Posts made by Roz

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@ThatGuyThere How is that not just saying that OOC is IC?

@Lithium I would actually say that Person A would be in the wrong to suddenly retcon a huge thing like that that would really affect the RP of not only Person B but also any other characters close to Person A's. Like, that's just a shitty thing to do, and if I were a staffer in that instance I'd say that they couldn't retcon something like that into other people's RP. (Although they could say their character was disappearing or dying now that the player has returned if they want to get rid of it.)

If there is a character who by logic sees yours on a regular basis -- a SO, a coworker, something like that -- then your character feeling avoided necessitates some change in the usual habits of that other character seeing them. Which means that RPing feeling avoided is still implying that something about the regular relationship has changed ICly.

@Lithium said:

@Sunny I think you're misconstruing what I meant, or maybe I didn't convey my point properly.

People talk about their opinions of things all the time. If a character is trying to reach another character, and has done everything in their power to reach them, but cannot, it is not unreasonable for a person to think they are being avoided. There is nothing wrong with RP'ing that the character thinks they are being avoided, because it is just the characters opinion.

Except the character isn't being avoided. The player is.

@Lithium said:

If Sam is avoiding the RP, then they are avoiding the character, and the character is free to react to that. Maybe they just get frustrated that they are being dodged, or just angry with the world at going against them in this fashion.

Oh my God that is 100% not true. You can't just say that someone who is OOCly unavailable -- even if you think they're avoiding you/don't really want to play with you -- is also avoiding your character ICly. If I have a busy couple of days and don't have time to RP and I come back to the game and see a character insisting that mine is avoiding them and/or absent from their responsibilities or something like that, I'd be pissed.

It feels weird to put it in this thread, but going through my old gchat logs with my late brother and being reminded of what a brilliant, obnoxious butthead he was is kind of great. They keep making me laugh, especially the ones where he very briefly tried out a MU* I was staff on.

For me, being proactive on a MU* means seeking out RP, either through general means (asking on a RP channel if it exists, joining folks on the grid, etc.) or specific ones (having a particular idea and seeking out a specific person for it). It means picking up hooks and following up on them. For example: you RP with someone and they mention something about another character in a scene. It's interesting or as some potential for more stuff, so you seek out the other person and go, "Hey, you came up in this scene and I think it'd be fun to play."

Like 95% of the time, when players have complained to me about not getting RP, they're not even doing the basic steps of seeking it out through the means available to them on the game. So yeah, I tell those people to be more proactive.

Welp. Didn't get the job. At least I don't have to keep waiting to hear about it.

@Lisse24 said:

Not RL, but...

I found a newbie on a MU and he is a good newbie. Despite playing on his first MU ever, he has great poses, has a good grasp of the system, reads files and the wiki, and has been great about checking in about RP boundaries and the like.

I want to hug him and squeeze him and name him George (and tie him to the mux so that he doesn't leave the hobby).

Awesome newbies are a gift from the heavens.

@Pyrephox said:

@Arkandel said:

@Pyrephox I think a good way to look at rolls as a Storyteller is to consider them hooks tying the players to your story.

Everyone wants to be useful in a plot; to come in and have an impact. Some players are proactive enough to do so no matter their stats but not everyone is, so giving them an entry point into the story ("roll wits+composure please") so you can hand-feed them some information perhaps unique to them achieves at least that much - they are now relevant.

Rolls are also an opportunity to highlight character aspects which are not often useful to them. A combat PC is never going to be out of fashion but how often does a locksmith, med student or car mechanic get to do their thing? Perhaps less often, so give them that nice fat exceptional success to go with the rest of the scene. I've specifically add elements to the story before to let the spotlight be shared.

Especially in systems like GMC where failure is actually rewarded it's even neater.

Yes, absolutely. Of course, the flipside of that is the frustration that can come of just having a run of bad luck, and your character not being able to do things that they really /should/ be competent at because the dice just hate you one night. A certain amount of failure can be fun (especially with a GM that lets failure add complications, rather than just shut down an action), but if it starts to feel like you can never succeed at a roll just because your dice have forgotten that high numbers exist, that stops being fun.

It's a balance.

As @saosmash noted, I played a crack shot sniper type on our old Mass Effect game -- like doing trick shots while upside-down while drunk -- but I tended to have terrible luck with dice. I'm a player who is happy to to put my character through the wringer with failure, but you're right that it's totally frustrating to repeatedly not be able to shoot baddies when that's like the main combat focus of your character.

It's funny: two of my close friends are married (and actually met each other on a MU*), and yet they rarely seem to RP together. They met each other before I knew them, so I think they RPed together more then, but since the time I knew them (when they were still dating/before they were married) they didn't really RP together a whole lot.

I've fudged, but always to the benefit of the players and the story, and always with publicly alerting the people in the scene. Most of the time that means giving characters pay-off for cool or epic choices when they have bad luck with a roll. Sometimes that actually means modding a baddie NPC up a little to provide a better fight -- with the interest of giving the characters a more epic battle. Of course, these were all PvE type environments; if it came to a PvP situation, I feel like you have to be a lot more strict, because then there's players on both sides of the equation.

But also note that I've either GMed without stats or a system or with FS3, so I don't have any WoD experience.

Yeah, you probably just caught us before people really start connecting. Like, right now we've got about 11 players connected, which is a fairly typical look at a Sunday afternoon. Tez is right that our logs page is a good indicator -- pretty much every scene gets posted -- and if you're super curious we have a staffer who loves putting spreadsheets together and literally makes graphs of our log numbers by week and month to see how we're doing.

@surreality If you're interested I have an Atlantis client guide I wrote a while back for newcomers to the client/clients in general. You might already know everything there, but just in case!

EDIT: Since writing that guide several years ago I have realized I can group all of my highlights in one line with the "matches regexp" option and | between names. I'm smart.

Hopefully going to hear back about a job today, but until then it's going to be literally all I can think about.

I'm a notorious fame whore, it's true.

@Nein TLF is still going strong! I am indeed on staff on two different games. I kind of have different focuses on both of them, and they're both on the smaller side and have several staffers. I just look the most impressive because I post the most here out of any of the staffers.

We've just wrapped our first big plot, which makes now a great time to join up!

It's been a rough winter in Mutant Town. Months spent trying to dodge a branch of the mutant-heavy Russian mafia intent on staking out territory in New York ended quite literally in flames - but not before several mutants in the NYPD's Mutant Affairs department lost their jobs after a public outting and any number of Mutant Town residents got caught up in the turf war.

Then a blizzard left most of Mutant Town without power for days.

Spring approaches, though, and surely things will start looking up. With the mafia locked up or chased back underground, business is picking back up for the newly-established X-Factor Solutions, which promises to solve problems big or small. Employees are starting to see real money, and sometimes the jobs are even more interesting than unloading boxes or playing courier.

Of course, sometimes 'interesting' isn't a good thing.

X-Factor is a second-generation X-Men movieverse game with a cyberpunk feel. We are a single faction roleplay-focused game with a friendly atmosphere and a playerbase that loves to hang out and chat. We use Faraday's FS3 system for chargen and combat.

@Bobotron Yeah, this is about the kind of structure I had in mind for a total softcoded system. I'd probably be a better coder by the end of it if I made the plunge!