Best posts made by faraday

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

@faraday There's some truth to your statement. But you're also, I feel, ignoring a very important part of what's being said. Its not that there's AN antagonistic character, or even A FEW antagonistic characters. Its that some people are finding (or have found, for those of us no longer/not playing) that EVERY interaction is antagonistic, often unreasonably so.

I wasn't ignoring it, just presenting a slightly different viewpoint. I mean, as others have said - you can have a white knight domineering every scene just as easily as you can have an antagonist doing so. The problematic behavior isn't "being a white knight" or "being an antagonist", it's the domineering part. I've seen conflicting info about whether or not that's actually the case here.

As a corollary example: Imagine if I posted here complaining about a game, "ZOMG, there's nothing but bar scenes". Sure, that's a legitimate reason to not like a game. It's not my preference on what to play. Doesn't mean the people in the bar are doing anything wrong. I feel an air of WrongFun on this thread that rubs me the wrong way. Dunno, maybe I'm misreading it. I don't play there and have no pony in this race.

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

But overall - this thread makes me feel like that I should really sit down to learn more web-dev stuff. I can do it, but it's not really coming easily to me, dammit ...

Web dev doesn't come easy to anyone. And that's kind of the problem I ran into with Ares. It's 1000% easier to add the text-based commands to Ares than to add anything on the web side. It can be overwhelming, especially to folks without a lot of coding experience. People have done it, but it is not an easy learning curve.

Also, with Django - I wouldn't be surprised if you eventually run into the same issues I had when Ares was using server-side rendering. The more I added to the portal and the more people used it, it started to really impact server performance. That's why I shifted to a Javascript framework for the front-end. Not only did it improve performance, it also enabled more client-side fancy features. Unfortunately, that just adds yet another several layers of complexity to the mix (and another language to learn).

@WTFE said in Fires of Hope: A Star Wars Story:

This leaves the third option (the one you chose) which will lead to endless shitfits over favouritism.

@lordbelh said:

accusations of staff favoritism

Unless I missed something, it sounded like they were putting the force concepts up for a player vote. I'm not sure that making it a popularity contest is really much of an improvement, mind you, but crying staff favoritism seems like kind of a stretch.

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

I know in a lot of systems (WoD, D&D, etc...) initiative is a big deal in combat, but thankfully that's not a thing in FS3... and is one of the things I really appreciate about it.

Glad it's helpful!

And you probably knew this but for anyone who didn't - FS3 does actually have an initiative system; it's just all handled behind the scenes by the code. Players all declare actions in parallel and pose in parallel, but when the code is resolving actions it does matter what order people go in. If A shoots B first, then B is now suffering wound modifiers when they try to attack C. It actually does make a big difference, it's just buried under the hood.

@TimmyZ, @Packrat isn't referring to pool limit, but to the fact that someone who spends 8 chargen points on Melee: 6 / Hunting: 1 / Politics: 1 will have a perceived OOC disadvantage versus someone who spends 8 points on Melee: 8 and plans to just buy up Hunting and Politics later very cheaply with XP. I don't want to derail your thread with an argument over why it is the way it is, but nevertheless, some people don't like the way the system works.

The design of FS3 expects you to combat this with a soft app review (e.g. "no, sorry, there's no way your nobleman doesn't know how to ride or deal with politics - spend some points in those") and by setting minimal starting skills. For example, on BSGU everyone has to start with a set of skills to represent basic military training, plus some background skills. As long as you meet those minimums, you can min/max yourself to your heart's content.

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

No matter how clear I try to be in the type of Mu I'm after, something is lost in translation.

Dude, I once went for "Battlestar-themed space rescue/firefighters" and ended up with "Sopranos in Space." There are all kinds of things that cause clashes of expectations. Doesn't make you a bad game-runner.

@Auspice said in BSG: Unification:

Personally, I'm hoping for a multi-day (3-5~) recon team mission at some point. But I may be one of the only ones cool with being off the main grid for that long.

Yeah I don't have a problem with it as long as the people involved volunteer to go off-grid. Don't like to force that on people.

@SG The reason combats go fast is that there's no pose order. The combat system spits out all the results at once at the beginning of the turn, so everyone has the same frame of reference for what happened. They can just pose their reactions and their intent for the next turn.

Sure, occasionally you get a situation where somebody needs to tweak something after seeing Bob's pose, or wants to wait for Bob's pose before they go, but the vast majority of poses can just come in any order. Even with 10+ people, you can get through a turn in 15 minutes or less.

@Auspice said in Star vs Ensemble Cast - Why Theme is Vital:

I can have two Battlestar games. One is about the beginning of the war, the rise of the Cylons, and humanity's fumble. The other is about the end stages of the war when humanity has to find a place to rebuild. Both are BSG. But both have very different atmospheres (IC). One is about failure the other is about hope. One can become the other, yes, but the driving theme at the start is still different.

I have to disagree a little bit.

"BSG in the beginning of the Cylon War" is a setting too. Within that setting you could do all kinds of themes. Inter-colonial politics. Post-apocalyptic trapped-in-a-ruined-city. Space family soap opera (ala Caprica) centered around Cylon research. Or the one I chose for BSGU, aka "WWII in space shoot-em-up".

I prefer the terms setting and hook.

Setting is just the time/place/environment that the game is set.

Hook is more about what you're going to do within that environment.

Without a hook, it's just a city sandbox.

@Auspice said in BSG: Unification:

I may love @faraday a little for this.

Thanks @Auspice. Glad folks are having fun. I'm still smoothing out the edges around the new scene stuff but I do like the wiki posting (which was inspired by @ixokai at Marvel '63) and the fact that it auto-logs the scenes to the web portal (inspired by Arx).

Example Web Portal Scene

@The-Sands theme by Auspice’s definition doesn’t require a common goal. Westerns are a good example. Little House and Deadwood both have similar settings with wildly different themes yet no common goal for characters to pursue.

7th Sea has a really neat setting, but I've never understood what you would do on a 7th Sea MU. Like, sure, "live in the pirate era". But going back to what was discussed on How to Change MU*ing - what would the PCs do on a day to day basis? Without a coherent hook it seems like it would just end up being "Dating Game: Theah Edition".

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This amuses me because I remember you being resistant to those in-game logging options and I was a big proponent when we discussed the idea back on BSU.

Well I wasn't resistant to the idea, I was resistant to coding it into Ares because I worried that the "OMG you mean staff can dig into the database and read my pages!?!?!" hysteria would drive people away from playing on Ares games. In the end the demand for accessing pages via the portal reached critical mass, and I decided "eh, screw it, if you're gonna play on games where the staff is so untrustworthy you're worried that they're gonna go digging through your pages... the code is really the least of your problems."

@ganymede said in Good TV:

Solo is under-rated. If you watch it as a heist movie, as opposed to a space opera movie, it is pretty fucking sweet.
Similarly, Rogue One is an excellent war movie.

Star Wars is a universe in which you can tell many different kinds of stories. Too many SW fans seem to think only one kind of story is valid, though, and much drama results.

(Like those bemoaning Rebels for being too simplistic and not gritty enough. Guys, it's a kids cartoon.)

@Arkandel said in Consent in Gaming:

I think the disconnect here is trying to create a catch-all rule that applies forever to all situations.

Sure, but that's not what I'm saying at all.

As with any social endeavor, there are any number of reasons why somebody might want to bow out of doing a thing. I'm tired. I have work to do. I just don't feel like a bar scene tonight. My kid just woke up. I have to be up at 6am. Whatever. Literally nobody is arguing that somebody should be chained to their keyboard and forced to RP.

But when you come up with lame reasons to get out of social things, there are social consequences for that. "I don't like to RP out negative things happening to my character" is a lame reason, IMHO. YMMV of course - that's why it's a social consequence and not a disciplinary issue.

There are also various reasons why games historically have preferred/insisted on certain things happening on-camera. I mean, is anybody seriously arguing that off-camera incidents have the same dramatic impact as on-camera ones? If that were the case, why RP out anything? I've even seen it taken to an extreme on some games where "If it wasn't RPed, it didn't happen". Personally I think that's silly, but I do get where they were coming from.

All that, to me, is entirely different from having protections in place to let people opt out of content that is potentially triggering/upsetting.

@ominous said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@Too-Old-For-This has pointed out that apparently it's freaking common, so nevermind.

43 deaths across 10 years and thousands of movie and TV productions is really not all that common, thankfully. Especially when you consider that the industry routinely employs explosives, firearms, low-flying helicopters, fight scenes, vehicle chases, and countless other dangerous stunts.

Don't get me wrong, 43 is still 43 too many. As Brandon Lee's sister said, “No one should ever be killed by a gun on a film set. Period.” More broadly, nobody should ever be killed making pretendy fun time entertainment.

But until everything is CGI, there's always going to be an element of risk inherent to Hollywood productions. That's why it's critical for people to follow the safety procedures, which early reports suggest was not the case on Rust. I suspect a negligence lawsuit is inevitable, maybe even endangerment charges over the dangerous set.

So I don't know how we got sort of fixated on the "CO yells at subordinate" as this hours-long ordeal of boringness, but that just hasn't been my experience at all. I had plenty of scenes on BSGU (here's one) where folks actually willingly engaged in getting taken to task by the CO. The players were good sports, the scenes were kind of amusing and reasonably short, they moved the story forward, and they spurred other RP and deeper character connections that I don't think would have happened if the parties involved were just "yeah whatever, you got yelled at".

@23quarius said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

I am ignorant and dumb, why the hell would live rounds be anywhere on a movie set?

That's the million dollar question that will determine whether this is a criminal matter or just negligence.

Unless you're Adam Savage shooting Iron Man armor for a documentary or something, industry safety standards say there should never be live rounds on sets.

Yet this sort of error has happened before--even on military training exercises where regulations are even stricter. Somebody had live rounds from some other day and gets them mixed up, leaves a round in the chamber, has a misfire that doesn't clear (ala the Crow incident), grabs the wrong box off the shelf when preparing the batch of ammo for the day, etc. That's why it's so critical to have MULTIPLE levels of safety checks involved, so that any one human screw-up isn't going to kill somebody. And why it's so staggering that all those levels failed on Rust.

Snap caps are so cheap and come in colors and materials that are so obviously fake you can see they're fake from the MOON, do they not use them???

There are various reasons in a film why you don't want to be able to see that the bullets are fake. Like in this case, because it's a revolver and you can see the rounds in the cylinder. Or if the actor has to load bullets during the scene. You want dummy rounds that can't fire but look real.

Also, many directors feel that blanks give a more immersive feel. They look better (CGI muzzle flashes don't quite look right) and the actors react more realistically (the pop of gunpowder in a blank makes them flinch). And of course it's cheaper.

Sure, we can sit here and say that everybody should just use CGI because it's safer, but where do you draw the line? Do we ban on-set explosions too because somebody might get hurt? What about wire stunts? Car chases? I don't think that's the right answer.

Instead perhaps there should be more stringent licensing or regulations about armorers. Maybe inspections, penalties, etc. to discourage productions from cutting corners on safety.

@Thenomain It's come up a couple times - I believe Sunny mentioned it originally. But regardless, my point isn't about length it's about the prevalent sentiment that it would inherently be boring and is "exactly the sort of scene that would mostly be glazed over in a book or a movie". (Which is not really my experience with books/movies either, but that's neither here nor there.)

@Derp I don't work in the film industry specifically, but I deal with safety regulations and risk analysis in my job so a lot of that training translates. I got a bit hyperfocused on this particular incident wondering how the heck it could have happened, and ended up spending entirely more time than is healthy researching the subject. A LOT of armorers have spoken out about the typical on-set safety practices.

Here's a good article from American Cinematographer that pre-dates the Rust tragedy and explains a lot about how firearms are normally handled on set.

@JinShei Thanks!

@JinShei said in Serious Question About Making A MU:

There are a lot of moving parts and I have broken many of them.

Part of this is because, as mentioned, Ares is still in beta. There are many configuration items, and sometimes it's not as tolerant as it should be to improper settings. It's continually being improved, though.

But as you know (but FYI for others), most cases are easily resolved on the Discord. "I changed the foo settings and now I'm getting this weird error on app review." "Oh, it's because xyz is blank." Having detailed error logs helps a lot