenes.

I suppose that there's really no polite way to say this, so -- too bad?

'You're with me, you have to just be with me and only me' is what you would expect from narcissistic creeper stalkers, not everyday RP partners.

Unless there is a game rule against it (which I think would be incredibly stupid and nigh unenforceable given the number of games out there), then people who 'don't appreciate people doing multiple scenes' can go fuck themselves.

@Auspice said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Though you do miss an important factor of the multiple scene factor: some people can't handle multiple scenes at once.

My point was more that it was an option, not that it was mandatory. To put it another way, 'there is no excuse for a character with access to an NPC not getting time with said NPC when required because there are multiple tools that allow you to do so, and failing to do so is worse than favoritism, it's dereliction of duty'..

@Jeshin @Bananerz

Yep. That's a very real thing that @faraday will do. Will attest, it is totally painless.

Explanation of my 'mostly good' vote:

NodeBB blech. There has to be something better out there somewhere. Make it happen already.

The 'hands off' approach is mostly ok, but sometimes it would be great if there was a bit more actual moderation. Depends on the circumstances, but there have been some less than stellar behaviors that I wish would have been nipped in the bud long ago, Hog Pit or no.

I wish MSB had something more of a mission statement. If it's supposed to be a place for community engagement and connection, why does it feel like we deal with the same catty, cliquish crap as we do on the games? Isn't this place supposed to be above that? I mean, from what I understand, this place tries hard to be Not-WORA, but -- is that what we're really getting out of it?

@Ganymede said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

@faraday said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

MUSH games are not very good about setting expectations of what kind of game they are, and players are not very good about respecting those boundaries even when they are established.

I concur, but write to add that most players are simply unwilling to learn the rules of a novel game, and would prefer to twist it to suit their attitudes rather than adapt.

^THIS.

It's like pulling teeth to get people to read the core books of the game I run, much less the wiki or news files. They just assume they're right and that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

@solstice said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

Your character is yours. If you leave, that character goes away. If any one character is important enough to grind the entire game to a standstill if they left or vanished, you've found your actual problem.

Just tacking this onto here since I completely up and forgot my other side of this --

I want you to make your character because I want you to show me that you have a working knowledge of the rules.

I get it, the books are big. I'm struggling through the 700 pages of the behemoth that is M20 myself, and have a few books on top of that.

The number of times I've felt myself having sympathy for the people who go "I don't have tiiiiime to read the giant book, I just wanna plaaaaaaay" is exactly equal to the number of times someone has made a giant fucking mess in a sphere because they didn't have the first clue what they were doing.

Rosters make it too easy for people who have no idea what they're doing to come in and make a huge mess of things, on so many levels. It just doesn't work. It's not like FS3 where you can pick up the system in 15 minutes and be good to go. There's a level of effort that has to go into it. It's just the nature of the game.