Posts made by Derp

Rocketman is solid gold.

Child's play is also excellent, assuming you're not married to the original mythology.

I've tried joining this game twice now. Both times, I mainly failed. The first one, the character I made just didn't click. The second time, right now, I got a new job that (surprise!) takes up way, way more of my day than my last one, but also pays much better, soooo. This just doesn't seem to ever be in the cards for me, sadly. Every time I start and try to commit something kicks me in the teeth.

It seems like a fun game. Plenty of people I know have fun there. It has interesting stories, and the people seem chill.

Pros that I saw in my short time:

Cool people. Relatively inclusive story. Active playerbase.

Cons:

The learning curve is a real thing, and the wiki is out of date on some things. Especially on things where it says 'don't worry about this, TD will do this for you', when it turns out that's maybe not so much the actual case.

Also, in this latest story, it seems like there was a general expectation that people knew what to do, and how to do it, which -- as a relatively new player I found kind of offputting. It's cool that everyone is on the same level xp-wise, but some of us are still trying to learn, and when you have oldbies slinging stuff left and right and able to do all kinds of fun shit while you're still trying to figure out how the dice work, it doesn't make it feel substantially different from an xp game, even if everyone is technically equal.

I think that was the biggest drawback for me. I had people there who were willing to teach, but the tutorializing should probably start early in the stories. Throw some easy pitches so that the newbies can figure out what they're doing before the system masters just roll everything they've got at everything in the scene. It was really demoralizing realizing that I had no idea what to do while everyone around me was just jumping on top of things seamlessly.

Overall, 4/5. Information could be updated and the system could be a little smoother to transition into, but not bad.

I still vote for a 3.5 Dark Sun game.

@Lotherio said in What to do when your mush is attacked:

Person and Person are made up names as far as I know. Used as a proxy to see where one would use names when utilizing those commands in TinyMux.

Yeah, no. That's way too on the nose.

WTF, @skew?

Still having a ton of fun with Days Gone. Platinum trophy was surprisingly easy to get, if you just invest some time into it. Don't even have to kill all the hordes or collect every single collectible. (I mean, I did those things, but...)

New patch bringing with it a harder difficulty. Think I might give that a playthrough.

Buuuuut also decided to replay Days Gone. Still a fantastic game. Still get a lot of mileage out of that one.

And still working on beating the Resident Evil 2 remake.

Can recommend all of the above.

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

It'd require a purge of some games (I mean, I guess.... I don't play them all all the time? >.>) since I'm currently sitting at about 1.1TB used.

I know there are ways to set them up where things you use often go to the SSD, and things you don't get moved to a more traditional disk drive. Maybe an option?

@Thenomain said in X-Cards:

It's fairly easy to tell if someone is abusing a system to manipulate a scene's outcomes. Not everyone, of course, but most people are terrible at making up believable lies. And even if they're not entirely believable lies, if the outcome is a matter of still coming up with a realistic IC situation then so be it.

But this system is no-questions-asked. There's no need to lie. They just slap the veto card down and everyone is expected to change course.

Nah. Still not a fan.

I think @bored has it right on this.

But what's more, this could easily be misused by people just interested in controlling the scene to more easily meet their whims.

I'd be pretty firm against something like this, personally. If others wanna give it a shot, then by all means, but I already feel like there are too many people constantly bringing their RL into the gaming environment in manipulative ways.

Potato runs in Linux just fine. I use it. So if Chrome supports that, I think you're pretty set.

squeeeeeeeeee!

@surreality

I like and respect you too. Truly. But in this particular instance, I respectfully disagree, on several points.

@Auspice said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

Because sometimes I see things on these boards that starts to slip into the latter a bit and anyone who backs off and goes 'woah woah I can't be expected to take care of someone else's mental health' starts being accused of victim shaming/blaming and I am very not okay with that.

This. Right here. This hobby has what I'm just going to flat-out call Professional Victims. The ones that always seem to get into a situation where someone has wounded them grievously, and those bastards deserve to pay for what they did. But then, they take no steps to take care of themselves. To guard their emotions. To step away from bad situations. To be fucking proactive.

@surreality said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

the only reason you could be upset about anything that happens on a game or in interactions with people you know from a game is because you're mentally unstable.

This isn't remotely what I said. I said that the only power people have over you is the power that you give them, and that if you are constantly living in a state of fear/anxiety/anger or whatever about something that happens on a game that you voluntarily log into, that is a sign of instability. Being angry is fine. Being upset is fine. Living in that state constantly, willingly, is not fine. It is a problem.

Call it victim-blaming if you want. But if people are so invested that they can't see what long-term damage it's doing to them, and are unable to walk away in favor of something healthier? Yeah. That's a problem.

@Ghost said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

I believe that there is very little actual real damage that happens in this hobby and that cases of cruel behavior, stalking, and cheating at games are the actual offenses.

You know, I'm just gonna put this out here:

I agree with Ghost on this. And I want to take it one step further.

Yes, there are some bad actors out there, but ultimately, in almost every instance, they cannot actually hurt you. It's words, on a screen, on a game. You always have the option to walk away. There are some very rare exceptions to this, such as @Sunny's thing with her ex, I suppose, but the vast majority of the time? The only power these people have over you are the power that you give them.

And so, with that, I think that some of you are invested way too deeply in this shit. Like, to an unhealthy level. Sure, there are bad actors out there that do questionable things, but if you're letting them have so much power over you that they can cause you long-term anxiety issues, this level of paranoia, and anger that lasts for literal years, you maybe need to reevaluate how deep into this particular rabbit hole you've gone.

Someone else said that they think emotional distance is one of the problems with the hobby. I concur with the thought, but not the conclusion. You need emotional distance. You need to not be so invested in this stuff that a setback or a loss is an emotional devastation. If you have anxiety so badly that you are constantly on the lookout for X or Y person, and the very thought of maybe, just maybe running across them causes you actual distress?

You need to step away.

Go make an RL friend. Find an alternate hobby. Take up video games. Something. But for the love of god, realize that this level of investment in and of itself is also a problematic behavior, and a sign of instability.

Just -- detach, people. For everyone's good.

I'm with Ghost and Faraday. Outside of MUDs, this hobby is a couple hundred people, tops, not the thousands that we'd like to believe, as many people connect to different games at once and thus skew those numbers.

And I very much disagree that most people in this hobby don't know of MSB. Some people will play ignorant because of social stigma dating back to WORA, and others will give snider remarks about how they don't follow such things, but the population that hasn't heard of this place is almost assuredly in the minority.

@faraday

Yeah. I've been running into this problem recently. It just seems like people don't want to do things, and no matter how many carrots I out out there, this doesn't change.

Sometimes I wonder if sticks would be the better answer, but everyone gets up in arms about that. Negative consequences for failures to act should be a thing too.

@Sunny said in Our Tendency Towards Absolutes:

For the people who are still playing on games, do you feel there's a lot of people either ready to write one another off, or just in general hating each other to the extent that they can't co-exist? Is this actually peoples' experiences on the games?

God, yes. So much yes. So much shit-talking and vague hatred happens, on every major game I have played on in the last three years, regardless of genre.

For the most part I enjoy it. I enjoy the RP. I enjoy the games and the stories.

What I don't enjoy is all the extraneous baggage that tends to come with it. At some point people started piling their RL into their games, and we had this weird culture shift where not wanting to deal with all that makes you a monster.

I am all for being supportive of people having issues. I really am. We all have times when we need a shoulder to lean on.

I'm not so much a fan of this growing feeling that a lot of "issues" people have in this hobby are a subtle way to manipulate things in their favor by using cultural expectations to their advantage, and the sheer levels of outrage that come along with it, or how so many people seem to have so many different issues that must always be recognized and accommodated. It's starting to feel improbable. And insincere. And pushing back against the sheer weight of that, and the just mountains of "traumas" going back for decades because of games...

It's exhausting.

@Tinuviel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Derp said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

We expect you to behave like an reasonable adult would in any other position of responsibility, and if you can't do that, then you don't belong there.

And what a reasonable adult would do is find someone else to do it for them, so that it still gets done. That's what a team is for.

In what universe do you get to pawn your work off on someone else because you've got personal beef with that bitch Brenda in accounting?

You leave your personal bullshit at the door, and focus on the work that needs done. That is what reasonable adults do all the time.

@Tinuviel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

If you're going to demand people interact with people they have an issue with, then frankly you're the one that needs to rethink the whole staffing thing.

If a staffer has such a personal bias against a person that they can't set it aside for a bit to do something like this, then they're not the kind of people that I want on my staff. If your personal opinions are so deeply ingrained that you absolutely cannot have a reasonable interaction with another player for a short span of time, then you don't belong on staff. Period. I don't have time for that kind of catty bullshit. I would ceratinly hope that others don't either.

That weak-ass 'forcing people to interact with people they have issues with' crap is crap. We expect you to behave like an reasonable adult would in any other position of responsibility, and if you can't do that, then you don't belong there.

@faraday said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

This may be an unpopular opinion, but here goes: Nobody - and I mean nobody - is entitled to my free time. It is for me to spend as I choose. If RPing with Fred is excruciating, then I'm not gonna RP with Fred, as player or as staff

Does Fred have any barriers to access to this NPC?

Are you the only one that plays this NPC?

Not all PCs get access to all NPCs for various reasons, but 'I don't like the player' is not one of them. Not for a staffer. You don't get to just arbitrarily decide that a player isn't worth your time, and therefore doesn't get access to said NPC, even if you are providing 'other ways to succeed', because that sometimes doesn't work.

Frankly, if you can't work past a personal bias like that to give a player necessary screen-time with the NPC in question, then I think there's a problem.

If a staffer on my game said that, I'd probably fire them. Not gonna lie. RP with who you want to in your free time on your PC. If you're on a staff bit, you're held to a higher standard. Or at least, I would hope.