Posts made by Derp

@ganymede said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I think they are a great idea, for the reasons Ghost pointed out.

Rosters are usually capped or limited. This is a good thing.

Until Jenny#574 marries Luke#31 in a whirlwind romance that lasts all of two days and has a bunch of kids with him or whatever, and then life eats her so the character idles. And then Jenny#575 picks her up a week later and decides that she doesn't wanna be saddled with all of that and wants it retconned because like ohmygosh no roster should just come with a relationship like that.

Your continuity goes all to hell as each and every person plays them in a different way because they don't actually give a shit about their story or history, they just don't wanna do the chargen work.

Nah.

@il-volpe said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@derp Huh. Aside from my own, I've never seen a MU with anything like, "You can tweak your sheet for the first few weeks if the character doesn't turn out quite as you expected or whatever," announced anywhere.

I did it mostly to reduce chargen anxiety, prevent people from feeling like they needed to give thesis-level thought to statting up, and thus get players out of cg and into RP as fast as possible. (I firmly believe this is a priority, and while it might seem counterintuitive for a quick and lower-effort chargen to be a positive factor in player retention, I am convinced that it is. It's "charging the clicker" in trainer-jargon.)

I mean, really, it's been on so many games I've played that it feels like one of those common conventions, like -- poses should be in present tense and go in order. You rarely see them written down but people just kind of know that this is a thing, and everyone tends to go with it.

I've never had a staffer deny me any tweaks I've needed to make in the first 30 days or so. I mean, once you've been there a month or so you should be well settled enough that further changes should get some side-eye or require some real justification, but up until then almost everyone has been happy with make a tweak if I say something like 'Hey, I think I overspent on Academics, can we take that down a dot and put in in some other stuff that he'd likely have needed before now?'

Most staffers that aren't total jerkasses understand that you don't know a character until they've been subjected to their actual environment.

@misadventure said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

@buttercup I feel like reading tvtropes on a given game, and being given a character with basic notes about the supernatural factors in their behavior/history should be enough t try something out, and I wish staff were comfortable with only semi defined characters that you settle out their details after say 1-4 weeks depending on rate of play.

I mean, in my experience, that's exactly what happens. You create a character but until you actually play them and interact you don' tknow where they're going to land exactly, so usually you can make tweaks to the character (within reason) up to 30 days or so.

I mean, I only know of 4 WoD games off the top of my head, and none of them have roster characters that I'm aware of: Fate's Harvest, Fallcoast, LIberation, and another that's still currently in development and not openly advertising.

Roster characters just take too much work. They're labor-intensive to create and normally have to be created with even more story hooks and backstory than a regular character would. Then people pick them up and either ignore it outright or play them for like two minutes before dropping them, so another person picks them up and then has to deal with all the baggage that comes with their prior history which is probably not even particularly well documented...

I think it's pretty unlikely to be a thing again in the near future.

Bumping because @Faraday continues to be amazing, and has helped save my butt a few times now when some random thing made the game go down and I couldn't figure out how to get it back up. And she also continues to be easy to work with on setups and such.

Thanks, Fara! You're still awesome.

@ganymede said in RL Sads:

Word. Same here. I live in Ohio. Ohio sucks.

shouts across the border

Girl, same.

@silverfox

Tabby boi so cute!

@tiredewok said in Thundergulch:

@buttercup

Looks like the game might be down as I can't log on, either.

I just tried and I can get to it just fine?

Might be a regional outage or something?

@eye8urcake

Fuck 'em.

I mean, really. That day, for you, is about your son fulfilling a life goal. If they don't approve of the dress or the beliefs or the whatever-else, that doesn't affect you in the slightest. A few hours later, you will be back living your life the way you choose and your son will be off with his new wife and that's all you went there to do anyway.

Everything else is just details, and if those don't go exactly right, then whatever. Life happens.

Don't sweat it.

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

I get home at the end of the day and I haven't the druthers to slip into a persona.

I feel so worthless, but I know I just need to recuperate.

Stupid trial.

That's been my, like, last two years. I feel you. hugs You stuck it out longer than I did. You're a badass. Never doubt it.

@vixanic said in What's the tea on Obsidian Reverie?:

@raeras
Holy cow man, Demon? As in Demon: The Descent and not a Fallen adaptation?

If so I admire your team's bravery there, that is not a game for the casual storyteller

DtD has been done before. It wasn't too terrible.

@sunny said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@horrorhound

Okay.

Ours handles a great many infrastructure projects, including doing things like designing water / sewer systems that have to actually work.

You've got one of the good ones then.

In my experience, the software engineers I have met are brilliant -- if they're designing something for a hobby. Like MU.

The software engineers in real life? Can't seem to understand that the systems they create should not be overwriting the Date of Inspection with the date you access the file. Or, really, do anything useful with the database at all. There is a reason we just dropped a bunch of money to hire an outside company to design a system that actually works.

And good lord, our civil engineers...

ETA: nothing against anyone here, to be clear. I'm sure you are very good at your jobs. People like @Faraday continue to impress with their skills. But man. I wish we could get a better team. Or maybe I just need to move someplace with less lazy people.

@kanye-qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Engineers are all about making things work in practice. I think you got something swapped mentally.

Think we're hanging out with different groups of engineers, then.

@greenflashlight @Arkandel

It's really not useful, no. I mean, it's a good representation of actual numbers but the causes behind them are so varied and diverse that you can't really draw any conclusions just from the ratio itself. There' no magic bullet answer there.

Just from a perusal of the available data, I would say that a major driver would be the difference in alcohol consumption and alcoholism in general / drug use, which is a significant driver, but hardly the only one.

This sort of graphic is what hapens when you take, like -- alll the mountains and valleys on a continent, measure their heights, and then add them together for stuff like 'Average Altitude of Asia'. It's maybe interesting as a side thing but doesn't really tell you anything terribly valuable.

@arkandel

Well, if the title in the infographic is to be believed, it means that the number presented is the number of male suicides for every female suicide, so in France for every 10 women that kill themselves, 32 men kill themselves, whereas in Spain that same ration would be 37 for every 10, and in the UK it's 38 for every 10, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

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

And tbh I don't know if I still have a job or not, but I'm sitting in my car shaking. Pissed.

Just call the SM.

@grayson said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@horrorhound Which is interesting, because engineering is full of people on the spectrum in one way or another.

We all rage against the architects, though, because what bloody idiot puts that there and this over here and that girder through the chimney and how the hell are we supposed to make any of this actually work?

Engineers only have to make it work in theory. Not in practice.

And everything works in theory.

@carma said in New Mu* Creation: Atharia:

Just a suggestion: if you want to allow for temp room scenes but encourage on-grid scenes, you could gamify earning temp room creation by participating in on-grid scenes.

For example, complete 1 or 2 on-grid scenes to 1 temp room creation, up to a max of 3 at any time. That way, they can do up to 3 temp room scenes before they need to participate on-grid to earn them back. Play with the numbers to suit what you want to see.

Two weeks late to the party, but:

I'm not sure that this is a great idea? Ultimately, I Rp with only a handful of people, usually, and I generally do it where Billy Bob can't come bustin' in with his Psychobilly Band, or whatever.

Making people play in places they are not inclined to in order to play in the places they want to play in, with the people they want to play with, seems counterproductive.

If they can't do it on your game, they'll fire up a sandbox.

I know. I did it too!

@packrat

That kitteh is so cute!