Posts made by Derp

Then by all means, move it to another forum. I will address your ranting there, rather than muck up this thread more.

Doublepost for:

Wicked Little Things - Seriously, go watch this. Creepy as fuck.

La Casa Muda: I think you might have had an even lower budget than 'The Evil Dead', and yet still a fun movie.

@ThatOneDude said:

I'll edit this and be constructive in the response. Demon jobs that take 30 days to close for XP spends didn't lead to a great experience. Asking demon specific questions that don't get answered or ignored in jobs didn't lead to a good experience. A lack of Demon side plot, which myself and crew could make but seemed like a waste do to the job situation didn't lead to a fun experience. So, instead of complaining to a deaf ear that didn't care I took a break and log in from time to time to check on my PC and to see if things change... Or ask here.

Have you tried, I dunno, putting in a job to check on those sorts of things? Because Demon jobs -are- getting answered. There are some things where an answer takes longer than others because I have to ask for information, get permission to do things, collaborate with other people. You know, the whole usual staff dance thing. But on the whole, anything that doesn't involve 'we want to do something that requires massive amounts of bookkeeping and staff handholding to the point of needing our own personal storyteller to keep up with this endeavor' get answered fairly promptly.

As for Cade and him being an asshole we'll have to agree to disagree. IC vs OOC is different and I can only think of one place where anyone could think Cade is an asshole. Myself and the other party seem to agree there was no OOC beef so other than that I think you'll need to come with specifics. If I was a problem player on the mu* I'd assume there were complaints from other players or staff but I have yet to hear of those...

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But if that is your official staff stance based on the past and you getting fucked up here then you are close to a Spider 2.0 and I'm glad to see it come out.

My opinion of you is not my official staff anything. Your jobs, should they actually exist, get processed in just as timely a manner as everyone else's, and with equal degrees of fairness. Just because I personally think you're a prick doesn't mean I can't do my job. But by all means, compare me to Spider. I mean, you're reaching, and badly, but it's funny to watch you scramble for anything.

I stand by to listen to your crew defend your honor but all I need is a... Chance...

And suddenly I'm reminded of the time when an entire fucking channel told you and your partner to GTFO because, lo, you had already pissed off over half the sphere you were in a week out of chargen. Those were good times.

@ThatOneDude said:

Do people still RP on Eldritch? Let me qualify that with - New player shows up and has opportunities to play with people? Old people return and they can to?

Addendum: Would I have to always play with Derp and would he always play like Chance from TR?4

People still play plenty on Eldritch. Nobody wants to play with you, though, because you have this allergy to subtlety and can't seem to avoid being an asshole to everyone you come into contact with. Kind of like every iteration of the Cade characters you make. So I expect that your experience will be largely poor wherever you go, and you're one to talk about always playing the same sorts.

But lo, I see that you're still approved and taking up a demon spot while contributing nothing. So bitch on, little rager. Bitch on.

@Sunny said:

@Derp said:

@Sunny said:

To keep the game at a power level that fits with the campaign that I will be running while still allowing a very generous number of ways to earn experience.

This is not going to do what you think it's going to do.

Yes, it actually is.

Alright, then. If this is the intended goal, then I have to think you're just bad at game design, and shall choose not to play there.

Not only is a 200xp human different from a 200xp vampire different from a 200xp werewolf, two 200xp werewolves are going to be worlds different from each other.

Yes, and there is yet more of a world of difference between a 200 XP character and a 750 XP character. I am more concerned about this difference than I am between the factions. Some character choices are more powerful at some things than other characters are. That's as true at 15 experience as it is at 500.

How in the world do you figure this? Your methodology relies on the idea that characters who hit a certain amount of xp 'level up' in some fashion. This is not how world of darkness works. A character that has 200xp invested in Contacts and Retainers is in a world different place than a character that has 200xp dedicated to fighting styles and combat skills. It just doesn't work that way, and you're treating the system as if it does, which is at best naive and at worst shortsighted.

Experience level does not relate to power level.

This is incorrect.

See above.

That largely comes down to build choice.

Build choice impacts it; how many experience you have to spend on that build also has a significant amount to do with it as well. I can do more with 500 XP than I can with 50.

For some things, yes. Not for all things. Build choice is the ultimate arbiter of this, not your experience level. I can do plenty with a 50xp combat character that I can't do with a 500xp social character. It depends on the stories told and what design I took with it. I don't hit level 10 when I hit 200xp, so there is no way to distinguish my 200xp from some other guy's 200xp and call them the same. Again, it just doesn't work that way.

And as @coin mentioned earlier, when you set a hard cap, you're just going to end up with people who frontload a whole bunch of other stats and ignore others.

This is how tabletop works.

And you think that's it's not going to work that way in a MU? That the two are so magically different that something you would see in one can't happen in the other? Are you new here?

I see the reasoning that you have. But your reasoning in this instance is faulty. It's based on the false premise that characters at the same level of xp are at rough parities of power.

Er, no. It's not. It's a limiter on upper power level. It's a cap, not an equalizer. If I was (stupidly) attempting equality I'd simply give a flat rate of XP to all characters (including those not made yet) at a set time. This system is not an attempt at making things equal.

And that's simply not the case.

If you're not looking for equality, then what the hell is the point of your xp cap? Again, going back to the first statement, not only does this not do what you think it's going to do, I'm not even sure that you're aware of what you want it to do in the first place, given that your premises contradict each other.

WoD is not World of Warcraft. If that's the way you want it to work, try the D20 World of Darkness, Monte Cook's version. This is going to solve a lot of your issues.

@Sunny said:

To keep the game at a power level that fits with the campaign that I will be running while still allowing a very generous number of ways to earn experience.

This is not going to do what you think it's going to do. Which is why I'm rather skeptical of this as an approach in the whole.

Not only is a 200xp human different from a 200xp vampire different from a 200xp werewolf, two 200xp werewolves are going to be worlds different from each other. Experience level does not relate to power level. That largely comes down to build choice. And as @coin mentioned earlier, when you set a hard cap, you're just going to end up with people who frontload a whole bunch of other stats and ignore others.

I see the reasoning that you have. But your reasoning in this instance is faulty. It's based on the false premise that characters at the same level of xp are at rough parities of power. And that's simply not the case.

@Sunny said:

It's less meant to be a throttle and more a wall. It's not meant to slow growth, but to keep characters from going past a certain point at all.

+1 Theno. This sounds like a terrible idea. If you don't want them to spend xp, don't give it to them. Setting a hard upper limit like that is just depressing, and leads to periods of non-growth that will lead to more frustration than steady growth with a slow xp gain.

Well, if we're sharing:

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::. XP & Beats .::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Normal: Experience: 3, Beats: 2

• Earned: 79.5
• Spent: 76
  Player: Experience: 0, Beats: 0
• Earned: 2
• Spent: 2
  ................................................................................
  You have been approved for 5M 3w 1d 17h 9m 58s
  You are auto-gaining 10 Normal Beats per week
  You have earned 4 out of 10 Normal Beats this week
  It will be reset in 1 day

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Starting XP: 10 (Chargen 7 + BG 3)
Aspirations: 9.0
Newbie Bonus*: .2
Conditions: 2.6
Dramatic Failure: .4
Scenes: 5.0
ST XP: 2.0

29.2 (I think. Quick mental math)

Which would leave auto-gains at something like 50, if my lazy math is correct, which at just shy of six months ain't bad. Plus that leaves like 5xp until I'm down to half xp earnings on auto-gain (since I think the threshold for that is 55?) And then it goes down again at something like 80, and then again at... some other point. Point being it goes down to 1 beat per week on auto-gains at some point, which will probably happen sooner rather than later.

I mean, yes, the amount of xp gain on Eldritch seems to run a bit on the high side, but if we were to make it lower, people would scream and bitch that the 'dinosaurs' are outdoing them in everything (which is kind of laughable since we don't actually have any 'dinosaurs'). XP gain is one of those delicate balancing games where nobody really wins. There are some people who still complain that xp gain isn't fast enough, there are some people who complain it's too fast. Mostly, people just kind of roll with it.

What can you do? If you take away passive gains, then the people who can be on all the time end up being your monstrous xp people, or the ones who can sit there and hammer out scenes non-stop. If you make it too fast, then the plots become laughably easy or you have to create something monstrous. There is no best answer, only decent answers for available situations.

But note! There is also an xp cap, and auto-gains diminish over time. There are already in-system compromises.

Edit to Add: For posterity, I'm not a believer in 'xp equality'. I absolutely believe there -should- be an xp-based hierarchy in things, because if everyone is equal, then nobody takes anybody seriously. WoD is a game set up for those kind of hierarchies in all but, maybe, werewolf, and even then you have those packs that you just don't fuck with, tribal elders, etc. So take that for what it is.

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past? -- Yes, in the past. College makes it a bit more difficult to find a reliable tabletop group that actually wants to play the same game. Thus why I got into MU'ing just over a year ago. You can always find DnD groups but even then they're playing different settings/editions, and I'm sort of burnt on DnD.

What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop? - Mostly Mage, all of the editions, though I'm familiar with many of the others as well. There are few WoD games that I haven't at least played at one point. DnD, obvs. Rifts. Ummm.... others that I can no longer remember. What is the .. Sword and Sorcery stuff?

Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop? -- Have been! We tended to sort of rotate so that one person didn't get burnt.

Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity? -- Maybe. It's not just a matter of opportunity, for me, but also of time constraints. School is hard, yo.

Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop? -- Likely. I mean, I'm sure that there is some group somewhere within a reasonable distance, but I currently have other things to put effort into, and don't have the time to try and track down a group that I won't hate. Maybe in the future, but right now, priorities are different.

@Thenomain

Yes, but those same arguments have always been posited by people. They said the exact same thing about NWoD over CWoD when NWoD was the shiny new thing. It's just different.

@faraday said:

FWIW in terms of builders being mini-coders, the common examples I've come up with where builders might need functions are things like spacing/formatting, weather and time of day

Sometimes it gets even more complex though. Sometimes, you need commands that only work inside of specific rooms, for which you code in $-commands. You sometimes need rooms that can respond to certain stimuli within them, and so listen patterns become important. Etc.

Essentially, there could be a reason for a builder to need nearly every function available to the MUSH (because most commands have functional equivalents, and the ones that don't are probably things you wouldn't much use on a room anyway). Not every room has a strict IC purpose, because they aren't all IC rooms. Some of them serve specific OOC purposes (your build nexus, for example). The IC side of things is all well and good, but time/date/weather/formatting is just a small fraction of what builders will end up doing.

@Griatch

And see, this is why I am hesitant to consider Evennia. The general argument for it seems to be two pronged, and goes something like:

1. Python is a powerful programming language that lets you do all sorts of super neato things which

2. Provide for an end user experience that is not currently possible under the systems used now

Except that:

1. Your python structure actually takes away from the soft-coded aspects of the current game environments, restricting developing ability to only a select few and requiring working knowledge of a different programming language using a more complex and sophisticated system of markup and design than what is currently needed to play these games while, which as mentioned above leads to 'complexity issues' leading to

2. Not even being able to replicate the basic functionality that we have in the current system, which to me does not translate to an improved end user experience.

If it cannot do everything that the current environment does and then some then it is not an improvement over the current methods of working. The first thing that you need to do if you want to sell people on this thing is to make sure that it can do everything the old system did. And right now, you're telling me that nested function calls, something which are relatively straightforward and simple in the in-line language of MU's, can't be replicated in Evennia because it makes for too much complexity under the hood with the new and improved programming language.

Yeah. Hopefully you can see why I remain dubious of this.

But see, that doesn't make much sense.

Okay, so I have a function r() that turns all of my text within it red. But it can only turn text red. It can't underline it. If I want to underline it, I have to use u(). But u() can't make it red like r() can. If I want to make it red and underline it, I have to create a new function, ru(). But then what about green? Well, then I would need g() and gu(). Can I make it bold on top of that? Surely you can see where this is going.

And while yes, you could theoretically provide all of that within the arguments of one function, not every developer is going to foresee every possible permutation of those things and write arguments into the function to handle that. Whereas if you provide several simpler functions that can be nested, you are in fact increasing the simplicity, because each one does a specific thing, and in combination they can do things that would take an incredibly complex function with multiple args to do together.

@Griatch said:

Evennia's inlinefunc system (which Thenomain refers to in the function-call bits) was never intended to be a full nestable language construct, it was meant as a way to allow coders to offer customizable replacements by safely parsing and calling functions supplied by the developer - this was meant to always be a single call, the return of which replaces the function call within the string. Any code trickery was meant to be done in that function, not in the input - the user's agency is only to choose which function to call, potentially with arguments.

Why? I mean, this is a serious question. Why on earth would you ever have a function call that you could only call with a single function, and not allow for nested function calling? What purpose would this serve? If you're savvy enough with the code to do a function call, you should know that functions could be nestable. So why not provide that functionality from the start?

@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.

@il-volpe said:

@faraday said:

• Doing something more interactive with auto-populated buttons and such requires not only a new server, but also a new client

Does it really? I was imagining maybe that the MU server had a text file, settable by the owner, which the client grabs and reads -- the content tells it what buttons to auto-populate. New client, yes, but that file would be something one could add to any game.

Buttons should all be closable, re-open 'em from a drop down if you want them again, like Photoshop toolbars and menus.

I don't even think this would require a new client, in that case. Mushclient already supports plugins written in whatever it is that you write mushclient plugins in. Betcha you could already get it to recognize something like that if you made the syntax universal.