Posts made by Ninjakitten

Yeah, SL is still going strong, and it has definitely got RP areas. Some explicitly, plenty just in practice. I don't like it as a RP platform, but there's plenty of folks who do. Chances are they aren't much younger than MU*ers, though. SL skews pretty middle-aged, last I heard, even if the human avatars tend to appear to be young adults.

@HorrorHound It's a virtual world in which you can build things, buy things, sell things, talk to people, go places, play basically 3-D paper dolls, play other games, etc. This being a virtual world peopled by avatars run by human beings, there's a lot to be horrified by. There's also some neat stuff, though.

Dear People of the World,

LEARN TO READ FOR COMPREHENSION. Thank you.

Sincerely,
NK

Not unless it changed when I wasn't looking.

There's my userscript (over in Userscript for Ignoring Users and/or Threads) but since that's clientside the board still pops notifications and therefore still needs to be marked read, so it may not help a lot for this case.

I like both those ideas -- people you played with might be something a player can list on a character's page.

So some important questions if it's going to happen are who's going to host it, where, and what to call it...

ETA: thinking about naming, I realised I still have 'texthibitionism' from when I was planning to make a central site people for people to post logs, years back. More appropriate for that, but could sort of work for this. Or it could be MUspace and everyone can have autoplay playlists of MP3s, terrible background images, and lots of flashy gifs.

@faraday

Ahhh, I see where you're coming from with that! Yeah, in a situation where all the games people would be coming from already use the platform and they already have a username connected to that info for the other game(s), that would be handy.

Since not all the games that would be involved use wikidot, though, I don't think it would be as useful for this. Plus, those of us who didn't have wikidot names (or have ones that aren't our MU* community identities) would be in the position of having to worry about the potential username conflict instead, then, and I suspect there's a lot of usernames already in use on wikidot.

@faraday
Sure, but what you have with the self-hosted mediawiki is, you've got Larry, Curly, and Moe as usernames on the wiki. The wiki's been set not to allow anonymous editing. If Larry posts an update saying Joe@CoolMUSH is an alt of Larry, you know it's legit. If Curly posts an update saying Joe@CoolMUSH is an alt of Larry, your moderator has reason to be suspicious. So there's no difference there.

As a bonus, @surreality's suggestion of using the User page as the Player's overall list means you could curate by things that user contributed and it would then be near impossible for someone else to attribute an alt to them.

@faraday said:

@surreality said:

Which gets sticky if someone is also active on wikidot for something not related to this hobby. There are just enough stalker issues that this could create more problems than it solves, unfortunately.

Interesting. Every game I've played on in the past few years uses Wikidot for their game wikis, and people have no problem creating additional logins if they don't want to use their OOC one. Some even create different wikidot logins for each game if they're worried about being stalked. :shrugs: It's a solved problem in my game circles.

@Roz You could tie it together with Wikidot too - I've done player/alt lists before on Wikidot in an automated fashion. That said, if you're more familiar with MediaWiki there's no reason to switch other than the universal login aspect for alt verification.

But if people are making separate accounts to join the wikidot wiki, how do you have any universal login alt verification in any way more than you do with a mediawiki where they have to make a user account to make their list anyway?

Making your own wiki instead of one on a wikifarm gives you MUCH more control over it, in my experience.

@surreality
I was thinking of them more for the situation where someone goes, hmm, I want Bob @ Somegame. <types> http://thewiki.mu/index.php/Bob@SomeGame <enter>

I know how to use DPL.

@surreality
I'm against submitting playlists for others also -- one could be wrong, or the player might not want that character tied to them. People have haven alts, etc. So yes, I agree on that for sure.

For the naming, that nearly works, but I'd take out the comma. I think it would be ideal if trying to go to Name@Game by itself goes to Name@Game (Player) IF there's only one Name@Game, and otherwise, disambiguates.

Using the User Pages for the Player makes sense to me, and having Players in a different namespace than characters seems potentially useful to separate them out. Then looking for JUST a name (say, Bob) in the main namespace could get you all the Bob characters, in case you forgot the game name but you'll know it when you see it. Or you want the Bob that YourFriend played, but don't recall the game.

@Lithium
Dude. That's what this entire conversation has been about.

@surreality said:

@Arkandel You can't, really, which is the downside.

Thing is, all adds and edits are identifiable on mediawiki by default, so someone maliciously changing things, or making strange claims, are going to be visible in the doing of it.

Maybe there could be some kind of process for challenging in the case that you felt someone was claiming to have been a character you actually played. Not sure what that would actually BE, though. Asking for logs is a thought, but they could theoretically be faked or taken from posted places, not everyone logs, and someone would actually have to read them. Just having a little template for 'this character claim is disputed' is also a thought, but people could dispute other people's genuine claims just to be jerks. Plus, anything might get disputes from people who just don't realise the name was used before or after they used it on that game.

I think it would be really handy if character pages required approximate dating (i.e., 2005-2006) but I suspect a lot of people would have a lot of trouble getting that near-right. I would, if I didn't log and date everything.

I really like this idea a lot. Hmm.

Let's see. Character page naming order options...

• Player - Game - Character
• Character - Game - Player
• Game - Character (Player if there's been more than one, with disambiguation at Game - Character in those cases)
• Character - Game (Player if there's been more than one, with disambiguation at Game - Character in those cases)

Those seem like the basic possibilities. Am I missing an obvious one?

I think I'd lean toward the last of those options, as either Character - Game or Character @ Game, since that's how I'd be thinking of anyone I was looking up -- 'Fred at/from ThatMU*'.

@tragedyjones said:

my entire character concept is "sex and violence" and also I am busy bumping in the night.

Seems appropriate for that concept.

@Halicron said:

remember the Oxford comma is the difference between helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse, and your uncle jack off a horse.

...while I agree those are important commas (although when writing you can generally get away with helping your Uncle Jack off a horse without them if you capitalize, and could solve it entirely by helping him down off a horse or off of a horse), they aren't actually examples of the Oxford comma.

The Oxford comma's the one before the 'and' (or occasionally 'or' or 'nor') in a list. A traditional why-you-need-it example would be "I'd like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

@mietze said:

I don't fudge rolls or ignore them--but I do require when people make them that they include how they're going about doing something (unless it's just a straight up thing). Sometimes this gets me fussing from some players "What? I've never had to tell anyone how I'm going about investigating, I just want to make my roll and then I get information," or "I don't know how I'm going to persuade/intimidate does it matter? I just want to roll and be done with it." Not very often though. Most folks are happy to do that, because it means the response is personal. Creativity is rewarded--if someone can sell me on what they want to try, I'll let them, even if that means that none of my plots ever goes quite to plan.

I'm of two minds on this, as a player. Generally, if my character is trying to do something, I'll try to explain how as well as I can, because it's more interesting and fun, and because sometimes I come up with something really good. I really enjoy when thinking through how to approach a thing is rewarded; I especially love when GMs/STs will allow some weird lateral-thinking maneuver a chance to work.

However, sometimes my character has a whole lot more dice in a skill than I would. How is my character going to investigate X? Honestly, much as I wish I did, much as I've mulled it over, maybe I still have NO idea in this particular case. But s/he does. To me that's what having the stat at that level means: s/he will have the talent/training/experience to know and think of ways to do this thing, and to judge whether A or B is more likely to be effective.

I try to play the downsides of characters not knowing things I do (random example: one would have had a decent chance of explaining away a conversation where someone else was heard saying too much as having been about a roleplaying game, but that character has never RPed, knows nothing about RP, and wouldn't see the point if he did, so his actual cover story was decidedly weaker), so I don't think I should be penalized when, even though I do try to research stuff my characters are supposed to be good at but I'm not, I still don't know how to approach doing X. S/he does.

As a benefits-for-creativity/cleverness thing, sure, please do ask me how the character plans to approach it; that's awesome. But if I don't really know? That's part of why the character has a stat. You may only use it in the first form, I don't know, but I've encountered this both ways, and the latter's been frustrating enough that, well... this post now exists.

My actual version's not in the voting list:

• Channels to one window
• Pages, OOC, and things like +friends to a second window

@Gingerlily
If it's not, poke me and I'll check my bookshelves and old files. If it references MU* and it's published before about 2006, chances are pretty decent it's in there somewhere.

@Gingerlily

I'd guess probably Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle. That's the first that leaps to mind, anyway, and I'm pretty sure the others I think of are post '97.