Best posts made by Rook

Would be interested in helping in any number of ways, be it coding, building, writing or organizing plots and running them (daytime US, weekdays).

There is a crowd of however many that believe that Telnet is the problem.
There is a crowd of however many that believe that Telnet is not the problem.

Enter a thread that specifically states "Telnet is the problem", and both crowds will voice their opinion.

People are getting personally offended by the voicing of opinions, so it seems much less a technical discussion than it is a preference discussion. I have tried to guide both of these threads into some sort of technical planning/dreaming/design direction, and each time people have apparently taken offense.

@ThatOneDude Eh.... not sure what they offer, but my experience from military to today suggests that shaving cream and blades are one area that you should not suffer poor quality to save a few bucks.

Saving two bucks here and there, and having your (for Dudes) neckline look like you shaved with a yard trimmer is not a good compromise, especially professionally.

Buy quality, or you will end up replacing it later anyway.

EDIT: After seeing your URL, I still don't recommend disposables. They are too fat (IMNSHO) to do a good job. One blade is all you need, not 5, not 10.

So I had a visit yesterday from a guest that suggested simply using WoD core rules, and exclude all of the 'races'. I am not sure how viable such a game would be, but I understand the approach easily enough and it has had me thinking all night about it.

I thought I'd ask this community, since y'all are the only experts on the system(s) that I know. Would oWoD or nWoD lend itself better to just using the Core Rules (again, no Vampires, Weres or Mages, any of that)? The idea came in to use the Hunter/Mortal+ rules, and then one of the splats for the antagonist character types. I am thinking Umbrood for simplistic non-Demon demonic concepts, easy for storytellers to run, as I picture the nasties having strength in numbers, not PC-level power.

I've grabbed the core World of Darkness book from oWoD and am going to be going through it today as I can, seeing if this idea holds water. I am hesitant at using WoD without the major races.

Hye, @Pyrephox... you RP with some weird, unbalanced, fucking strange people who don't understand cooperative role-play in a realistic environment.

That needs to be an acronym.... or something.

I believe in a meritocracy, where you get where you belong because of your skills and behavior. No more "<X> is better than <Y>" when talking about sexes, races, credos or orientations.

This may be off-topic, but short of a game emergency (hack attempt, abuse, security threat) there is no reason for immediate response from staff. If you have a player that doesn't understand that, then they need educated on etiquette and the Rule that states "RL comes before Game, always".

Well, no, not sarcastic. I was just musing, but it was an idea.

People have mentioned removing the ability to stalk, and this would be one way to do it? Clearly (to me), people use Unfindable for various reasons, just as some people clearly use OOC location data to abuse it.

I absolutely agree that people should be resolving their shit, yes. I can't fix that, though. I can offer a way to cut down the problem? Like I said, it was just an offered idea.

Down. Look at the stair caps on the sides. Those go atop the stair step. </engineering>

@Ganymede said "I don't think removing the DARK flag entirely is a punishment; it is removing a privilege that isn't needed, in my opinion."

I completely agree here, and in fact will take this statement a step further and state that most powers given routinely to staff are not needed, are highly abusable (note that I didn't say abused, necessarily). This is why I built an @groups system and then coded everything on the game against that. It's also a design of my game to allow PLAYERS to manage themselves via @groups, since they can be OOC groups (Architects, Staff) as well as IC groups (Police, Beggars, Research Group Alpha, etc).

You don't need bits to do day-to-day staffing jobs. It's just that almost all code out there ASSUMES a wizbit means staff, and therefore requires it in the code.

It's stupid.

MSB is a clique. You may boo and hiss at me for saying so, so blatantly, but it's ultimately true.

Staff on a game are the people on the game who can Make Things Happen most easily, so when a staff-run scene is opened, people flock and step on each other to get there. It's worse than Black Friday at Walmart.

It says a lot about the state of MU*ing when we've come to a point that people cannot find RP because others are too worried about:

1. previously banned players,
2. disgusting OOC stalkery/gross behavior,
3. in-game spy worries,
4. being triggered.

First, getting thrown under a bus by a co-worker in front of bosses. The next day, taking the high road and stepping in to bail co-worker's ass out of the proverbial fire.

Then having co-worker take full credit for saving things. Despite evidence to the otherwise.

At least it is easy to tell that you have good bosses when they spot shit like this.

RE: Duty flags

I think that these are no more useful and guaranteeing of fruitful labor than an RP_OK flag guarantees you'll get a scene offer. Staff routinely have them on, aren't doing anything but idling, or have them constantly off. So, what's the point? If players don't respect them and staffers aren't diligent about setting them... why have them?

They set expectations that get smashed by the reality of the day: work, kids, chores, other tasks taking precedence... why go through the steps if it isn't authoritative?

If you utilize @idle properly as a staffer, you should be able to manage people's expectations and reactions, yes?

I, too, agree with Ghost's conclusions.

As usual, my posts tend to focus on a specific point someone has made, trying to make sure that said specific point doesn't get lost in the other specific points. I think that being excluded because you are an unknown factor is a Real Thing.

@Lotherio's chalk board analogy is a Real Thing, too. Do a few social experiments, as some have up above, and you might see things in a different light.

Without knowing if he was actually expressing disapproval or not (and I have been in those situations where I didn't know), I usually give them a chance to prove themselves dicks or not. I usually speak up and ask calmly but firmly, 'Is there a problem, sir?'

This is one of those things that I try to backwards-think. Such as, if this were a man and woman (the opposite situation) holding hands and he was smirking at them, what would your supposition of the reason of his smirk be then?

I try to gauge my reactions based on both angles. Maybe one of the boys had burned him with a witty quip and the baffoon was still trying to think up a snazzy comeback. You don't know.

My thought? Don't police someone based on your suppositions of their thoughts. It's just asking for drama that no one needs.

If he had /said/ something, light into the fucker with both barrels, but don't put spark people into hating the guy because he had an issue with the shirt one of the persons was wearing, or whatever.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I might grumble about a particular staffer always being dark, but I will personally be more upset and angry at a staffer just blatantly sitting on their staffbit and doing fuckall every time I log in. Its that whole 'out of sight, out of mind' thing, I suppose.

This just goes back, I think, to the core issue of people being distracted by other things, be it work, kids, meal-making, bosses, having wild kinky sex in the other room, porn, another game, or just sleeping at the keyboard. They are logged in, but idle.

Players idle waiting for staff, waiting for Something to Happen (tm), waiting for <Person X> to log in, or just because they have no one to RP with. I'll try not to rant about this whole phenomenon, we've all see a WHO list full of people in separate rooms all day, idle.

Staffers are no different. It's the same people behind that name that you see logged in on other games, idle for the above reasons. I have only seen two instances of a staffer actively avoiding/ignoring players in my decades of playing, so I don't that it happens a lot. But, I'm naive, so we'll let me live in my dreamworld.

Nothing code-wise or policy-wise will change this idling behavior. I'd be interested in a study that sees, of the people who staff somewhere, do they idle more on their staffer alt than their PC alts? My instinct says yes. And not always for 'good' reasons (they want to catch questions in scrollback when they wake up, get home from work, and essentially strive to be as productive and helpful as possible).

@Misadventure said:

Fuck, make a WORLD setting where 19 year old genius CEO surgeons are the norm. Then everyone can be special, and any concept that rules or setting are linked to our reality will be blissfully euthanized.

Have you ever been to one of these royalty MU*s where everyone is a nobleman/noblewoman at the sweet age range of 16-24, have won the world with achievements, are the darling of the Court, are absolute darlings to each other and are Beautiful People to boot?

Yeah, it's been done.

@Roz Apologies, you're right. My focus of my response was more toward assumptions of what was being thought rather than my counter-example. I could have chosen a better one, sure.

@HelloRaptor said:

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of having to know all the ins and outs of the character's mind before I've played him. Some of the template specific ones are really irritating if you're making a brand new member of whatever, too.

Neither am I. As a new player to the game, you might miss a perfect niche event that your character could have fit into, or conversely, would have been devastated by, or some other key change. It is a bit heavy to assume that you, a new player, know everything.

Also, I think it paints people into a corner. Character Generation should be just that, a shell that you grow into and expand. You have hopes and dreams for the persona, but won't be strung up if you can't make them happen. Hell, I've played with the idea of letting someone 'tweak' CharGen point allotments based on their first month of play. Sometimes you find out that the Merit/Flaw that you took is on everyone, and now it's just a sap of points that has a sour taste.

@Thenomain
No no. I was posting in the spirit of a more generalized thread, not her specifically. It seems to me that the comment of 'why start a thread like this' is going to come up rather quickly, so I guess I sort of answered that. Dumb?