Posts made by gryphter

I even misspelled the name of the program, so that should give you a sense of how often I've actually used it. Out of guilt for my shitty and unhelpful answer I tried to research 'how to get started on a flow chart' however, that just turned up a lot of technical guides from the perspective of a multitude of different flow chart applications.

I suspect it's not the technical 'how' you need here, though. I always find it helpful to dial down to the smallest point of detail; what's the first event or decision point you can identify in the process? Get that, then work from that point step by step.

I'm sure none of this is blowing your mind with my fresh, hot take on flow charts or the vast amount of detailed information I've provided. Bottom line: You Can Do It.

We use Vizio for flow charts to lay out workflows for our vendor entity. That's about the whole of my 'advice', as I just deliver these, I don't build them.

@Alamias I'm stoked about how into the title of this thread you are.

I don't care if you call it a MUD, a MUCK, a MOO, a MUX, or a Fred. If I can engage with the story of a game and feel like my character is part of it, that's what I'm looking for. I don't code at all and I won't be interacting with the codebase. Do I like the story? Cool. Is there a character available that sparks joy, or can I make one? Awesome. Is the climate of your game healthy to be on? Perfect.

I strongly doubt we're living or dying on specificity of terminology here.

The best PRP is the one that exists, and is happening because someone has the energy and enthusiasm to run it. All activity is good activity. Even if there are elements that spur conflict, that sparks RP.

That being said, it's important to be very clear about what kind of content your PRP will include up front. You'll find that a broad spectrum of catalysts exists, where anyone who finds themselves traumatized to any extent by content they weren't expecting can and will air legitimate grievance.

You can't always avoid them all; you have no way of knowing if RPing about marshmallows (randomly) might cause me psychological trauma because of my past experiences with marshmallows. It would be unreasonable for me to expect you to realize puffed sugar is my trigger, in this weird example, but if my thing is extreme violence, or animals or children being harmed -- I would have really expected some advance warning of that, as those are pretty common catalysts for many people.

If your PRP exists and you're happy to run it and put energy into it, it's a good one. Just be sure to carefully analyze both your plan and potential ways the PCs might depart from your plan, and do your best to identify and disclose extreme content that some participants might not find healthy for them to engage.

Rank's not a bad system for negotiating this, but for fairness' sake you'd need a way to equate civilian expertise to rank to decide who's senior in a given scene -- this to not 'discriminate' against the civilian characters. Unless that's something you're fine with in a certain setting which is defined as primarily a military one and that's part of the expectation.

Given a system where different types of events and stories are run for different types of groups, this is clearly easier to sort. If it's a combat mission the military's in charge; if it's a science mission it's probably the ranking civilian expert. Now you have the setup to have your NPC, someone who gives 'General' orders (wink) give those orders directly to the ranking person in the scene.

Now it's their responsibility to 'post-set', if I may coin a phrase, and kick the orders or directives down the rank structure. Everybody needs to have a pretty clear understanding of where they fall on that spectrum, civilian and military both, for this to work as smoothly as it might.