Best posts made by gryphter

@Auspice I really identify with this. Probably people that know me online would be shocked to hear that I'm a painfully shy person who struggles to even place a food order on the phone, let alone make a friend. I'm borderline socially dysfunctional in almost any situation I haven't prepared myself extensively to face, and maybe even then.

Around people where I'm comfortable I'm cracking jokes and the life of the party.

I think I'd be hard-pressed to control myself from exploding if somebody saw how I act online or with my friends and tried to tell me I'm not shy. Motherfucker, eat a whole bag of raw dicks.

Okay, this piques my curiosity. I see you currently have no Idealist. Curious...

I served with a friend who called (presumably calls) all soda 'Coke'. I would reliably bring exactly that when asked. A Coke is a Coke, and while I might entertain some interest in what sort of soda a person would like, I won't voice the question of what non-Coke Coke they might enjoy.

Because standards.

I always used MUSHclient, and still go to that when I need to log or if I know I'm going to have a lot of windows open, but I greatly enjoy the convenience of web browser clients.

Looking for me. I lost touch with myself some time ago and I'm hoping we can reconnect. Can anyone help me find myself?

I don't even fucking know anymore. Somewhere between sitting here trying to persevere through a panic attack and complete my work, and erasing my personal files from my (rented) personal computer so I can return it as I can't seemingly afford the one object in this house that sparks joy, I really feel like I am on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Why in the hell am I battering myself against this joyless, soul-killing job only to not afford my life? My complaining about my job and my (new) complaining about struggling with the onset of this anxiety disorder are starting to sicken me, I can't stand to listen to myself anymore, but I also can't continue to grind myself into a fluffy, irritable, panic-ridden dust so that I can eke the minimum possible amount of joy and enjoyment out of life. I want to get the fuck off.

The chairs at work can almost accommodate the boys. Almost! Right up until the moment I cough or sneeze, which has the approximate effect of a jackhammer to the groin, and folks in the open office looking at me while I try not to rub the affected area.

(Not that it would help anything.)

Also added for bonus points: that sneaky little check when you suspect that your fly might be open. Just adjusting my belt or something?

In the interest of troubleshooting, I can report that I'm not experiencing any of these issues. To guess haphazardly at possible drivers, I don't have anyone blocked or ignored? I can't think of any other setting that would be substantially different from anyone else.

I did get here late, though, sometime in 2018 -- so maybe it's a thing that happens to older accounts.

@Auspice I'm trying. I'm looking. This is a bad day; the final bastion of something I could point to and say 'well, at least I earn that from all this mental sickness I'm taking on' falls today. It's dumb; this object shouldn't be so meaningful that it's the thing breaking my shit right now to sit here and strip it clean, but I'll be damned if it isn't. Earlier today I was looking into remote freelancing opportunities... going to need a computer for that, though. Blah. You suppose the 'old' job will just let me keep their rig if I ask nicely? Tee. Tee hee.

Nonetheless, thank you for your encouragement.

@SquirrelTalk I drew the breath -- so to speak -- to say that I am married to grids, and then it died on my lips as I realized maybe I'm not. Probably I'm not. The way Ares handles scenes I'm not sure you need a grid at all and we pretty much have it because we're used to it. Having observed the scenes system I think even shy people feel comfortable joining an open, public scene, and that obviates the need for players to 'happen upon' one another on a grid. Just join the open scene -- and people do. The behavior change took, in my opinion, and very quickly at that.

But you do need, if not a grid, something like Ares' scenes that lets people have some way to know when RP is out there that is open to them, and to let them know they are encouraged to join it.

@krmbm It's an interesting question. Both extremes would be fun to play, and the latter would be much more fun to code, I think. However, Moiraine is such a BA at the beginning because she's the only channeler we've encountered. Once we start to meet others, the sense of power really changes -- yes, our principal characters begin to grow stronger, but we're also treated to a view of the world where channeling is increasingly common and the things Moiraine did in the EotW become downright pedestrian in comparison.

So I would argue that the sense of power we have as readers at the beginning is a false, forced perspective. It's not really true to the setting and we have to mostly ignore the movements of larger powers and outside forces. Although the Dark One and his Forsaken are only beginning to stir, there are still many powerful Aes Sedai out there doing things, and we do already have people attempting to fulfill the prophecies and assert themselves as the Dragon Reborn.

I do like the idea of playing out the salient events of the novels in an alternate timeline with new PCs or NPCs emerging as the big players -- your Amyrlin Seat, your Dragons true and false, your ta'varen.

I suppose what it boils down to is I love WoT. If a game exists that isn't a sand box, I will show up, no matter the details. I would love love love to see it in Evennia rather than Ares, though that seems to be a minority view, but I like the Arxcode base for WoT in the way it handles orgs and economies of resource, as well as other things. The higher complexity of the code is a factor, true, but I'm not being coy when I say I would be a contributor financially to seeing this exist. So like, if someone is out there seriously considering a WoT build on Evennia, we should chat. I would back this. I don't know if my wallet feels so freely about an Ares build, just because I've never really felt attracted to the interface and elements that come out of the box. Ease of connection while on a VPN for remote work is a huge factor for me also, and Evennia nails this with its web portal client.

Food for thought, and stuff.

I love Ares, but I don't want to forget my love of Evennia either. There's something that feels more like 'game' there, and it's pretty slick and modernized too. I've thought that Ares comes off as more of a collaborative writing tool for RP and Evennia comes off as an RP-centric game. Both of these approaches are awesome and valid, and both can be spawned up easily and functionally in-browser. I feel lucky to have both any time I'm forced to fire up a client program (gross, how 90s).

So we have the systems. Are we just so out of touch we're only playing themes nobody but us gives a shit about? I'm really not ready to believe that either. Maybe we need to slut ourselves out to some new clientele with games that pander to new users, but I think those would draw the little preciouses deeper into our webs and onto our more thoughtfully-crafted settings.

The sort of places we've applied our collective experience over years and decades evolving ideas together to build. Maybe we can do the same thing and put our heads together to come up with game settings that would work and appeal to fresh meat -- get them in the door and twitching our webs.

I think if you were mindful in the approach, you could balance the way you use these systems so that the people who enjoy those elements as part of a sort of civilization simulator (guilty) can engage them, but those who really want to focus on the granular RP and largely ignore those systems should be empowered to do so without consequence. This would take careful thinking to achieve, but could be done if it was maintained as a focus point through the planning and creation of the game, imho.

Evennia and the Arxcode base can be very flexible. At Ithir for example they made critical changes to the systems; they gutted prestige and social clout and social rank from the code because it didn't work for their setting. Similarly the creators of a WoT game could tweak the elements of the system to streamline it to the intended use, and the removal of unnecessary parts could help to relieve some of the heavy systems lifting in the player experience.

I say all this very blithely as a non-coder, but I know there are some geniuses out there who love to do this stuff and help people get and keep games up, particularly if they can get some compensation for their time and effort.

@silverfox Fixed it.

Side note, remember when you used to have to '@lock me=me' to prevent everyone entering you? Those were the days. I seem to recall littering items into many an unsuspecting friend.

Remorseless double post because it would also be great to just play a very small slice of the setting, like the Two Rivers for example, and really preserve the feeling of mystery and fear, of being powerless in an increasingly hostile world and lean into how you're going to cope with and react to that.

ETA: You can't really go wrong with WoT, no matter how you spin it.

@Griatch Certainly I would imagine that someone with the code chops could take an Ares or Evennia setup out of the box and do virtually whatever they want with it. I've had more direct exposure to Ares done different ways than Evennia, but I'm sure you could emulate or approximate any function of one within the other if you really wanted to. When I get into combat in FS3 on Ares I'm not not gaming, but when I say 'Evennia feels more gamey' I'm aware it's more a statement about what I've seen either code base do than what either is actually capable of doing.

That being said, Ares out of the box feels like the RP crowd I would've found in the 90's on a less code-heavy, more freeform game. The sort of players who came over from other venues of RP and found MU*. I've really only seen Evennia run Arx, but its resources and item objects in tiers of quality minds me of the code-heavy games where you were more likely to find players that had come from MUDs and RPIs. However they got to MUDs in the first place remains a mystery, but I posit that it has something to do with the large monetized MUDs that were successful and marketing heavily at the time. Your Gemstones and Dragonrealmses.

And once again, we're talking about money and marketing now. What's interesting to me is talking to folks, most of the people I've asked would be comfortable paying a subscription-like fee -- within reason -- to be on a game, provided that the code and admin support felt 'worth it' to them. I think we've all dreamed the dream of a MU* so successfully monetized that its admins can afford to quit their day jobs and focus on pretendy-funtimes whole hog. But there's a slippery slope here. Would you want, as a staffer, to be a literal employee of the game? How chill would players be if they had the mindset of paying your bills, I wonder?

@fatefan Double-post because there sure were a lot more than seven of those little souls, or whatever they were, in Father's weird little jar-thing. I suppose for MU you would have to broaden the concept to include more characters... but I really don't see why that wouldn't work. I also would probably avoid having the heroes from the show even exist in this game's canon.