Posts made by Pyrephox

@jinshei said in The Work Thread:

@faraday Exactly! I'm not even hanging around with uneducated people. These are university staff with advanced degrees in medical sciences...

Engage pedantic hat:

Because the human brain is very, very bad at sustaining a state of alertness over time. Just, biochemically, absolutely PANTS at it. This is adaptive, because it allows us to live in a risky world without being in a constant state of meltdown, but maladaptive, because it makes us willing to take dumb risks that we know are risks and feel good about it even if it WILL kill a certain percentage of us.

We're also just horrible at risk assessment, particularly if we're given too much warning. It's one of the reasons why things like traffic lights and railroad crossings have to be specifically timed, because if you give people too much warning, accidents go UP because our brain is filled with dumb ass reasoning like, "there's plenty of time for me to get through the intersection/crossing before a car/train actually comes".

It's stupid and frustrating, but it's just something we're bad at as a species.

@ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Yeah, see, she knows I like cooking. I think she just wants to cook for me. Which is sweet, but what she’ll make will probably taste like sadness.

Could you cook something together? Maybe where she gets the chance to Do Something for you, and you can gently keep her from veering off into the lands of food sadness?

@macha Please talk to a local professional about this ASAP. Renters are often taken advantage of because they don't know their rights, and because housing is //very important// so people don't want to risk getting evicted. This enables predatory landlords to dick people around - but the laws around tenants' rights vary widely and can be complex. You're not likely to be able to handle this without trained, professional help. Document everything, write out the timeline as best you know, make copies of your receipts, and find an advocate.

@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Have I entered a state of delusion, or can a landlord suddenly change rules/terms/fines for xyz on a lease without advance notice or it being.. oh, signed?

This is a question that you should ask your local tenant rights or renters' advocacy organization immediately!

@dnvnquinn said in Your yearly 'Active WOD' request thread.:

@pyrephox I haven't dipped into Ares yet. But the lack of anything else might drive me to the platform.

There is one CoD MU* on Ares: Obsidian Reverie. They're in a cyberpunk setting right now, though, so it's not exactly a standard WoD experience. But I remembered it!

I would love a CoD MU* focusing on Mortal or Changeling (maybe Mortal/Changeling/Geist or Mortal/Changeling/Demon or something, if I'm going to get all greedy). Something that leans away from the psuedo-politics and heavy into the urban horror and fighting for survival against the darkness.

Alas, nothing exists. And I don't know that I could go back to a non-Ares platform, anyway. My last attempt - aside from reminding me of the flaws of the typical WoD playerbase - was painful, trying to navigate old-style MUSHcode once again.

But I waaaant it.

Whatever else one feels about rules and whatever?

The correct answer as staff to, "Someone is stalking me, I'm pretty sure they're on the game, and I'm afraid."

Is never, "Your out of game interpersonal relationships aren't my problem."

Not as someone running a game, and not as just a decent human being who cares about other people. Is it difficult to navigate the line of how much OOG info a staff member needs or wants to have? Absolutely. No one sane wants to put staff in the position of arbitrating whether people are being nice to one another on Discord, or trying to make sure that players only ever interact with players they like. In some cases, you just have to suck up that you might be playing with people you don't personally like. That is a qualitatively different situation from allowing someone to stay on a game who is abusing or harassing another player, even if that abuse or harassment is happening outside the game.

Is it a sticky question? Absolutely. Are there reasons why a player can be legitimately uncomfortable existing on the same game as another player that do not warrant removing the latter player? Yep. Is it a pain in the ass to navigate where that line is as a GM? Absolutely. Will GMs get it wrong? Most of them will at least once. It's hard.

Because it's something that requires sensitivity, judgment, and discretion. And as a player, I want to see that GMs have all of that, and aren't going to fall back on mindless, "But we have a RULE," like a 'code is law' cryptobro.

I want to say that I really admire all the coding work you've put into this. That crafting system looks pretty sweet, and more user-friendly than some I've seen. And an easy-to-use OOC journal that people can keep their thoughts/plots/info in is sorely needed in any game that has mystery/investigation elements.

@herja said in GMs and Players:

@il-volpe Boy. I can't think why GMs aren't falling over themselves to make story for you.

Honestly, @il-volpe isn't wrong here.

It is wrong to expect that a GM or staff member's world revolves around a player. However, it is not wrong to expect the same consideration and respect that we would expect from any other person in a social setting. Players and staff are both carving out time from their lives to meet up with each other and do things, and that's important to respect from both sides.

If I sign up for an event or a scene, as a player, I am /absolutely/ choosing to miss out on other things I want to do in my life in favor of this. If a GM continuously just blows it off or decides not to run something on little to no notice, it's exactly the same as if you and someone else made an agreement to go out to dinner or an event together, and the other person keeps blowing you off at the last minute. It's not 'falling down on the job', it's not the end of the world, but it IS RUDE.

And if it happens occasionally, that's fine. But I've absolutely left games (and will again, probably) over GMs who schedule events and then blow them off with little to no warning on a habitual basis. The GM's life is important, and their time is valuable...

But so is mine. And it being a hobby that people are doing for fun doesn't really excuse disrespecting other people's time and effort, or making serial commitments that you then break with little warning.

It is possible that having these expectations makes me a trial to GM for. If so, I'm okay with that.

@zombiegenesis said in Potential M&M 3E OC Game:

And thusly I'm at a bit of an impasse. I'm just not a fan of M&M and its forced sense of "balance" and I'm not sure what I'd use instead. Hero/Champions is probably my favorite system but I think that'd be a hard pill for some to swallow.

So, yeah, that's where I'm at. Sort of languishing. Thankfully I've found some people to help out with another game so I'm not just twiddling my thumbs.

I think you might be able to do Hero/Champions if you simplified chargen for most people. Like, had pre-built common powers that people could just choose in chargen and add onto their sheet. Maybe an 'advanced' version for people who know the system and want to do weird things, too.

@faraday Newspapers and TV have stopped headlining the daily deaths, so that means that they aren't happening anymore and EVERYTHING IS FINE.

(Sarcasm, if it needs to be said.)

I swear to god. Talking to any living human person over the last three years just fills my heart with rage and the desire for revolution.

@faraday The realities of a pandemic and keeping people alive in a pandemic are inconvenient to the desires of late stage capitalism, so the wealthy class is more than happy to sacrifice thousands of people a day as long as their short-term profits don't take a hit that makes stock prices drop.

Also, in our current situation, you do not want to be incentivizing people to come to work sick. Particularly in a school environment, which is already a huge vector for disease.

@jennkryst said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@pyrephox begins HSPACE Chant

Noooo.

My idea would be the colonization of a single planet, with either a crash-landed ship or - at most - a monitoring station that trips could be made up to so that you could have space-walking adventures and orbital dangers. The map would be divided into regions that would expand as new tech was built/reclaimed from the archives/discovered in the world, but I'd prefer to represent that in a 'resource cost' rather than OOC time.

For example - if you started out at the base camp, initially you have five regions right around you that you can explore, and each one covers about five miles, because the skimmers are locked in a crashed part of the ship, and that's as far as you're going to get on foot, in a hostile alien terrain that may or may not require hazard suits before you get the terraformer up and running. So you'd pay X amount of resources (effort/fuel/energy/whatever) to go out to them, scene regarding one of the Crisis Points of each territory if you've got some people and/or a GM, or you can go out alone and gather samples of 'Unknown Alien Flora/Fauna/Geology X32288' and its friends, and bring them back to the camp for analysis (which would also cost energy/skill checks), or give them to other people for analysis, etc. Then those Flora/Fauna would get names created by their discoverers, and skill checks would reveal one or more uses, + one or more threats. So, you might discover that an alien critter has dense, waterproof fur that is excellent for making cold-weather gear...but the code also throws out that its blood gives off a horrific, gut-curdling stench that causes anyone who smells it to require Grit/Constitution checks or be paralyzed while they wretch or try not to wretch. If the character then enters the sample into the colony database, then everyone gets the stats/behavior of that critter to be able to use in plots freely.

As the original regions become better explored, they take less energy to reach. When skimmers are released from the ship (or native fauna is tamed for riding), new regions open up that are BIGGER, because people can cover more ground, and those new regions take more energy to get to, but you might also discover things/recreate tech that let you have more energy.

An emphasis on discovering and transforming your environment rather than doing ships and interstellar travel.

I also want to do a SF game. Definitely original, and about planetary colonization - big emphasis on exploration, identifying and learning how to use planetary resources, some mystery, ancient ruins with creepy magitech effects, environmental puzzles, and so forth.

Unfortunately, my ideal would need to be heavily coded, and I am too shy to ever ask someone to put that much effort into something which, statistically, will fail within three months, and too low focus to learn what I would need to code it myself.

@silverfox Although not a relative - on my first day of work in a high school (during the school year; I'd actually started in the summer but most of the staff wasn't there), I was heading to my office before the first bell.

I was twenty eight. I was in a suit. I still had someone stop me and try to make me leave the building because students weren't allowed inside before first bell.

@faraday Oooh, it works in incognito mode. Thank you!

@sixregrets said in Last One Standing:

@pyrephox said in Last One Standing:

Yesterday, the web portal stopped working on my work computer. It works fine from home, but from work, it claims that there's an invalid security certificate. This may just be a glitch on my end, but if other people are experiencing it, I figure I'd put it out there in case something could be fixed before the start of the game proper.

I don't think anyone else has mentioned this sort of issue, but I can't speak for @crayon . The SSL certificate currently being presented looks valid to me, and it looks like a bog standard Let's Encrypt certificate, so if you were running into issues on your work machine, I'd expect you to have pretty widespread errors on other websites as well. Might be worth trying a force refresh (ctrl-f5 in Chrome) if you haven't yet and making sure that the work computer's time and date are accurate.

Alas, that did not fix it. I'm not having trouble with any other site, including other Ares games. It just abruptly started throwing errors yesterday, and then will not load now due to 'privacy concerns'. It's not my org's firewall blocking it, either. Ah, well. I'll hope that being shut off for a weekend will help reset it.

Yesterday, the web portal stopped working on my work computer. It works fine from home, but from work, it claims that there's an invalid security certificate. This may just be a glitch on my end, but if other people are experiencing it, I figure I'd put it out there in case something could be fixed before the start of the game proper.