Best posts made by Glitch

@Coin The answer is: that is not the RP they want to focus on.

Your examples are hyperbolic, but I can see where people just want to bump their gnosis, or make the job rolls for a token or just burn that XP on a new pact and cover.

Whether you agree with that or not, they might prefer to let the pact thing happen in the background so they can instead play with other demons or a particular cover. A mage who doesn't want to go on a spiritual journey PrP and would rather just offscreen it in order to keep playing with their cabal is reasonable to me.

People come to a game for different reasons and one of TR's strengths was allowing you to focus on the content that you found desirable. I think RP'ing out the things you describe would be more fun, but is it really such a hard thing to believe that people don't look for the same thing in their RP?

@crusader said:

A healthy game is one in which players are creating and driving the main dynamic for conflict, from the top down. Presumably, you want as few NPCs as possible, because realistically, you'll never be able to give them all justice as a storyteller.

That's a play-style choice, not a sure indicator of a game's health. I tend to prefer an NPC at top, partly so that 5 people can't group-join and take over leadership solely due to numbers.

This should be working now, let me know.

@Arkandel I'm a fan of +meetme, but I don't think you're right when you say there are better ways to encourage grid use. I couldn't give you directions anywhere on any game I've played that has +meetme code. In ancient mud/rpi times, however, I was much more aware of grid locations and relationships. While I find +meetme code eminently useful and convenient, I 100% believe that to implement it would destroy grid usage or significantly reduce it.

I do agree that clear guidelines on how to run stories, and what the limitations and opportunities are, is essential.

Glitch takes the bet with @Coin.

So it looks like the ignore plugin was completed. You may all thank @WTFE for its installation. I don't know how well it works, if at all, but feel free to make use of it. There should be a little eyeball crossed out next to people's names on posts, and if you go to their user page, should be an option to "ignore_user" in the dropdown menu.

War Against the Pure gives rules for creating were-alternate bonuses. It's not another CB book or anything, just a small blip at the end of the book for "creating your own".

You could reverse it:

setdiff(%qm, %qv, .)

If anything returns, it's not a subset, otherwise it is.

So I mentioned this in passing in another topic, but these forums have an option for deleting a user and all their posts with a click. I decided to experiment with it for the few unwelcome souls that find you guys irresistible. In the latest instance, I woke up this morning to half a dozen flags from people that resulted in a user account being deleted that had accumulated 30 posts.

I would encourage you to try not to feed the trolls as their posts will likely disappear and we lose some context. I don't like deleting posts in general, but when someone has been asked to leave the forums, I don't think allowing them to continue the conversation over multiple iterations of accounts to be enough of an incentive to not do so.

If it seems to be breaking too much in the way of continuity for you guys, let me know.

@Thenomain said:

@Corruption said:

4. Hire Coder. Give coder all needed "We need this common code, we need this customized code."

Be careful about asking a coder if it's okay that their code gets shared. Tell them that the code is for the game, regardless what happens later, even if you won't share it. Staffers are contractors; build and code staff doubly so.

I don't generally like this comparison. There is no actual contract, so treating coders and builders like contractors fails almost immediately. When people throw their time and effort into your game, they or you can quit at any time, there are no real timelines, it's all a dance of falling in and out of passion with the work by all people involved. There are expectations and hopes and fights and drama, but there are no contractors, just people working on the things they're passionate about until such a time as their interests no longer align.

There's also MUCon.

@Arkandel I think you're entirely underestimating the amount of work it would take to integrate those things in a mostly seamless manner.

@Derp said:

Well, the entire point of creating a website is to present something visually appealing and easy to use to share information with an audience. In a forum like this, I don't think there's much question that it's meant to appeal to a wider audience too.

A forum like this is meant to appeal to an audience. Aesthetic is also individual.

So, given that, and the general reactions a while back when @Glitch posted a thing about this and said 'check out the new look', and the response to it even then was 'hate it, yuck, no',

You, @TNP, @Tempest and @Thenomain expressed distaste for it. @Tempest was also mostly neutral about it. @HelloRaptor and @Coin showed a preference for it, despite @HelloRaptor's later distaste. So out of all of the users of these forums, 4 had a negative opinion and 3 had a positive opinion, if you want to consider me as someone with a generally positive opinion since I actually did the upgrade. That's hardly an overwhelmingly negative response.

So yeah, his point actually does have merit, and the people that you write off as screeching and having a shitty attitude about it are just as much target users as anyone else on this forum. They have a voice, they offer feedback, and not working to make something that appeals to them is counterproductive.

In response to the highlighted:

• You certainly "voiced" your opinion, repeatedly
• "offer feedback" is a generous term for the verbal vomit spewed
• Taking the thoughts of people on these forums into consideration is certainly a good idea, but as I pointed out earlier, it was a tiny minority that felt moved enough by the upgrade to even voice opinion, let alone a negative one.

They do not like this. They stated before it went up hat they didn't like it, in some cases, and it happened anyway. They're allowed to express their frustration and anger about something that didn't need to happen happening. That desn't make it a shitty attitude.

Expressing frustration and anger is understandable. @Miss-Demeanor and @Misadventure both had a bunch of early difficulties that sorted out after a bit. Even if they don't much like it as it is now, they've adjusted. @WTFE had a strong negative reaction as well, but he was at least willing to see some small benefit in the upgrade and realize it wasn't me who designed it and that I didn't do it to frustrate him. @HelloRaptor similarly doesn't like it, but also accepts that I didn't upgrade just to make his life worse.

It did need to happen, whether you agree or not. The theme change didn't need to come along with the other stuff, but that is a result of selecting this forum software.

Disagreeing with the upgrade is not a shitty attitude. Disliking the theme is not a shitty attitude. Expressing frustration with the change is not a shitty attitude. Losing your goddamn mind over it and then continuing to defend your reaction as somehow appropriate to the situation is a shitty attitude.

Come to terms now with this, because upgrades will happen again. Hopefully it won't be as jarring and the experience of going through this one will smooth the transition for people (particularly the cache clearing and some of the backend problems I had that resulted in 504s and 502s), but upgrading for fixes and features is going to continue.

@Kireek said in Arx- Gareth:

I wonder if she was already well predisposed against me and then apped in a character that she knew was going to have to interact with me on a very regular basis... and then failed to inform me so I couldn't try and play with her in a way that would make her feel more comftrable.

That's giving yourself a lot of presence in her life and headspace. She created a character specifically to make it so you wouldn't know it was her when she played with you just so you couldn't adjust your actions to suit? Because no one would want to play the Dawn character otherwise, right?

This song is definitely not about you.

On the plus side, as a hobby with no appreciable return for time invested, at least it is not also a monetary sink. I mean, we could all be model train builders, as @HelloRaptor so often likes to reference for their own brand of invested crazy.

I have the same issues on mobile. Someone should do something about it.

He probably just typo'd.

@bored You don't see how a web-based VTT and a free-form story "logger" and platform have anything to do with this? Seriously?

The reason people haven't abandoned MU'ing entirely for these other options is because neither roll20 nor Storium offer the style of gaming MU'ers are familiar with, as you say. But the building blocks are there. Storium is lacking in that their system is immutable and the real-time feel is a bit lost in the "post" nature of interaction. As for roll20, it has that real-time component, but little prominence is given to text-based RP and it doesn't do a good job at handling scenes as anything more than one long log.

However, there are people that use roll20 for text-only RP (they have even recognized this by adding a text-only search option for people looking for games). It's basic, really only offering /emit, but it allows people to fold it in with the visuals of a "scene" with the rolling and combat that can accompany any PrP. Storium puts scenes into terrific order and flow and does a good job tracking the components of what could easily constitute any MU scene.

If people want exactly what they have now, then no, there is nothing that will replace it. If there's something that eventually comes out and offers things like always-on connectivity, flexible enough code to build a game around any theme or setting and the mechanics to play it? I'd certainly move on at that point.

Just to give out some information, how low you go as far as negative reputation is concerned doesn't stop you from posting. You have to have a minimum of zero reputation to flag a post or downvote a post, but that's just the default number.

For post frequency, once again defaults:

• No one can post more than once every 10 seconds.
• New users cannot post more than once every 120 seconds.
• New users must have a reputation of 3+ to lower that to 10 seconds.

There are some other settings, but those are the relevant ones.