Posts made by Quibbler

@Coin

Nothing like a good ZINGER amirite?

I chose 'sometimes' because I will sometimes check @mail from my phone or tablet. I never RP on my phone/tablet, though. Way too annoying.

@Arkandel

I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.

I have been using the hell out of this.

@surreality

Chrome Version 53.0.2785.143 m.

Looking at the character generation page, the clipping on the lower part of lowercase Gs in the headings would probably annoy me. That said, this is a million times better than most. Your mastery over Vector is amazing.

@Coin said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

Ask @Quibbler, I have in the past made people roll Drive quite a bit. >.>

TRUE.

I had a cabbie PC whose whole focus was Drive - skill specialties, stunt driver merits, everything Drive-related - and @Coin did indeed let me roll Drive repeatedly in order to escape an evil ghost farmer or something like that. And we escaped in the kind of style crazy successes implies, which is actually the same kind of style as a single success, but like we don't all pretend our seven success move is crazy awesome anyway.

@Coin said:

I love these. One of my favorite characters on The Reach (and his whole family) was secretly a dreaded cultist. His closest-thing-to-a-girlfriend and one of his best friends were both Ferals (which on TR were basically the world's response to Things That Must Not Be). He literally spent most of his time with the enemy. He loved them. He really did. He cherished them, loved them, slept with them, helped them, rescued them, was rescued by them, and in general acted and behaved like you would expect a nice guy with a bit of a violent streak but clear delineations regarding who he was violent to and with would.

But behind that facade, he was a baby-killing, infant-eating, human-sacrificing, Outer Thing-worshipping cultist.

I never got to play it out...

But I really, really wanted to eventually have it come out and have his friends--his loved ones outside his family--turn on him. Because he betrayed them. He constantly and consistently betrayed their existence and entire reason for being. And they should have wanted him dead, buried, gone.

But he was a Sin-Eater and they are notoriously difficult to put down and I would ahve loved to roleplay that--to roleplay the heinous, brutal shake up of that revelation and the subsequent small war that would have errupted, because believe me: he loved them--but he would have murdered them for his Lord in a heart beat...

... or would he?

And that would have been the best part!

The sad thing about this was how often my secretly horrible sociopath PC who was friends with him was bid to 'find out where the cultists were hiding'. RIGHT THERE, kiddo. Your hobbyjob has you working for them.

And she hated cultists and the idea of following a demon or other critter voluntarily and she was the type of girl who'd nod, take in the information, coldly divorce herself from pesky things like 'feelings', make a plan to kill her buddy, and then act when she was confident she could win without him ever seeing it coming.

WE COULD HAVE DANCED.

PC death by T-Rex. I got so close once.

People. My most 'successful' characters have been the ones that others have been interested in/intrigued by/found funny.

@JustNobody

I tend to be a character flipper myself. So, things that help:

• Remember it's OK to drop a character if they're not working out.
• Remember that going out in public to do random scenes on the grid is probably not going to be super great all the time. It's actually going to be kind of painful sometimes.
• Sometimes, applying into an RP group is a good idea. It seems like families are a thing on NWOD games these days (and on Buffy MU*s, once upon a time). Usually, people in RP groups like that want to meet other people in that group and it's a nice 'in' for your character - a built-in reason to RP.
• Sometimes, applying into an RP group is kind of awful. Maybe they're cliquish, maybe they're insane, maybe they've gone way off the concept you thought you were going to play. Remember you can go rogue.

More specific ideas:

• Friendly PCs. Characters who like to talk to random people and will talk to random people. Chatty types. They're just easier.
• Do go to big scenes, but concentrate on finding and including newbies or other people who seem to be on the fringes. That's easier than trying to keep tabs on everyone all at once. Also, newbies are usually eager to RP and super happy when someone notices them.
• Characters with jobs that involve meeting random people. Excellent occupations for this include coffee shop employees, mechanics, bartenders, pool hall owners, and so on. Cubicle farm workers? Not so much. Now I kind of want to play an electrician.
• Give your goods. You spent a long time on that background, so if something comes up where you can share it, take the plunge, even if it's your character's 'secret'.
• Have a wiki page, if the game you're on has a wiki. Yes, it's a pain, but having a list of things your PC is interested in can really help other people find reasons to RP with you.
• Drop the pencil. Man, I love that this is a term now. Come up with reasons to talk to other people in public areas. Lose a cell phone, lose your wallet, look for one of your earrings. Be three cents short when you're buying something. Get splashed by a passing car, slip on ice, deal (briefly!) with a jerky NPC, look for interesting things in people's @descs and then compliment them on them or ask about them ('those shoes are awesome', 'where did you get that necklace', 'is that a dog collar you're wearing?').

I have found Fallcoast, which is NWOD, to be pretty welcoming. Like I've had people page me out of the blue because of something on my wiki page.

@icanbeyourmuse

No, really. Copy, paste. Mess around with it. Best way to learn.

And now an unpopular opinion:

My character page doesn't stand out!

Well, it's not supposed to. A wiki is ideally a centralized location for information, not a website host. It's reference. When you're looking up something in a book or on a site, you expect certain information to be in certain areas and you expect it to look like similar content in the rest of the book or the rest of the site. Think of a cookbook. Imagine if every recipe page had a different colour scheme, different fonts and font sizes, and this one cake recipe had a giant artsy photo of the cake as a background with the name of the cake written in huge white letters in a fancy font spanning two pages. That would be fucking nuts.

Sorry. Organization of information is kind of a peeve of mine. Part of my day job is essentially getting paid to enforce it, like a tiny book dictator, and helping people find the information they need as easily as possible. AND I LOVE MY JOB, BRO.

And now without the rainbow barf:

__NOTOC__
{| width="100%" 
|- style="vertical-align: top"
| width="100%" |
{| width="100%" 
| 
= Character Name =

== Overview ==


== Hooks ==


== Contacts ==


== Potato ==


== Logs ==
|}
|
{| |
{| width="100%" 
| colspan="2" | [[Image:CPage_Main.jpg|250px]]
|-
| class="left" | '''Birthdate:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Virtue:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Occupation:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Played-By:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| class="left" | '''Clan:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Covenant:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Auspice:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| colspan="2" | 
<center>
== Soundtrack ==
</center>
|-
| colspan="2" |
'''Song Title'''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''
|-
|}
|}
|}

Character page templates! Character page templates can be tricky because they have to a) look nice and b) be simple enough that most people can fill them in easily.

(Then you get into the problem of people wanting their character page to look nicer than the others and fooling about putting things like banners and image-based layouts. Which, yes, more 'interesting' pages, but also sometimes results in really awful looking stuff that's difficult to read. Some people know what they're doing and can turn out really lovely things. Some people do not know what they are doing, copy and paste complicated things, and wind up not understanding WTF the code does. So on one hand, yay, creativity, but on the other hand, I worked hard to make stuff cohesive, thanks for tossing that out the window to have dancing alligators all over your bright purple page, you special, special snowflake.)

ANYWAY.

The best way I have found to get things to align mostly how you want them to on MediaWiki pages is to use tables. The following code is your garish teachable moment; for the non-crazy just-give-me-the-template-learning-is-for-nerds version, skip to the post below.

__NOTOC__
{| width="100%" style="background: lawngreen"
|- style="vertical-align: top"
| width="100%" |
{| width="100%"  style="background: turquoise"
| 
= Character Name =

== Overview ==

== Hooks ==

== Contacts ==

== Potato ==

== Logs ==
|}
|
{| style="background: teal"
|
{| width="100%" style="background: yellow"
| colspan="2" | [[Image:CPage_Main.jpg|250px]]
|-
| class="left" | '''Birthdate:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Virtue:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Occupation:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Played-By:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| class="left" | '''Clan:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Covenant:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Auspice:'''
| Potato
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| colspan="2" | 
<center>
== Soundtrack ==
</center>
|-
| colspan="2" |
'''Song Title'''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''
|-
|}
|}
|}

What we have here are four sections.

1. containing table – lawngreen
2. character information – turquoise
3. infobox shell – teal
4. main infobox – yellow

The 'NOTOC' up there at the top keeps MediaWiki from automatically generating a table of contents despite all those headings.

Anyway, section by section again:

1. containing table – lawngreen
   This is the entire table's background. It's set to be 100% of the page width, though it doesn't look it in that screencap because I modified the window's size so the picture wouldn't be as wide. The character information and the infobox are both nested inside this yellow outer portion. You could specify a different width here, or add a border with rounded corners, or whatever. The 'vertical-align: top' part is important: otherwise, MediaWiki will center text vertically in the table cell, which looks stupid if one side's text takes up a lot more length that the other side. That's how you get an infobox floating halfway down the page to the right. That stinks.
2. character information – turquoise
   All the long-form character information goes here. It starts off with a large heading for character name, and then smaller headings for the next sections, which are usually things like overview, RP hooks, whatever. Treat this section like its own little regular wiki page, because it kind of is. Just having headings and text makes it simple and hopefully easier for rookies to fill out.
3. infobox shell – teal
   This is the right column, where the infobox is. This teal part holds the smaller infobox table in place. It will go right down to the bottom of the page, because its length will always be the same as the length of the main character information text.
4. main infobox – yellow
   This is a smaller, two-column table that keeps shit arranged under a picture.

Under all that is category junk.

Some notes:

• Keeping the tables simple wastes some space, namely anything under the infobox. In order to have the main part's text wrap around underneath the infoxbox, we'd have to float the infobox instead of making it a table cell. This would probably be nicer, but in the interest of simplicity and not making a tangle of style divisions (divs), we just made it a static part of the table.

@Glitch - Why is it eating the square brackets down in the category code? I'm not having any luck with unicode.

I put up a tutorial http://musoapbox.net/topic/268/mediawiki-log-template. It will sear your retinas.

This is probably clunkier than it has to be, so if you have suggestions, let's see 'em.

Also maybe I should have put it in How-Tos.

You probably don't want your log template to look like it got splattered by a fucking rainbow, so here's the template sans background colours:

__NOEDITSECTION__ __NOTOC__
{| width="70%"
| style="width: 100%; text-align: center " |
<div style="text-transform: capitalize">
<div style="font-size: 1.3em">{{{title}}}</div>

<div style="font-style: italic">{{{subtitle}}}</div>
</div>
<br>
{| style="width: 100%; text-align: left"
|- style="width: 40%; font-weight: bold" |
| Cast
| style="width: 60%; text-align: right; font-weight: bold" | {{{gamedate}}}
|- valign="top" style="padding-right: 300px"
| {{{cast}}}
<br>
| valign="top" style="padding-left: 20px; text-align: justify" | <div style="float: right">{{{summary}}}</div>
<br>
|-
| 
|- 
| colspan="2" style="border-bottom: 1px solid gray; font-weight: bold" | {{{location}}}
|-
| colspan="2" style="text-indent: 21px" | 
{{{log}}}
|}
|}

[ [Category:RP Logs]]
{{#ifeq: {{{categories| }}} | | | [ [Category:{{#dplreplace:{{{categories}}}|,|  Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}}{{RB}}{{LB}}Category: }} Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}} ]] }}

Careful with the category code above. The forum likes to eat square brackets that are next to each other, so it had to be faked out with an extra space between the left square brackets. They should be snuggied up to each other as usual for this to work.

Here is a log template. It is essentially Eldritch's log template as of 2015-04-14, minus some styling.

For this to all work, you're gonna need these three extensions:

• Dynamic Page List (third party) from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList_(third-party)
• Parser Functions from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions
• Variables from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Variables

We're actually going to set up four templates in total.

Template:! just contains a pipe, |. That's it. Just put the | in and you're done.
Template:LB just contains [[. No punctuation, just the two characters.
Template:RB is just ]]. Same as above.

Those three templates allow us to use the parser code in the categories without fucking it up.

And now, Template:Log. This is garishly coloured to be more helpful as a tutorial. If you don't want the explanation and teachable moment, skip to the next post and C&P that.

Copy and paste the following:

__NOEDITSECTION__ __NOTOC__
{| width="70%" style="background: yellow"
| style="width: 100%; text-align: center; background: orange" |
<div style="text-transform: capitalize">
<div style="font-size: 1.3em; background: limegreen">{{{title}}}</div>

<div style="font-style: italic; background: lime">{{{subtitle}}}</div>
</div>
<br>
{| style="width: 100%; text-align: left; background: mediumseagreen"
|- style="width: 40%; font-weight: bold; background: mediumaquamarine" |
| Cast
| style="width: 60%; text-align: right; font-weight: bold" | {{{gamedate}}}
|- valign="top" style="padding-right: 300px; background: mediumturquoise"
| {{{cast}}}
<br>
| valign="top" style="padding-left: 20px; background: paleturquoise" | <div style="float: right">{{{summary}}}</div>
<br>
|-
| 
|- 
| colspan="2" style="border-bottom: 1px solid gray; font-weight: bold; background: skyblue" | {{{location}}}
|-
| colspan="2" style="text-indent: 21px; background: powderblue" | 
{{{log}}}
|}
|}

[ [Category:RP Logs]]
{{#ifeq: {{{categories| }}} | | | [ [Category:{{#dplreplace:{{{categories}}}|,|  Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}}{{RB}}{{LB}}Category: }} Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}} ]] }}

Careful with the category code above. The forum likes to eat square brackets that are next to each other, so it had to be faked out with an extra space between the left square brackets. They should be snuggied up to each other as usual for this to work.

This is what that looks like:

Holy shit, that's ugly.

Going section by section:

1. outer template table – yellow
   We didn't want the log to take up the whole page, width-wise, so the table is set to occupy only 70% of the page.
2. inner template table – orange
   The stuff in the yellow table. This is set to 100%, because we want the log information and log to take up with whole width of the table. The text is aligned in the center because that's where we want the title and subtitle to be.
3. title – limegreen
   The title, centered, with a larger font size.
4. subtitle - lime
   The log's subtitle, italicized.
5. log info section and log – mediumseagreen
   A new table nested inside the orange one.
6. text: cast – mediumaquamarine
   This table cell takes up 40% of the table row and it's just the word 'cast' in bold. This part of the template never changes. It doesn't have to say 'cast'; it could be 'dramatis personae' or even 'list of shitfucks who appear in this log', though I can't promise that last one wouldn't be too crammed looking.
7. gamedate – palegreen
   This is where the variable gamedate in the log template shows up, tucked over to the right. It takes up the other 60% of the table row with section 6 – cast. The text is bolded.
8. cast list – mediumturquoise
   Left-aligned again, nothing special. A bit of padding (300px) from the right side. This is just in case the log has a long cast list, so it doesn't bump up against the edge of section 9 – summary. That would look cramped, if the summary took up more than one line. Some fuckers are verbose, man. It is 40% of the table row's width because it's the cell under 6 – cast. If we didn't put 'valign=top' in there, the cast list would be centered vertically in this cell, which would suck ass.
9. summary – paleturquoise
   This section of the table is floated to the right. The end of the text will always meet the right edge of the table cell, which makes the table look cleaner. There's a bit of padding (20px) to the left just to make sure things don't get cramped with the cast list. Again, 'valign=top' is there to keep the text up at the top instead of hanging out in the middle vertically.
10. location – skyblue
    Another call for a variable field taking up the whole width of the table. It spans both columns above, hence 'colspan=2'. Border-bottom adds that line under the location cell.
11. actual log – powderblue
    It also spans both columns of the table since it is styled 'colspan=2'. There's a text indent of 21px to the left.

After that, we end the table that makes up section 5 – log info section and log. Under that, we end the whole table.

Under that is the categories bullshit you need those extensions for. Just don't fucking touch it, it's how the variable log categories get added to the bottom of the log.

The template you load the log into looks like so:

{{ Log
| title = 
| subtitle = 
| cast = 
| summary = 
| categories = 
| location = 
| log = 
}}

It is used like so:

• Title is the scene name, so you don't get stuck with the scene's date prepending the title.
• Subtitle is optional.
• Cast should include the names of the people in the scene and links to their wiki pages, if applicable, separated by commas.

cast = [[Bob]], [[Jim]], [[Clancy]]

• Summary is a short explanation of the contents of the log; can also be the TL;DR version.

summary = Bob and his brother Jim meet Clancy for a cup of coffee and a game of knuckles.

• Categories are the sphere categories pertinent to the log. The template adds 'RP Logs' automatically. Just list the spheres with commas between them; the template will add 'Logs' automatically after each sphere category.

categories: Vampire, Demon

• Location is the grid square where the scene takes place, if applicable, or even the name of the establishment where the scene takes place.

location = [[DT1]] or
location = [[DT1|The Siren]] or even
location = Paris, France

• Log is where the entirety of the log goes. Step one: cut. Step two: paste. Step three: profit.

log = It was a dark and stormy night. Clancy is already waiting for Bob and Jim, his knuckles wrapped with masking tape from which shards of glass protruded. Clancy played knuckles to win.

If you want the logs to sort by date with this template, you have to have the date as the beginning of the log page. For example, for a log called 'Knuckles' that takes place on March 23rd of 2015:

Logs:(2015-03-23) Knuckles
Logs:2015-03-23 – Knuckles
Logs:2015_03_23__Knuckles

...Or whatever, as long as everyone uses the same format to name their logs.

Ebla@The Reach's 'gamedate' field is different from mine, if you take a look at it. It's full of code. I don't know how that one works. I tried to figure it out and failed, and that's why my version of organizing logs chronologically is ghetto. Sorry.

ETA: Edited by @Glitch at request of author.