Posts made by Derp

@Auspice said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

@lordbelh said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

@Auspice said in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo:

I've been swapping between it and the second Expanse novel and I've all but forgotten about the Expanse book for the moment.

I'm the opposite. I started reading Ninth House, while also reading a bit of the Expanse, and I ended up dropping Ninth House for the time being. Not that it was bad, it's just that I got totally engrossed with the Expanse. I'm almost done with the series, tho, so I'll soon be returning to Ninth House.

I'm only on book 2 of Expanse and I feel like I need to just sit down and devote a few hours to it vs my fits and bursts of bus reading.

I haven't read those, I just saw the first season of the show, but I want to read them so bad. I need to get through The Dark Defiles first though.

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

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

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

Oddly, I was in the middle of explaining to you that we aren't Arx and that our families have little power when I woke up...

Your motion shall not be considered until you have filed your memorandum in support with a corresponding affidavit.

Can I use one of those pre-filled forms someone was on about?

Most judges wouldn't notice. Most things that go through the court are pretty much pro forma these days, as far as paperwork goes.

@Ganymede, on the other hand, is a lawbot and will be checking your margins down to the last pixel.

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

Sucks that we only see Mickey and the gang in Kingdom Hearts, these days.

Make some more Donald, Minnie, Mickey, and Goofy shit, Disney.

Do you have kids?

If so, you'd probably know about the evil that is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

@Rinel said in The Haul:

@Groth

It can catch out issues that have been smoothed over by tradition. Like, w/r/t Mary, the Greek parthenos usually gets translated as virgin, but it can also mean young woman, and the Isaiaic prophecy of the Messiah says he will be born of an almah, a Hebrew word that usually means young woman of childbearing age. This is a useful thing to know in conversations about things like the Virgin Birth (though I started to profess the Virgin Birth a couple of weeks ago on different grounds).

I think the general idea is that he needed to be free from original sin which is apparently sexually transmitted.

That said, we should legit probably branch this conversation out of christmas presents before someone gets legit offended.

@Wizz said in Good or New Movies Review:

my super-conservative and religious bro in law came back from Frozen 2 saying there was something "very weird" about it.

Well... yeah. It's a movie about an empowered female witch who refuses to conform to the expectations of society and speaks her mind freely as an authority figure.

This is why I actually tend to have two documents: a pure policy document, and then an FAQ about the policies that I hope clarifies the vision and reasoning.

This keeps the policy document (relatively but still not entirely) short, and allows me to point to something else when people ask why we made a certain decision a certain way, and what we're looking for as far as player behavior goes. I do this for House Rules, too. (Really, if I think that at some point I'll be asked more than once to explain the 'why' on something, I have probably thrown it on a website somewhere.)

@GreenFlashlight

Or, you could just be looking so hard that you're suffering a confirmation bias.

In this case, I think you're specifically pulling a Texas Sharpshooter. Draw a big circle around enough dots and you can find a pattern in anything.

@Arkandel

And yet that still fuels the biggest complaint of the last several years, in that omg every game is just a cookie cutter, no originality, etc.

My big peeve, on the other hand, is that even if you give people a ton of original lore and details on the world, they just ignore most of it because of that same idea of "I don't have time to learn something new," and just do generic whatever system in whatever city, fantasy or otherwise that they usually do, which leads to a lack of cohesion.

There has to be some kind of buy-in on original content, and a willingness to learn. And frankly, if you don't have time to read a few wiki pages for general comprehension then I don't think you have the time to play a character in the first place.

Generic 'you', naturally.

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

oh my god this one is a mindfulness seminar just let me go home

Did law school teach you nothing about the consequences of procrastination? (I mean, yes, it teaches you to be super effective at it, but all the CLE in basically two days? Woof.)

That aside, some of these aren't terrible. I've used a couple of them in the past. It's not completely automated, most of the time. It's more like a templating system with various boilerplating and checkboxes that just switch some sections around when you need them to, and it actually does end up flowing kind of nicely. (As nicely as Old High Legalese can flow, anyway). The freeform text boxes still let you enter your pleadings up to the level of specificity that you need.

But it's probably less fun for lawyers since ya'll are control freaks like woah. It's glorious for your paralegals though.

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

Is this meant to justify or excuse it, or what?

The point, I think, is that it's easy to find this sort of thing when you're focusing on it, even when it might not be there intentionally. It's just another sort of confirmation bias, wherein we can assign meaning to things that don't actually have them in order to justify our beliefs.

Look, my boyfriend and I saw Frozen 2 together too, and neither of us actually read anything into that either. I don't think that the vast majority of people would.

MSB is not representative of a vast majority of people, and the ones who notice it here are probably hyper-sensitive to such things in the first place.

Maybe it's intentional. Maybe it's not. But most people aren't going into Frozen 2 looking for queer iconography.

Personally, I don't consider it 'baiting', even if it is intentional. I consider it a step in the right direction, moving away from old stereotypes into at least some kind of new territory. All things in time.

@friarzen

Admittedly I haven't been keeping up with Evennia lately. I have no idea what systems have been coded for it. @Apos might have something similar? Or ... someone else who runs some other Evennia game.

That said, aside from OOC rooms, what sorts of things do people think we could alter as far as game structures go?

@friarzen said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

Hmm... This topic is timely to a game design issue I discovered after my last Section14 post. I was planning on just building out a traditional grid based on my first couple plots, only to realize that would lead to a sprawling set of used-once-or-maybe-twice-at-most locations that would then just rot. In my head, the game is fairly episodic, with only a couple of small recurring locations (like the secret base where the players reside between missions and the "generic" supply depots/storage-dumps/oubliettes that per-mission resources get pulled from or sent to), and the rest of the grid would be temporary-ish rooms used for part of a "Season". Right now, I'm working on just giving the players a set of commands to "re-skin" temporary-ish rooms as needed for scenes or PRPs.
I guess I'll need to think more on what that design means for privacy/ooc issues, though.

What codebase are you using? I know that MUX has some pretty robust temproom code out there already, and that would probably work fine on Rhost. Ares has a whole 'scenes' system which is just lovely.

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

@Derp

Counterpoint: you reap what you sow.

When the Kindle came out, Amazon put the screws to the publishers. They fell in line as big box bookstores started to die out. That Apple put the screws in a similar way does not make me cry for them in the slightest.

Have I stopped buying Apple shit? Yes. But let’s not pick on this little corporate skirmish as the best reason to do so. Amazon started the fire, and Apple adapted to it.

Oh, no, I have a myriad of reasons to hate Apple. This is just but a drop in the pond.

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

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/23/20991659/ebook-amazon-kindle-ereader-department-of-justice-publishing-lawsuit-apple-ipad

"But Apple couldn’t enter the ebook market while charging consumers five dollars more per unit than its biggest competitor was. It needed some assurance that no one would have a cheaper product than it had. So it made a deal with five of the Big Six publishers (Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan; Random House, then the biggest trade publishing house, abstained): They could all sign on to Apple’s agency model, as long as they guaranteed that they’d also use that same agency model with every other retailer they worked with. That way, Amazon, too, would be forced to sell its ebooks for $14.99 — and if it refused, publishers could withhold their ebooks from Amazon and make them exclusive to Apple.

Publishers agreed to the deal. And just like that, everything changed."

Solution: Everyone quit buying Apple shit.

@Arkandel said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

To clarify on that point, my intention in the context of this thread is to define 'power' mechanically.

I mean -- I'm not sure that you can mechanically define an 'ideal' power level as a matter of general terms. The 'ideal' power level, mechanically, is just the one that lets the PCs have a reasonable chance of overcoming the challenges that you put before them in the story that they want to tell while still involving some real risk.

That's going to different drastically between every game world. In order to know the 'ideal' mechanical level, you have to know the world you're working in. I don't think you can do it in reverse as easily (though i suppose you could look at the range and then design a world around it, but that seems like trying to roll a boulder up a hill.)

To the specific bullet points:

I think that most PCs should start as beginners and move to probably be in the intermediate range, somewhere. But that is also a byproduct of overall lethality / difficulty, which tends to be scaled down greatly in MU.

I think that having a spectrum of character abilities is really essential, but that doesn't have to be a very wide gulf, especially not from a story perspective.

Characters should reach higher levels of power through risk/reward proportionality. I don't think it should be a mere function of time, because time alone doesn't really present any risk.

Power caps are usually a good idea, though they don't have to be static. What form they take varies as wildly as everything else, and depends on the same stuff as the first paragraph.

@mietze

Not talking about WoD specifically. This is also the case on some non-WoD games that I've seen/played. This is really just more of a general question.The game I am currently working on isn't even WoD.

I don't mind people being in private rooms. People need to be able to have privacy. As most people who have RPed with me can attest, if I can't find at least some mode to have a decent one-on-one without getting dogpiled, I get mighty cranky.

I'm just concerned that letting the grid get too big with permanent rooms doesn't really do anyone any favors. As someone who started their staff life as a builder, I can't tell you the amount of times that I've had someone request 10+ room builds because clearly the bedroom needs a master bathroom, that's gonna see a lot of RP, and then people get so proud of their little build that they don't ever go anywhere else. I'm not sure that some kind of punitive solution is really the way to go, though. I'd much prefer the carrot, or to just design it with the intention of drawing people together in the first place, which is the ideal.

I've got a pretty thick skin when it comes to people screaming about something. I'm sure that this game will see a lot of that anyway, really. We've planned for it so far as to put up a Vision file that basically just says "yeah, we get that it isn't for everyone, but this is what we are shooting for."

I guess the meat of the question is -- what game-design patterns can be instituted that can meaningfully draw people out of hiding without having to beat them into submission to do it?

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

So, uh, Elsa sure does enter a lot of tight tunnels while singing about having confusing new feelings that nevertheless seem right and make her tingle, huh?

Have an upvote for causing a very near literal spittake.

So my general thoughts on this:

'Power levels' are kind of a red herring, because a 'power level' is really defined by what a character can do within the world, and whether or not there are more powerful people than them.

Take DnD, like you mentioned. What is the actual different between a level 1 and a level 20 character? Better gear, better abilities, but does that automatically make a level 20 character some kind of god-king, destined to rule over all that he sees before him? Or does it make him a seasoned but still very human (or whatever) member of his profession, just as mortal as the next guy but far more capable of keeping himself alive?

In the series I'm reading right now (A Land Fit for Heroes), all of our protagonists are incredibly capable individuals that have survived numerous tribulations and probably qualify as high-tier characters in the DnD world, with fantastic weapons and magical abilities, plus fighting finesse that outstrips pretty much everyone else alive. But you get them surrounded by four or five mooks and they still worry about dying, because they aren't that different, really.

I think that's the ideal that I would shoot for. Rather than focus on power levels, focus on the role that the characters play in the range of their various powers, and keep it grounded and somewhat realistic. Yes, that 20th level wizard has some impressive magic at his beckon call, and that 20th level barbarian can probably cleave his way through a small crowd -- but are they unique in the world? What level is the captain of the guard? The army generals? The king's protectors?

Give them enough to make them shine without outshining everything around them.

@mietze said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

I think it would be a little harder to adapt for a permanent-grid-less game, for me personally, because I like being able to use rooms I dont have to create in order to seek RP, but for the right game I would definitely be willing to try and adapt.

Well, yeah. The grid still serves a purpose. It shows you the layout of the world. My thing is more -- too big of a grid and you just start to dilute players and RP, really. So the question was 'how big is too big'?

One of the bit things on games lately is that people just aren't actually playing them, I've found. There are plenty of characters, plenty of places, ongoing plots -- and a ton of people just idling in the OOC lounge or private builds and not even bothering to try to leave to go find RP. I'm just curious if taking away some of the barriers/crutches that are used to avoid going out to the grid at large might ease some of that.

@sibermaus said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

My only request as an old fashioned MUXer is: Make sure all the help files are somewhere on the MU. I don't always want to have to open a PDF or a web browser to remind me how to use the game's CharGen.

Faraday makes that pretty easy on Ares. The process of creating the help file is part of the process of creating the plugin, which harbors the commands. So unless you're just being super lazy and skip it there's no reason that it wouldn't be on the game itself.