Posts made by Derp

@skew said in Setting up a builder Bit:

Edit #3: On all the games I have helped run (BITN, Fate's Harvest, Fallen World), we just chose a builder and gave them Wiz access and told them not to break anything. They didn't break anything.

As buildstaff for a few games now, let me be the first to assure you that, no matter what a paranoid headwiz may think, your builder is one staffer that absolutely needs wizard powers. Builders do much more than just dig things. They interact with all manner of code, and are miniature coders themselves. If they are efficient, they will be regularly running searches and doing privileged @dols to fix things and ensure consistency. They need the kind of access that wizards get even more than Team Leads in many occasions.

If you are truly worried, just check the log files. Most builders know what they are doing and are not going to break anything. Find people you trust, give them access, let them go.

@Thenomain

Not trying to prove you wrong. I legitimately disagree with your premise and think that it's a somewhat narrow reading of what is a perfectly thematic mechanic.

@thenomain said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

It only starts to work when you apply the guilt onto the character's foundational personality (where The Wyrd's psychoactive nature taps into), which seems to me to be a silly act of an RPG reducing player agency over their character.

No, it works when you take into account that it's in their very magical nature to do this.

Look, no player has 100% control over his character. Vampires are subject to the Beast taking over and ruining their fun, mages can get paradox in their heads and go on a magical spree. Werewolves have Kuruth.

You are playing a game in which there are a fixed set of choices that you can choose from, all of them with various strengths and benefits. Sometimes, you don't get control over every choice and thing. That's part of playing a system with predefined stats and pre-sorted mechanics.

In this specific case, you are playing a person who has had their agency taken away in order to fill some sort of meta-tropey-idea-thing. I cannot stress this enough -- if agency is your thing, changeling is not the game for you. You're gonna have a bad time of it. Or you're just gonna ignore the rest of the theme anyway.

We can fight about the limits of player agency all we want, but at the end of the day, changeling is still the most flexible system by far, so.

@thenomain said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

Spike is a mean-ass vampire who regains his soul and then shrugs about it gets on with life.

Shenanigans. Spike was a mean-ass vampire that went crazy after regaining a soul and attempted suicide on multiple occasions, while stalking the Slayer.

Low-Clarity would let you do that just fine I would imagine.

Further, I see nothing wrong with negative game mechanics enforcing a behavior, but YMMV.

Don't think the number of turns rightly matters. If they're beaten down, they can still surrender, and that enforces the surrender mechanics:

Beaten Down:

Any character who takes more than his Stamina in bashing damage or any amount of lethal damage is Beaten Down: He’s had the fight knocked out of him. He must spend a point of Willpower every time he wants to take a violent action until the end of the fight. He can still apply Defense against incoming attacks, can Dodge, and can run like hell, but it takes a point of Willpower to swing or shoot back.

Before that happens, he can surrender, giving his attacker what she wants according to her declared intent. If you give in, you gain a point of Willpower and take a Beat, but you take no more part in the fight. If the other side wants to attack you, they’ve got to spend a point of Willpower to do so, and probably suffer a breaking point. If everyone on one side has surrendered, the fight’s over and the other side gets what they want.

Ogres were true monsters that did truly mostrous things. If you don't come out of Arcadia feeling regret for that, you're gonna have some issues. The atonement aspect makes complete sense for that. I'm not sure why people find it so kneejerky.

@thenomain said in Changeling the Lost: 2nd Edition:

Beaten Down: Must spend Willpower each time they want to take a violent action.

It should be noted that the aggressor also has to spend WP to keep going in this situation. It's not quite as haxx as it sounds.

@skew said in Crescent Moon Mux / New Orleans CoD Mux:

So, when we refer to "Chronicles of Darkness", it's not nWoD 2E. It's nWoD, by Onyx Path marketing lingo. We'd technically need to refer to CofD 1E vs CofD 2E to differentiate between the 2004 book and the 2015 core rulebook.

While this might be technically correct, I think the point is also kind of moot, since 1e was discontinued with the coming of the 2e and THEN it was rebranded as Chronicles of Darkness. So no new content will be released under 1e, making CHronicles an exclusively 2e enterprise.

So I think it's perfectly fair to refer to 2e as Chronicles, and not 1e, as that is the understanding of most of its players.

@auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

What'd they do this week? Decide that, despite me only being on a particular project for 4-10 hours a week, on weekends, I was going to be one of 5 'test agents' to start taking calls.
What the ever living fuck you fucking donkey lickers

Just refuse. Cite medical necessity. You've got the documentation for it. If they try and take retributive action, you've got a mile of proof that their actions were unreasonable given the circumstances.

@thenomain

Thanks!

(Also what's horrible?)

@Thenomain

These run off of a parent, right? Fallcoast's seem to be mostly set with a series of softcoded commands, which non-staffers can't see, right? Is there a version of this floating around somewhere that doesn't require elevated privileges to see the source for?

Didn't see this in the last 5 pages or so, so I'm not sure if we've ever talked about it, but -- does anyone know where we can find code for some of the cool logger objects that various MUX-based games have been using?

These are the ones where you turn them on and drop them in a scene, and they pick up all the poses before spitting out a nicely formatted version for copy-paste to a wiki?

@ganymede said in Random Oddness or 'Is This Normal?':

Please go see a neurologist.

Probably the only free advice you'll ever get from an attorney. Do as the lawyerbot says.

Thanks, you're the best!

@skew

Mostly! I was actually more wondering about the +poseorder command with the beep option that I think FH and some other places had set up. Is that a seperate command, or does that work with what +repose uses? I could probably figure out how to code one, but I'm lazy, and it already exists. <.<

Does the pose alert code where it sends the tone work off of this same system? It would be awesome if you could post that too. I know a few people who could really use it. Not to name names or anything. <. <

I'm not saying that some graphical utilities aren't there to make life easier. I use Potato's mail editor all the time just because it's faster. What I'm saying is that you're never going to create a system so divorced from command line input of some nature that it'll allow you to do the things we do now without ever using the command line unless the GUI itself is ludicrously complex.

Yes, Discord and such are gaining in popularity, but even they don't allow for some of the things that we have right now unless it's doing it as a workaround. Same with Roll20, or forum-based stuff. You run into problems with persistence, or information recall, or any number of other things.

Sure, there are things that would be better as GUI because they don't often take different kinds of input, but I don't think that's really going to do that much, either. About the only sorts of universal things you're going to be able to rely on a GUI for are things like mail, finger, sheet. Maybe pages and channel stuff. Anything more game-unique than that and you're probably still gonna have custom commands, which is still gonna require them to learn how those commands work.

ETA: And te things that a GUI would work best for are already simple. Where. Who. Page. Channel chat. Sheet. Etc.

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.

I would play the Alien game. Huuuuge fanboy.

Spotify. I would die without spotify at this point. I am addicted.

@thenomain and @Darc

I believe the policy also says that nobody can start at Tier 4 at this time, so that closes the gap a bit too. You can spend boatloads of xp and still be relatively supernaturally inept. It depends more on focus than quantity of xp, IME.