Posts made by Derp

@a-meowley said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

how many mages were in the queue who didn't make the first cap?

This is relevant how, again?

Yeah, if you had made any sort of substantial progress on the character, then you probably got an @mail informing you that you were still good to apply. Which is at least how Mage doubled their expected numbers. Gabriel (who I think is @Darc ?) is still working on processing those apps.

And staff there have been very open and accommodating of just about everything, from what I've seen, so it's not like people had the door slammed in their faces. If there are people who were in chargen and are now barred, it's probably because they either hadn't logged in for a bit, or hadn't really made any kind of substantial progress on this one.

I know in Mage, literally 20 people got that @mail, and he even said on channel that he'd be willing to work with people if some got missed but were still in chargen. Which is how Mage went from 33 to like, 45 or something.

So this is pretty much the opposite of unkind.

For those worried about resource hoarding, two things:

1. It is a very large city with an extensive grid. Nobody will be able to control all of the resources with the current caps. It is just not feasible.

2. Those starting with resources have to be able to justify them, even if it is so much as strange contacts/allies. Gabriel is great about asking about this stuff, and I know he is willing to blue pencil it.

@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:

Sometimes—rarely—that someone I don't know tells me what they do like about the app so I can focus on that and get it done.

I.don't know what you are making, but Gabriel does this. He takes the bg you write and the concept you have and tries to figure out how to get you connected to the larger picture.

The others I have no idea, but I assume a similar process.

@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:

He's also referring to the currently in development Open Beta SF game

The SF game doesn't have quite that much. I think that their max tier is somewhere around 400.

@arkandel said in RL Anger:

13 Reasons Why'

I'll admit to having heard of this series, and yet I still have no idea what it is.

Also, they don't run stories about suicides after the CDC found that running stories about suicides caused teens to try and copycat the dead one so that they could be dead and famous too.

@surreality said in Now for something different:

I choose GrumpyCat to be my avatar.

@coin said in Now for something different:

I think @ILuvGrumpyCat called dibs.

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.

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.

@coin said in nWorld of Darkness 1E v 2E:

Honestly, so would I. I would prefer if they all worked that way.

Hey, if we can ever find the time and motivation to get something up and running again, I am more than happy to work together on such a project. You know how to get ahold of me!

@ganymede

In the 2e tabletop I was running, I basically retooled Wisdom to work similar to harmony. High Wisdom, cool. You remember that people are people, and the world is not meant to be trifled with... buuuut you also don't see some of the underlying flows of magic, and it is harder for you. To be -good- at magic, you have to dive in... but then you risk forgetting that those rules and formulas you are tinkering with are lives, and people, etc. You have to give up caring for the status quo and natural order if you want power. And you need power if you're going to survive. Where do you draw the line?

To me, it made it make more sense than the book version, which has always felt lame and toothless to me. I would probably do all the games like that, if I had a choice. Ride the line between the basass world of awesome things you know is out there, and the world full of things you love just the way they are. How much are you willing to sacrifice to save the rest of it?

@ganymede said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

An ad hominem retort, counselor?

No more so than the original point, which was that I lacked sufficient reading comprehension to grasp her point, iirc. Missing the words <--> missing the behavior (text vs subtext) felt like a logical counterpoint. It wasn't meant as an attack on you. No more than I assume yours was an meant as an attack on me, anyway. We argue. It's what we get paid for.

That said -- to @Thenomain's point that calling out unconstructive behavior is likewise unconstructive, sure. But ignoring it also lends it tacit approval. Which is arguably worse.

As for the mechanics of Mage, who likes it, who doesn't, its level of complexity, etc, I think that it's been beaten to death, and people are firmly in their camps. We won't change minds in this thread.

I appreciate this one as a tool and reference guide. If all levels of everything could be contained in a chart, we wouldn't need any other part of the book. But given how many possible paths it can take, I challenge anyone to make another that is both somehow simpler and equally comprehensive.

@Ganymede

It's not a problem with my reading comprehension. Other people are seeing this too. Probably because it's a well-known pattern. So I counter with -- Perhaps you've just become so accustomed to this type of behavior that you're not seeing it for what it is. Others in this thread seem to be following my train of thought just fine.

@surreality said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

The whole attitude was dismissive and condescending from the jump. 'Oh, sigh, that is a pile of garbage.' It's certainly not constructive, but the untouchables are freely permitted that, I suppose.

This.

@ganymede said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

Alzie did, actually.

Oh, so they did. I stand corrected! But that doesn't really negate the point, either. While Cobalt can come back with a snide 'maybe you should read further before commenting', I did read further, and her later reply seemed like equivocation justifying being mean-spirited toward another forum user earlier in the thread. It's not cool, and this is the kind of stuff that somehow seems to slide under the radar, even though we're in the constructive part of the forum. Again. You shouldn't get a pass for being catty toward another user just because you come back later and say 'well I suppose this could be ok to a certain class of player'.

As far as the actual chart goes, I've always found this to be a helpful tool. I saw this years ago, and have a copy saved on my computer, because sometimes it proves to be useful.

@cobaltasaurus said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

I react with sarcasm to holier than thou people who aren't interested in having a conversation but rather ram their argument down other people's throats. I never said that mage wasn't complicated, it sure does get complicated. However this flow chart is a detriment.

Currently, the only person that I see espousing One True Right and Only Wayism in this thread is you. You're convinced that a tool meant as a reference to a complicated rules system should be somehow simpler and more streamlined, and that anything less is somehow a detriment.

It's not a detriment. It's a reference. And I agree with @Magee101, if this rather condensed version of spellcasting turns people off, then they probably aren't going to want to read the full and elaborate version of spellcasting that the book actually has, complete with its 40 or 50 exemptions and oh-but-ifs.

So, seriously. (S)he posted a thing that was intended to be a handy reference, and you're jumping all over him (or her) because it's not as simple as you think it should be. Come off it, already.

@kanye-qwest said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

because it is balls out insane

No, not really. This happens frequently enough that many of us have commented on how very odd it is. But, you know, I wouldn't really expect you to see it.

@Arkandel - While I can respect that finger-pointing isn't really what you were going for here, at some point it needs to be said, and specific people called out on it. There's been an ongoing conversation about this for long enough that it needed to be done, and I tried to do so as civilly as possible. And I'll even note that I only did so in response to someone asking who was on the list, and limited that response to informing them that the questioner was on it.

But as a prime example of exactly what we were talking about regarding inconsistent policies and such, shouldn't the earlier comment implying that someone only made a remark due to a possible genital infection rank slightly higher on the things-to-call-out-o-meter than me answering KQ's question as to who people are with a response that I consider her one of the people in question?

Things to consider, you know?

@kanye-qwest said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@derp who are these untouchable people

If what you're really wanting to know is whether or not I count you among them? I would answer emphatically, 'yes'.

If you're wanting an entire list of the people I think are among those who frequently skirt the line and seemingly suffer little to no actual consequences for it, that's probably material for another thread not in this section of the forum.

While @Arkandel might not feel that this problem has grown to the proportion of an epidemic, there are those of us who strongly disagree.

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

The reason debates don't stay civil around here is because a good many people around here don't value civility. They have stated repeatedly that they'd rather the whole forum be gloves-off.

For the record, I don't want that. . . people should be reined in.

Ditto. While I don't mind stating things directly when I think they need to be stated (see above), I do think that there should be at least a minimum amount of civility to these kinds of things outside of the Hog Pit.

Note, also, how the last couple of pages of this thread have managed to somehow mysteriously devolve into a series of insults, though. That's not what I would consider civil.

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

I keep hearing folks say they really would prefer that, except for a very vocal few, and I'm not sure why we as a culture/community are letting a vocal few people make us keep the hog pit around instead of making the decision that we need to be better.

I don't mind the Hog Pit. There are times when gloves off can be beneficial. I more mind the fact that, even with a designated gloves off area, people can't seem to keep it there and it ends up spilling everywhere because things get dragged into the mud if they get too dirty, instead of someone turning on the hose, like should happen.

If we get rid of the Hog Pit, then those lines become, well, muddier. I think that would ultimately have the opposite of the intended effect. At least with it there, there are moderate boundaries between 'pit material' and 'non pit material'. Even if some people still fail to grasp that.

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

When this has happened, my response in chat with Auspice and Arkandel has been invariably between "nuke it from space" and "burn the heretic."
Supposing that an offending post can be identified, I would simply step in and delete that message and every obliquely-referencing message that follows. That seems to be the most neutral thing to do: acting without regard for right or wrong, and simply adhering to the rules as directly as possible. This is especially so on advertisement threads, where it is very easy to pick out where a conversation veers into offensive territory.
I think there are plenty of dissenters to that position, however.

If we are going to seriously consider this, can we also embrace @Surreality's suggestion and stop pretending that there isn't a nigh untouchable cabal of folks that try this shit basically all the time, skirt right on the edges, usually get away with it, and end up getting even more leniency due to sheer desensitization and fatigue?

Because there is.

And they do. Already.

And we need to start being honest about that of this whole mess is gonna work.

Edit because stupid quoting code is stupid. Sorry @Sunny and @Ganymede!