Posts made by Grayson

I'm playing and enjoying it. It's heavy on the crafting at the moment, and I'm not sure what direction it's going to go in.

There's PvP if you want it and there are three factions, which is infinitely preferable to the two faction standard setup. All three have the same access to areas, and PvP is entirely optional. I haven't indulged in PvP yet, but there are forts with upgradeable locations, and siege camps, suggesting it's going to be a lot like DAoC was for that side of things.

So far it's interesting. I've mostly been noodling around doing my own thing, though, rather than questing.

The main character of the Lord of the Rings is, let's face it, the languages.

The rest of it is just a handy showcase.

@derp Matrilineal doesn't matriarchal.

Matrilineal, the bloodline - and inheritance - goes through the women to the children. If the King doesn't have a sister, well, it's his grandmother's line you start looking at (same as with male primogeniture, if there are no sons you start looking back up the generations until you find one).

Matriarchal, the woman rules.

@derp said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

@ominous said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Matrilineal, non-matrimonial society. Political power and titles are passed down solely through mothers to their children. Marriage doesn't exist. No one cares who your father is. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. His children won't inherit his political title all. His sister's children would. The prince, as a king, would not have a queen consort.

This is how I structured my nomad society character. Matrilineal, nobody cared who your dad was, sexuality was open and encouraged.

The particular setup there confuses me, though. How would the prince become King if there were female daughters of the queen who could then become queen? And if there are no female daughters, wouldn't it default to his daughter inheriting, not his sister's kids?

Matrilineal societies have existed; it boils down to the mother's bloodline is bleedin' obvious, but the father's not so much.

If you have to have a King, you need a man. But given that you can't guarantee that his kids are his, it's his sister's kids who inherit because you can guarantee that her kids are hers. So the new Queen is the King's wife, but her kids won't inherit because she's not of the bloodline and you don't know if her kids are. Her kids will inherit from her, instead.

It's a neat solution to a lot of problems, but it does mean that the king's own kids aren't - can't ever be - his heirs. For some reason a lot of people dislike that idea.

Marrying your sister also solves the problem, but most of us would consider that an extreme solution. That never stopped the Ancient Egyptians, though, or the Hapsburgs.

@clarity Sod passing for normal; it's a one-way trip to stress, hatred, and bullying. Look for a space where you can be yourself, instead, and where people will cope. They're becoming more common.

I got formally diagnosed a couple of years ago (during Autism Awareness Week, entertainingly).

I'm in my 40s. There wasn't really a stigma around autism when I was a kid - it was just something that didn't happen to girls, and therefore I was forever being naughty and acting out, and had to be corralled back into what was socially acceptable even though it made absolutely no sense (and still doesn't). The word 'ladylike' still makes me twitch, because it was always what I wasn't and yet what I had to be whether I understood it or not. This is not an uncommon experience for women diagnosed later in life.

It occurred to me that it was a possibility when I attended a talk on neurodiversity in my then-new workplace, four years back, and a new presenter brought up a list of traits that people on the spectrum might display; I looked at it and went 'Well - I don't have those two? But other than that...' - and then a work-friend with two autistic sons said 'Sorry, I thought you knew'.

I did some background reading, then marched off to the doctor's and made them refer me. Attended a screening interview, then a diagnostic interview, and then after talking to my mother they made their minds up. During the formal diagnosis interview, the poor chap tried to gently break it to me that sometimes an experienced clinician can pretty much see it walking through the door, and that's what had happened at the screening interview. The interviews after that had been justifying the diagnosis rather than determining whether I warranted it; in some ways it was nice that it was so obvious, but I was left feeling a bit as though if it was that bloody obvious then maybe someone should have said something in the preceding decades.

So yeah. I'm on the spectrum, significantly so, and always have been. It would been nice to have known a few decades ago, to have had some coping strategies I didn't develop myself, to have understood that not everyone thinks like me and that not everyone can cope with difference. I only found out after I got my life on some sort of track, not when it could have made a massive difference to its prior path.

And then, talking to my little brother to let him know that it's in the family in case my nephews need the support I didn't get? It turned out he'd known it was likely for 20 years.

As to what MU* RP has done for me? Playing a charming character who was able to handle people let me learn how to deal with people in a friendly fashion myself. I got to test things out before trying them in reality, and I got to learn a lot about how people who aren't me think - and that helped me realise that it's not the same way I think. Not everyone has a branching code-like script for interactions with other humans. Who knew?

LARP helped hugely as well; when you've been in a battle with 3,000 people, when you've hopped up on a table to make a speech to fifty, when you've saved someone else's character with quick thinking and a spell that was never intended for that purpose, there's very little that can stop you grasping your courage in both hands and stepping up to do something that truly needs to be done.

RP teaches a lot of 'soft' skills, and without it I never would have learned to cope with people.

A MU*, to me, is multi-user, real-time and text-based.

That's it, that's the whole definition.

Anything added on top of that is just gravy.

@chibichibi said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

Wouldn't the equivalent of a WoD roster character just be those templates found at the end of each and every splat/tradition/convention/tribe/clan book? You could easily take those and boom, ROSTER.

Gods, no. Have you seen those characters?

There's reasons my dad - a mechanical and electrical and design and innovation engineer who's now in his mid-70s - considers the words 'graduate engineer' to be unprintable.

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

Engineers only have to make it work in theory. Not in practice.

And everything works in theory.

Hey, some of us have to make it work in practice too, you know.

The term 'engineer' covers a lot of territory, from the person who designs new tech to the person who fixes the washing machine. And a lot of us work in the nebulous space where theoretical meets practical, because theory's cock all use if we can't make it work.

About half my team have deep theoretical knowledge, the other half have at least a decade on tools, and there's one or two of us who've got experience across a lot of fields instead of in-depth knowledge of just one. It's the best team I've ever worked with, in several ways.

@horrorhound Which is interesting, because engineering is full of people on the spectrum in one way or another.

We all rage against the architects, though, because what bloody idiot puts that there and this over here and that girder through the chimney and how the hell are we supposed to make any of this actually work?

@macha No, they don't. Why would they? They never see it.

I remember Cole, too. Saint here.

@groth Wait, people still use underarm crutches? What?

I frequently have random conversations on busses and trains. Most often, when the damn thing's broken down, or when traffic is just that hideous, or when the bus has to go a different way because there's been a crash on the main road and nothing's getting past.

I rarely have conversations in McDonalds, but if the milkshake machine's broken it's pretty much guaranteed.

People like to moan and share their grumbles with others affected.

I'll also greet anyone wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, or anyone carrying something to do with a hobby of mine, or anyone reading the right genre of book but not seeming entirely engrossed in it, or someone older who's dyed their hair bright colours, etc., and that greeting is either the start of a conversation or just an acknowledgement of someone else's humanity depending on them. Either I have things in common with those people or they've done something they want to talk about, and a conversation is always more interesting than not if they want one - and they usually do. I've made a good friend with 'I love the hair', and a few more with 'Great book, is this your first time reading it?'.

And then there's the times I'm sitting on the bus or train with handwork, and people will start talking with me about what I'm doing and why and who it's for and who they used to do that for and all the stuff they've made, and it's glorious, especially when children sit there wide-eyed and curious and bouncy over a new thing while granny smiles.

Life is as boring as you make it. It seems some people have very boring lives.

@de-villefort said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

The problem with most RPG settings and coffee shop chatter is that in most games you are keeping secrets. You are secretly the vampire slayer, you are secretly a witch, you are secretly a werewolf or an agent of the technocracy.

Most, but not all, games have a premise which require that you never talk about the thing that consumes most of your adult life with any strangers. On games where everyone is keeping secrets small talk has to be kept to the smallest, most boring stuff possible to protect the hidden truth.

The problem with most RL settings and coffee shop chatter is that I'm keeping secrets - yeah, that doesn't work.

Most, but not all, of my RL has entailed keeping secrets of a greater or lesser degree, from the one that would have ruined a man (and did bring him down when it finally came out) to just how often I'd had to pay the bills and thus not eat that month. And yet I still manage to chat with people in random places, like on the train or waiting for a bus, and the conversations cover all sorts of topics.

All-consuming secrets are things that people find different ways to deal with. In my case they almost demand that I find other things to talk about as yet another distraction technique. I mean, why would I talk about that when I can talk about this totally unrelated topic instead and therefore not risk conversational landmines and reactions that might give me away?

@de-villefort I disagree with the idea that if you murder one person in a game set in modern times you'll be hunted for life.

It takes skill and it takes style, but you can play a mass murderer, have people lauding you for it, and have people queueing up to RP with you.

@carma said in Character likeness:

Also, supporting artists feels altruistic.

It's altruistic, absolutely. But it ain't cheap.

I always do words first and foremost.

If I - or more often, someone else - finds a picture? I'll stick that on the wiki for wherever I am at the time. Sometimes, if it's the right picture for one of the characters I port around the place, the picture will be ported with them. It's like the old 'who would play your character if this MU* was a film', reinvented for the modern age. I never was any good at it, but some actors and roles are just too perfect to pass up.

The usual suspect was Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty before he was Tom Hiddleston, but Haughty Loki fits him so beautifully I can't not.

@arkandel said in Character likeness:

@bluebird said in Character likeness:

Also, to @Carma point, it's a little unsettling to me if a popular public figure is used as a model for the character.

Just wait until you're in a room with three Robert Downey Jr. lookalikes.

Hey, meeting yourself is always hilarious, and can be spun into a plot point without much trouble!