Best posts made by Roz

@Kanye-Qwest Listen, maybe if you stopped excommunicating people with marriage plans!

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

just marginally worse than the flu

?????

@Deviante Jasher's maybe the only roster I've seen go up that's really explicit. (He likes men, he doesn't like women.) So I'd say it's vague almost all the time rather than on occasion. Some others do have explicit "this character did fall in love in their past so they are attracted to that gender" bits, but who knows how they feel about other genders, etc.

I know for Jasher the staff wanted it to be pretty explicit (since he was written with a firm sexuality instead of vague). They didn't want a potential player missing hints and then having the sexuality seem like a surprise once they got him and got a better look at the sheet. Which is fair.

Four-time Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally, 81. Of coronavirus complications.

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

After playing for a few days on Arx, some thoughts.

• I really really like its investigative/task/support system. It's pretty smart that it's built so not only are there diminishing returns to getting backing up by the same people, you can't support your own primary faction - so you can't just have a huge House circle-jerking support, as it's implied that it's a given, and all those people need to go out there and recruit others to help.

Just to clarify: you can get investigative help from your primary faction. But I think this does make sense, because it's asking individual people for their help hunting down clues (in whatever form that may take), whereas tasks/support are an organization-level thing. Definitely agree that it makes sense and is a good setup for tasks to not allow a circle of support from within the same org that it's originating from.

• I'm torn about resource management. Basically the way it works (to my understanding) is larger Houses have more money to give out but also, typically, more people. So Lord Bob of House Large can choose to share the wealth and buy everyone a small present or play favorites, buy a couple of people a Death Star and piss off the rest - plus it makes smaller, well populated Houses' players even more short on cash. That's both a good thing (since it makes sense, it's realistic and life ain't fair, plus it gives leaders meaningful choices to make) and bad (since some players will feel bad about it).

It's definitely designed to give a lot of autonomy and power to the org leaders. I run a duchy-level house (with @Meg!) and, sure, I'd love to have the income of a high house -- who wouldn't? For me, it still falls within the realms of "realistic and not maddening." I think a better perspective might be from folks in a March level house or lower who have even less money coming in.

• My main concern is the suggestion someone made that at times support is given for OOC reasons. While staff has made it clear it's not cool to apply OOC pressure ("hey, did you back me up for my zoo project yet??") there's no real way to regulate trading favors OOC without RP and without running the game as a police state - which I agree it shouldn't be. And although I've watched people get bitched at on channels by staff about trying to get favors for their alts, once again it's pretty hard to track down alt-circlejerking trading.

Yeah, that's a bit -- I'm not sure how to combat it unless it gets reported. I'm sure it happens, because the idea that it doesn't is more unrealistic to me and there's always jerks who don't care about the rules, unfortunately.

• I haven't done combat at all so far, despite playing a soldier type, so no idea how the balance works yet. I've heard some bellyaching about dino-monsters but no idea if that's true either.

There are definitely combat monsters on the game. However, I'd actually say that if you want to play a combat monster and decide to focus all your XP there, you can do a lot to catch up in your early weeks. The XP tax really slows down the ability to keep raising skills quickly. I mean, I kind of heard a little implied bellyaching about my combat-focused commoner alt maxing out his weapon skill within his first month on the game. I can also say that he's crappy at other things, and that crappiness has had a negative impact at times. (Just ask anyone who's seen me run a Perception check. He's the most oblivious guy on the game sometimes, and it's cost him successes on plot that would've translated to actual money. Which is part of the fun!) He's also in the position of not being able to afford the sort of fancy armor that rich nobles can, so that's another limitation. (I could whine about noble combat monsters with fancy armor who skip over skills nobles should probably learn even if they're not in the line of inheritance, but I have to trust that they'll probably get stuck failing etiquette checks at some point on some plot the same way I fail checks at stuff my characters aren't good at. And there's no point stressing over being the best, because that way lies madness.)

• The randomscene idea is excellent, more MU* should use it. Basically every week it generates a list of people you can RP with for extra XP and every newbie is also on that list automatically... so as soon as you get in suddenly there're a bunch of people trying to play with you for their own good. Big thumbs up for that.

I looooooove randomscene, too. And it does have a good point of diminishing returns (you're not going to get twice as much XP claiming 20 people than claiming 10).

• Getting settled into the metaplot is a bitch and a half. It's probably the worst thing about the game, at least for me, because so much has happened and it takes a lot of reading to catch up. Arx can probably really benefit from a very basic 101 page somewhere, giving the fundamental facts and nothing else but links to where you can learn more.

There is a whole lot. That's definitely true. Having been around since Alpha -- AKA before plot was actually moving forward -- I do feel rather sympathetic to people coming in now after it's all gotten started already. And the other difficulty with having a "Basic 101 Page" is sort of indicating what's public knowledge and what isn't. But -- maybe we should try it anyways, at the very least on the player wiki we have going. Just stuff that really is public knowledge (story updates, stuff that happened in big public events, etc.). I know a big problem I've witnessed newcomers talk about is coming in asking about what they should know about certain things getting discussed and the answer being "not much, you probably didn't think it existed as of yesterday."

There's also an instinct on the part of a lot of players to want to have ALL THE CLUES which is neither realistic nor a productive angle to approach the game from. It's a very natural instinct, and I've had to temper it in myself, so it's not like I don't get it. But it's probably more productive if people kind of focus in on certain topics/areas instead of worrying about what everyone else knows about other things.

• My former major concern - the lack of PrPs - doesn't apply any more. They are doable, and due to code limitations they are even light on mechanics which for me at least is the best case scenario. But others' mileage may vary.

We've had a lot of cool PrPs, which is awesome. I'm super excited for the formal, coded PrP system. @Tehom did a great (and hilarious) summary of the current envisioning of the system.

When everything at work is crazy for WEEKS because of THE BIG THING and you get to the day and you've done the work and you finish it that morning and everything goes off without a hitch.

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

So probably sometime in the next week or two, characters will be added to the roster that belong to one of the counties underneath my character's March. I have an inkling of the personalities involved, so if you might be interested, hit me up and we can chat.

I can confirm that all of these characters are super awesome.

Animorphs movie?!?!?!?!

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

Places can be awesome, when it's appropriate. I had a really great private conversation while doing a large public scene where there was a central focus that people were focused on (which provided a good cover for the conversation my character was having). But, that sort of large, focused scene is different from the 'increasingly large numbers of people wander into you random scene', and I always feel bad and wrong for confining the conversation I was having to places when there's a couple of new people who clearly want to be included.

I'm not sure there's a great answer that's universally applicable, except to try to be understanding and flexible with other players, regardless of the setup of a scene.

Honestly, I tend to be welcoming enough in public scenes 75% of the time that I don't feel bad if 15% of the time I need to hide in places when other folks enter. And if there's more than one new person about, they can clearly just RP with each other, so I don't feel bad about that, either.

Re: votes, I would like them to not be shared across alts. Even if I can't vote for the same character on both alts or something like that to try and mitigate that potential affect.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Good TV:

@Roz yeah tbh anything suffers when compared to ATLA.

tru tru

I do love Korra, and I'm gonna do a rewatch, but they definitely didn't have their footing as firm from the getgo like they did with ATLA. And tonally it's really different, so if you go into LOK expecting more of ATLA, you're just set up for disappointment. A little distance helps, I think, in just letting those expectations relax.

@Ghost I have seen you tell this story so many times but you still keep spelling Rich's last name wrong.

***Discussions of difficult content***

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

With Penn/Tiny you can't get away from @desc versus +desc, or WHO vs +who or help vs +help. It's just a legacy suckage you have to deal with. But why is Arx saddled with the same problem? I thought you could just override commands in Evennia like you can in Ares.

Most of the commands on Arx have @/+/no prefix all aliased, but it seems to be something that has to be aliased manually, and some of the commands are missing one of the prefixes. The fact that there's a time/@time difference and a home/+home difference is really weird and I'd say probably not a great idea as far as consistency goes. Everyone is kind of taught that everything is aliased prefix-wise but then there are these two random examples that are actively different commands.

I haven't actually figured out the particular rhyme or reason for which commands get added as @ to start or + to start or -- what.

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

I think this is partly on Evennia, not just the Arx staff. (Sorry, Griatch.)

Specifically, Evennia generates a lot of the documentation automatically for each command; in a lot of ways, this is great; you include the documentation in the command source code, and a helpfile is made for it. No worries about documentation being out-of-date; you edit the command, you edit the description RIGHT THERE. I wish more things supported this.

But conversely, if you alias a command to another command then 'help' for both commands will give you the same help text; this leads to the home/+home, time/@time versus guards/@guards/+guards situation you describe. And additionally, since the coder is writing the documentation right there in the command, you... well, are getting coder-written documentation. Which (as a coder) I must admit is not always the ideal; sometimes you want an editing pass by someone who doesn't think in terms of code.

(That said, I object on general design principle to having command, +command, and @command do different things.)

I would say that it's really still a documentation issue, no matter where you put the documentation. The fact is that everyone playing the game -- including myself, who really loves it!! -- basically are muddling through, in a lot of cases, really unclear or confusing documentation. I know it's because of limited time and the fact that systems still change and develop regularly, but honestly they could use some dedicated to just cleaning up documentation. The team seems to lack a cleaner/organizer/admin.

***Discussions of difficult content***

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

(I hesitate to call it a wiki)

It's not a wiki at all, so you shouldn't worry about hesitating.

@mietze Omg job searching is SUCH hell, I am SO glad you found something!!

@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:

I just have a hard time remaining interested for long if you can't /at least/ give me 2 paragraphs every pose. Because, tbh, you're probably not giving me a lot to work with. And honestly, that might be more a flaw with me. Or it's just different tastes.

I mean, that is a hugely variable measure. Two paragraphs can mean something very different across players. I tend to do one paragraph poses, but they can be bigger paragraphs than some folks who regularly pose multiple paragraphs. So. YMMV. I would object to the idea that I don't give people stuff to work with in 4-6 sentences, though.

Ended up crying during my weekly 1:1 with my boss today, telling her about the spike of stressors over the past week, including me being surprise responsible for running several event livestreams and a senior event lead being a total shitshow with getting materials to us in a timely or clear fashion and then finally sending a super aggressive email last night when a design proof of something wasn't to her liking.

Fortunately my boss has taken it really seriously, is prepared to lay down all sorts of protective barriers around me if need be. But GOD, what is this week.

@Sparks said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

Inability to add pages as players, mostly.

Arx has the Evennia webserver set up to show dynamically generated character profile pages, organization pages, to automatically log public events (and also store logs of private events you can view if you were invited to or attended that event), and so on. You can view a lot of the help topics and other theme right there on the website as well.

However, other than the journals, there's really no way for players to edit content there. Want to write a guide on "How to use the +task system?" Can't do that. Want to make a reference page for public knowledge on a given historical event (like the Tragedy at Sanctum, or the Battle of the Night's Grove)? Nope. Want to write up random additional player content like, for instance, "A Comparative Summary of the Types of Cheese Found in the Lyceum"? Also nope.

That's where a wiki comes in handy: you have much more freedom for guides and other pages beyond what just the staff want to write.

As one of the folks who made the player wiki, this is generally correct. We wanted to be able to host player-written guides for systems and whatnot. But also, I wanted to take advantage of Semantic MediaWiki to build out dynamic data relationships between different items. I know these relationships exist within the Arx code, but the website isn't set up everywhere to sort of easily traverse between them. Like: if you're on the org page for a noble house, there's no easy clicking through to their liege lord or their vassals on the Arx website. We set up stuff like that on the player wiki.

The other big thing that at the time wasn't available that we did is set up public journals in a way that could be easily searched. This is, thankfully, redundant now, as Arx added this to their website officially and it's great. But before, there was no way to just -- go look at one character's journals, or look at journals about a specific character, etc.

And another benefit was just, uh. Searching capability in general. Which the Evennia website build doesn't have, and Arx hasn't tried to add itself yet. (My understanding is that it's a lot more intensive than anyone would like to think.)

@Wizz forbidden knowledge