Best posts made by Groth

@faraday said in Evennia (Arx) webclient feedback:

Unless my phone is in rest mode or alt-tabbed for more than 5 minutes, then I start missing things.

I get why it works the way it does. My point (and krmbm/bear's as well) is that from a player's perspective it's disruptive to miss information.

The only ways to solve that are either:

a) Don't let the connection drop. This requires an app AFAIK.
b) Make a way for the game to let you retrieve information (poses, pages, etc.) that transpired while you were offline. This requires a paradigm shift in how people expect to interact with the game.

You can't prevent the connection from dropping from the tablet/phone side of the connection but you can keep the session alive for however long you want on the server side. There is a trade-off involved in picking how long that should be because you don't want to give the impression that people are online when they are not which could be partially addressed by giving semi-disconnected characters a special tag.

For Arx in particular keeping connections alive in this zombiefied manner would be helpful because whenever a character is fully disconnected it also despawns their retainers and respawns them when they log back in which can get rather spammy.

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

So in the US, you can say whatever you want around your colleagues, behave unprofessionally, prove yourself unsuitable for the job you were hired for and not get fired?

Hmm. I like our laws better.

The 2010 Equality Act does provide you with a defense to talk about all kinds of horrible things at the work-place as long as they don't infringe on anyone elses fundemental rights. It's easier in general for religious people because saying you'll burn in hell for doing X or Y doesn't affect anyones rights.

@friarzen

I think one thing that should be seriously considered is making an https://www.electronjs.org/ version of the webclient.

This would be beneficial on both computers and mobile devices.

1. On computers you would now have the benefit of having the webclient as its own window rather then 'just' a browser tab
2. On mobile devices you would no longer get aggressively disconnected whenever you're not in focus.

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

Usually I catch my missing words before I post the pose but sometimes I don't and I die a little inside every time.

@Derp said:

@ThatGuyThere said:

In the seduction example Person A rolls well and say gives Person B a 2 or 3 dice penalty on all roles in the presence of Person A because they get flustered. Still no player is forced to do something they really don't want but Person A has definite advantages in a situation of Person B.

Yep! That's the entire purpose for the Swooning condition. I agree that I think this is what the Conditions system is meant to be used for. Nobody loses control over their character (which is why there is a condition associated with offering an alternative). There are incentives for going along with the dice results, and other incentives/disincentives for going with an alternative approach. It's all narrative cooperation.

.

Self-serve conditions was probably the most widely enjoyed system @Alzie ever coded for us.

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

@Auspice Oh no.. I bitch as Ashen-Shugar too... I don't do anything with Evennia directly, I have someone on my dev team that is a wiz with Python and such, so we can make what we want happen.

I am at this point rather surprised anyone wants to work with you.

Yes, PvP mainly comes down to what sort of setting you're playing. For instance I think that trying to play Vampire on a MU* without embracing the concept of player conflict is a rather silly endeavour as one of the most central themes of Vampire is conflict with other Vampires however in other settings there may be fundamental concepts of cooperation that makes direct character conflicts out of place.

However I strongly believe that PvP in RPG's only makes sense if you're trying to tell a good story with conflict, it shouldn't be done in an attempt to 'win'.

@nyctophiliac
I'm sorry

My favoured approach in those circumstances is 'Trust but verify'. In practise this means giving players a wide freedom to do handle things on their own while making sure that everything important is logged somewhere so a staffer can investigate if needed.

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

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

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

I suspect it's less about your safety than their fear of legal liability.

What liability?

If you get sick on their premises, there's at least an argument to be made that your illness is their responsibility for not disinfecting the facility; and if they get sued, I can't imagine their business owner insurance covers pandemics.

People can sue over whatever you want, but I doubt you'll get any court to believe that an apartment complex owner is negligent for not managing to keep a laundry room disinfected during a pandemic.Usually you just have to show you're following best practices and best practices are going to be to ensure that there's posted rules about hygiene habits. For instance it's probably a very good idea to wash your hands before and after you do laundry in a public space.

@mietze said:

It can be a bit of a balance though. My ideal is someone who has a PC with flaws, who RPs them, but who is /also/ capable of give and take and noticing/playing off others' flaws too. Because there are some people who are so in love with their broken PC that sometimes they become very self centered as far as needing that to be the focus of all scenes you have with them. (The If Only People Bothered to Unwrap My Awesome PC but Instead They're Bothering Me With Their Own Stuff people--I bet everyone has experienced that too.)

This is actually what I find the most enjoyable with MU* RP, the interactivity, having your characters learn about others, having others learn about your character, having relationships develop etc.

One of my most amazing experiences was when the person I RP'd with ICly commented on a minor thing from one of my poses more then a week previously. I felt completely floored by the fact someone had actually noticed and remembered such a minute detail.

I'm not particularly good at making deep and flawed characters, however I try to make characters that are interested in others and hopefully fun to interact with.

That DLC artwork is amazing.

For proof that systems can bring the worst out of people, I don't think you have to look any further then the MOBA genre. People quickly get very degenerate when they feel someone else is responsible for them losing in a competitive environment. At the same time, there's countless of competitive environments out there (like most sports) where people get along just fine which I think illustrates how important community/culture/sportsmanship is.

I'm not convinced theme has a direct correlation with poor behavior. If you made a game about kittens where they're all constantly fighting to be the top cat, you'd probably get most of the same issues you see with running Vampire.

@Jaded said:

I am finding that I am enjoying Lucifer far more than I thought I did. It seems each episode is improving as the actors and 'tresses get more comfortable with their roles.

I want to like Lucifer but its insistence on trying to be an episodic crime drama makes it hard.

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

"Coffee shop" rp (AKA rp amongst yourselves) should be at least half of your rp on a game. Otherwise, you probably aren't roleplaying a character so much as playing the world's crappiest video game.

I make something of a distinction between what we could call 'social rp' and 'coffee shop' RP.

To me social RP is primarily about getting to know the other characters and exploring the interactions they have with my own character and the enjoyment I derive from those interactions is often the primary reason I play MU*.

However 'coffee shop' RP often takes place in a literal bar or coffee shop and has a habit of leading people to the most boring interactions possible.Often the RP is just rote poses about ordering/consuming whatever and talking empty platitudes. It's possible to make these scenes interesting(The article linked in this thread is great) but it takes more effort since you have to break the pattern and introduce something the rest want to interact with.

I'm tempted to suggest it might be good policy to not have any generic bar/coffee rooms on a game grid as a way to guide people towards doing something more interesting as their 'default' scene.

@Arkandel said in Universal Basic Income:

@Ganymede Also 'basic' will be a hell of a variable to define.

Basic is well defined in Swedish Law, it's calculated each year based on the expected minimum amount of money to buy food and necessities in a given month(Currently around $300). I think basic income makes sense because noone wants to be unemployed and the bureaucracy involved in welfare is both dehumanizing and a huge waste of money.

@tinuviel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

It's important to note that there is a difference between PCs who are antagonistic, and groups that are designed to be antagonistic.

My Ventrue and your Toreador are PCs who have antagonism between them. My Camarilla and your Sabbat are in groups that are designed to be antagonistic. The latter is harder to deal with and would probably require policy, the former is... basically expected in many kinds of games. So OOC communication is an absolute must, and that's basically it.

I think as a rule of thumb, it's not worth the headache to have militaristically opposed groups (like Camarilla and Sabbat) in the same game. People will be way too eager to jump to any justification for murder and it can be hard to come up with good non-combat scenes.

That said it's possible to create a PvP centric game as long as you carefully manage the game community to create a focus on story over winning. Most game settings tend to have competing factions of various sorts and you can try to set up situations where people can arrange their own faction to come out better which doesn't require the other side to be murdered.

@littlelizard said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

Just a quick thought: I encounter way more 'White Hats' or 'good guys' that are antagonistic and ooc problematic than bad guys. I've encountered way more communication and community in antagonistic spheres barring a few jarring examples.

Sadly these examples tend to be the only antagonists people care about or remember
.

So I don't buy the 'Assholes are the only people who are likely to play villains' argument.'

Usually if you have 'the good guys' and 'the evil guys' in a game, the 'evil guys' tend to be massively outnumbered and are usually the ones that have to deal with people randomly deciding it would be fun to murder them.

The one exception is a post-Clone Wars era star wars game I was in where Empire had the population advantage. It worked out ok since there existed a rule of sorts you couldn't kill people, just capture them and let them escape later.

@Cupcake said in Good TV:

I've watched 3 episodes of Motherland: Fort Salem and I still don't quite know what to make of it. Thoughts, anyone?

The worldbuilding is pretty cool, but the premise in and of itself is a bit whackadoodle. I think it might be too much for the casual tv watcher to handle.

I haven't actually watched it yet, but isn't the premise basically just 'What if elite soldiers were magic?'. Depending on how they choose to play it, it could easily fit in next to the likes of Top Gun, 24 or Homeland with magic instead of fighter jets.My biggest concern before watching it would be how much it plays into fascism and imperialism and I'm hoping it will be a good undermining of those elements rather then embracing it like many other military themed shows.

Edit:

After having watched 3 episodes I feel like they've taken an interesting premise and then just.... not really done anything with it. It's mostly just a bunch of random relationship drama that I have a hard time paying any attention to because at no point have they made me care about the characters yet. 3 episodes in I can't really tell you what drives any of the characters aside from their urge to fuck eachother in semi-public spaces.

Majesty gives bonuses to the Doors system in addition to all other effects. It in no way relies on that sub-system to achieve its effects.

I've never actually been a fan of Sudoku before but for whatever reason this channel 'Cracking the Cryptic' showed up in my youtube recommendations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAyZ9K2EBF0

It's almost hypnotizing to watch this guys enthusiasm as he solves mindbogglingly hard puzzles in minutes while apologizing for being slow. He has such a pure love for the process, the puzzles and the people who make them that I've found myself watching for hours and hours. I definitely recommend watching him even if you don't normally like puzzles because his genuine joy is infectious.