@ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I don't know where you live, but this is a "find someone to present this bullshit to a school board" moment.
Yeah, it's on my list. I kinda know the school board president.
Like, I can understand maybe reading Wallace's speech in social studies class as part of a higher-grade study on segregation, but "Read George Wallace's 1963 inaugural speech to identify effective argument techniques" in 8th grade? Even my kid was like: WTF.
@thatguythere said in 'The Magicians' mechanics with FS3:
From my understanding Ares is a code base designed by Faraday that uses the newest version of FS3 also brought to us by Faraday. I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the newest FS3 since I have yet to play on a game that utilized it, (BSG and pirates aren't really my things) it looks thye the skill range has flattened but not the core mechanic seems to be unchanged.
Ares is an entire server, like PennMUSH and TinyMUX. Its core selling point is that it comes with all of the things we traditionally think of as softcode built in, so it's essentially a complete MUSH-in-a-box. It's also not done yet.
There's a blurb about all the Third Edition differences here.
@tnp said in 'The Magicians' mechanics with FS3:
I don't hate FS3 at all but I think it encourages combat more than RP. That's not a fault of the system but the ones playing it.
Lots of people use it for combat-centric games because, well, it's one of the few systems that comes with a built-in combat engine. But you can use it for anything. You can even uninstall the combat engine completely.
@ghost said in Difficulty with Friend/Gamer:
I want to approach them as a brother and recommend counseling and seeing a doctor about it, but I'm afraid they'll go super edgelord about it or storm off out of the friendship out of "chase me" rage.
The whole situation sucks. Sympathies.
Your concerns about them storming off could be on point, though at least you would have tried to help from a place of care and concern. Ignoring it and hoping it goes away probably isn't going to turn out great for the group as a whole. There might be a different kind of blow-up or other people just getting sick of it and quititng.
@nightshade said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
Yeah, I think this hesitation is why we've had a slew of boring, setting-less, theme-less WoD sandboxes over the last few years.
I think that extends beyond WoD games too, but on the flip side - it goes both ways, yo. If the overwhelming majority of players are either unwilling to expend any effort to learn an unfamiliar theme, or unwilling to expend the additional effort to find roleplay / stick with a smaller game with fewer players, then you reap what you sow. Niche games can work if people are willing to play them, but frankly most people aren't. So you end up with a niche graveyard.
@Ganymede said in MUers in the news?:
@Derp said in MUers in the news?:
Seriously? Are we going to do this dance again? Can you maybe, I dunno. Just fucking stop with the insistence on people having the "proper" skin color in 2022? Because that is SUCH a big "oof."
You know, it may very well be that the material itself is inherently racist.
"Racist" isn't necessarily the word I'd use, but I do think there's a lot of implicit bias in world design, and a degree of ignorance (in some cases willful) among those who cling to "book purity" as an argument against diversity.
I wrote a fantasy novel when I was a teenager. In my mind, it was modeled after medieval Europe, so in my mind all of the denizens of the main kingdom (and thus all the main characters) were white. This is not because it was somehow essential to the world or story for them to be so. It was just the implicit bias of an '80s Euro-American white kid who didn't understand the value or importance of diversity.
In the (laughably unlikely) event that someone were to make a show/movie today set in that world, it would be asinine to argue that all the main chars should be white just because that's how the book describes them. We can be better than that.
@arkandel said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):
It's not an accident no 'social system' has really been presented as a yardstick, that none of the mechanics our collective hobby has come up with have gotten any closer than "well, roll manipulation+persuasion versus composure or something"-type rolls.
I agree it's not an accident, but I think the reasons are very different. I don't think it's about trying to equate physical or social combat, but rather:
Nobody(*) has any problems implementing these sorts of manip+persuasion rolls against NPCs. The GM typically doesn't care, and if they do - they have executive fiat, rolls behind the screen, etc.
But that aside, I agree with your basic argument that games need to approach it differently. And I'd find it impossible to define all those personality traits in chargen. Heck, I'd have a hard time putting them to paper for a BSG char I've played for 3 years! I know her personality, but I'd have a hard time spelling it out.
@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
I don't think we've ruled out manual moderation or policy fixes.
@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
Heavy policing of every thread is simply not going to happen.
@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
since the appearance of civility still leaves a lot of leg room to be a shithead to others, it's beyond the scope of administrating MSB.
More moderation sounded pretty ruled out to me? Maybe I'm missing something.
As for policy fixes... when the bulk of the problem is people ignoring the already-existing policy about keeping the mud in the hog pit, forgive me for not thinking that additional policy is a viable solution.
@mietze said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):
I guess I fail to see why somehow the person rolling the social dice is somehow more taking away agenc
The agency argument isn't about "I should get what I want all the time". That's not agency, that's just being selfish.
Player Agency is about being able to control the character's thoughts and decisions.
That doesn't mean your character's thoughts are correct. You may completely misjudge someone or misjudge a situation.
That doesn't mean you character's decisions to act will be successful. There may be rolls involved to see whether your decision to do a cartwheel on ice results in a really cool move or you falling on your butt and breaking your leg.
And it doesn't make you immune to consequences or to random acts of nature or intentional acts from other players or NPCs. A building falling on you doesn't deprive you of agency, nor does a bullet fired by a sniper a mile away.
So yes, a social character rolling social skills to make my combat expert not kill the person they wanted to kill does deprive me of agency. Not because it invalidates my character's concept or combat skills, but because it takes away my ability as a player to control my character's thoughts and decisions. Incidentally, so would a social character manipulating my combat expert into killing someone, even though that is perfectly aligned with their concept.
Either you trust players to know their characters or you don't. Frankly I don't want to play on a role-playing game where someone else gets to play my character for me. That's agency.
@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
And call each other out. Not by attacking one another, but by a mere "Hey, that wasn't cool." Just like you'd (I'd hope) call a friend to task for being an asshole, pull someone here aside. It doesn't have to be out in public, but it can be in PMs or in your private chats / pages. We want to be a more uplifting, positive community? It begins with ourselves. Be better, yourself. Pressure your friends to be better. Start small.
It isn't even remotely like this, though. These people (for the most part) are not my friends - they're strangers on an internet forum. Moreover, they're strangers who by the very nature of the problem we're describing have demonstrated that civility and respect for the rules (and by extension other people on the forum) are beyond them. Someone with no authority telling other strangers on the Internet "that wasn't cool, knock it off" is most likely to be met by "hahaha yeah whatever" at best or "F you" at worst because these people don't care what we think. They may only marginally care what the mods think, but the mods at least have the authority to kick them if they don't listen. If there are flagging/downvote tools like on many forum software systems, I'll use them, but I'm not going to play Lone Ranger moderator. That's just not going to end well.
@mietze I think you're missing my point, or I wasn't clear. Every roll of the dice does not take away my agency. Only the ones that override what I feel my character's thoughts and decisions should be. Rolling to make a fire in the wild? Failing that doesn't deprive me of player agency. Nor does failing a drive roll. Or a knowledge roll (I don't mean facts when I say thoughts). Or a million other rolls.
Social rolls don't take away agency either when they're treated as performance rolls and not mind control rolls. Your social roll can tell me that your character sounds sincere. How I have my character react to that is agency.
Agency also doesn't mean I get to put my own OOC desires above what's IC. If you roll well on a bluff roll and my character has no reason to doubt you then my character should be bluffed.
None of this renders social rolls useless. It makes them work differently than combat rolls, yes, but it doesn't invalidate them IMHO.
ETA: To your point about damage... I can have my character decide to try to get up even though the +damage says she's too injured to succeed. That's not a loss of agency. A loss of agency would be if the damage system says something like: "your only possible action is to lie there blubbering and not even try to move" because it's then telling me what my character has decided to do. Code and rolls should set up situations (a rock falls on you; the car crashes; you've been shot in the leg and it hurts terribly and you can't use it effectively). Players should decide how their characters react to those situations.
@roz I can understand that, but IMHO constructive is constructive. If somebody posts something in the constructive zone, then the replies should be constructive. "You're a horrible person and I spit on your apology" isn't constructive, no matter how much of a horrible person they may be. (But if the mods want to move all apologies to the Gloves Off area, that's up to them.)
@sg said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
I deal with a LOT of students who have all of their points plunked into (Name grad program here) and like 0 into computer use or pretty much anything other than boiling Mr. Noodles.
Really? None of them read? None of them do a sport at some modest level? None of them have hobbies? Or interpersonal skills?
Most of us talking about rounding out characters aren't suggesting that you need pro levels at 7 different jobs, just that characters should have the skills that a functional human being would have in that world.
@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
That's how it has been done and clearly doesn't work. We've discussed deleting the offending posts and some people are very opposed to it.
But... that's not what Ark said?
@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
What we are considering doing instead is placing a warning into the thread itself ("Please stop attacking people here") and if it's not respected then we'll start deleting offending messages. If it keeps happening, well, we'll break out the banhammer to give those posters a time out.
I have the same concern @Sunny mentioned that by leaving the original post and just deleting any follow-ups it basically enables a one-time bully pass to whoever escalates first. Which seems like it would only make things more toxic, not less.
The original post needs to be nipped in the bud. That's the only way this will stop. Whether that means temporarily editing it (if nodebb allows mods to do this) to say "This post is in timeout" until the offender has time to edit it to meet the board standards, or deleting it, or moving it to the hog pit. Leaving it in the thread hasn't worked and IMHO will never work as an effective means of deterrent.
@ganymede said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
look at the total pool.
There are a few problems with that though:
It expects that people will be familiar with the dice mechanic and associated statistics to figure out what those pools give them in practice, which is often not at all obvious when you factor in modifiers, merits, etc. Especially for new people.
It doesn't provide any consistency across players. Two people may intend for their characters to be comparably skilled (let's say... both modestly successful pilots fresh out of flight school) and end up with wildly different dice pools completely by accident because they're just not on the same page as to what's appropriate.
So I get why people don't like to rely on the skill descriptions, because they're often wrong. (Apparently in WoD they're always wrong, but that's not true for all game systems and this isn't a WoD-only discussion.) But I think that they can provide a lot of value if you can manage to get them right.
@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
It's not slanderous or defamatory if it's true.
Yeah, it's a fine line but I do think there's an enforceable line there somewhere. 
ETA:
Like saying "this thing happened - beware" is something I haven't seen anyone object to.
The trouble is keeping it from devolving into:
"This thing happened"
"No it didn't!"
"Of course it did, you vile scumbag."
"You just have an axe to grind you lying garbage pile."
... and so on until the dumpster fire and popcorn GIFs come out.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
And this is my problem. My problem isn't that the flavor text is broken. I'm fine with broken flavor text. I look at it and go 'huh. That's stupid' and then move on. However, apparently some people want to say 'no, you can't do that, it's cheating'.
I really don't know where our wires are getting crossed.
<something> is written in the rulebook.
Player A sees <something> and says, "Wow, that's stupid. I'm gonna ignore that."
Player B sees the same thing and says, "No you can't ignore that - it's in the rules. That's cheating."
It really doesn't matter whether the <something> perceived to be broken is a mechanic (hello social conflict thread), flavor text (hello skill fluff thread), a bit of theme that someone thinks is nonsensical (hello Arx thread) or what. Different people have different tolerances for chucking bits out of the rulebook, whether you consider them "rules" or not.
@arkandel I don't think you're going to find better than linode's pricing for a high-memory droplet.
Redis is probably the reason that you need so much RAM. Using it as a cache layer to speed things up makes sense, but using it as a primary data source for a forum of this size seems non-ideal.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
Is it the earlier line that makes it sound like everyone needs to take it or is it the list of examples that suggests only people who spend quite a lot of time behind the wheel who should buy it?
Right - that's what I was getting at. Games/GMs need to decide which one to follow, and that decision may vary from one GM to another. Since it's unclear in the game text, it needs to be made clear.
But now doesn't that open up the counter argument that Bob was expecting '6 dice means 6 dice' and is told 'no, even though you have the same pool you can't do that'? There's nothing anywhere in the rules that suggest to Bob that he could suddenly be penalized simply because his Skill is only 1 die.
See... that's where I think we disagree. There's never been any statement in any rulebook ever that says "you can attempt any task in the universe with your dice". Skills have limits. That's Rule Zero, or the basic rule of common sense, or whatever you want to call it.
Where those limits lie is ultimately up to the individual GM. We can (hopefully!) all agree that it's OK for a GM to say: "No, you can't jump over that giant chasm no matter how many Athletics dice you have. You're going to fall and die." Similarly, I have no problem as a GM telling a commercial airline pilot: "No, you have no chance of successfully launching this space shuttle no matter how many Piloting dice you have." Or a GM telling a paramedic: "No, you have no chance of successfully performing brain surgery no matter what your medicine dice are."
I prefer it when a system spells out these limitations so that all players are on the same page in advance. (FS3 does, for instance.) But even if the system doesn't, I have no problem whatsoever with a GM making that limit.
One really big danger I see is that if your argument is 'no, you have to have Medicine-3 to attempt this' then shouldn't we forbid people from buying Medicine-3 unless they have earned their Master's degree, done 4 years of med school, and 3 years of residency (the requirements to be a GP)? After all, they aren't a GP so they are purchasing a skill their character 'can't' have by the dot-definition. Doesn't that mean they are cheating? If I expected that only characters with medical degrees could purchase Medicine-3 then doesn't that give you 'an advantage over me' because I'm following a more literal interpretation?
Just because you got an advantage doesn't mean you're cheating. Cheating to me implies deliberate and malicious action.
But I think app review is an important part of any game, and addresses this problem. Whether you're a tabletop GM saying: "Yo, dude, you're a 16-year-old high schooler; how the devil did you get Piloting 5?" or a MU staffer saying, "We interpret Medicine-3 to mean an actual doctor and that is inconsistent with your background; you must lower your skill." I have absolutely done that.
@derp said in Forum wonk:
Seems like if we're going to try to preserve/archive things and not lose any data, figuring out a way to migrate the DB from Redis to Mongo is the way to go. If we're gonna set up funds to do that, I'm relatively sure that the people here would pitch in and put that together relatively quickly.
I agree that's a sound option, but they can also explore creating a static archive (web scrape, or maybe nodebb has something built in) that is non-operational but maintains an archive for posterity.
(Reposting because my post apparently got eaten by the RAM monster.)
@thenomain I don't think we're disagreeing with the historical timeline - we're just saying that some (many? I didn't take a poll.) gaming groups recognized the need for Rule Zero and implemented it without needing the rulebook to spell it out for them. House rules have existed as long as RPGs have.