Best posts made by Sparks

@a-meowley said in Atlantis Client:

Raising the topic from the dead to ask:

• Is there any way of adding a custom word wrap to new worlds without changing the actual size of the client window?

I've got some MU*s that have super elegant in game word wrapping, and some which have decided that +sheet and other misc info should equal the entire width of the client window no matter what. The (un)readability is driving me bonkers and slowing me down. Is there a way of changing this without resizing the window? (I like to keep things full screen, and have a lot of blank client space to the side.)

Sadly, no... I apologize. The Atlantis 2 prototype I've been writing does allow manual wordwrap instead of width-of-screen, but the original Atlantis doesn't.

(However, Atlantis 2 has been taking me so long, I might just try to get Atlantis 1 updated to 64-bit and then once that's done, see about adding a few of the most-requested features as a sort of tide-folks-over release.)

@Cobaltasaurus said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

@Testament said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

Mostly play straight male characters. Occasionally(very occasionally, infact I can only think of one)will I play a bi female.

Nowadays, I play asexual, mildly sociopathic male characters. Because I just can't give two shits about romance RP or TS anymore. There's very little interesting in it for me anymore. There used to be a time when I loved all the romance stuff.

And now? Zero interest.

This is me lately, too. I have pretty much zero interest in playing out real romantic relationships. I'm fine with playing somewhat flirty characters, or those who use romance to get what they want, but playing out a real love story doesn't really interest me.

Truth be told, playing out the love story itself has rarely been a priority or significant interest to me.

I think a lot of players focus on the love story as the actual story. Which, sadly, means all the enjoyment starts to drain out of the relationship once you reach the 'now we are in love' stage. After all, in romance novels, the book ends when the couple (or group) are together. And while there's nothing wrong with romance novels, they do have an actual clearly defined end, whereas RP on a MU* generally does not. So if what you enjoyed was the love story itself you'll start to get disappointed now that it is status quo, because you've finished the romance novel you were reading.

I am convinced that's the cause of a lot of those "we just don't see eye to eye anymore, he's cold and distant, and I have found solace in the arms of <other character>" situations: not that the player is flighty or flakey, per se, but that they still want the love story itself—whether consciously or unconsciously—and the only way to recapture that story is to start over with someone new. To start reading a new romance novel.

The long-term relationships I've loved playing out the most are where the meat of the story is what happens with the relationship after the love story, where the love story is just the setup, the prologue.

A political marriage where you slowly learn to love each other is great... but it's even better if that relationship forges into a long-term partnership where you can scheme together. Maybe it's a patriarchal society, but the queen consort becomes the silent partner behind closed doors, helping to guide things in secret. How do you make this work? What happens if a political opponent of the king learns about the queen's influence and feels it flies in the face of tradition?

You find your love... and then learn they're a member of a hidden organization that opposes all that you stand for. What do you? Do you try to pull them from that organization's clutches and redeem them? Do you feel betrayed and try to cut all ties? Do you allow them to drag you into the organization? Do you follow your heart or your head?

When you have a surprise wedding with the person you love... what happens next? If you're both nobles and the wedding happened without proper negotiations and contracts, what's the fallout of that? What family does the couple end up in? Does the other family feel slighted? How do you bridge the chasm your love story may have created socially and/or politically?

Those questions are way more interesting to me for long-term RP than the love story of "he's so perfect, and I love him for always", which will always have a defined end-point.

I'm legit kind of loving the reaction to Ikumi Nakamura presenting her game (Ghostwire: Tokyo) at E3. Instead of people being horrible towards a woman in gaming, everyone seems to just adore her and her enthusiasm. I haven't stumbled across anyone saying anything bad or commenting about whether she's attractive or not, etc. (I'm sure it's out there somewhere, because humanity, but I haven't had it end up in my face as usual.)

And there's been some really touching observations about how with Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, The Evil Within) retired from directing games, the way he came out and introduced his protege to everyone was kind of a symbolic passing of the torch.

I didn't watch the presentation, but just seeing the reactions around the net has been weirdly refreshing.

Office doggos on a really bad day.

Sure, certain things are potentially on fire (and I mean that literally, not metaphorically) and I kind of want to hide under my desk, but I got love and kisses from a giant affectionate floof (who I hadn't seen in a while because she is the rarest of office dogs). Also a golden retriever who lay down and rolled on his back because he wanted belly rubs. And a little dachshund who sat down at my feet and wanted his head scratched.

Office doggos make everything a little better.

To add to what @roz says: my MMO guild buddies are used to a single document/thread per RP, even if that RP involves multiple scenes and moves from place to place. The concept of a grid—of rooms you move between—was both alien and alienating to them when I tried to describe it.

Does that mean they needed a particular "session" of RP to spread across multiple logs? Oh, your client thing just keeps one ongoing log? How do you do two separate scenes with different people at once then? Etc.

There are a lot of assumptions we take for granted; even just knowing "look" and "page" are not givens for newcomers, which can make even learning how to get started a puzzle for folks. Especially when they are used to an entirely different set of assumptions about how RP even works.

@faraday said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@Alzie - You're splitting hairs. I could implement a sophisticated communications protocol over an 8-bit serial bus too if I really wanted to but that would be supremely silly from a technical standpoint. Especially when standard web protocols do everything we need already.

The server-client protocol isn't even the biggest hangup, it's the MUSH clients. Maybe you expect somebody to invent new cross-platform MUSH clients across windows/mac/seventeen-flavors-of-mobile, but I don't. So what you're dubbing technically possible I say is largely impractical.

Moreover, people will not change from their current clients. I see people complain about how SimpleMU doesn't support https links and 256-color, but still refuse to change to Potato.

So even if you write a client that supports music and sound and graphics and VR—witness Pueblo—and even if it was available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, lots of people still won't switch to it because it's not the client they are used to using.

But everyone has a web browser already. Everyone's already used to using the web browser for wiki, for web forums, and so on. This is part of why web is pointed to as a low bar to entry for a new paradigm of MU*ing.

@Rucket said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

Obligatory 'Do not donate your money to the Catholic church, one of the richest entities in the world. Donate to rebuild the churches in St Landry Parish if the destruction of churches makes you sad:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/church-fires-st-landry-parishmacedonia-ministry?fbclid=IwAR3ryvDSM4ka7rP-0S_WUqzOlOjYFM4vAcUZR2HHMl75REaM_Yd8ues3iH4

100%. Besides I think some really rich dude already said he was going to drop 100 million euro for Notre Dame. So helping out these churches who were part of some asshole's hate-filled rampage is better, imo.

They've apparently already raised €700M for repairs and rebuilding, €500M of that from three people. Various companies have pledged big chunks of money also; I won't be surprised if my employer's parent company (the largest engineering/R&D company in France) ends up pitching in a pile of cash as well.

So I think Notre Dame's restoration is going to be financially fine; they don't need our donations. Whereas I suspect the St. Landry Parish churches need the money much more.

I've shed plenty of tears over the fire at Notre Dame because it pains me to see a part of our history damaged or destroyed; I haven't been able to cry over the St. Landry Parish churches because I am too angry for tears. I feel like the latter situation is a better place to put my money if I want to make a difference in someone else's life.

@tanyuu said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

I honestly think that MU* s could offer something new to RPers who are looking for something lightweight, especially on tablets and phones. It doesn't need constant attention, it doesn't need a specific console or computer, and/or your internet access is limited or spotty, MU* s are great. Telnet seems to connect okay, but I've never tried to stretch it beyond 'connecting in to chat while cooking'.

This is another reason I think web access—specifically, web access designed natively for the web, not just a SimpleMU-esque client running in a browser—has a significant benefit. On an Ares game or an Evennia game with web-enabled bboards, I can read boards and emits and such from my phone or tablet easily, without having to log in. If I'm somewhere with spotty connectivity, engaging in a scene is all but impossible, but I can at least catch up on bboards and all.

If I could actually engage in scenes readily from a pure-web interface like that, I might actually try RP'ing (from a tablet with a keyboard, at least) the next time I'm on an airplane headed somewhere. In-flight WiFi is terrible and I've often been disconnected from a stateful link like telnet, but something like Faraday's pure-web prototype with scenes played from on the web? That would work great while I'm on airline wifi. If the link hiccups, I still see the poses the next time I reload the page, etc.

Those parental stories horrify me. All the sympathy.

I am lucky inasmuch as my parents are loving and supportive and have always been so. Unfortunately, I was unlucky inasmuch as I was misdiagnosed as a kid, and was literally only diagnosed as having ADHD in the past seven months.

As a kid, I had a tendency to find something that interested me and just ignore everything else—including, sometimes, sleep—to do that thing. Reading, writing, coding, tinkering with electronics, etc. This would happen instead of my chores, sometimes instead of actually coming to dinner, etc. Meanwhile, things like chores or homework were really hard for me to get started (yay executive dysfunction!) until the eleventh hour, at which point I would work in a panic-induced state of intense focus.

When I started to suffer some fairly severe depression as a teenager, my parents found me a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist went "Well, depression and hyperactivity? The hyperactivity has got to be hypomania, so clearly this is a case of bipolar disorder!" So I got treated for that, medicated for it, but the medication never seemed to work that well; I kept wrestling with depression, and eventually I got taken off the medication because if you stay on depakote long-term it has Bad Effects.

Flash forward to now. Last year I suffered a massive streak of depression and went back to a psychiatrist again. The psychiatrist talked to me about the previous diagnosis and went, "Really? I don't think that sounds quite right for bipolar. That intense focus sounds a lot more like ADHD hyperfocus to me. Have you ever been tested for ADHD?" When I said I had not, he gave me a worksheet to fill out and made me take the excruciating QbTest (which checks concentration, head/eye movement, etc.). When we got my results for the QbTest back, he said the results were borderline ADHD. So he diagnosed me as mild ADHD (and having developed coping mechanisms), along with clinical depression.

The psychiatrist told me I should probably try a couple informational organizational systems to manage things, but he didn't think it was severe enough to need medication. (He did medicate the depression, which was desperately needed.)

About three or four months later we were talking about something else, and he went, "You know, let's talk about that ADHD diagnosis again. Because having worked with you for a while now and given this executive dysfunction situation we're talking about, I'm beginning to think I may have misdiagnosed the severity in that first session. You mentioned you used a few coping tricks to focus during the QbTest; can you tell me exactly what you did?"

I noted that I'd been jostling my foot to keep myself from fidgeting, that I'd dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand (because when I do that, I find it makes it harder to have my thoughts wander; I do this during meetings), and I had tensed my shoulders to keep myself from looking around and letting my mind wander, and after about a minute I had devised a mental trick to let me remember the color/shape combinations so as to not miss many.

Psychiatrist goes, "Yeah... in light of that, I think I'm changing my diagnosis: you are just flat-out ADHD and have developed a number of coping mechanisms. Let's start discussing medication."

So... now I'm doing medication trials to figure out what medication works best for me! Whee?

(Watch me double-post!)

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

• @clues should auto-refresh with new PCs: some of mine I know are defunct. Others, I'm just wild-ass guessing whether they are or aren't. Investigative PCs should (maybe randomly?) have new @clues added. This is being worked on, though.

So, until recently I played one of the most clue-laden characters on the game. Not because I was particularly seeded with clues to start with, but because I was a very active info-trader; I would find that person X was invested in plotline Y, and give them clue Z to further that. Generally, being invested in that plotline, they had other clues about plotline Y and would share them in return, and thus I had more plotline Y clues the next time someone was interested in plotline Y.

(Aislin didn't actually do as much as people seem to think—she was rarely a decision-maker or the character in the spotlight—but she was a really solid support character, who was on the edges of a large number of plotlines as a result.)

But the real value people seemed to find from my portrayal of her was that I got very, very good at putting together a set of related clues to form a coherent theory, and then sharing that theory—sometimes a coded @theory, sometimes just sharing information in RP—with the people interested in that plotline. So I highly, highly recommend not just collecting clues, but gathering them together into coherent @theories and trading information in general. You will find you can amass quite a few clues that way through info trading.

Which is why the automated refreshing of clues seems very hard to automate in a meaningful sense, simply because there's so many clues on so many topics, and some of them are related to a player's secrets or something you couldn't find through investigation, etc. Others are clues you could find through investigation but which wouldn't be terribly useful for information brokering. (For instance, knowing about the fate of Frosthaven—which was the outcome of a player run plot—may be neat, yes. But no one is really looking for that information, so it's not a useful clue to trade.)

At any rate, trying to just automate giving 'hey, X could use more clues' is probably a really bad way of giving them a useful set of clues; having a single clue on each of 10 different topics is often far less useful for getting involved in things than having 5 clues on each of two different topics that flesh those topics out really well. So I feel like giving a curated, hand-selected set of a couple sets of clues that relate to each other would be more useful, at least based on my own experience having played a very lore/clue-focused character for a while.

And also as one former investigator/clue-collector to a current one, that's what I'd highly recommend you focus on: find what storylines interest you and focus on those to start, trying to get all the information you can on them. And if there's a specific storyline that intrigues you, ask staff to help refresh your clues with ones focused on that specific storyline.

I mean, trying to track every single storyline going on will probably drive you just a little bit mad.

I don't know if that helps at all for a little bit of clue-focused direction, but I hope so!

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DIS-COURSE DIS-COURSE... (to the tune of the Badger Badger song, as always)

***=SPOILER SPOILER***

I actually think metaposing has a place. If this character has reason to know me but the player hasn't played with me before, I will throw hints in.

"Aislin rubs at the bridge of her nose, a habit those who are familiar with her know as a clear sign she's gathering her thoughts. She doesn't yet speak, however."

Stuff like that I think can help rather than hinder.

After previous conversations, I sort of think the best way to handle it is that you can affect how other people perceive you, but not necessarily other things. I.e., I can convince you to perceive me as trustworthy (and possibly even 'more trustworthy than James over there' during an argument where James and I are both trying to sway your opinion), but I cannot necessarily convince you to change your own beliefs and positions. I can convince you to think I'm an honorable individual rather than a scoundrel, but I cannot convince you to change your own world-view.

To use peasoupling's example, Felicia would not be able to convince the faithful monk to join an orgy for the glory of Satan. But she might be able to convince the faithful monk that she's trustworthy, and then slowly begin her campaign of gradual corruption.

That allows for social actions that make sense. "I want to know this secret", you aren't playing "convince the person to tell you the secret", but "convince the person you're trustworthy and can know the secret." Maybe the person still refuses, because it's important to them to tell no one—not even trustworthy folks—but it gives a hook that's probably easier to agree on.

@SG said in Game of Thrones:

I feel like everyone would be happy with the heel turn if it happened seconds before the bells sounded. Going ape after you've finally won is stupid and clearly insane. Going ape because the city just won't effing surrender, 'okay you mofos, you're going to burn' makes all the sense that the writers are trying to talk about. Even having the bells sounding while she's razing the town is fine and still in character for her, but doing it after the surrender makes no sense at all. "It's personal" wtf is that?

What bothers me most about that is, as I've said before, here and elsewhere, it's almost trivially easy to make that moment work if you want to. I could justify it easily by adding a little bit of dialogue in three scenes this season and the addition of one action (and a set of imagery) in a fourth scene. If you want to go for a bigger change that's an even more blatant reason (but admittedly harder to come back from to where you need to be for the final episode), you can do it with one change to a scene and the addition of a brief flashback. (I think I already detailed these two methods of making her snapping feel natural last week, which is why I'm not reiterating the actual changes a second time here.)

And I am not an obscenely well-paid showrunner for HBO; I'm just a reasonably practiced writer and GM. I feel like they could've had this one with just a tiny bit more effort.

@arkandel said in Spotlight.:

@sparks said in Spotlight.:

and if you do, you're going to run into "you got a chance to shine once, a year and a half ago, so you can't go on plots anymore", which is a surefire way to burn out otherwise active players (who are the ones who stir up RP when you aren't GM'ing).

That's a pretty good point and a legitimate question on its own right.

Do all players deserve the same access to the spotlight? That is, if you are putting in a lot of your time building up a successful House which your character leads, run plots for its players, recruit others to it, making yourself available as someone in a leadership position and integrating yourself thematically into current politics, then should I as a casual player who's there an hour here and there get to have equal access to metaplot?

Everyone should have equal access to the same tools -- things like actions and investigations, on Arx, or things like gm requests on WoD games, etc. -- that allow them to dig into the metaplot. The same baseline opportunities.

But what they do with those tools will determine their involvement. If someone never puts in an investigation or action on Arx, or never interacts with staff or GM's on a WoD game, they're probably not going to get a metaplot spotlight moment.

Now, like I said, you can find people who seem to be struggling and throw them a story hook or two to get them involved in plotlines. And you should! But that doesn't guarantee involvement. I mean, they still have to run with that hook.

In your average urban fantasy novel, the character who "answers the call" and heads off to investigate when things get weird ("holy shit, magic is real?") is probably going to end up with a heroic moment more readily than the one who ignores the opportunity and sits at home watching Netflix ("eh, I haven't finished Jessica Jones yet; I'll do that first"). Both characters had equal access to the opportunity (saw magic is real), but one chose to engage and the other didn't.

@Auspice — I still love people contrasting Rick's encounter with Imhotep in the Mummy, and Carol's encounter with the Skrull agent in Captain Marvel. They are pretty damned near identical:

• Confront thing.
• Thing roars/screams.
• Roar/scream back.
• Follow up with attack.

Similarly, both Rick and Carol have been known to wield a cat (or flerkin) as an impromptu tool to frighten off enemies. This has led to a joking fan theory that Carol is a descendent of the O'Connells, like their great-grandchild. Which I find a delightful thought.

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Is it worthwhile? I don't know, often trying to discourage 'cheating' makes things a lot less enjoyable for everyone else who just want to have fun. Are people making items named 'for modeling' and junking them a real issue?

It was something we noticed happening, albeit not commonly; it was a hole in the system we thus thought we should close. Making the modeling stuff have a big benefit for running it in public was the response to that, as I detailed before, to encourage people to make real outfits to show off. But it seems that the fuss that's caused—having modeling be something you do in public rather than privately in your rooms—is far worse than the initial problem of people gaming the edge case of the system.

Hence why I'm going to gut and rewrite the prestige system to handle a bunch of things—including modeling—differently. As part of that overall rewrite, among other changes, modeling will no longer have to happen in public. This means modeling won't be nearly as rewarding any longer—since as part of those changes there won't be any benefit for doing it at a large event for an adoring crowd of prominent citizens—but hopefully it reduces people's pain points and encourages the use of modeling again.

(Staff's got some other ideas on a different system to make it worthwhile to show off things in public—and make social resources a little more useful, while we're at it—but they're still in a sort of half-gelled state right now, and not quite ready to detail.)

@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I have twice now -- twice -- gone on the first leg of a trip with a pocket knife

I stopped carrying my little leatherman tool (with a completely-incidental-to-why-I-liked-it pocket knife) in my purse after the 9/11 security stuff because I just KNEW that I would forget about it and accidentally walk through security somewhere with it.

Very, very belatedly...

I've got a much-loved pocketknife/multitool which lives in the messenger bag I take to work. I have carried it onto a plane for work trips more times than I can count. Many times no one finds it or comments on it (yay, security theater), but I have had to mail it home from the airport on five occasions.

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I have chewing tendencies. I know this is an autism spectrum / ADHD thing.

Wait. You're telling me my habit of chewing on my own lip if I don't have something to chew on is part of my ADHD?

The fuck.

Adult diagnosis of ADHD continues to be an adventure in "Oh, that's not just me being weird?"

@mietze said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Maybe we should get rid of the leaderboards since they seem to be used as a reason to be shitty to other people and to get resentful or think that if you don't have 6s in everything that you are useless

I plan to remove score entirely and replace it with buzz and legend commands which will break things down more organically.

So buzz might show "Who's Being Talked About Right Now" and list things like "Joe, a celebrated fashion icon" or "Sara, a celebrated Champion" or "Fred, a well-known event host", using a value range (X to Y being 'celebrated', and so on) and the largest source of your recent fame. Fame would still decay, so people would fall off the list.

Similarly, legend would show things like "Sara, hero of the Battle of Examplis" or whatever, or "Tommy, owner of the Blade of Destiny" or whatever, to break down why people are on the legend list. Legend won't decay, but will be much harder to gain.

My hope is that by taking the overly-precise-seeming numbers out of the system entirely, it will let people focus on the end result and use it to spur RP, rather than everything else.

I'm also going to add a nominate command so that people can nominate other players for manual adjustments over things staff might've missed, which hopefully will let people feel like the coded systems aren't the only avenues to gain prestige.

@caryatid said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Let it be a month-long story-only request so that those of us uninterested in code, numbers, min/maxing, etc. can have the forward momentum on our RP that we'd like to see when we engage with the game.

On a personal level, I was hoping to have magic and Shardhavens live by mid-February, and put some focus into storytelling using those systems; the prestige system does not interest me, on a personal level as a GM and as a system designer, nearly as much as those systems do. So I admit I'm a little sad we've sidelined into prestige being the Single Most Important Thing on the game; it was meant to just be a minigame people could participate in, and one that would make social characters valuable to their houses.

But it seems likely the prestige rework will save a lot of hard feelings and hopefully provide new outlets for a lot of folks, so it's not like it's a bad thing to put time into. And prestige systems will be more immediately accessible to people than magic and Shardhavens, so it'll probably affect more of the game more immediately.