Posts made by Groth

@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.

@Ghost said in NPC Roster:

I also had another idea I didn't share with you yet. In my experience most players tend to look at that influence list and go I want ALL of those at max, which never really made sense to me. How can both your vampire and 30 other players have the police commissioner in your pocket?

On RFK Shav solved that by creating a slot pyramid. Only one person could have a sphere at 5, two at 4 and iirc 4 at 3. So only one person could have the police commissioner and you'd either have to steal them or replace them with your own.

@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.

@faraday said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

The Penn/Tiny/Rhost codebases might be a bit trickier to implement. You might be able to do it with a hook on the page command though; I haven't messed around with that in years.

Yes. You just implement @hook/override and write your own version of tell.

It would be trivial to make any MUSH log tells the way @Pandora describes. It's just a question about how comfortable you are with members of staff being able to read your tells since the default behavior of MUSH is to grant all staff readaccess to all variables. It would be slightly less trivial but equally possible to make it so only wizards could view them.

@Taika said in Etsy:

@surreality Right?!

Seriously about the pictures. I swapped to a google pixel 2 xl specifically because it can tell my blue from purple. On an average post (cause I hangups) it takes me... probably an hour of fiddling to get a couple of not-claw-your-eyes-out boring af pics. Then you upload and fill in all those blanks - which isn't too bad. It's the 'write 300 words, minimum, of nice things about the product and get people invested in some bs story'. When all I wanna do is be like: It's shiny, this long, these materials, and this one jingles a bit when you shake it. Buy my stuff.'

If you make a fair amount of those things and they sell for a reasonable price. It might be worthwhile to find someone on Fiverr who'll write your blurbs for you. Someone like this although 300 words seems a lot longer then the Fiverr standard.

@Pandora said in Groth's Playlist:

You might grind my gears on MSB, but I enjoyed every interaction I had with Andry and will miss seeing flashback updates from him now.

We may have a difference in opinion on a lot of things but I've always enjoyed your RP. I hope that if anyone picks up Andry you'll continue your efforts in trying to convince him to get some decent clothing.

Updated because it turns out I'm playing on a MU* again.

I wish I was anywhere near as good at creating content for others as Raemira is. They're good people.

@Runescryer said in Wheel of Time:

I like the idea of removing the 'Main Characters' so that the focus can be on the PC's. However, just playing Devil's Advocate here, that leads to another problem, IMO. If the setting and events of the WoT series are in use, someone has to be the Dragon Reborn to fight off Tarmongaiddon. So, you seem to be trading Super-Special NPC's for a group of Super-Special PC's that all the prophecies revolve around.

Just something to think about and plan around.

Depending on what you're looking for in a Wheel of Time game, you could ditch most of the apocalyptic storyline and just keep the setting, an alternative history where Tarmon Gai'don happens 100 years later.

@gangofdolls said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

and coders who can knit the backend systems together (this is often the hardest part to scale).Because there are so few coders in this community so they have the ability to be choosy about the projects they want to work on and the people they want to work with and the complicated history of a lot of these former partnerships on other past games means that some coders won't work with game owners and vice versa.

Just easier said.
Hard to do.

I don't think we're that rare honestly (There's multiples of us, multiples!) but most coders aren't interested in running a game (if they were, they'd code their own game) and if you're going to spend hundreds of hours working for free on someone elses game you need to be really sold on the vision of the game-runner.

@sparks
It's not about the power level as such more then the way that the power level is described. The first chapter of the first book starts out by telling us about how the teenage protagonist is the most notorious and skilled assassin in the land and you're expected to take that as a given because unlike say the Farseer Trilogy or Arya's chapters in Game of Thrones or The Nevernight Chronicle by Jay Kristoff(I quite enjoyed that one) it's not an assassination story, it's as far as I can tell primarily a love triangle drama.

Since I don't know what kind of YA Fantasy you're looking for, we're shooting in the dark here but to start with I think you can't possibly go wrong with anything written by Brandon Sanderson. I did quite enjoy Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crow even though it felt very forced that every single character had to be paired up. I havn't read anything by Marissa Meyer but she's very popular and new so she might be what you're looking for, same goes for Victoria Aveyard (Honestly the premises of Red Queen and Lunar Chronicles are so similar I struggle to remember which is which).

Shades of Magic by V.E. Schwab is pretty decent and if you think your sister in law has a thing for hilariously poorly written overpowered protagonists, there's always the inexplicably popular Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas

MSB Meta is OP, Plx nerf

@pyrephox said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@saosmash said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

This is always my fear, honestly. I try to couch what suggestions I make in terms of my personal preferences and viewpoint, with an understanding that it may or may not fit in with the design goals of the overall game, but it can be hard once you get enthusiastic about some bit of system nonsense that no one but you cares about (but suddenly you find that you care an unexpected amount).

If couching your ideas defensively makes you feel better about proposing ideas, that's a good thing but a bad idea is still a bad idea even if expressed politely and guardedly.

I think it's important to realize most ideas from everyone are bad, there's no mythological person out there who only has good ideas and it's very hard to recognize which of your own ideas are bad. What you can do however is make sure your idea is properly developed. For a game like Arx you can ask yourself.

What kind of goal/problem do I have in mind for my idea? Will it actually achieve that goal/problem?
What specific kind of RP would my idea enhance?
What kind of RP might my idea detract from?
Might my idea cause other problems?

If you've already considered those questions you should have something worth talking about at least.

@sparks said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

However, a lot of this thread has not been actionable suggestions, which... well, after all, it's more a theorycrafting and analysis thread, rather than something focused solely on how to improve things to make stuff more fun for players, which is the focus I needed in my redesign work.

In terms of actionable suggestions and focused discussion on those suggestions, the Github ticket is always going to be the winner by far since it breaks the discussion into specific topics that can be sorted/labeled/assigned etc.

A catch all forum topic like this one is always going to be derailed by whatever someone feels like ranting about for the moment and while good suggestions may appear in it, they're not going to be at the forefront or given good individual discussion.

While the systems discussion board does have the advantage of being available to anyone with an Arx character, in terms of discussion it's even worse then MSB because it's a kind of half-assed version of a BB that was never designed to be used for discussion in the first place.

If anyone has any actionable ideas or concerns I really recommend going through the effort to make a github account so you can make a ticket here:
https://github.com/Arx-Game/arxcode/issues

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

You throw feedback at the "proper channels", which is often code by bad staff for saying "throw it in this pit and we may look at it".

Arx is proud of its "our way or the highway" methodology and fortunately that works for a lot of people. I think the only truly successful games would have a Benevolent Dictator approach. The question that you and Tempest raise is: Are the dictators benevolent?

Or at least are they benevolent enough?

If not, then I agree with Tempest's echo-chamber concern. If they are, then there's not much to worry about.

I think any succesful design requires a single strong vision for what the end result should be like. You can insert all sorts of proverbs about captains and cooks here. However when you're sitting up there and designing things in line of your vision, it's really easy to lose touch with how it actually feels like in play and it's only through good feedback you can ensure you'll end up where you wanted to go.

It's hard to get good feedback though, most players never want to give any opinions at all while others just want to rant and rave about what they want while the designer usually just wants to know if things feel like they're intended to feel.

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Agreed, but here's what's going against the Echo Chamber theory:

• 100+ Players
• Feedback from people who are engaging the system

Unless there is a secret channel I don't know about, there's very little talk about Arx on Arx outside of the odd panic on the info channel whenever a major change is made. As far as I'm aware, MSB is the official Arx forum and the main place Arx players talk about Arx.