Posts made by Groth

You could start using new fun special symbols like /& #£!. For instance Library(Occult/Advanced) or Library (Occult)/Advanced.

@wanderer said:

With regards to GamerGate, I think they're all idiots. I only recently looked into it, but have you guys checked out the output of these attacked women? What they've accomplished with their lives? Why they call themselves "game developers?" Dude, I felt second-hand embarrassment for being a woman. Holy shit, so much entitlement over so little worth. I won't stand for online abuse, and I'm especially leery of internet mobs on either side. But wow.

Regardless of the social or economic value of the things these people produce, none of them are to my knowledge being actively harmful. Zoe Quinn calling herself a game developer doesn't really affect the rest of us. The sensible thing to do for most people is to simply not care about what those people are up to and condemn harassment.

What I find sad is that these days whenever any issue is pointed out in the game industry it's immediately made personal with tons of abuse directed against individuals that may or may not have anything at all to do with what people are complaining about, see how Alison Rapp got attacked due to localization choices in Fire Emblem, choices she had zero influence over or the complaints about Dragonspear became all about Amber Scott.

It should be possible to point out that adding the line 'It's all about ethics in heroic adventuring' as one of the character selection jokes is a bad idea without being affiliated with harassment.

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.

@Thenomain said:

Double post, to nerd over data storage:

@Groth said:

I advice using SQL for logging purposes.

I advise only using SQL for logging purposes if your coder can easily handle it. As the information is only important for that character bit, then keeping it on the character is fine, especially if you only need to keep information about the most recent event. If you want to keep a deeper log, then believe it or not MUX has a way to log to and read from an arbitrary text file. Use this as a NoSQL setup, or as a way to collect information until you can create a proper SQL schema.

There's a lot of things you can store in MU* fields or text files, but once you start caring about things like timestamps your life just becomes so much easier if you store the information in some sort of table imo*. Once you've stored the logging in a relational table it also becomes really easy to ask queries like "Which are the last X pools that Y fed from? Which people fed from X pool in November? Which month did X and Y feed from the same pool?" etc if you ever care to do so.

*Yes I know you can store those tables in text files if you care to do so.

@Thenomain said:

Fortunately, the login time is logged, but it comes with a second issue: What if someone never logs out? If someone never logs out, how do you determine if they lose a blood point? Do you really want to alienate the people who want to always be logged in? Do you want to punish those who aren't? I don't have an answer there.

1. Create a character attribute that determines if someone has paid their daily upkeep or not.
2. Set up a daily timer that A) Unflags every character, B) Charges every currently logged in character and C) Flags every logged in character as having paid.
3. Write a login trigger that A) Checks for the presence of the upkeep flag. B) Charges upkeep if it is not present. C) Flags as having paid upkeep.

Requiem for Kingsmouth contains code that handles everything that @nyctophiliac wants to do but it's not necessarily easy to navigate. https://github.com/ccubed/RFK

I advice using SQL for logging purposes.

@faraday said:

@Thenomain Fallout has a thematic reason for being low-tech, like Battlestar. SR3's reason is just "It was written in the 80s." Given that it's arguably supposed to share the same history as the real world, that makes it a little jarring.

Not as jarring as trying to play Twilight:2000 though

Couldn't you easily fluff magic interfering with radio signals or something?

@skew said:

You tell us, man.

Don't you guys go to the spa, get all hot and oiled up, then like wrestle or something...? Or is that just Finns?

The tradition is to go into a wood-powered sauna next to the sea and whenever you feel you're getting too hot, you dive into the freezing water before going back into the sauna.

@Olsson said:

@skew
Nordic LARP methodology.

What's that exactly?

It means LARP with little to no formal rules and a focus on cooperative storytelling.

@Coin said:

Not actually on topic but something I consider to be a worthwhile PSA: Cold water makes burns worse, not better. In fact if you subject your burn injury to too much cold water you'll suffer frostbite injuries in addition to your burn.

I think my only rule/advice for Good RP is

1. Pay attention to the poses of others and try to pick out details from it to reference in your own pose. That way the scene will feel more interactive and fun.

@Lithium said:

Back on topic:

I think with anime themed games the world itself has to be huge, and more expansive than just the player characters. I would think a world like Full Metal Alchemist would work, because the main characters are cool but hardly the most only alchemists on the planet. There are a lot of problems that can be used on the grid and it allows for a wide variety of game play as a setting.

Something like Knights of Sidonia... not so much.

What sort of system would you use to actually run FMA?

@Thenomain said:

I'm still trying to play Witcher 1. If the controls for Witcher 3 are better than Skyrim, then a lot has changed because the control and combat scheme for Witcher 1 is pretty bad. A lot about Witcher 1 has been bad for me, so I can't confirm or deny the desire to play in a game based on it.

Witcher 3 is vastly improved from Witcher 1 and 2. In the first two games the combat felt like novel experiments that didn't quite work out while in the third it all feels pretty fluent and awesome.

@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.

That DLC artwork is amazing.

Wow, there's a lot of people irrationally offended by the fact that White Wolf are not going to try to license the CoD Setting for novels/games etc and that they don't consider TTRPGs an income source.

It gets a lot easier once you hit the first big blacksite. If you look closely at the black sites you can see the dark event counters being stacked up individually per site.

@Warma-Sheen said:

We did this on a The Reach once. I still get alerts from the account. It was awesome.

But one thing is for sure. You don't have to be a great writer to make a twitter account. It is known for everything but. So not sure why that would even be thought of as a problem.

Other then the harpies, I just enjoy the idea of seeing someone tweet "I love redheads #juicebox" after feeding or "Rats ate my guests today again. #necropolis-problems"

@Coin said:

@Groth said:

On RfK I argued that we should set up twitter accounts for our vampires and have IC twitter brawls. The players were worried it would make outsiders over-react.

What? In what way?

Right before I started MUing, I was playing in Livejournal games (we used AIM, and then a private MU, for our scenes) and one of the things I loved the most was the complicity of "private" posts that every player could see, and the comment wars on journal entries. That shit was amazing and so much fun.

I can't remember exactly how the conversation went, but creating twitter accounts for the characters of the MUSH is still something I'd like to try. Having the harpy actually tweet biting blow by blow commentary about the weeky court complete with hashtags would be amazing.

My experience is that the in-game BBS works fine-ish for announcements but suck for discussions however most of the time people are not that interested in discussions so that's fine. I've seen atleast one game that created a subreddit for their game though it didn't look very used.

On RfK I argued that we should set up twitter accounts for our vampires and have IC twitter brawls. The players were worried it would make outsiders over-react.

@Ninjakitten said:

@Ashen-Shugar
Curses! That does make for a hell of a flaw in the plan.

I don't think it would be too hard to implement @robot in PennMUSH through softcode if one felt like it.