Best posts made by il-volpe

I am too old for a childhood autism diagnosis -- I predate "Asperger's Syndrome" in the US and Canada, and a speech delay was a required criterion for an autism diagnosis prior to that. I probably had a speech delay but nobody noticed; evidently I cried so much as an infant that family members feel they are still justified in ignoring me when I make noise forty-six years later.

So as a kid I was "gifted, but emotionally disturbed" and put in the gifted program and the one for the firebugs, the kids in foster care, the kids of colour who didn't grovel enough and the girls who got angry.

One day like fifteen years ago I made a MUSH character with a certain set of my own quirks, more of them than I usually do, and another player told me what a great representation of an autistic adult he was. I still don't have an 'official' diagnosis from a medical-expert-on-autism, but nurses, shrinks, my GP, other autistic people, my uncle's PT, etc keep giving me the casual one.

MUSHing, where people's social-signals are right there in text, allows me to play at being far more socially adroit than I am.

I am totally hyperlexic. It's not so profound now. When I was a kid it was probably hilarious. When I was in grade 3 I went on this Hemingway kick. I didn't understand Hemingway, of course, but when I re-read them in my late twenties I remembered the cadence.

@faraday I, too, am an "idiopathic toe-walker." You might be amused by this barefoot running trend thing, and the 'Born to Run' book and related stuff about the mechanics of the human gait, 'cause it kinda looks like not being a toe-walker is an artifact of wearing harder-soled shoes and shoes with heels. My mom used to hang out with this old Shoshone guy when I was a kid and he said I just walked the way people did when everybody wore moccasins.

@tmr said in The Desired Experience:

they wanted to expand on the town-side RP so thought suggesting a townie was a way to do that. Only it wasn't because smart people (or at least people familiar with the game) knew that the town was Deadville

This is classic, and I've fallen for it a good handful of times.

I will even notice that the area is deadsville and yet be extra naive about it, assuming that staff's attempt to grow that area will include making it attractive. Later, if I bother to inquire, I'll learn that staff feel there aren't enough players for them to bother giving the ones who exist something to do, and are mystified that players walk instead of waiting indefinitely.

@macha Another autistic friend of mine uses only slip-on shoes because it takes too long to adjust laces so that lace-up shoes are exactly the same amount of pressure on each foot.

@mietze This.

"Damn it's hard to get a scene."
"If you are fun, people will play with you."

Gee, thanks.

ETA: If the game is big, yeah, nobody notices them in the corner, so it's no problem. On a small or middlin' size game, the sandwich club can be very very noticeable. When staff PCs are members of said club and non-club-members are standing around staring at condiments, well. You prolly remember that game.

@23quarius Not just "somebody" but organizations with the purpose of helping people with disabilities, invariably (in the experience of myself and everyone I've ever asked) advise you to keep your 'invisible' disability to yourself until hired. Once hired, you can ask for accommodations and the law is on your side about getting them. Disclose before you're hired, you won't get hired because you are "not the best fit for our organization" and there's fuck all you can do.

This was not some rando giving me bad advice. Stunning or not, this is reality.

Yeah, somebody applying for a full-time position and then demanding part-time as an accommodation is probably being crap.

@quinn Lead isn't really bioavailable to plants, so if you wash your vegetables well it's almost certainly fine. Chuck a lot of phosphorous-bearing fertilizers in that soil and and it'll bind the lead to stable, insoluble.

Probably those chipmunks dug up your tulip bulbs and ate them before they even came up. Happens to me with squirrels. Then I'd find a tulip blooming in a random spot in the woods nearby.

I hate it when they are a novel, and I curse whoever started the idea that the BG is a test to see if you are a good enough writer to play the game.

The GoB wiki actually has this list of suggested points that a BG might cover. Once somebody actually did it as a questionnaire, and that was fine by me, though few, if any, other BGs actually cover every point because it's not meant to be a questionnaire, just a source for a mental prod.

@macha Made my day. Or month. I frickin' framed it.

Yep. The thing that gets old with these super talented sorts is that they tend to lack flaws, or they have flaws like "does not suffer fools gladly." Coooool flaws. That's just Mary Sueism, really. Characters don't have to be 19 year olds with PhDs to be annoying in just this way, and often are not.

The tendency to ring the twink alarm whenever somebody with a certain (rather corny, sure) type of special shows up doesn't prevent the problem that we're associating with said critters, and limits the possibilities for good players to get into RP with PCs that have snowflakish aspects. Which can be done very well, really, and have been.

@Nymeria Ehh, I won't stand corrected. It may well be that you have no rule barring characters of colour per se. However, scrutinizing them such that they're nigh impossible to get approved (on a game with a very laborious application process at that) amounts to the same thing.

I doubt lot of people are super keen to play PCs of colour on a game where they are strongly discouraged by a headwiz who's notorious for saying racist things on social media.

@hobos I getcha. I wondered about it myself -- not only is GoT a typical white fantasy setting, the notion of family resemblance, and specifically in terms of hair-colour, is a major plot point. More than once.

I didn't do or say anything about it. Game of Bones had PCs of colour. I even actively encouraged them. But players, all on their own, kept their Lannisters blonde, their Baratheons black-haired, etc. "Not Overtly Forbidden" does not mean "Inevitable".

I did not have problems with PCs of colour having a reason to be in the setting. Because, one, every character needs a reason to be in the specific setting of a game, and players all come up with one. I simply didn't require PoC to have a good and compelling one while white PCs were there for the beer, all characters were allowed to be there for stupid reasons. It's realistic. Also, the Narrow Sea separating Westeros from Essos is narrow. People have been sailing back and forth for somewhere between two and six thousand years. It's just not much of a barrier in the books, so it seems a stretch to be all oh nooooes how could you possibly be there?! on a MU.

@Misadventure Pointless info-dump-esque thing. Ned Stark doesn't understand genetics and it's quite likely that George R. R. Martin doesn't either, but Jon actually works out fine -- some primates on Planetos, Valyrian humans notably, have the equivalent of a "dominant white" mutation. In the real world humans don't have this, but a lot of other creatures do. Horses have lots of different ones. So Rhaegar had one copy of the Valyrian white-hair gene and thus the phenotype. Lyanna Stark didn't have the gene, and Jon happened not to get it from Rhaegar, so Jon's brown or black haired depending on your show/book preferences. Interesting, in real world animals having two copies of a dominant white gene often results in neurological dysfunction. Which would explain why Targaryans are often batshit. Dominant white mutations are also often what coat-colour-genetics people call 'leaky', meaning that whatever colour the creature would be without the white gene covering it shows through -- you want a snowy white chicken, you breed recessive white because dominant white is likely to give you a brassy white or a ticked white. If Valyrian white acts that way with blonde, it would explain how generations of Lannisters could 'carry' it and be 'golden' rather than white blonde.

Probably coincidental, but amusing thoughts to me.

@HelloRaptor said:

Those who haven't (to my knowledge) been caught tend to accomplish it through a few rules:

See, if they follow those rules, I cannot give a single ghost of a fuck if they have 'illegal' alts, because they're hugely unlikely to be annoying anybody.

Normally I'm against having rules that follow, "Don't do X, which is harmless in itself, because it makes it easier/more likely that you'll do Y," reasoning. Alas, in the case of the alt-abuse thing, I ended up doing that. But my "You must register your alts so other players can avoid you if you're a dick," rule is so not interesting to me if nobody notices 'cause you're not being a dick. This is, of course, terribly unfair and lazy of me not to even try to enforce this rule universally, or whatever, (not that I've thought about it much 'til now.) but you know. Smokin' pot and whackin' off at home in the bedroom vs. in the candy aisle at the grocery store.

@hella Yeah. My reaction tends not to be "Waaah, I wish you liked me as much as you like Theno," but "Waaah, I wish you liked me enough to invite me to join that table too," and I still feel that this is legit, especially if the "table" I was at is rendered empty or near-empty by your shifting to Theno-table.

The most charming sci-fi convention guest of all the con guests I've ever seen was Andrew J. Robinson, who admitted that at the time he was still in deep mourning for Garak and had been for quite some time. And read to us from his (as yet unpublished) Garak novel, complete with Garak voice and eyeballs.

No answers there, but you're a long way from alone.

@crayon said:

do not purport to represent all text-based roleplaying games. If you perceive that our site is doing it, I'd be happy to get to the root of what causes those perceptions so we can fix it

I think the cause of that perception would be @Jeshin saying it.

The rest, well. You have come to this community to advertise a game and an online community. This is allowed. Your upcoming Project Redshift is advertised here as equal to all other games advertised here, even though it's not the sort of game that this community is about.*

However, your community does not reciprocate. Very few of the games that we here enjoy qualify to be advertised on your community in a manner equal to those that are your favoured type. Why is it hard to understand that this is annoying?

Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.

*Actually, since you persist in bumping this thread by posting about the new content on Optional Realities, you're really sort of grabbing more than your fair share of metaphorical airtime and thus creeping into the field of bad manners by local community standards.

I've gotta say, ugh, Fantasy WoD? I so strongly wish for more things that are not WoD.

Ahh! Thanks. Naw, the message isn't on the parent. It's not on every exit, either, but if I search for it and it's not there, well, it won't replace it, so all good.

Yes.

That is 'Game of Bones.' It was dead when it was given to me, was resurrected, and had a pretty decent run -- sizable-enough connect numbers and scenes going on 24-7 for around two years. Lately it's quiet enough that people would probably call it dead, though a core group of dedicated players are still having fun with it.

@crayon said:

I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.

Not really -- this board is our space for advertising. It's as big as it gets here, and you get equal space with everybody else. Your site has your 'listed game' advertising space, and then each of those games gets a subforum, and then there's this one 'other games' area on your forum. So you've come along here and used our advertising space to its fullest extent, while denying us the same privilege. If I post an advert for my game on your forum, it's not only more clicks away from the front page for your community, it's in a subforum area that's down at the bottom and named the equivalent of 'miscellaneous afterthoughts' and there's no link to it from the part of the site that people who are looking for new games are most likely going to be looking at. Your poster is up on the wall here, but on OR, most MUSHes are indeed hidden in the bin by the door. The fact that you have a special big-poster-wall doesn't change that; in fact it makes the effect worse by calling attention away from the advertising space we are allowed, and by implying, in no uncertain terms, that our shit is second-best.

it's a MU* Soapbox, in which case while the community might be overwhelmingly of a particular genre the board's intent seems broader.

Since I don't play WoD, a hell of a lot of the content here doesn't relate to me, either. I believe you are correct that the intent is broader than MUSHes/MUXen alone, and it's certainly broader than WoD, but most of the content is about WoD anyway. Nobody minded that you wanted to advertise a MUD here. They minded that you want to use our clubhouse to advertise a site which was put forth as being about text-based RPGs in general, yet enforce policies that class the favoured format of most of the users here as clearly second-best. Possibly if we had a board, hidden down at the bottom, called 'Advertisements for Games That Suck' and the mods moved your ad down there, people would see it as fair and ignore you instead of having all the snarky fun.

Some of the criticism levied towards us has been based in our lack of willingness to really become participants in this community, but part of the obstacle to that has been the general 'outsider' treatment and a lack of explicit focus coupled with a community userbase that is definitely focused.

Heh. As far as I can see, you've not posted anything that isn't advertising your own shit or defending your position. This is indeed bad form; it appears that you're trying to get something out of us (users for your site, players for your game) and not give anything back. I do this on 'Game of Thrones' fansites, but I've got the courtesy not to get into arguments about it if people complain, and in fact sometimes even apologize for treating their communities in a slightly predatory fashion.

If you want to become a participant in the community, well. Participate in the community. It is a rough-and-tumble community, and people will laugh at you and call you names and you'll have to take your licks, have a sense of humour about it, and figure out the culture. If you don't like that, stick to some other place. I think the phrase is, "There's no crying in baseball."

Oh! Thanks for the explanation. The automated systems requirement is definitely a blurry and tricky thing to really hammer down and determine a firm line on.

No; FS3 +combat does apply the damage, it is not set by hand.

It's different from a MUD in that you can more or less ignore it. Okay, you get damaged in +combat, you have minuses on your rolls and if you get hurt bad enough you can't hit shit, but it will never kill you.

More important is just. The culture of how it's used. My first RPG MU* was that Ghostwheel MOO, which was very MUD-like. Actually, that fuckin' thing was like the golden dream of heavily automated. All the exits had sizes, if you were in a mecha or riding a dragon you couldn't fit through small exits. All of your clothes were objects, and would add a line to your desc when you put them on, replacing the line of your desc that reflected that part of your body naked. You could find new clothes or armour and drop the old ones and people would find them and pick them up. You had a lockpicking skill and could find picks and open locks, and maybe find /better/ picks that would make it easier. If you swam under water for too long without a scuba-tank, you would drown and die. Code prevented you from doing anything you ICly could not do, there were McGuffins all over the place, and collecting and interacting with coded shit was a major part of the game. This, to some degree or another, is what I believe @Jeshin wants when talking about wanting automated systems.

On GoB, and the other FS3 games that I have experienced, the +combat system and +heal command are just convenient resolution-generators, no different from the +roll system (FS3 has both), except requiring one to enter fewer commands (and wait for other people to enter fewer). Interacting with it is less part of game play and more just a way to easily decide how game play shall proceed. The relationship between this code and RP is the same as the relationship between dice commands and RP on WoD MUs, but WoD MUs don't meet your criterion, and that is dumb.