Posts made by Derp

@Wretched said in Good TV:

@Derp That ending tho...

I am HERE for it.

Yeah, that's where it gets confusing. She's legally dead due to brain death but still being kept on life support for organ donation.

Either way, much sadness. I remember her and Ellen being some pretty powerful gay icons back in the day and she made more than a few movies that I really loved.

Anne Heche. While she hasn't passed yet, her family released a statement saying that she is suffering anoxic brain injury and not expected to wake from her coma following a car accident where she was severely burned.

@ZombieGenesis said in 2022: A New Year, New Dead Celebrities:

This one hurts. Olivia Newton-John

Holy crap.

Watching Evil with @Devrex and man, I gotta say, this last episode was so. Effin'. Good.

Season finale is next and it's got enough tension built up and I'm like, actively bouncing in my seat.

If you aren't watching this series you should be.

@Ganymede

This is what @reimesu and I were talking about yesterday.

Bad day for his lawyers. Good day for everyone else.

He also put up a segment on InfoWars alleging that Judge Maya Gamble, his judge, was involved in child trafficking and pedophilia, also showing the judge on fire, which was played in the courtroom in front of the judge.

And that the members of the jury were shills and plants that "don't even know what planet they are on," which in turn prompted the jury to submit a question read by Judge Gamble:

"Are you aware that this jury consists of 16 intelligent and fair-minded citizens who are not being improperly influenced in any way?”

I mean, I know that he's shooting for a mistrial to buy himself some time but damn if this isn't funny to watch anyway.

Here's a board that we can use for what MU Gripes and Peeves used to be for. Those little things that start to build up and build up and you just kind of feel like you need to get them off your chest before they explode or eat you alive.

I can start:

I feel like i've been working hard lately to make a group work on a game. I've been coming up with plots and doing a lot of other stuff to make it feel cohesive and engaged and just in-general fun for the people working it.

And then something happened. Something, by all accounts, relatively minor. But that minor little thing stuck in my brain and just won't let go. It's a rabid little brainweasel and it refuses to die no matter how much 'you are being irrational' salt I pour on this thing.

And so now -- I'm still doing the thing before. Finding out how to grow the group, finding out how to make things awesome and get people playing and having fun --

But now I can't help but think 'but you need an escape plan in case this thing that should be No Big Deal turns out to be a Big Deal'.

And that is a terrible place to be in, headspace-wise. It sucks. It just sucks.

@Misadventure said in RL things I love:

Do peeps have air fryer recommendations?

Air fryer fish sticks are dope.

That sounds yummy! Next time you make it take pictures. I wanna see this magic when it comes out.

@ZombieGenesis said in Good TV:

For me, Strane New Worlds just ruined other sci-fi shows. I thought the first season was a slam dunk. The most I've enjoyed sci-fi since TNG.

Brave New Worlds was absolutely chef’s kiss. The way it handled that long-debated what-if nerd question was brilliant.

@Ganymede

That’s only for special occasions. They’re awfully fatty.

My house smells of ground beef with onion, garlic and ginger, and I think if they sold this smell in an air freshener I would keep it plugged in all the time.

@Ganymede said in Highlights of Ares?:

My position:

You don’t know how much Ares does until you’re not using it any more.

@Ganymede

@Ganymede said in 2022: A New Year, New Dead Celebrities:

@Macha

She will always be Jon Arbuckle’s grandma to me.

Chili powder in the gravy.

@Devrex

Yeah, that's been kind of aproblem for me too. I've found that I need to set strict pose-time expectations for async scenes, otherwise people just tend to get to them when they get to them. Async is fine, but I think a pose time of 2-6 hours per pose is reasonable.

But that's another benefit of Ares. All the communications are easy to pull back up and go 'look, we definitely agreed on this thing here and that has not been happening so I think that we should work on wrapping this up asap'.

@Devrex said in Highlights of Ares?:

@Hella Just being able to leave a scene and come back to it.

It's a double-edged sword though...because a lot of times players are like "oh hey it's cool if this scene takes three months, right?" whether you set it as "async" or not, thus slowing down the whole game and sucking the energy right out of it. It's like the culture of Ares has shifted from MUSH to forum-based RP...which is awful, because forum-based RP is universally too friggin' slow to get anywhere.

It's not like there on every Ares game, but the phenomenon has killed a few of them.

Being able to come back to a scene after taking a break and having everything right there.

Being able to be in more than one scene at once. This is the absolute game-changer for me. I have very limited spoons and time to RP nowadays, but being able to dedicate one day to just doing ALL the things I would need to get done? Fan-effing-tastic. This is the #1 top appeal of Ares to me. If this were available in other formats, I'd be all over it.

The aesthetic appeal. Ares just -- well. With proper CSS formatting, it just looks damn nice. For the traditionalists you still have the old command-line system but that web portal is just kind of a game changer for me being able to properly visualize everyone in the scene.

@Devrex said in Artificially Slowing Character Growth:

"You may only raise this stat again in X days" system hardcoded right in might be the only sensible answer.

Admittedly this is my preferred option, though I tend to like playing the long game when it comes to MU rather than racing to the top. I also understand that I am in a tiny, tiny minority of people where this is true.

@Tirit said in Artificially Slowing Character Growth:

Keeping the analogy of Player A and Player B starting at the same time. Player A rush and raises Attribute X (or skill) to level 5 (arbitrary number). Level 1 to 2 takes 2 days. 2 to 3 takes 4 days, 3 to 4 takes 8 days, 4 to 5 takes 16 days. As Player B grows he can marginally catch up during these cool down days. I don't see them every fully catching up.

Yeah, that's always the downside. How do you keep players from feeling like they're being punished for being active while still keeping them from just buying up all the stuff to steamroller all over everyone? Some of the best ways I've seen to do this include having what you mentioned, cooldown timers. If that xp spend cost <X>, then you have to wait <X> * <interval> before you can raise it again, but it doesn't stop you from buying anything else in the meantime.

@Misadventure said in Artificially Slowing Character Growth:

Give players a set number of xps. Thats where they can get to.

Fate's Harvest did this, and it actually worked surprisingly well (while I was there, anyway, I don't know what became of it after or whether they even still do this.) It even had an interesting way of rewarding "extra" activity via the Tix system.

Alright, so this is a topic that we've touched on a couple of times before, but I wanted to open a formal thread on it so that we can engage in a discussion -- self-servingly because I'm thinking about this stuff for a game and want some opinions.

We all know that in a game where xp is given out based on things you do versus just being there, someone is going to try to game that system to its maximum effect, just going full-bore all-the-time with scene-running and whatnot.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. That kind of energy and enthusiam tend to fill in great big holes where the game staff can't meet the needs of demand for plot or whatever. But it can have some negative consequences in that one-or-a-group-of players can easily just balloon out of proportion, power-wise, to the rest of the game. Additionally, some players will just buy the most beneficial thing over-and-over again, stat-wise, and just RP that they have all the other things that they should be buying, if they can freely buy whatever.

So sometimes it's necessary to put some brakes on that.

What do you think the preferred method of slowing character growth is? (Whether or not is should be is another topic entirely -- consider this a pick-your-poison topic.)

Do you think you should have weekly/overall xp caps?
Do you think that certain stats should only be able to be raised in given time intervals (the classic "you can only buy X every ninety days.")
Do you think that the buying of stats should be justified by actual plot activity that supports those buys (i.e. the 'show me the logs / justification' approach.)

Out of the methods that you've tried before, what do you think is the best?