Posts made by Roz

I love FCs, this all feels a whole lot like saying "we're setting this game at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, but don't worry, Steve Rogers won't be the most important part."

Bit of a necro, but: having a big upcoming plot on your game -- the all-hands-on-deck kind of plot -- and being so freaking excited about it and watching the whole game get so stoked for it.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

@surreality said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:

@Cobaltasaurus said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:

• The ability to decide whether the wiki is open to see or only members can see it.

It's worth mention that I think this may be able to be altered to some extent based on namespace. Or, at least, even 'locked down' members-only wikis can have a specific intro designated as 'open to public view' (which may just be the main page, I would have to double-check that one).

I strongly suggest admin-only user account creation. The one wiki I accidentally left open to letting people create accounts was flooded with spam pages almost immediately.

We've eliminated this by basically setting a question-based captcha. That way we don't have to lock user creation to admins, but we don't get spambot issues.

Wikidot is absolutely a fine solution if you don't have anyone who already has some comfort with digging into wiki syntax and learning their way around SMW. But if you have someone who can do that and is willing to, you should absolutely take advantage of it.

@Tat Oh yeah, I actually forgot that #ask is specifically SMW and we almost never even use #dpl itself anymore.

@surreality I've never staffed on a game that had the game-to-wiki integration, although I have assumptions about how it works and imagine there are some pretty awesome things you could do maybe. I don't know. Can you just slot in stats from the game into a specific property field on the wiki?

This logs search is a great example of something awesome @Tat did that's made possible by SMW. This org page is a good example of a bunch of different kinds of lists -- currently affiliated characters, formerly affiliated characters, deceased characters -- that are housed entirely on the org template and are all updated automatically based on PCs and NPCs with the org listed on their pages and whatever category they're housed in. On this org page you can see how the plot the org is marked as being involved in has autopopulated at the bottom. This user page shows all the plots Tat has GMed automatically, and this timezone property page can give you a list of users, what timezones they're in, and what characters they play.

Magic things MediaWiki does that make it worthwhile:

Semantic MediaWiki combined with DPL. This is the thing that basically turns your entire wiki into a searchable database. All the fields you expect on a character page -- name, age, height, etc. -- or a log page -- participants, location, date, etc. -- become searchable and sortable properties. This is what made it so that @Tat could make a custom log search function that lets you search by date range, people in the scene, etc. It's what lets out organization pages remain largely untouched, because people can just mark their current or former associations, and we can build auto-generating lists of either that update themselves. This is, IMO, the big huge thing that MediaWiki has on Wikidot. It's definitely not true that Wikidot can do all of the things that any game wiki would want to do, because both of my games -- X-Factor and Lost and Found -- use extensions and functionality that Wikidot doesn't offer. Of course, do you need all those things? Not necessarily. Will you become pretty much addicted to them if you start using them as a wiki admin? Probably.

The other big one for us is Semantic Forms. This is the answer to every player who goes "oh I'm so bad at wikis, I don't want to make my page, I just break everything." Build a template, then build a form to fill out the template. It's a lot more user-friendly than the autofilled templates, it's harder for players to break, and players also have to work a lot harder to change up the page template if you're a game has a standardized template you don't want to change up (which both of mine do -- I don't care about player creativity here, sorry).

Again, do you absolutely need all these things to house a functional game wiki? No. Does it make the experience better both on the admin and user ends? IMO, yeah. It's incredibly useful for organizing plot pages -- you can autofeed logs that are associated with the plot, add people who were on the plot so that the plot shows up on their character pages as something they participated in, etc., etc. If you're a game that has a lot of plot threads, it can be incredibly useful for keeping things organized.

And hey, I know that I suggested a few of these things to @surreality and now she's in love with them as much as I am, so clearly they're awesome. I bet I can summon Tat to this thread to expound at length, too.

I think the bigger difference for me is that DA2 is one singular game/time period, whereas comics adaptations are generally drawing from years or even decades of canon in their stories. So it feels a little more of a precise rehash of a specific canon.

@Kanye-Qwest I'm always sad there's not more DA2.

I'm not usually anti-FC at all, but I do find myself a bit wary of the wisdom of allowing FCs in the same setting and time period of one specific game.

Are you guys basically going through the DA2 time period? How has no one chargenned Hawke yet?!

I'm currently working on a series of rooms with like hyper-basic instructions for newcomers who want to opt to go through a tutorial, starting with instructions on how to get to the tutorial and everything, from the most basic of common terminology to basic commands of moving around, posing, and talking . Of course, as Tez pointed out, there's already an issue where people jump up to welcome the newbie and the room description slides right off the screen. But the idea is to do a from the ground up kind of intro. It may be better-served on the wiki, or it should possibly live both places. We'll see.

Isn't the game-to-wiki logging SceneSys?

@saosmash said in New Player Onboarding:

I feel like we've done a fair to decent job of this on TLF (Transformers Lost and Found) by a.) "Hiring" dedicated staff for the purpose and b.) getting brand spanking new player input on building easy cheat sheets for other brand spanking new newbies to use figuring out MUSH. It helped a lot because we've all been doing this shit so long we felt myopic about what exactly newbies really need to know to figure out the interface (sorry, as I type this I realize I'm crossing the streams again).

It's been legit fascinating to hear about what terminology brand new MU* players find confusing, what's the hardest parts for them to learn, etc. It's often not the stuff we think of.

@ThatGuyThere It's certainly what everyone thinks.

@ThatGuyThere Marya and Django Maximoff. Oh, also they're not mutants anymore, they were experimented on by the High Evolutionary and that's how they got their powers. ??????????????????????????

@tragedyjones said in Comics Stuff:

@Arkandel said in Comics Stuff:

@Roz What wut? Pietro and Wanda aren't Magneto's children any more?

Uhm, what about House of M? Age of Apocalypse? What the hell, why are they shitting on 50 years of history plus big fairly recent big events based explicitly on the premise he was their father?

Is making headlines at all costs that important? Do these gimmicks actually work?

Up next: Peter Parker murdered Uncle Ben in an act of insurance fraud to fund his scholarship!

Settle down, Beavis. First of all, their being Magneto's children was a retcon in the first place.

While that's true, their being Magneto's kids was the center of a whole lot more character and plot for decades -- a hugely long time in comic book years -- than anything they had going on paternity-wise before.

@Arkandel said in Comics Stuff:

@saosmash said in Comics Stuff:

The last big dumb anti-Semitic thing that happened in comics was Remender on Brevoort's watch and he was just as dismissive then as he is now.

I've not read anything about that. What happened?

They revealed that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver aren't really Magneto's kids, and when someone asked Brevoort why he went along with removing the Jewish heritage of two of the most prominent Jewish characters in comics, he was like, "When has their Judaism even been important?" Which made a lot of people unhappy, particularly Jewish readers who'd grown up happy to see characters who share that aspect of their background that Brevoort kind of says they just -- made up the importance of. (It's also weird that he says they can be more legitimately Roma now, as if their mixed Romani/Jewish heritage meant they were somehow lesser at both.

Brevoort's just always pretty stunningly dismissive in general. I find him tiring at best.

@Arkandel I feel that way about Bendis and Remender. Bendis at least has books that I've enjoyed, but mostly when he's either creating new characters or taking ones that haven't been used in forever and kind of rebooting them (Miles Morales, Jessica Jones). Every time he's been put on a book with characters I already loved, he goes wildly OOC with them. Drives me crazy. Remender's work is just awful to be me across the board.

@Thenomain I don't adjust my pull all that often -- I probably add more than I subtract -- so I can say it's not a weekly adjustment or anything. I drop books once I stop being entertained by them, but more often that's more of a "Eh, I'm just not into it" than a "WHY IS THIS AWFUL."

It's actually the most frustrating when I find myself taking major issue with a writer I otherwise really like. (See: Gillen on Iron Man. He's not the only one, just the one I think of first.) I'm just like

@Thenomain I mean, maybe I'd feel that way more if I didn't always have -- uh -- a good number of books on my pull. So it's not necessarily that I drop a book and look to replace it with something specific; I just try to pull books I enjoy reading in general. If I drop a book, it's not a chance to look at something else, it's just losing out on a story I was once interested in but am no longer for whatever reason. Maybe if I had a set budget and only let myself subscribe to a certain number of books.

@Thenomain I mean, as a comics reader that's never really something I've felt as a plus. It's a reality of the fandom, because there are so many stories going on and characters change hands so much, but I don't know if people are attracted to reading comics because of it.

And as much as it's a reality with so many cooks in the kitchen, it's still natural for people to be attached to their favorite characters and feel frustrated when it seems like the writing and editing really fails them. I mean, I love a lot of Kieron Gillen's work, but I was wholesale not interested when he decided to do a storyline that necessitated Tony Stark having been secretly adopted. Like, that doesn't even make sense! He's always drawn as looking exactly like Howard and people comment on the resemblance all the time! But when I dropped the book, I didn't think, "Man, it's a good thing I have other options," I thought, "This was a really dumb move and I'm dropping the book."