Best posts made by Groth

@Seamus

So the thing about the seasonal flu is that even though it has a tendency to infect a very high percentage of the population in a relatively short amount of time (It tends to spike very very hard in January) it's not known for causing the hospitals to enact emergency measures and start using all their elective surgery rooms as extra intensive care halls. Only a relatively tiny percentage of the Italian population is estimated to have been infected and they are at 200% of their normal hospital capacity. With that in mind what do you think their hospitals would look like if they didn't lock down the country to prevent further spread?

Further aside from deaths directly attributable to the virus itself, what do you think happens to you if you've been in a car accident or have a heart attack while the hospitals get stretched past 200% normal capacity?

The reason that the total number of deaths so far is relatively low when compared to the seasonal flu is because of the extraordinary length that most countries have gone to try to limit the spread.

@Apos said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:

It's not just about protecting new players from dinosaurs, but also protecting dinosaurs from feeling their time investment is completely meaningless, and being unwilling to do that and having no one at all do that.

I think the healthiest way to go is make sure the Dinosaurs have things that they can point at and say 'I did that' rather then having the biggest numbers that ever numbered.

For a long while now I've been a fan of the idea of keeping the power level of PCs relatively level while trying to find ways they can feel they're shaping the game world itself.

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

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

Privatizing profits - When the economy is good only those invested benefit.

Private ownership of the means of production is the hallmark of any capitalist nation. This is true even in socialist nations, where people are allowed to own real and personal property. I do not understand why it is morally wrong to retain the profits one earns through one's labor and/or property.

Socializing losses - When the economy is bad suddenly the Government (via taxpayers) should come help a company that was all about profit for their shareholders and nothing else before. Suddenly it's in the national interest.

The fundamental principle of socialism is to enact policy to benefit the most people rather than favor a smaller group. Said another way, government should act in a way that benefits the greater good. Where there is catastrophe, a socialist nation should move to allocate government resources to where the most can benefit, and this is morally good, in my opinion. But this is also, as you put it, "socializing losses." Another way to put it is "insuring against common risk." I therefore do not see how "socializing losses" is morally wrong.

Socializing losses is a direct transfer of wealth from the tax payers to those who own assets. In essence you're telling asset owners that they should feel free to pursue maximum risk strategies with no concerns whatsoever because if anything ever goes wrong, that will be paid by the tax payers.

Now if you genuinely think that the purpose of a good government is to funnel money from those who pay taxes into the pockets of those who own assets, I'm sure you can view that as a good thing. However I happen to think that a good government should be trying to make the people as a whole prosperous rather then a wealthy minority pursuing high risk strategies.

If we're looking at the US specifically. A lot of companies used the low interest rate as an opportunity to take very large loans which they then used to buyback stocks to the benefit of senior executives who get paid in stocks. Now that there is a crisis, those companies have a huge debt and no revenue. Without intervention those companies are looking at a stock value of 0 dollars and a complete asset liquidation.

What possible benefit is it to society at large to bail out the creditors who gave out those loans and executives and investors who benefited from those buybacks? That's a straight up transfer of wealth to people who engaged in reckless behavior for short-term profit.

The correct thing to do in my opinion isn't to bail out the investors and the creditors, it's for the Government to force the investors and the creditors to take the loss, because they deserve that loss and take over the company so it can hopefully be resold to someone more responsible.

@Kestrel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

I also don't buy the innocent "blinks slowly" reaction he gave when I said his behaviour had made me uncomfortable. Looking at this thread, I know I'm not the first person to have ever said something like this to him. It's simply impossible to believe that after however many incidents of him behaving this way and having it pointed out to him, he remains oblivious.

I'm on psychologist or anything but from my experience that kind of behavior isn't so much deliberate psychological manipulation as much as it's a kind of delusion where they're unable to take any kind of criticism and a seemingly compulsive need to make everything about themselves. Trying to guilt people seems more of a reflex then something they think about as a coherent tactic.

Where his entire approach gets extremely nutty is in the very premise of the strategy he is trying to use.

• Claim to be banned for no reason
• Proceed to actively try to sabotage the game (an unambiguously good reason to ban anyone)
• Try to use the sabotage to leverage the staff into letting him play again

First off, if you don't get along with the staff you shouldn't play the game. There's enough games out there there's no reason to play a game where you don't trust the people running it.

Second off, you're never going to get anyone on your side by actively trying to sabotage them. That's not an appeal strategy, it's inanity.

@Insomnia said:

I saw this little video on how to tell if a conspiracy was wackadoo or not recently. Now it doesn't work for everything, but it's pretty good:

"Does X affect the really rich?"

So "Do really rich people die of diseases that they could have been cured of if only Big Pharma had released some super secret cure, but didn't want to because they want to keep the population down?" Yes, yes they do. There is no secret cure.

When it comes to Big Pharma and Big Oil, the conspiracy theorists tend to be half right. In most cases the big companies are not preventing any new development (Every now and then there is a case where they deliberately sit on a patent with no intent on using it, but it's fairly rare and usually not something super groundbreaking) however for obvious reasons they don't spend any of their R&D resources on things that they think would lower their own profitability and they do spend quite a lot of their money on advertising their own products over whatever new developments may come by.

However as especially in energy and medicine, there is a gigantic publicly funded research industry, there is nothing they could actually do to prevent something from being discovered and these companies do spend a lot of R&D resources on improving their own products in various ways.

@Sunny said:

People using the phrase "big pharma". I'm hearing a lot of it right now due to current events, and it drives me nuts. "Big Pharma" is the reason I'm fucking alive right now, thanks.

The silly thing is that the current events don't even involve "Big Pharma", it involves "Small Pharma bought by Hedge Funds and leveraged by complete soulless ass-holes"

If someone wanted to create their own heavily political vampire game, we (That is the former staff of RfK) would most likely be willing to help create a more streamlined version of the systems we used and pass on the lessons we've learned. We're not going to create that game ourselves partly because we want to take the opportunity to experience something different and partly because the players would expect it to be a continuation of RfK and we'd rather it be a fresh start.

Most of the systems (Boons, status, influence, feeding, beats etc) were relatively easy to maintain, the system that would have to be redesigned is the system for taking over and managing territory. The problems that became obvious as time went on was partly that time became an unlimited resource as the characters grew in XP (Actions per week should probably not scale), dogpiling became the way to get territory once territory got scarce (Teamwork should be sharply limited) and having every territory disruption handled manually by staff requires way to much work(Something more automated by code would be more manageable).

@wizz said in Good TV:

Also, that the author was pretty new really explains the other minor thing I found kinda cheesy, how pretty much all of the on-screen recurring characters have a romantic pairing or two. It felt so Young Adult Novel, haha!

It's my biggest peeve with the books. She paired up literally everyone, it felt a bit like reading a shipping fanfic.

@Sundown said:

See, I would've thought a mechanics, systems-heavy game would never be something I'd enjoy, but it was. I just let my friend handle the crunchy bits and I did the diplomatic schmoozing. Because on this game, the subtle intrigue play was actually finally possible.

Also, all I see when @Coin says "narrative game" is "make your own fun." Which is okay, but ultimately it's an empty game unless /someone/ runs plots in which most of the playerbase can be included. Even then, if the playerbase is fragmented, it'll end up sandboxy, with consequences not really propagating over the entire game world.

The fundamental limitation of MU* when compared to TT is that the Storyteller is a very limited resource. There will never be enough dedicated Staff to run scenes for a non-trivial playerbase at a regular basis and Player-Storytellers will always have a hard time to run anything with impact because they're players and the setting is managed by Staff by necessity, any other arrangement and the world would not be consistent.

Keeping that in mind the inevitable conclusion is that the vast majority of RP that is going to take place on a MU* is going to be social RP. Characters interacting with eachother with no direct NPC/Plot involvement. The question then becomes, how do we make social RP fun?

The approach attempted by RfK for that question was to give the characters something to RP about. The purpose of territories/influences etc were not to let players play online RISK when not RP'ng, it was to provide a constant source of recent events to bring to the on-screen RP.

For the most part it was very successful, characters would constantly RP about territory negotiations, alliances, political backstabbing etc even to the extent we'd sometimes get mock complaints of 'I don't have the time to TS because I'm too busy with politics!'.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

The ability to have conversation that is clear and is paying attention to what the other person is saying, as well as theability to ask clarifying questions is often very much a learned skill.

It is something that has to be worked at and its never perfected. It isn't easy. Some people have more difficulty in learning than others.

It's something I hope to get better at, though in the meanwhile I need to get better at identifying the right time to drop something.

If you see it happening in the wild, someone looking like they're digging a hole over something entirely unimportant, you would do them a favor by cutting it off.

One of my biggest difficulties is tone, my text is often interpreted as combative or intimidating and I think that's tied up with an expression style I picked up in my teens and I am not sure how to go about changing.

I suppose that makes an advice of mine to anyone with a child on the spectrum to help them develop a style of communication that feels approachable and keep them out of unhelpful habits.

@mietze said in Autism and The MU* Community:

It is often helpful to learn to stop devaluing or dismissing as "easy" skills that others may be better at than you right now.

Few skills are ever easy. It's said that to master something takes 10,000 hours and in my experience that's probably accurate.

It's easy enough to learn the basics of something or another but to become good at it is not something achieved casually. Dabbling vs mastery is an interesting topic but best had elsewhere.

@surreality said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Absolutely no one is making fun of anyone for having disabilities. What you initially quoted in no way is an example of making fun of someone for having a disability.
@surreality said
"Join the fucking club!"

As fascinating it is to watch people on this forum keep inventing excuses to not care about people on the spectrum it grows rather tiresome. I'm not asking you to be an unpaid online psychologist, I'm merely asking you to avoid comparing a lifelong disability to temporary social distancing. I'm asking you to not encourage making light of a condition someone was born with and has to deal with for their entire life.

I think the perception of what is easy and what is hard and the contrast against what is (subjectively) easy or hard is pretty interesting.

For me I usually think it's strange when people say computers or most tech gadgets are hard because in my mind, they just do what you tell them to and you can usually just google what's up but to many people computers are still spooky magic boxes.

I also personally find arithmetic, algebra and geometry to be easy but once you get to calculus my intuitive understanding just fails me and it can take severe effort to untangle how things work and what an expression means.

One of the things I dabble in is fighting games, just looking at them it can be easy to think they're easy. After all you just move around in a 2D plane and activate one move at a time, combos are only pressing the correct buttons in the correct tempo, no different from playing the piano. If you've ever tried to get decent at one, you'll quickly learn you have to make split second decisions that require high manual dexterity and top players are the ones willing and able to spend hours and hours each and every day to achieve perfection.

If you're looking at a boat or plane captain while they're cruising, you can trick yourself into thinking they have an easy job, all they have to do is let the auto-pilot steer the craft and chill. What you don't see is all the training they have for all the situations where something goes wrong.

Something easy to overlook is also the difference between mastering a specific skill like say being able to dunk a basketball and the kind of mastery you need to get paid dunking basketballs which requires mastering all the skills involved in a basketball game like dribbling, passing, game sense etc.

Being able to do something very specific better then a professional is not necessarily hard, something I keep seeing referenced lately is Gordon Ramseys Grilled Cheese Sandwich. Does being able to make a better sandwich then that make you a Michelin star chef? Obviously not, it just makes you someone able to make a decent sandwich, being a head chef is a complete skillset that does not as a rule involve cooking sandwiches over open flame.

It's easy I think to underestimate what something involves but to me learning the basics of various crafts makes me appreciate their depths. For instance earlier this year I spent something like a week trying to figure out how to move a character model in Blender (animation software) and it made me all the more appreciate the work of animators and modelers.

@RDC said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@Groth I feel like it would really benefit you to stop, take like half a day, come back tonight or tomorrow to re-read this series of replies, and then gauge whether it benefits you or not to keep replying to this series of comments.

It doesn't benefit me but I have this very faint hope that MSB may one day become ever so slightly less shitty to people who struggle with understanding social cues instead of reveling in it like it's some kind of virtue.

The problem here is that there are certain things which are statistically true which will not be true for independent cases. The average white male is more privileged then the average of most other social groups, this is a well supported fact. This does not mean that every white male is more privileged then all other social groups, it's trivial to find counter-examples.

Whenever you find yourself arguing of the form 'Every X is Y' then you should really stop yourself right there and backtrack, because you're going to be wrong and you're going to be wrong in a way that undermines what you're trying to put forth.

I don't like framing this as a question of 'right' or 'wrong'. This isn't about morals or ethics, being able to effectively navigate chat communities isn't the same thing as being a good person. Some of the worst people in the community have proven themselves to be masters at navigating these social interactions and being bad at handling these things doesn't make you a bad person.

That said most of the advice given in this thread is good advice for success. By trying to be more passive and paying attention to how the others behave you will over time build a better understanding of what is expected.

Because it was my staff name at RfK and I wanted to comment on something RfK related at the time.

If you like me don't like google and facebook tracking cookies, you can find it on libgen here. Epub though so layout is slightly off.
https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=dc36f341efc47a0d2bb88ceeeb25dfda

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

The race aspect might still apply though -- is there any reason the Baratheons could not be black?

Offhand, the only ethnicity I remember mattering in Game of Thrones are the Targayens because unlike everyone else they're inbreeding immigrants though even then they only have to be different so in theory you should be able to mix them all up and it should still all make sense.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

And given just how many hairstyles I've seen claimed under the banner of "vikings", it's super wild that somehow the vikings invented a whole lot of very specific shit apparently in parallel with every African nation and tribe under the sun, except one has incredibly well-documented and researched explanations for every single individual hairstyle existing, and the other has airbrushed art on the side of a dude's van to document that the vikings did indeed do all of this.

There exists astonishingly little historical record about what kind of hairstyles the 'vikings' used. What we know is that they used a lot of combs and there exists a few references to a hairstyle that's something like this Cossack one where the sides of the head is shaven and the hair falls over the eyes. .

It is almost certain that male vikings didn't braid their hair because it would imply their hair was long and none of the surviving imagery seem to portray anyone with long hair.

@Bobotron said:

@Gingerlily
The Status system in MET: Vampire the Masquerade is built around social play and rewarding you for making good on what you do, and punishing you for fucking up.

You get lauded by positive Status, which gives you a variety of social (and sometimes mechanical) benefits, like allowing you to talk to your superiors without permission, to offset an offense when you fuck up, and a number of things.

You bet punished by Negative Status when you fuck up and can't offset it. Most Negative Status imposes some type of social punishment, though you can go so far as to get ejected from your sect for fucking up too much. There's also some interesting political play with some Negative Status, where people whoa re backstabbing vampire bitches to people with those specific Negative Status getting a special Positive Status for insulting and belittling the fuckup.

Overall it works really well for play in my experience, and I've been using in in live-play with a 30 or so player game for over 2 years. You'd need to tweak it to allow every joe to give positive/negative status a little though, since ia lot of it relies on people in positions of power giving out the status (harpies, prince, seneschal, elders, etc.)). You can look at it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t3t1c455rcnlcw/METVtM Status.pdf?dl=0

RfK tried to use the MET status system as written and it worked 'ok' while the game still had a relatively small population but as the game grew it became increasingly impossible for the Prince/Harpies to actually keep track of what was going on and properly award/deduct status.

What I'd like to experiment with is a system where every character on the game is allowed to make one positive vote and one negative vote each time interval, these would be public and optional. In theory this could create an effective crowd-sourced harpy that would help make everyone in the game aware of what's been happening.

@Thenomain said:

It was horribly abused and people would stir up a storm whenever they were down-voted, so rank ended up meaning nothing.

The biggest problem with the Harpies/Prince besides the difficulty in keeping track of recent events, is that their players would get OOCly hassled over their decisions. Every month we had to remind players that any issues they have with Prince/Harpy decisions is an IC issue that should be handled by confronting those characters IC. In the end we decided to implement a 1 beat fine for any OOC complaints about status.

The core of the issue seems to be that many players become emotionally invested in their characters success and treat any failure to succeed on the behalf of their character as a failure of their own, rather then a new avenue of RP to explore.

Another related issue is that it's hard to make reputation meaningful on the scene level. It's not uncommon for characters to treat the most respected person in the city like street trash, either because they're not OOCly aware of the status of that person or because they just don't like their own characters reaction being decided by a number, it's similar to how everyone just ignores everyone with Striking Looks.

@Pyrephox said:

With reputation and status, I feel like one thing we need to do more of is incentive BOTH ends of the scale. Everyone wants to have high rep and status because you /get stuff/ by doing so, and no one wants to be shut out of potential RP or plot because their character has low status or rep. So of course, there's a race for the top, and of course people get upset when their characters lose rep, because now those characters are objectively less effective and connected than before. Which means less RP for the PC.

But I think if we offered appropriate incentives for having both high OR low status/rep, then people would be more willing to take the hits. Like, there should definitely be events tied to and benefits for having a low or negative rep, to make it fun for those players to play that, and give some compensation for not having the bennies of high status and rep. Whether it's having targeted RP where enemy factions try to recruit you, or events where there's a Status ceiling of people allowed to join (the police commissioner should not be investigating the gritty street crime), or high risk/high reward plots that require a bit of "plausible deniability".

Yes. I think a reputation system where there are appropriate benefits for being low rep would be really cool.