Best posts made by Packrat

Another factor that I have run into a lot is that, certainly in a text only medium, is is amazingly easy to attribute the worst possible motivations to people when you interact with them online. I certainly am not perfect at practising what I preach there but my own experience is that if I clamp down on my initial gut reaction to personally file somebody as a Super Jerk for disagreeing with me or questioning what I am sure was an objectively right decision?

Fuck it, they probably had some kind of point or are operating under different assumptions and priorities to me, so if I continue to treat them as a cool person then it will likely be a self fulfilling prophesy.

Obviously that goes out of the window if they start vomiting forth sexist or racist vitriol.

@fortydeuce I give quite a lot of training courses and this is so important. I try to structure things into roughly 50 minute blocks with 20 minutes of 'lecture', a re-engagement such as a quiz or exercise, then another block. Ten minute breaks every hour to let people hydrate and stand up.

One thing that endlessly frustrated me about Wheel of Time was that the main character established his Male Channeler School, probably the second most powerful group/organisation after the White Tower.

Then he just ignored them and left them alone for months at a time to do whatever the fuck. Despite the fact that he could teleport. Despite the fact that dozens of them were able to teleport themselves and thus could have established communications between his wildly disparate holdings and nominal allies. Just popping in to do a double check and supervision pass every few days for an hour could have made the whole series infinitely less head impact against wall inducing.

Well, or at least versions of said disorders that are heavily medicated and rigorously clamped down on thanks to therapy and attempts at mental discipline to limit the impact.

I am externally seeming a quite successful person who should be happy but I have probably lost 1/3 to 1/4 of my life to depression, I have absolutely run into people who have said things like 'I was made redundant once and I was so depressed for a few weeks!' or 'I was so depressed when my mother died!'

The way to engage with that is not to mock them or outright confront them, it is to ask them. Now imagine if you felt like that all of the time? Remember the immediate aftermath of a family member dying. Imagine if that was your default state thanks to fucked up brain chemistry and you felt like that even when everything was going fine and your life was good?

One method I have seen work pretty well, is to allow one to suffer crippling injuries in order to turn failure on rolls into dramatic success. At opportune moments that is.

Did your roll to lead a charge into battle fail due to the vagaries of the dice? Well you can instead win and be a triumphant hero but you will lose a hand or an eye. That was done (not very consistently) on Star Crusade, Sofia for example lost a hand in seizing an enemy warship twice the size of her own.

This allows people to be huge badasses, encourages them to suffer and makes said suffering or crippling injuries really memorable. Not very many people want to have one hand because they critically failed the one time, but having one hand because they lost it storming the Citadel of Whatever and got to be the hero in the process? Suddenly that is a positive.

I am travelling with work right now and instead of putting my kittens into a cattery I am paying somebody to come and look after them in my house. It worked out about the same expense wise (well, I guess more because they are still eating their regular food on top) but hopefully avoids traumatising them too much.

The thing I love though? She is sending me an update email after each visit, this is the longest I have ever left them alone and it is so reassuring to know they are okay and getting less shy, even if they are apparently still hiding behind furniture once they realise the door opening is not me coming home.

Weirdly I have a kind of hard mental cut off for scheduling RP, outside of specific events. If somebody say asks if I will be free 7pm on Tuesday to RP?

The internal response is almost immediately a kind of mental FUCK NO! NEVER!

Even if I was originally probably planning to be around and RPing at that time.

@Aria My brother got married last year and had a pretty good way to avoid it costing a fortune.

He got married in a field.

A field owned by a friend of my sister in law's family, the seating for the ceremony? Made by him and his friends out of scrap wood the day before in an isle of trees at the edge of the field. They did rent a tent along with paying people to run a hog roast and an icecream stand but the whole thing cost a couple of thousand (pounds sterling) whilst being an amazing day.

Especially memorable was every bridesmaid either leading or carrying a happy dog.

@krmbm said in Ruins of Pern - Discussion:

#gayhormone

#Tentpegs

That kind of thing can be extra fun with international teams.

I live and work in the UK, my boss and every other member of my team are in the USA. Generally? This works out really nicely, I basically get to rule my own domain for all of Europe and while I am supported really well by my manager and colleagues they do not try to micromanage at all and generally try to schedule things so that I am not stuck working too late.

On Monday though? My boss did not realize it was a national holiday here. Where are you? Why are you not dialing into this meeting? I was half way to getting drunk in a beer garden.

The confusion on my part was that the wiki was just so vague about the setting I had absolutely no idea where the game might be based. Some kind of actual nether realm? (but if so, what is it actually like?) A place on actual Earth with a lot of mystical connections? The actual city of Derby with its quarter million population trans-located into a pocket dimension?

If the information was anywhere on the wiki it did not reveal itself to a 5 minute search. Also the actual city of Derby is about the least mystical and magical place I know of which made it additionally amusing to me. Derby is really aggressively dull and honestly seems to have less going on there than most cities a third of the size though the countryside around it is lovely.

@moth said in Critters!:

The embedded image is not working (for me at least?) but the link is, also that is a very pretty kitty!

@bored It does not help that quite a lot of games have implemented FS3 without the people running it actually reading the documentation at all. I have been on more than one where various stances/weapons/whatever have actually been doing the opposite of their stated intention with staff utterly oblivious until I pointed it out to them.

Things like shields making it easier to hit you, that kind of stuff.

Well I finally got blood work done and found out why I have been feeling so low on energy that I sleep 10-12 hours a day (whilst having a full time job). Apparently? Vitamin D deficiency. Not the best news but at least it is something I can easily treat with pills, thanks job that has been in an office with no natural light!

I am rather a luddite when it comes to PBs and tend not to use them, but one thing I tend to do if trying to find one for a character who is supposed to be super athletic/strong/whatever is to not look at actors or actresses.

Instead I look for pictures of Olympic athletes, as an added bonus you can then find people who are ethnically diverse pretty easily, plus they are going to be as close as you can get if you want to have your character look like they really do have those maxed out physical attributes.

Given what they look like now as babies they are going to have the most magnificent manes once they have grown up.

@arkandel said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Another take on Lords and Ladies could be to introduce a level of strategic planning to it.

One of my peeves about settings like that, for some time, was that there was no cost to anything. Every other noble PC walks around throwing gold at problems; if Jane comes asking Jim for some ships to move her good he can just... give it since there's an inexhaustible supply. Here, have some imaginary ships, lady!

Similarly there's no downside in being nice. Hey peasants, I lowered your taxes! Love me! Which means playing cutthroat, cynical characters with an eye toward making money and using it to gain political advantages (think Littlefinger from Game of Thrones) doesn't give any edge over honorable ones (like Eddard Stark), and that ultimately cheapens both; honor is cheap without sacrifice, and bastardy is just dumb because... you act like an asshole IC yet get nothing to show for it.

I'd love to see a setting where clever players managing their estates well is meaningful and gets them the upper hand. Treating serfs well makes one popular - which grants bonuses - but empty coffers also translate to disadvantages that have to be played around.

Anyway. Lords and ladies. Resources. Meaningful choices. I'd like to see a good take on it.

One of the systems used on the Fading Suns game set on Vargo did this pretty well, basically you defaulted as a noble to having everything funded at the 'thoroughly mediocre' level when it came to loyalty of your people and vassals and that left you with a properly funded lifestyle for your rank along with some spending money but not a fortune. The moment you wanted to live in an extra fancy manner, or do well by your peasants, etc? You either needed to be excellent at managing your lands or obtain money from outside sources.

It ended up with things like one faction leader trying to sign a peace deal with the NPC neighbor and it being foiled because one of his baronesses was sending pirate ships to raid their coast and he had no idea it was going on. He thought the other party was making up coastal raids in order to try to get concessions but they were totally real and were making said baroness a ton of money.

I had a character who was held a senior military position and she was 100% embezzling the budget to help fund her personal goon squad of elite and ludicrously well paid murderers. They were just down the road from the palace where her boss lived though and so whilst he knew she was embezzling money he did not say anything due to being legitimately concerned about a coup.

It obviously had major problems but I loved how it rapidly turned landed nobles into money grubbing kleptocrats who would strike dubious deals with people and go into debt continuously. Successful military campaigns and sacking towns was also a great source of incoming if you could pull it off.

@Cirno said:

Now, in real life, the other kid would have most likely been a fat old pervert, I know. That's part of the reason why I couldn't take that episode seriously at all; the Internet usually does not work that way. There are exceptions to the rule, but I am much of your opinion where this is concerned.

Also, the kid's mom actually encourages him to meet his internet friend! Worst. Parent. Ever, as Comic Book Guy would say.

I question this, the internet is just plain normal now and has been for a decade or more, the last couple of relationships I have had were with people I met over the internet, hell my (divorced) mother who is in her late fifties dates people she meets via internet dating sites. Most people are on the internet and doing internet things and is it not the unique preserve of social outcasts.

I might be single right now but that was due to a drunken argument that went really wrong combined with withdrawal from anti depressants, following a year long relationship with a smart as hell microbiologist I had a ton in common with. Where did we meet? OkCupid, neither of us living in a basement or being above a healthy weight. Would we ever have met without the internet? Hell no, we did not live close enough though commuting was easy enough, did we keep in touch via internet stuff? Absolutely.

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Yeah, I just had a discussion with this with my house, because I feel like people should be able to afford some things, but we also shouldn't be bankrupting the house. I offered to up everyone's payments, but the feeling was that even with the upped payments no one would be able to afford anything, so we kept the payments low and ended up paying for really expensive armor out of the house account - which might be a mistake, or might be brilliant considering the current situation.

I have done some messing around with making gear and I really feel that, from a house perspective, sticking to High Quality Steel / High Quality Pelts level, refined to Excellent quality, makes an awful lot of sense. You can outfit somebody with gear 95 percent as good as refine Rubicund/Exotic Leather for literally a fifth of the price and even a Marquis level house can afford to spend 30,000 silver every now and again to outfit a new family member.

Added: Refining to exceptional quality does not help much (not at all for leather, very slightly for steel) and costs SO MUCH more. Limiting to Excellent grade outside of lucky rolls is critical here.

I recall trying this years ago and it suffered a lot from the classic 'You should learn that ICly!'

Regardless of if this was really basic stuff that anyone actually living in the world would know or not, actually putting said information on a website or wiki or whatever to read was anathema, you had to bumble around like an idiot and get murdered for it like they did back in the day!