Best posts made by Groth

The two most distinguishing features of vampires are the sunlight allergy and the fact they feed on human blood. So if you're playing Vampire instead of Mage, Werewolf, Hunter or D&D, it's expected that you're somewhat interested in the idea of playing an undead monster that preys on people at night.

From a game design perspective you then want the player to care as much about preying on humans as the vampire does, the player should be thinking about how to get their next fix of blood. The way most games choose to do this is by making all the vampires special powers fueled by blood, requiring the player to regularly find a source to renew themselves. In VTR/VTM the vampire also loses blood daily requiring them to find blood sources even if they're not actively using their powers.

Since being a predator is such a big thing about vampire, you ideally want feeding to be something that's done on screen, in video games you'll usually have a feeding attack you're expected to use regularly. However in TTRPG's or MU* it's not practical to have every feeding event on-screen however since it's still a big thematic point, you'll want some mechanic that makes the player pay attention to when/where they feed. In TT that usually means making a roll with some sort of modifiers and if you fail, then your feeding went awry in some fashion. In MU* however you can take the opportunity to play up another part that's a big part of being a predator, territoriality.

By making blood limited on a grid-square basis (Abstractly representing the difficulty of getting away with several feedings in the same area in a short amount of time) you make the players care very much about who feeds where and when. It's in their interest to control some part of the grid and determine who feeds their in order to guarantee their own supply of blood as well as being able to offer blood supply to others in return for favours.

Talking about the chances of getting away with feedings based on population numbers is missing the point. Handwaving feeding in Vampire is like handwaving breaking&entering in Shadowrun or exploring the dungeon in D&D. Regardless of your chances to get away with it, it's something you're expected to care about and you want complications to happen somewhat regularly so you have the opportunity to use your fancy vampire powers to make them go away.

I agree with lordbelh that the call for silence was misguided and doomed to fail and it follows that all bans related to that call for silence are poorly justified.

That said, this is a community not a court. I think it's much too common of a mistake for people in the hobby to consider themselves arbiters of justice rather then caretakers of the community. What matters isn't the rules or procedure or any such nonsense but what kind of community you want to build.

Right now this isn't much of a community, there's like 3 people posting outside of the ban drama but that doesn't mean it can't grow into a community again. However that requires you to sell people on what this is supposed to become.

@Selerik
It's because the way Arx is set up, it distinguishes between Account and Character and the caller for commands is the Account. There's also some confusing subclasses that I no longer remember how they're laid out because I havn't touched that code in 6 months.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Groth
History is what creates a characters mindset and philosophy. Any character or person for that matter is essentially the sum of their past experiences and genetics. And sense fictional characters hove no genetics all they have is the experiences.

As someone that's read a lot of character backstories, I will tell you with great confidence that if someone took 10 random backstories written by players and swapped out all the biographical details like where they were born, when they were born and basic activities and completely replaced them with something else. In 9/10 cases you wouldn't notice the difference because those details did in fact not in any way influence the resulting character, because the character was actually designed in the other order with the mindset being designed first and then some random background fluff is thrown into the CG to make Staff accept it.

Fictional characters do not actually experience their lives in chronological order.

@Coin

Not sure I get what you're implying, so I'm not going to reply to it as if I do. But... what?

^H is the symbol representing backspace. He was deleting the 'Now' and 'Again' from your comment.

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Those are valid reasons for expanding the functionality of the 'who' command, not for having two obscurely different versions of it. But that's just IMHO. If you're happy with the status quo, then there's no reason to change anything. Some of us aren't, though.

I don't think any MUSH coder will argue that MUSH is an awesome platform however when you critique MUSH syntax and UX, I think it's important to remember what MUSH is actually designed to do otherwise you'll look a bit like someone complaining about a multi-tool being a poor hammer.

Yes if what you want to do is hammer nails, then the multi-tool isn't the best, or even a good choice. However that was also not what the multi-tool was designed to do.

MUSH is standard and a toolbox designed around allowing allowing the users to code almost anything from within the game itself. It's very convenient for most TTRPG to MU* translation games since it comes out of the box with everything you need to make a grid and roleplay, leaving most games to only need to install AnomalyJobs and a roller and they're good to go.

Being a standard is also convenient, because it means that regardless if you play Bob Mush or Alice Mush or Eve MUSH, you know the basic commands used to play the game all work the same way.

I really honestly fail to see how breaking that standard makes things more intuitive and once you do leave that standard, you may as well leave the entire way to Evennia or Ares or whatever floats your boat because I see absolutely no reason to use the Pennmush or TinyMux codebases if you plan to replace their core commands. Any talk of doing such things within the context of MUSHcode is to me insanity.

@ThatGuyThere said:

And how fiction characters experience their lives vary greatly with the medium we experience them in.

My point is that characters are made, not born. They generally speaking start as a concept and are fleshed out from there. Very few people make a character by going 'My character was born in a small fishing village in the outskirts of the empire, their father was lost at sea so my character had to learn how to fish so their family could get fed etc etc.' rather they usually go 'I want to play Mage Batman' and go from there.

Depending on how late we're talking you might be a good fit for early bird europeans.

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Lithium I didn't say documentation was evil or unnecessary. But I would challenge you to find a UX book on the planet that tells you to fix UX problems with documentation. (And I've read a lot of them.) Your #1 goal with software is to make it as intuitive as possible so the documentation is unnecessary. When was the last time you cracked open the manual for a PC or web app?

The UX issue with MUSH starts right at step 1) when you're asked to install this really quirky client designed in the 1990's that doesn't even have proper window managers. Then at step 2) You're expected to handle everything through pure CLI and now any hope of being intuitive has been thrown right out the window.

Indeed all incentives can be viewed as punishments for those that do not take them, however taking that pessimist view does in my experience never lead anywhere positive.

The reason to provide players with incentives is to make them more inclined to take actions you feel are desirable but not necessary.

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

ETA: I'm not entirely sure that I have the willpower to address that gently. I told her that Irish immigrants were indentured servitude and had rights, unlike chattel slavery, but if it turns into an argument, I dont know if I can keep Jim Halpert WTF from turning into...

I hope you're not unironically defending the practise of indentured servitude.

I can't vouch for its accuracy since I'm not a historian but I found this text to give an interesting perspective on the subject
https://ibw21.org/reparations/slavery-vs-indentured-servitude-which-aids-racism/

A lot of people seem to gloss over the fact that while indentured servants just like pre-unionisation factory workers and miners had 'rights' on paper, they were often worked to death.

@Jaunt said:

We post an update, what, once a week? Once every two weeks? It's pretty non-intrusive, too. It just says, "Hey, here's what is going on at OR if you're interested."

On this particular point, I'm actually with @Jaunt. It's very easy to avoid this thread if you don't want to be in it, until today I had actually never opened this thread before because I couldn't care less and it was only until I saw the thread that @Thenomain split off to discuss MUSH philosophy that I got interested in investigating the source.

Yes this thread will show up among your unread threads however you don't have to read all your unread threads, you really don't.

When RfK started, it consisted of Shava playing a dozen NPC's, her husband and about 5 PCs. When RfK closed it had over 100 unique active players and no active NPCs. As the game grew it became much more political then it was while it was still very small and the relative importance of Shava's husband became much smaller.

I'm not sure why @Tempest feels like they have anything to contribute about RfK events that happened after March 2014. There were plenty enough real issues with RfK that you don't need to make them up with your imagination.

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

(And again, that was on one-third of a full dose. Full dose, I think my brain probably wouldn't even have wandered those two times!)

I don't have much experience with dextroamphetamine, I've always been using the generic version of Ritalin. However my experience with Ritalin isn't that you get even better at concentrating the higher the dosage, rather there exist a dosage during which you feel like you function like a normal human being while doses higher then that make you feel like your eyes are itching and you can't relax and finding that ideal point is probably what you'll be working out with your doctor.

My biggest issue is that while the ADHD meds will keep me awake and better able to get things done, especially in the mornings, it doesn't do anything about chronic fatigue from bad sleep. For better and worse what you're getting is alertness.

@Jaunt said:

2. Because they are so invested in their player characters, and they have the ability to do so, they cheat to get ahead. Cheating has always been a huge problem with MU*s, because there is an important trust-based relationship between player and admin. When that trust is destroyed, it very often ends up in an eventual player exodus, and it's really difficult to re-build.

That's why staff on my games don't play PCs. We test PCs for gameplay purposes, and we observe others' play, and we GM --- but that's something that I always feel strongly about. Even the perception of cheating (even when it might not be true) can ruin the trust between players and administrators in other MU* sub-genres.

The compromise that we decided on in our Requiem2.0 MUSH was that we would allow Staff to play PC's but those PC's would never be able to 'get ahead' by making it against the rules of the game for Staff PC's to hold any position of influence beyond place-holder. I think this worked reasonably well though in practise the most active staff barely played their PC's due to being busy staffing, still the option to play was nice.

There does exist one notable advantage to having staff members who actively play the game and that is that they experience first hand how the game feels from the player perspective. As Staff it's easy to lose touch with what the actual game is like.

@HelloRaptor said:

Not too long ago I was asked if I had a copy of a news file I wrote for mage years ago, because they remembered it'd been funny but to the point they wanted to make. Took me about five minutes to find a search term, but I was able to pull it up and pass it along. Nothing to do with paranoia, it was just useful to have an archive of all the things ever.

This is actually the only use my own logs have been put for so far. It's especially useful when you or someone else accidentally destroy a characters sheet and you can find the previous version somewhere in your logs. I'm not going to say how many times this happened but it was more then one <.<

@Arkandel said in Fandom and entitlement:

Perhaps the answer is "well, some writers are better" or maybe their material is just easier to write for. I can't tell. But for most creative teams around popular productions I can't imagine being online because there are fans out there who will trash them completely, and very personally, pretty much no matter what choices they make for their characters or plot. Because what do you tell the guy who literally tattooed the show's lines on his body, named his firstborn after a character and basically lives for your show when you have to do something he doesn't approve of?

There were two advantages that Breaking Bad had that many shows do not have.

1. It was properly planned from the very start with a clear overarching story-arc that was never milked for more seasons. You can compare this to House of Cards where it's obvious that Seasons 3-6 were in no way planned ahead of time.
2. Breaking Bad never had a complicated plot or unsolved mysteries for fans to get angry about. It was always just a rollercoaster ride of one mans crazy journey of self-destruction and the writers just had to deliver on that.

@Ganymede said:

That's not what I was getting at. I understand this. Judges should do this voluntarily, but do so in obvious cases because their ethical code can be enforced against them. On a MU*, if staff don't follow or enforce their policies, the policy is pointless.

I've been around the block for a long time, and I don't believe any code or set of policies will make me trust staff more or less than the reputations they have.

On a MU* if Staff don't follow or enforce their policies, the policy isn't worthless. The fact the policy exists and they ignore it tells you that the staff of that game are untrustworthy which is valuable information to have, especially if you can get it before you've deeply entrenched yourself in that particular game.

In the absence of a well written policy it's very hard to tell when a staff member is being fair and when they're just making things up as they go along.

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

I think you might be surprised to find out how many people on the forum are on the spectrum, or have a close relationship with someone that does.

It still does not mean that folks will not be shown the door for inappropriate behavior.

You can have empathy for someone's struggle or having been there yourself, and still show them the door when their behavior gets to the point it is detrimental to others on your game or more than you can handle.

As I have said it isn't fair. But it also is not kind to tell people that they should expect accommodations from places that are extremely unlikely to give them.

Is there any reason why you do not organized a game that can accommodate behavioral issues to give those that cannot or will not learn to moderate them, perhaps with more concrete and published boundaries, a mu they can play on that where behavior won't be a stumbling block? Seems like you are passionate about the subject, have ideas on how others should do this, and seem willing to tolerate a lot of behavior others wouldn't. Why don't you step up? Maybe if you showed others it could be done and how, people might be willing to try your strategies once they see it in action and working.

Because it is also the case that many people do try, but have limited success, especially when the behaviors involved are lashing out, or extreme emotional distress or neediness coupled with angry lashing out when someone puts down a boundary.

It's not about tolerating more behaviors. No matter how deep your understanding and patience of whatever issues someone may have, you can't run a functional game if people can't behave within a certain standard and quite frankly there's nothing about being on the spectrum that makes it particularly hard to follow reasonably clear rules. My problem isn't with people being shown the door if they're unable to behave, my problem is with the flimsy justifications I keep seeing for treating them badly before and after they're shown the door.

@Rinel said in RL things I love:

@Groth said in RL things I love:

Also LaCroix sounds seriously unhealthy, drinking pure water fucks up your salt and mineral balance, it's the kind of thing that leads to water poisoning.

I think you've gotten wires crossed somewhere. Drinking distilled water is not particularly great for you, because it lacks useful minerals. Even so, all of those minerals can be obtained by a proper diet. Water poisoning requires you to drink an obscene amount of water to overehelm your kidneys' ability to filter it. Your kidneys can filter a bit less than a liter of water an hour, so while this isn't impossible, it isn't exactly trivial.

LaCroix is just carbonated water with esters added. The biggest danger it poses is eroding tooth enamel.

Water intoxication doesn't require you to drink an obscene amount of water, it just requires you to drink a large amount of water without replenishing your electrolytes in a short amount of time. If you're sweating a whole bunch and drink a few liters of something as pure as LaCroix chances are you'll pass out.

@JinShei said in RL things I love:

@Rinel I'm using my little soda stream. Also I love halo But then I am on a diet (well, intermittently fasting).

I love my soda stream. I flavor it with this and it tastes weirdly amazing:
https://www.funlight.se/products/appear/

It contains both acesulfame K and aspartame but it doesn't really taste like it.