Best posts made by Sparks

Sorry, but no, Theno. I both disagree with the implication that perks are universally a bad thing, and feel rather strongly these supposedly-inherent benefits to staffing are either not guaranteed, or even actively harmful to the game.

So I'm going to address those point-by-point, and I'm probably going to get characteristically verbose; for the likely-impending wall of text, I apologize in advance.

@Thenomain said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Tangentially: It never ceased to amaze me that people who staffed acted like they needed benefits.

Why? I mean, demanding perks—especially specific ones—rather than being offered them is super gauche, yes. But staffing is an unpaid volunteer position, and many real-world unpaid volunteer positions do offer perks or benefits to say thank you.

For instance, I used to help out with organizing author Q&A and signings at the local bookstore. I did not work at the bookstore, I did not get paid for this. And because I was volunteering, I couldn't just sit in the audience and be part of Q&A, I needed to go 'flap' the store's entire stock of books for signing (i.e., sticking the first few pages under the front flap of the dust-jacket, so that each book would open immediately to the page to be signed). I got to do it within earshot of the Q&A so I didn't miss any, but I didn't get to participate and ask my own questions. I also had to show up early for any signing to help prepare, and I had to stay late (sometimes very late) afterwards to help see the store's stock signed, put away all the chairs, and all that.

That kind of saps some of the fun out of the event, no question. But in return there were non-monetary benefits I received.

I got to hang out and chat with the author without a crowd around after everyone had left, since I was standing there to help pass the flapped stock over to sign. And this particular bookstore liked to take the author out for launch/dinner (or at least provide food) after the signing was done, if possible; I'd get to go along for those. I've gotten to share a meal with some of my favorite authors as a result. I have lots of anecdotes and fond memories from those meals and the post-signing chats.

And some specific signings ended up having other perks, too. For Terry Pratchett's final signing at the store, on his final book tour, his health was bad enough that he said he could only sign a handful of books compared to all his previous signings. So the signing slots were given out to lucky audience members at random via raffle, only about 20 slots for the like 350-ish people who showed up. (It was honestly really unfortunate; the poor guy visibly felt bad when he saw how big the audience was and everyone's hopeful looks during the raffle.) But he had said he'd also sign a book for each of the two volunteers without our needing to be in the raffle, so I still got my book signed.

Those are perks. Were they unfair? Maybe some folks in the audience at those events would say they were, sure. Maybe they wanted to have dinner with the author, too. Maybe they felt those two signings that Terry gave the two volunteers should've been raffled off to attendees along with the other 20. But those folks also showed up right before the Q&A rather than coming early, they got to ask questions during the Q&A rather than flapping books, and they left right after their books were signed rather than sticking around to clean up.

Those folks did not have to turn away people who showed up at the door to see their favorite author one final time on what he'd said would be his final book tour, only to be turned away because they had not read the event listing and so hadn't realized the event—unlike pretty much every other signing—was ticketed, and that tickets had sold out weeks earlier. They did not have to turn away folks in the event who tried to get into the signing line despite not having winning raffle tickets, pleading how important an author Terry Pratchett was to them and how this is the last time they'd have a chance to get his signature, and surely one more person in the line wouldn't matter?

(Dealing with the disappointment and anger at that signing was not my favorite experience as a volunteer.)

Similarly, players get to focus on just RP. They don't have to spend time going through requests. They get to be be pleasantly surprised by plot twists and dramatic reveals, not having been privy to folks writing them. They don't have to worry about people paging them when they're trying to RP, going, "So, I have this policy question" or "can I get some clarification on this GM response?" They don't have the unpleasant job of dealing with player management (i.e., "stop harassing Becky OOCly for TS immediately, this will be your first and only warning").

So, yeah, I think perks/benefits for unpaid work are not necessarily a bad thing in general. And I think the same can be true for a game offering perks to the staffers.

But those kind of perks should always be additive; they should be a benefit to the volunteer without being a detriment to someone else. If, for instance, one of my perks as a volunteer at the book signings had been to kick someone out of the signing line and take their place? That would have been a terrible perk, and absolutely would've been unfair.

So maybe a staff perk offered on one game is "where normally you're limited to two PC alts, a staffer can have one extra as thanks for their hard work." Maybe a staff perk on another is "Once a year, as thanks for your hard work, you can put in a request for GM action without having to pay a luck point/AP/karma coins/whatever." Neither of these perks are detrimental to someone else, but do offer a small perk for all the volunteer work.

Now, sure, maybe it's ideal if those perks are written somewhere so that players know "Oh, staffer Jane is playing three alts because that's a perk for a staffer doing all their work." versus "Staffer Jane is playing three alts; she's clearly cheating! Get the pitchforks and torches!" But the perks for volunteering at the book signings certainly weren't made explicitly clear to the attendees, either.

(To be fair, we did sometimes have people who were like, "You said everyone has to leave! That the signing is over! So why is she getting to stay and talk to the author while she hands him those books?" We even once had someone nearby in the store overhear the dinner plans for the author being discussed while we were setting up for the Q&A, and try to invite themselves along. I wish I were kidding on that one.)

@Thenomain said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

You can change the course of the entire game, numnutz, what kind of benefit would you call that?

Something that really should not be done casually, or just to suit your own mood? Changing the course of the entire game should be treated as a very weighty decision made by more than one staffer, not a right to be exercised on a whim as a benefit of being staff. I think if you're changing the direction of the game just because you can—because it's a benefit of being staff—that's hugely detrimental to the game.

@Thenomain said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

And you get to RP any NPC at any time as befits the game.

Many games assign specific NPCs to specific staffers for consistency, so even if you did want to play that NPC in that scene it's not yours to play. And many games have rules about when NPCs can be used, too. I would argue strongly that if you're taking an NPC out on the grid to RP with people every night, you're doing NPCs wrong; at that point, it's basically just a PC with an unfair advantage.

In fact, I actually feel pretty strongly this suggested "benefit" of playing an NPC on a whim wherever you like and in whatever situation you like as often as you like is potentially way more detrimental to the game than the perks I suggested above.

@Thenomain said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

And you have an organized support network, which is far more than non-staff players can say.

I disagree that this is even guaranteed to be true at all, much less that it's a benefit that only staff can claim. I have seen games where the staff were not exactly OOCly close-knit, or even are on the verge of outright hostility. Where staff has schismed into two rival clusters who are only grudgingly cooperating, with a thin veneer of polite cooperation atop a seething mound of antipathy.

And conversely, I have seen player cliques who were so tight OOCly that individual molecules of air would have trouble passing between them.

I'm actually pretty sure we've had threads about both types over in the Hog Pit at some point or another.

@Caryatid said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I hate the extremes we fall into in discussions here. I hate that the distinction becomes "those who get NPC time and plot shenanigans are more fun to play with!" and "those who don't are boring and if they complain they're jealous".

Ugh. This thread. U g h.

Looking at how some stuff's being taken in this thread, yeah, I do think we have a tendency, as a community, to swing to extremes and read one statement as meaning way more than it does. Someone says "sometimes A causes B" and then people swing to "B isn't always caused by A! How dare you suggest that!" That's not what the original argument is. That's not how logic works; "if A then B" doesn't mean "If B then A".

Like, there are so many reasons besides "that player is boring" that someone might not get an on-screen NPC scene they were hoping for. Maybe the GM and the player's RP times don't sync up. Maybe the GM has been swamped and hasn't had time yet. Maybe the NPC is ICly ignoring the character for a reason. Maybe the GM has ADHD and has honestly just forgotten the request. Maybe the GM wrote all the requests down somewhere, and can't remember where. (sighs, raises hand I've done both of those two.)

All "some players can make GM'ing for them excruciating" means it precisely what it says. Nothing else. I have, on one game or another, GM'd for players who make scenes absolutely torturous. They're the ones who complain about the dice every time they fail a roll. They make passive-aggressive metaposes when they don't get exactly what they hoped for. If other characters are in the scene, they get palpably jealous and upset if any other character gets a moment of glory. They're the ones who, when you tell them to knock it off, go sullenly silent, stop posing more than one-line poses, and meanwhile go page all their friends about how the GM is being unreasonable.

My point in that post was just that if we want to say that staff is obligated to give an equal amount of on-screen NPC attention to every player, it's worth keeping in mind that you're telling folks "you must go roleplay with these people". (Or else kick them off the game, but then you get the players complaining "what did they do to get kicked off?")

@faraday said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

What I do pledge, though, is to "provide a sane, fair and friendly environment for you to tell your stories." Part of that fairness means ensuring that Fred has the same opportunities for success as my BFF Mary. I do not need to RP with him to do this. Off-camera scenes and +rolls are a thing for this very reason.

This, I think, is an excellent general pledge.

"Fair" does not have to mean "every staffer is obligated to RP out things with every player who asks for something from an NPC". "Fair" does not have to mean "the plot dished out to every player must be an equal portion, regardless of how much individual effort they put in to seeking and engaging with that plot".

"Fair" can just mean "staffers should not set one character up for failure while spurring a different one along; plot actions/requests from both should be treated with the same level of regard".

Hitting that sweet spot in GM'ing where you can evoke genuine emotional responses from your players because they are invested in the story. It's what I always strive for, but no one hits the target height every time. It's an odd mindset where you can be so happy that you broke people's hearts, but it means the story is a good one.

@arkandel said in RL things I love:

I haven't seen a thread about this already, so... the Incel subreddit was banned.

Apparently the final drop in the bucket was a discussion where when a member complained his roommate had a girlfriend, others chipped in with detailed instructions about how to castrate him.

What bothers me is that they had years of threatening violence to women, but when they threaten to castrate a guy that's a bridge too far.

Glad the group is gone, depressed at what it took before that happened.

@faraday said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@surreality But... why listen to them? I mean, the idea that original theme games can't work is demonstrably false. Arx, Firan, Aether, Castle d'Image, Otherspace... some of the most famous and arguably "successful" games in MU* history have had original themes.

I think some of this may also be that Aether, Firan, and Arx all built incredibly detailed worlds and libraries of lore, because they had no shortcuts. No "just watch the show/read the books" or "well, it's <City X> but with werewolves." They had to put together all the lore, and either present it in a nicely consumable fashion, or conceal it but provide a good IC reason that players would be unaware of some of it.

Conversely I'm trying my first WoD game out, and I find I'm stumbling and a bit lost in places. (Ha ha it's a pun because I'm playing a Changeling.) Much of this is the system—they have a ton of Random Capitalized Terms, some of which are the same as other Random Capitalized Terms but mean different things depending on which sourcebook you're in—but some of it is all kinds of little expectations that aren't communicated anywhere, in the books or anything else.

And I suspect this isn't because staff is lazy, but because the vast majority of the game have played WoD in the past and take all those little fiddly bits for granted.

This isn't a criticism of any game, merely an observation that in some ways, the extra work for an original theme—done right, at least—makes it easier for newcomers to dig into the game than a lot of us, me included, do when building games on established canon properties.

Depression.

Especially depression you fight against for weeks and weeks only to have it get way worse when put on a new anti-depressant. (Then you get off the new anti-depressant, and you're back where you started, and then you get to try a new medication instead!)

Just... bleh. I have not felt fit for human contact since early January, and acting like I am still functioning normally at work is getting exhausting.

@Apos I'd say it's also worth calling out that you also have the Action Points system, where you have to spend AP to do metaplot things and thus no one person can do all the things themselves. AP thus encourages you to bring others in to involve them with whatever metaplot goals you have.

I can't do an investigation on my own unless I take a very long time or blow all my AP on it every week; if I want a timely answer I thus would be well-served to involve others. Things like that do hopefully encourage people to reach out and involve others.

@Ganymede - If we're doing live action versions of Disney films that didn't perform to expectations, give me The Black Cauldron. Even adjust the script to be a bit more true to the books.

...so basically just use it as an excuse to give me a proper live action version of the Chronicles of Prydain.

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Conversely, some of the posters here are staff on various games, and I suspend they wouldn't have tolerated neither the tone or degree of criticism applied they are themselves showing. Nor is it easy to shrug off being told you are complete shit at what you do publicly, then come back and word a polite response back from that.

For whatever it's worth, I don't think the mods are "complete shit" at what you do. I do think you guys kind of dropped the ball on this one. That can be written off as growing pains, a misunderstanding compounded with ill-advised pre-coffee posting, but it was a dropped ball nonetheless.

However, we have a community here who are, to some degree, conditioned to descend like a pack of starving wolverines on any perceived bad staffing, who consider it a sacred mission to warn others about such incidents. Be it favoritism, turning a blind eye to the faults of fellow staffers, general injustice against players, or whatever.

You say there are staffers here who wouldn't shrug off this type of criticism, but I suspect almost every staffer on here has been chewed on by the wolverines at least a few times. And the community has not historically been terribly forgiving of replies to criticism there, either.

And staff will always fall short on occasion; people are human, they make mistakes, and so on. No one is perfect, and no one's going to make the right decision 100% of the time—be it as staff or otherwise.

This incident was, I think, a mistake rather than malice. But given the fact that this is a community seemingly founded in literal part to call out bad staffing, I feel like it probably shouldn't be any real surprise that when an incident viewed as bad staffing happens, there are suddenly wolverines trying to gnaw on your liver.

@mietze said in RL things I love:

And we didnt put a dent in the problem I know, but it was nice to see those people breathe just a little easier.

I do a thing which the homeless folks downtown around my office call 'playing sandwich fairy'. When I leave the office for lunch, if I'm going to go grab a sandwich, I'll make a quick circuit around the area, and any of the homeless folks I see, I ask if there's a sandwich I can get them at Subway. If they say yes, I get their order, then I walk over to Subway, get my sandwich and all the others, and then I retrace my steps, handing out the sandwiches before returning to the office to eat my own.

One of my co-workers asked me why the heck I do it, because "You realize you're not actually fixing the problem by getting sandwiches for five or six people, right? No matter what any one person does, it won't make a dent." To which my reply was, "Yeah, but it makes a difference to those five or six people. And if everyone did little acts of kindness like that, then in aggregate, it would make a huge difference."

It's like the quote from The Adventure Zone: "Do good recklessly."

@mietze said in RL things I love:

And I can't believe I have an employer that gave me the day off to help and paid me my usual wage too.

It's so nice when a company is supportive like that.

There's a shelter for homeless youth about 10 minutes walk from my office. My company has, for years now, staffed the shelter during lunches; a bunch of folks will walk over and spend an hour helping make lunch, and then another batch will show up and spend an hour serving food (while the first group heads back to the office). It's not just allowed but encouraged to pitch in.

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

The metaplot secrets on Pugmire would probably be really, really cute.

"You are a good dog. A good, good dog."

@Misadventure said:

Atlantis. The creator is out there, and she used to make appearances on MU*s and on forums.

I still exist. I even still MU*!

Part of the problem is that so much of the Atlantis 1.0 codebase dates back to literally Panther; I can't even /compile/ it without booting back into 10.6 any longer because of some of that. (I wrote code that was very future-proofed for running, but apparently not very future-proofed for compiling when Apple changes all the tools.)

A while ago I began a clean rewrite, killing off a lot of the older, harder-to-maintain code and redoing things in a cleaner manner as Atlantis 2.0. So, a rewritten core that works on OSX and iOS (iPhone/iPad version!), native Dropbox integration for logging scenes such that the mobile version in 2.0 can also log into the same directories, a proxy system that lets you switch your connection from laptop to mobile to desktop without disconnecting (or even 'detach' a'la TinyFugue+Screen), stuff like that. Updating the Lemuria windowing toolkit I wrote (the thing that manages spawns) to function in a sane, modern manner now that I don't have to do Weird Goofy Nonsense to allow spawns to be torn off and docked elsewhere, etc...

I'll eventually get off my ass and finish 2.0. It's been sitting at a 60-70% done state for ages, but since nothing actually /breaks/ in Yosemite and there's been little pressure, I've admittedly been taking my sweet time about it and working on other things.

@kestrel said in What Is Missing For You?:

I second @thesuntsar that I would be more likely to consider a supernatural horror game that eschewed the usual teen/college drama cliches and maybe wasn't set in a small town in America. Go big. Go Noir. Like London, New York, or some other familiar, dusky urban playground. As a bonus, the first two have a literal underground/subway which can make for a pretty neat setting.

On the note of "London Underground", if people open more supernatural/vaguely horror games, I'd sort of love to see someone even attempt a game in the vein of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

The design goal is not just to make a meaningless leaderboard, but to give a reason that people will want to have social characters in their house, just like how people want to have combat characters in their house for combatty things. Or if they don't have social folks in their own house, a reason to hire social characters—Whispers, for instance—for social things, just like people hire Champions or mercenaries for duels and combat.

The problem is that by making social characters important to existing systems people feel like they have to be social characters, because people in general are stressing that "if you aren't a social character, you aren't maximizing your prestige gains, and if you aren't maximizing your prestige gains you're not maximizing your gains in other systems, and that means you're doing it wrong". (And whether or not that's the intention, focusing on 'what is the most effective way to use the system' with examples given in math is going to add to that flailing.)

At any rate, the entire thing clearly has turned the whole thing into a source of frothing stress for people in about seven different ways, rather than something fun to make social characters useful to non-social characters.

What I, as a coder looking to redesign things, would like to see is suggested solutions to that actual design goal and problem (hence the 'constructive' in the thread title), so that I can deal with it and get back to the magic system. I've got one in mind, as I've detailed, but that doesn't mean people's input might not be useful.

However, any solution kind of needs to be at a more macro level—this isn't about "what can be tuned in modeling", this is at a higher level; "what will make social characters fun and useful to other people" is the question that we want to answer.

That's why I personally feel that the math behind things is secondary to this consideration. Raw math—or focusing on how you maximize your gains in a mechanical sense—is not going to make social characters feel useful. Worse still, any system where people feel you have to read the system math in order to "maximize" your gains is not going to be fun for people. (Thus why I'm going to try to remove numbers from the scoreboard and from viewing your own prestige in the rewrite.)

@krmbm said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Goldfish said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

But did they have a wave of amputee apps and had to be like. STOP. All limbs now.

Yes.

@Ganymede said in Not even sure what to title this, but here goes..:

I think the "why" is personal and largely irrelevant.
[...]
The apology was made. Demanding an explanation is a personal thing. Some may want one, others may not. This is not the greatest place for giving such explanations publicly, and I think it's enough to want to change.

Sure, it's nice to know someone's thought process. But it really, honestly, should never be expected.

I think when someone realizes they've done wrong, you have ever right to expect an apology, and actual change. A real apology, mind you, not the prevaricating wishy-washy set of excuses or "I'm sorry people were offended" that puts the spotlight on everyone else rather than your own actions, like seems to be popular with a depressing number of celebrities out there in recent years.

stares for a moment at the various 'apologies' issued in that whole ProJared thing

But I don't think it's really fair to ever expect—much less demand—a detailed explanation of how exactly they came to realize they were wrong. If they want to share it, sure. But maybe it was something private, something they aren't comfortable sharing. Maybe it was just a moment of epiphany and they can't articulate how they reached that "Wait... oh, heck, I am the asshole in this situation." moment.

What matters is that the apology was genuine, and that they carry through on the promise to do better. Not whether they can present a paper trail of receipts on their reasoning to be audited.

@Jeshin said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Kanye-Qwest

I'm open to better comparisons, do you have any?

Not KQ, but gonna answer anyway!

If you're excluding an ethnicity on geographical grounds ("people who look like that exist in this world, but they're from a faraway nation which, for various thematic reasons, we don't want PCs to be from at this point in the story"), it can be justifiable. It's probably still not great if that ethnicity happens to align with a player's iRL identity, but it can make sense on simple geographic grounds; it's unlikely, for instance, that you would've historically encountered an aboriginal Australian in Siberia in the 1700's, so I can see a game set in Siberia in the 1700's going, "Sorry, we're not going to allow this concept."

However, being gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary... that's not tied to ethnicity or geography or really anything. Even in cultures where it wasn't acceptable to be those things, historically, it still never stopped people from being those things. It may have stopped them from presenting as those things openly—the nobleman who is gay, but forces themselves to conceal it and takes a wife to have children, etc.—but it did not stop them from being those things. Look at the military surgeon, James Barry, for instance.

It's far, far harder to justify "there are no QUILTBAG (or whatever acronym you prefer) people in this setting" as a result; while it's fair to say you would not likely have found an aboriginal Australian in Siberia in the 1700's, it strains credulity a lot more to say there were no gays or lesbians in Siberia in the 1700's.

I'm guessing that's what KQ meant by saying it's not a good analogy.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs.

This is why my eyes glaze over whenever people talk about how "the hobby is dying." There's TONS of text-based RP, it's just in places most of us don't interact/acknowledge on this board. Like, RPI MUDs aren't much different than MUSHes, but that's still a very different audience. Once you get into stuff like Dreamwidth journals or Tumblr or whatever...people be RPing. If every PennMUSH game imploded tomorrow, I could go find a place to text-based RP. I like MUSHes because of the immediacy they provide and the way they create a persistent, shared world, but I can imagine that being created another way.

My MMO guildmates—who I've followed from game to game across more games than I want to think about—are avid RPers.

None of them, that I know of, have ever MU*'d. (I've tried to drag them onto games a few times, but they find the whole MU* commandset and dedicated client and everything else very strange.) They RP in Discord. On Tumblr. On forums. In Google Docs. And if I want to RP with them, I need to go there. It's eye-opening how many people are RP'ing that way; the number of people doing Tumblr RP probably dwarfs the userbase of this board. The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

@gryphter said in Wheel of Time:

I would love to see a Wheel of Time game of any stripe running on an Evennia engine, personally. I might even consider throwing real money at such a thing to see it happen.

The thing is, Ares is a complete game in a box. You may need to modify a few things, but it has forums and bboards and everything already written, so unless you have something you really want to change (like adding magic to FS3), mostly you just need to set up theme and pick which dice system you want to use.

Evennia is incredibly powerful, but it's really more a framework to be used to build a game. It's more like MOO or LPMUD in that sense, where you still need a 'core' to actually give you functionality. And there's not really any 'standard' cores for Evennia (though Arx's code has been released freely and could admittedly be used as a core). So if you want to do an Evennia game, you can make it exactly what you want, it will be totally bespoke, but it will be a lot more work.

If you don't have incredibly specific needs, Ares is absolutely the best path to getting a game up and running.

(I admittedly slightly prefer Evennia from a coding standpoint, but that's just because Python is a language I use every day, whereas I touch Ruby maybe once a year.)

@lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

If the way that fashion is implemented allows me to ignore it completely, and doesn't result in me needing to go out and buy some prettyprettything to be included in PlotX, then I'm fine with it.

So right now, a lot of people view combat as what you "have to have" to get involved in plots. This isn't exactly true—there's lots of things that involve stuff other than combat, but there's still a perception.

I think the idea @Apos describes about fashion is meant to give other avenues: letting there be more play for social and fashionable characters who can build up prestige, and use that in plots to influence NPCs to influence the story. Giving more paths to influence than just having to be the Strong Person What Uses Sharp Metal Things For To Hit Demons.

I mean, there probably will be plots that are focused towards the social mavens who deftly influence the social scene with style, just like there are plots for the people with the pointy metal bits, or the people who dig into all the occult lore, etc. So I don't know that "ignore it completely" is 100% true, any more than you can "ignore it completely" for combat if you want to go into situations where combat is required.

But you can probably ignore it in terms of "do I need to go buy the pretty things or play the fashion game myself", and instead find someone who does play that part of the game to use if you need someone with a lot of social prestige for some other plotline.

And I'd imagine there will be times you might need an influential social powerhouse to do things, like if you want to convince all the NPCs that Plan A is really better than Plan B, please and thank you. Just like how sometimes you might need a combat powerhouse to do things, such as keep you alive while you explore ancient ruins full of monsters.

But the goal as described seems to be to make those people useful to others, not to make those skills required by everyone.

(This is, mind you, just me talking about what I read as the intent of the design. So don't read too much into this.)