Best posts made by faraday

@sunny That’s quite true, but those people, like the immune compromised, could be covered by herd immunity if all the people who -can- get vaccines do. It’s the people willfully opting out that are putting everyone else at risk.

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

Yesterday, there were twelve scenes that were logged and posted (could have been more that weren't logged). We don't have time to read that much content, man.

I don't see though why you can't just read the log summaries. That takes 5 minutes, and it's pretty easy to tell from a summary: "Oh, it's just Batman having coffee again" versus "Oh, look, Batman foiled a bank robbery, cool."

I mean, if you don't want to make a qualitative assessment part of your idle policy, that's your business. I don't care. But the idea that it's somehow impossible for staff to gauge a player's activity through logs doesn't fly with me. I do it. Granted my games are smaller, but I'm also only one staffer. It scales.

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

Keeping your pens neat on your desk, or organising things a certain way, is a compulsion. It might even be regarded as obsessive. Unless you have some serious impediment to your function, it's not a disorder.

Look, my family has OCD too and that's just factually incorrect. It is possible to have mild OCD, just as it's possible to have "mild" a whole lot of disorders. The impediment to your function does not need to be serious to qualify as OCD. But don't believe me, check out Psychology Today or a host of other actual resources on the subject.

I agree the term gets overused as @Auspice is griping about. So do ADD, depression, bipolar and other disorders. I'm not saying it's okay to joke about that or whatnot. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a mild, non-debilitating form of these disorders.

@ixokai said in FCs on Comic MUs:

I know it can be done; but I do find it pretty out there a suggestion for 94 FC's

I'm seriously not trying to beat a dead horse but just to be helpful...

I know you guys have some sort of automated scene code right? Just have the players flag the type of log. For example: social/plot-related/event. Participating in an event scene is worth 3 points, plot-related 2, social 1 (or however you want to weight them). Then the idle policy could be X minimum logs, Y minimum points... or tiered by FC type... or whatever.

Sure, it's imperfect. There's some subjectiveness about what people consider "plot related". But it's also 100% automated with no staff intervention beyond some casual oversight of "Hey wait that log looks like it's mis-tagged". And as @Ganymede said, the players can help flag those kind of things.

Again, I'm not saying you should do this. That's your business. I just don't think it needs to be some kind of crazy burden.

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

As a kid, I had a tendency to find something that interested me and just ignore everything else—including, sometimes, sleep—to do that thing. Reading, writing, coding, tinkering with electronics, etc. This would happen instead of my chores, sometimes instead of actually coming to dinner, etc. Meanwhile, things like chores or homework were really hard for me to get started (yay executive dysfunction!) until the eleventh hour, at which point I would work in a panic-induced state of intense focus.

Oh, yeah, totally relating to the hyperfocus. My family always teased me for being in my own little world with absolutely no sense of time passing. "I'll be there in a minute!" Hah. Yeah, no. And the last-minute thing? Same.

It's funny (ironic-funny not lol funny) now to see it from my kids' perspective. Alexa says the timer's up. "There's no WAY that was 30 minutes, Mom! No fair!" Like somehow I've managed to establish this secret code with Amazon where I say "Alexa set 30 minute timer" but it only sets 10 or something.

@tempest Does active discussion have anything to do with whether a game still exists?
Are we expecting game owners to come by and bump their thread every few months just to say "Hey, by the way, we're still here" ? If not, then sifting through pages of ad threads trying to figure out what games may or may not still be open is not a very user-friendly experience for someone seeking a game to play.

Now if the admins don't want to do that housekeeping because this is a discussion forum and not a games directory, that's their business.

@Ganymede @mietze To clarify: a couple of us suggested moving the threads to a "Game Graveyard" section, not deleting them.

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

In some ways, I'm grateful for my differently-functioning brain. It took me a very long time to appreciate the simple fact that I would have doubtless been the most bored and miserable, sickly child, otherwise.

I agree. I like this lady's video about that. She say ADHD is related to the "novelty-seeking gene" and actually can be advantageous to society in many ways. Just not, y'know, sitting in a school desk all day. I don't know the science she's citing, if it's bunk or not, but I like the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWxmEv7fOFY

@Ganymede @Three-Eyed-Crow Yeah, 'treat' represents first aid. It's a one-time thing (you can't bandage a wound three times and expect to get better results) and it only gives you 1 healing point (negligible in terms of how fast you heal, but important in combat because it reduces damage modifiers). But all you really need is to either modify that command's behavior or make a different command that could be used multiple times and/or gave you more healing points each time.

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

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

Kids are good for that too. "Mom, when are you gonna start dinner?" Ooops.

The days when they're at their dad's house are the ones when I tend to get wickedly off-schedule and eat dinner at 9pm or something stupid.

@auspice said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

It was just two people and one was... rather unreasonable in their response. There's actually a lot of folks around here who don't mind consent-based roleplay at all.

Yeah, I'd dare anyone to find a single post on MSB favoring consent-based games that wasn't immediately met with snark, disdain, cries of "wrongfun" and/or insults about "wusses who just can't stand to lose".

@DariRyu you're not alone. I personally prefer consent games too. But yes, it is a distinctly minority opinion around here.

@Arkandel said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

For instance does a question such as "we're currently a team consisted only of men, how do you feel about that?" sound like we're preparing to listen for feedback and keep things professional, safe and constructive or signal we might be shedding too much of a spotlight on gender right out of the gate?

I think anyone who works in tech is already aware of and used to the imbalance. (I have frequently been the only woman on my team.) Calling attention to it like that seems like an uncomfortable spotlight that would probably be taken the wrong way.

I will also second everything that @Sparks said. Particularly the issue about writing actual code under pressure. Sure it sounds good on paper as a live skills test, but for introverted people and/or women (and lucky me as an introverted woman) it can be particularly nerve-wracking.

If you set aside the superpower stuff, I really don't see the appreciable difference between FS3 and nWoD. The die mechanics are virtually identical (just d8 vs d10), the skills work the same (attr + skill + mods), and chargen is only slightly different (fixed skill list vs. freeform background skills).

Where WoD gets complicated is with merits and flaws (which you could easily just ditch if you hate them as much as I do) and superpowers.

"But Fara, we have to consider superpower stuff for a Magicians game." Sure, but the existing WoD mage system doesn't fit and FS3 has no magic system, so either way you're going to end up cooking up something custom. Just cook up something simple and it shouldn't matter which system you use.

(Unless of course you plan on doing mass combats, then FS3 offers significant benefits.)

@BlondeBot said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

The person who can show up more often, when asked, on short notice has the advantage.

There are certainly some jobs where that's the case, but there are tons of jobs where it isn't. Particularly the M-F 9-5 jobs that you tend to find in the tech industry. As long as the person is able to fulfill their assigned schedule, with time off within the company's allowed limits, who the heck cares what their schedule is outside of work? They could be working three jobs to support their ailing mother, they could have a kid, how is that any of the company's business?

@thenomain said in Alternate Game Systems:

where we realize that the entire game lives on a computer so why not let the computer do all the work.

One thing to note - in my experience, MUSHers don't do too well when it comes to trusting the computer when it comes to skills.

Entirely too many actual conversations (give or take):

"Should I pick Good or Great for my Firearms?"

"Well which one describes your character more?"

"F-- that. I want to know how many dice I get for each one."

"There are no dice. This is a computer RPG. The probabilities of success at different difficulty ratings are posted <here> if you really care."

"This system sucks."

Couple years later...

"OK! The system now uses dice. Each rating rolls 1d8."
"Argh. I failed and I can't see the dice results. This system sucks."

@BlondeBot said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I have never heard of 'Sorry, I'm not coming in today because I'm volunteering.' being an acceptable excuse to miss work in any vocation, for any gender.

I have (from some more socially-focused companies), but that's completely beside the point here.

I think that there are two points being argued here, and that they're getting confused because they're related but distinct.

• A bias against people with outside of work commitments, which may impact their ability to do the extracurricular things that employers look for in the hiring process (my original point).
• A bias against people with obligations during work hours, which may necessitate them using more of their PTO days than someone else without said obligations. (Gany's point)

Neither of these is explicitly bound to gender. There was a single dad at my previous job who took just as much time off for kid obligations as me, a single mom.

However it is well-demonstrated that women, statistically, are frequently the target of these biases, and that it is a part of why women are underrepresented in the tech industry.

Also bear in mind, nobody's said that anyone of any gender should be given a pass for taking unexcused absences beyond the company's allowed amount, nor should they be given a pass for not being able to meet the requirements of their job.

One other random thought... If we take a step back and ask ourselves what purpose does a desc serve?

For me, the purpose is to help others visualize my character. And frankly: "Jessica Chastain in a flight suit" helps a thousand percent more than anything I could ever write.

But I think other folks would view the purpose as secondary. They would see descs as a form of creative expression. A place to stretch one's prose. And they want more than just the bare-bones facts of hair, features, clothes.

Neither is right or wrong, better or worse, it's just different preferences.

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

Oh hey, a disturbing number of these ring true for me. Probably for you also!

If by 'disturbing number' you mean "almost all of them"? Totally.

@thatguythere Fair enough. I think that's where technology becomes useful though. On my games, I've had a +wiki command that let me create someone's "starter" wiki page as part of chargen approval. If they never updated it again after that, that's fine. At least it's there. Now with Ares you don't even have to do that much. The instant someone's approved, their web portal page appears.

Folks like @ghost who don't like wikis for philosophical reasons... yeah, totally get it. But lots of folks just don't like them because the existing implementations of wikis have been a PITA. We can do better.

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

There's a reason for this.
They expect their developers to document as they go.

I think the reason is even more insidious than that.

Technical people don't like reading instructions. (Ironic, right?)

So there's this pervasive philosophy that documentation is worthless.

So nobody writes documentation. Or if they do, they half-ass it.

So then the documentation IS worthless or non-existent.

So then nobody will even consider hiring a tech writer or becoming better at documentation or whatever because they feel that documentation is useless.

And you get this vicious self-fulfilling cycle.

I've written MOUNTAINS of documentation that nobody has ever read. It makes me sad.

My process is similar to what @Seraphim73 mentioned. I start with an "elevator pitch" - or what Fate would call "high concept". This usually has three parts: a professional hook, a theme hook and a complication.

For 100 MUSH: "veteran archer (prof) who served in the Ice War (theme) who's all 'I'm too old for this s----' while saddling up for yet another conflict (complication).

For BSGU: "mob doctor (prof) for the Space IRA (theme) forced to work with the enemy for the greater good of defeating the Cylons (complication).

From there it's just a matter of fleshing out a few key details to make the character three-dimensional - family, career path, hobbies, that sort of thing. I use my character creation article as a guide but rarely hit every point for every character. Unless some important bit of personality falls out of their background, I usually don't figure that out until I start playing them.

I'm somewhat leery of pre-existing background ties with other characters. It deprives you of a lot of the MU bread and butter "getting to know you" RP, and it strains my inner sense of continuity because there's so much about the relationship that my character would know that I don't. I'm not the best at winging it and often feel off-balance playing that sort of thing. But I have done it sometimes - siblings, cousins, old comrades, old flames - and it can certainly be interesting.

I will totally replay concepts, though the theme hook and complications usually help me put a fresh spin on it each time.