Best posts made by Sparks

FWIW, having just seen this, I've added an '8thsea' alias to scrozzle, so you don't have to use the real hostname.

So, telnet://8thsea.noderunner.net:4005 should work now.

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

@sparks said in The Arx Peeve Thread:

But telling other people that their fun is "wrong"—that they need to adjust their sheet or their very concept to be more "effective" mathematically instead of playing the thing they want to play—is what staff's really not okay with.

"Oh, you need to be a combat character, social stuff isn't really useful."

"Oh, you want to do market stuff? You need to pick these specific skills, in this specific order, or else you aren't maximizing your effectiveness and XP spends; if you do anything else, you're just wrong about it."

Being pressed on those things is not usually fun for the people who are being told they're "doing it wrong", when they have a character concept they want to play. It's especially bad if it happens to someone brand-new to the game who doesn't know any better.

If you don't want people to feel pressured to optimize characters this or that way, why are the game systems built to give such massive advantages to specialized characters? Almost all Arx systems involve high base difficulties combined with massive multipliers.

I wasn't staff back in alpha so I can't speak to decisions early on, but I played in the latter part of alpha and I saw a fair number of people complain that specialization/high skills didn't matter enough, and so there was no advantage to playing specialized characters. So I suspect some of that fed into the system designs going into beta.

And honestly? There should be some advantage to playing a specialist; someone who is focused solely on combat should be better at it than someone who's a combat-social-crafter (and also dabbles in occult lore on the side). Otherwise there's no purpose to character concepts who do specialize.

To me, I feel like it'd be disheartening to be someone whose whole Thing—whole character concept—is this one niche area, only to have someone else who's a total generalist who does All The Things blow you away at your one thing you wanted to shine at.

And there's a difference between "if you specialize in this system/archetype, you will be significantly more effective" (which, I think, has a place in systems) and players telling other players "oh, social skills aren't useful at all; you should play combat" or otherwise insisting someone has to play a given way (which is what the post you are quoting from is referencing, in particular referencing a specific instance of precisely that happening). I feel like you've mistakenly conflated the two things here.

I mean, not everyone cares whether their sheet is optimized to eke every single last silver from the market; some just want to be able to haggle at a decent level as part of their character concept. Insisting they have to do it that way or they're doing it wrong is really unfriendly to other players, especially new ones. People have remarked on that in this very thread, that they don't care about whether they're super-uber-optimized down to the last possible point of XP.

Now, perhaps some of that benefit to specialization is too high! It's possible. System balance is not an exact science, since so much of it relies on player feel, and no system design ever completely survives contact with the playerbase.

But I am willing to bet you that that if we stripped those benefits out—if there was no significant, tangible benefit to specializing in a given area—people would howl about that too, and about how now the only thing that makes sense is being a generalist because having level 5 in something is worthless.

To be fair, maybe the real answer is "we need to just stop listening to complaints about system design until everything is done, and then do any re-balancing afterwards." Because the systems are meant to facilitate RP, not replace it.

Added new alt because, dammit, the discussion else-thread about how dogfighting works on BSGU intrigued me enough to go pick up a character there.

@Cupcake said in MU Things I Love:

tmw you realize that virtually any mush scenario you spitball has an accompanying music number from either "Galavant" or "Crazy Ex Girlfriend".

Honestly, I have no idea how Galavant got green-lit in the first place, much less how it managed a second season. I consider that a gift from the universe.

Hi.

I haven't been around for a while. And after this post I will likely immediately go back to being not-around. But someone mentioned elsewhere that Discord handles were being thrown around, so...

Packetdancer#4441 is me, in the off-chance anyone was looking for me in the past geological era. Or whatever it's been.

That's all, I guess?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bye again.

Another who was born to nerdhood here. It was definitely a collaborative effort to nurture it, though.

My maternal grandmother loved fantasy; when I was little, every summer either she and my grandfather would come to Seattle to visit us, or I would go to Philadelphia to visit them. Every summer we read another Oz book (or two) together; the summer she had laryngitis and she couldn't read to me, little-me worked hard to read the book to her instead because the tradition was that important to me. She was a physicist, chemist, and engineer, and the one who got me interested in computers and my start in programming. (She's also where I get much of my life philosophy from; nerdiness aside, she was absolutely the single biggest influence on my personality.)

My dad is a science fiction fan; when he realized I was reading way ahead of my grade level, he gave me Downbelow Station and The Pride of Chanur to read (C.J. Cherryh is one of his favorite authors, even still today). From there I went to get more Cherryh books (the Faded Sun trilogy) from the library and stumbled into Clarke, Asimov, Silverberg, and other old classics they had on the shelves.

As I kept reading voraciously, I started to give dad recommendations in return. When that happened, dad set aside a shelf in the house where we would collect science fiction and fantasy books which we both agreed were true classics; all my life, that shelf has been slowly filling as we read something and both agree it should be added. The first thing we added was dad's beloved Downbelow Station; the second, which I nominated, was Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake.

(...which I'm suddenly finding leaves me on the verge of tears to write. Years later I met Vonda and she became a friend, a mentor who took me—and many others—under her wing. For fifteen years she's been someone who I could turn to for advice about writing, or life, or even just to swap book recommendations. She also pulled me into a lot of activities, and I owe no small part of the offline fandom aspect of my present-day nerdiness to her. But I stupidly let myself get wrapped up in work and other things over the past year or so, letting our lunch dates become much more infrequent. It always felt like there would be more time later, until suddenly there wasn't any left at all, and her death this past Monday is still a fresh wound. Treasure the time you have with the people you care about, folks; it is not limitless. But I digress.)

My mother was not a huge science fiction and fantasy reader, but she was a Star Trek devotee; she pulled the rest of the family into watching The Next Generation every week with her, and from there I fell into the X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond (it was a great show shut up), and Babylon 5.

My maternal uncle was also a huge science fiction fan, and when he saw that I was reading classic science fiction, he introduced me to his frankly intimidating collection of old issues of Astounding, Amazing Stories, and Asimov's stored at my grandparents' house; I only ever worked through a tiny fraction of them when I'd visit Philly, but he's why I still have a (digital) subscription to Asimov's today. He also introduced me to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Chronicles, one of his favorite series. And, relevant to this forum, he was a D&D fan and introduced little-me to the idea of roleplaying.

My maternal aunt, meanwhile, is an enormous Tolkien fan; she is how I was introduced to the tapestry of stories in Arda. First the Hobbit, the the Lord of the Rings, and finally the Silmarillion

It wasn't just my family either, of course. My friend who lived across the street from me introduced me to Star Blazers, thus showing me that animated shows could have actual narrative arcs instead of being purely episodic. And little-me's best friend had a Nintendo; pleading to go visit even so I could just watch him play, if not play myself, was my first introduction to games. (And arguably, I suppose, to the concept of Twitch.)

So, yeah; my nerdiness was a team effort.

I mean, I've also had trouble finding RP on an Ares game, but I've realized if I would do +wantrp on=So I have a magic spear now, apparently, which we're all supposed to use together. Want to come stare into an espresso (alcohol isn't recommended with magic weaponry in the room) and help figure out what the heck we should all do with this thing? I can instead just open a scene—without anyone else being yet present—and put something like that as an initial summary (probably to re-write before sharing the log), write up a set pose, and settle in, leaving it open. If someone glances at the scenes list now, they see a nice ready made scene of what I'm all ready to do, all waiting for them to just click join. And if no one does show up, well, eventually you close the log and let it go to the great byte void when the server reaps the unshared log after a while.

I've added some more to the system, notably puzzles that, when solved, dispense treasures! Might be weapons, might be crafting materials, etc.

I'm going to run a few more groups through to make sure the balance works right, but then I think phase one is done. Then it's just a matter of fleshing out all the data—adding more monsters, puzzles, obstacles, and so on—and getting the expedition code working.

I mean, let's say you want people to go RP with newbies to help get them into the game. But people often tend to cluster, to RP with their trusted friends and existing RP partners, yes? And if just pointing out, "Hey, new players probably would like RP too" hasn't worked, you presumably need some sort of additional factor to help change that behavior.

Do you punish them if they don't? "Hey, I see that you haven't played with a newcomer to the game in at least six weeks. You know what that means; it's time for a public shaming!" I don't see that working to help people welcome new players; I see that being a great way to turn your players into someone else's new players.

Do you reward them if they do? It seems more likely to succeed, but... what form does that reward take? A nice post on the bboards? "So, Susan RP'd with three new players this week. Everyone applaud Susan!"

Or is a more tangible reward more motivating, one that they can redeem for something later? Maybe it's XP, maybe it's karma/luck points that can be spent to buy your way out of a bad roll, maybe it's a sort of 'staff time' currency that can be redeemed for "Hey, I want to spend 30 staff points to have this specific thing GM'd." (Though I personally kind of hate that last one. I feel like if there's a currency that can be used to buy staff time/attention, it should probably be something available to all players, not something you need to jump through hoops to earn.)

It's great to say "we're here to RP, so we don't need incentives to RP" but... demonstrably, we are often creatures of inertia. It's easy to play with the same old people, or even just sit idle and chat with the same old people. Want to change any of that behavior? It'll probably take either a deterrent (for those who don't engage in the behavior), or an incentive (for those who do), and of those two I would vastly prefer to be handing out incentives than arbitrary punishments.

@faraday — Moreover, trying to use encryption here only provides an illusion of security, which is actually worse than no security at all in my opinion. If you're aware there's no security in a system you can set your expectations accordingly. But if you think there is security, then you feel even more upset and betrayed if that so-called security is proven to consist of little more than a polite request of "plz no snoop".

Okay, more verbosity!

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

@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

And I think you're starting to put words in my mouth. If I ever mentioned that staff were not entitled to benefits that were available to players, or that players couldn't also share benefits available to staff, then shoot me now because that's entirely the opposite of what I meant.

Okay, please don't take this exasperation as a personal attack or anything. But you literally said that staff have an "organized support network", and that it was more than non-staff players could say they have. That implies that an "organized support network" is not a benefit that non-staff players can say they have, whereas staff are guaranteed to say they do. The sentence stating that is even in the block of text you quoted to write that reply.

But for reference, with bolding, to show what I mean:

@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 took that to mean that players could not say they had the that benefit, whereas staff are guaranteed it. So apparently I misunderstood what you were saying, but I feel like saying that my interpretation is "putting words in your mouth" is maybe a bit much.

Regardless, even with your clarification—that what you mean by 'organized support network' is access to all chats, the jobs board, all bboards, etc. is a huge perk—I honestly still kind of disagree with this premise. I know it's common to say that knowing what happens behind the curtain is a huge advantage to staffers, as though you can just handwave and say that the ability to look behind a certain is a net advantage to staff as a player. It's not.

Let's take a personal example here.

I enjoy Arx's storyline, and enjoy storytelling in it. I enjoy writing lore and backstory on Arx to use in that storytelling, and I love watching players uncover those seeds that have been planted and grow whole plotlines out of it. It's wonderful and rewarding! ...as a GM, that is.

As a player? It actually kind of sucks sometimes.

I mean, first off, you shouldn't be using things you know OOCly (like, for instance, lore you wrote) to inform IC actions, so knowing something OOCly means you should be really careful about learning it player-side and examine your IC conclusions carefully to make sure they're justified, in a way most players don't usually have to. Did you unconsciously follow that particular route of logic because you already knew the destination ahead of time? I thus examine a lot of my IC conclusions a lot more closely than I ever had to as just a player, before deciding if that's actually what I'd take away as the meaning of the vague hint we just found about some bigger secret.

It's also exceedingly rare for plot revelations to surprise me on an OOC level. Another player might look into who they're a reincarnation of, and be shocked OOCly when it turns out their past life was a historical figure whose reputation they know. Whose journals they've even read! Oh my gosh! Those are wonderful moments as a player. I, as a staffer, generally cannot have them, because chances are I know the reincarnation story OOCly already.

It's like if you work backstage at a theater where a new play is being put on, you've seen the play in all its various stages. You've seen the dress rehearsals. You know all the script revisions. You know the music cues and the scene changes. You know about the giant mechanical dragon that lowers from the ceiling at the end of act 2, and even how it works. And hey, that's cool!

But that also means you cannot have that moment the audience can, where the mechanical dragon descends to hang above the actors, its mane blowing dramatically in the 'wind' made by the fans offstage as the gears in the neck tick and it tilts its head to regard the characters below gravely. The audience sees this and gasps, because it's new. It's a surprise. They just see the sight of an immense clockwork dragon, and can enjoy that moment.

But working backstage, you saw the dragon being built. You not only know there will be a dragon at the end of act 2, so it's no surprise, but you even know exactly how the armature works. You know how the stage lights cause the lubricant on the gears to evaporate if you put it on before the show, so the darn thing will stick unless someone gets up into the rafters and greases it up between acts 1 and 2. You know that one of the stagehands was re-attaching one of the scales on the spine before the show and spilled a bit of adhesive in the mane, and there wasn't time to fully clean it, and you hope no one has noticed there's a patch of hair right over there that isn't fluttering in the wind.

There's no surprise and perhaps little sense of wonder to that moment of reveal on opening night.

So, sure, there are advantages to knowing what happens backstage, but there are also some serious disadvantages too, and those really shouldn't be discounted. What that exact mix/ratio is probably varies from game to game, sure, and maybe on some games it is really an unmitigated advantage. But I don't think you can say that's universally true, and therefore is guaranteed to make up for the hard/unpleasant parts of actually working in that backstage area.

Anyway, I suppose that was a heck of a lot of words to say basically "I don't agree that 'the job should be reward enough for the job' is a philosophy you can universally apply to staffing, much less one you should. Especially when the perceived 'advantages' inherent to doing the job can also be disadvantages."

I appreciate that in this most recent post you do clarify that you feel other games can try it if they think it'll work for their culture. That's cool! But I feel like when we say that in threads like this, it usually carries the implication of "Yeah, if you can convince your players that's kosher, fine, but I will still expect games I play on do otherwise."

And that's the part I think is actually not entirely healthy for the community.

It's the difference between saying running a book signing event and saying "I think the fact that the volunteers will—by nature of their job—be spending time with the author as stock is signed is perk enough." (which is fine, it's your event) versus being an attendee at someone else's event and appending "And therefore this person who brought cookies as thanks for their volunteers is doing it wrong; they either should have brought enough cookies for all the attendees, or they shouldn't have brought any at all!"

At any rate, I think I've said enough words to count as 'enough' on this topic over the past two days, so I have said my piece and shall try to let it be.

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

This isnt a pearl clutch. I will just never understand why staff feels the need to utilize their NPCs to have "romantic plot" or bring a child into the world or fuck somebody (which again, does that benefit the game or at least a certain group of PCs? Because it sounds like it benefits 2. The PC you are boning and the NPC).

So, let's say you're in a modern setting but where a lot of the conspiracies around secret societies are real. The Illuminati, the Templars, and so on. And there's an NPC, a senator who is a mid-level member of the Illuminati. And he'll do favors for the PCs, pull strings to get them resources, but he always asks things in return. And owing him open-ended favors is... unsettling, because sometimes when he calls them in, the people who are called come back subtly different.

Now, here's your character, who needs a piece of information they know that NPC has. The price, however, will be too high. So your PC decides to seduce the NPC senator. Maybe this is because they think if they succeed, the NPC will feel more inclined to do them a favor without demanding one in return. Maybe this is because they think if the NPC takes them back to a hotel room, they'll be able to take his phone while he's asleep, use his fingerprint to unlock it, and get the information for free.

Either way, this is a situation where the PC seeking romance/sex with the NPC serves the story; the PC can gain something which advances their storyline. If they were trying to get that information for a plot involving multiple people, it advances storyline for multiple PC's!

Or maybe the PC has been pushing something politically which a sinister secret society wants stopped. PC knows they want this, but has refused to be cowed by their demands, to a point that the society has decided to act. The NPC is a master assassin hired by that society, and wants to get close to the PC in order to poison them in private; once poisoned, they can blackmail the PC into doing what they want by withholding the antidote. Try to force them to turn on their allies and serve this society's interests instead. And what better way to get them in private and poison them than to seduce them?

Here's a place where the NPC seeking sex with the PC serves the story.

There honestly are reasons where it can serve story. I'm not saying it always does when people do it, but I think it absolutely can.

@Coin said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

Bad GM Habit: Wasting player's time when they know a lengthy and/or convoluted and/or complex action is going to lead nowhere. Especially on MUs, where that can take weeks or months of the player's time and effort. Just tell them.

My rule of thumb as a GM, both in the tabletop campaign I run and even moreso as a GM on MU*s (where actions can take a lot longer than they do at a table with dice), is that the answer should pretty much never be "no". Sometimes if their idea is brilliant but wouldn't work with what I have planned, I change the plans. If the action won't work at all, I strive to always give a "no, but..." with some other avenue to look into, some hint to steer them down a different path.

Either way, my goal as a GM is that the players should never feel like they're wandering aimlessly in a darkened room, smacking into walls and never finding a door out.

@Pyrephox said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

Trying to make sure that the consequences of actions that players take, whether they are successes or failures for the PCs, are fun for the players. Which sometimes leads to a PC intimidating the hell out of a group of gang members and short-circuiting what had been PLANNED to be a combat, but which later led to a pretty awesome car scene with other gang members t-boning the PCs' getaway car at speed.

Yes! Another GM rule-of-thumb I use is that the enjoyment of the players matters more than the purity of my narrative. I mean, especially in tabletop games, I have to be ready to adapt at a moment's notice, and if I've invested emotional energy in a storyline going a specific way, I'd potentially feel disappointed/frustrated if the players did something unexpected.

If they want to sideline into something else—if they come up with some other way to solve the problem that would actually work—I should let that happen if I can.

@Pyrephox said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:

No-selling character skills and abilities. I don't want or expect a single PC ability to be an instant win button on any scenario, but the times when GMs have shut down or bent over backwards to decide a character's extremely relevant skills/abilities Just Don't Work because they didn't think about them when building the challenge is kinda silly. And makes me grumpy.

It's frustrating to set up a complex and challenging situation only to see a player spot an end-run around it which you didn't plan for. This happened to me early on in my current campaign, when I had planned out this elaborate combat scenario where the party was going to have to fight their opponents while in an inn that was actively burning down; I had rules for how the fire would spread, and I figured it would force them into a smaller and smaller active battle area and impose a sense of urgency to the battle.

And then the druid was like, "Oh, I've got Gust of Wind! If I read this right, I should be able to blow out the fire in a straight line for sixty feet in any direction. Can I use that to carve a path through the flames?"

Welp.

But in those situations, you run with it! As with the reply to the last quoted block, it's generally far more fun for players to let a creative application of a player skill or resource succeed than to block it. Even if you're sure that battle would've been spectacular in its original form (which I am), that fun will be tainted if the players go in feeling sullen that they were blocked by GM fiat on utilizing skills and resources.

@Arkandel said in Roleplaying writing styles:

This reminds me. How do you feel about revealing things about the character through narration and not in any visible ways? For example: "Bob sits down and grows silent. Ever since he returned from the war he's been reserved in social settings with people he doesn't know well. He lifts his glass and...".

If I'm playing with someone who'd have IC reason to know my character well but doesn't necessarily on an OOC level (new to the game, to the character, whatever), I'll throw things in to try to give them background cues as to something they might know, and why they might know it.

"X rubs at the bridge of her nose idly as she listens, an almost reflexive tic that those close to her know all too well as a sign that she's distracted and stressed."

"Y grimaces as he's handed the plate of greens; his hatred of kale is well-known to those who've ever had the misfortune to share a buffet with him. But tonight, for politeness' sake, he remains silent. (Albeit with visible effort.)"

Etc.

For those who are curious what I meant about doing something as both bboards and and a web forum, here is a short little example.

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Okay. None of the following:

• Elcor

Resigned question: Does this mean no performance of Hamlet.

@tempest said in Automated Adventure System:

The 'gamer' in me thinks magic jewelry that boosted stats or a ring of temporary invisibility, etc kind of stuff would be awesome for that more....D&D-esque sort of feel.

So the reason I don't want magic items that just change stats when you wear them or something is that people will 1000% try to farm that stuff and metagame with it.

But god that'd be a trainwreck.

Every archetype of character would be scrambling to collect the specific set that maximizes what they can do.

This exactly.

What we're more likely to do is that if someone's very interested in and attached to a specific trinket, they could start a plotline to figure out what it does/how to make it work, and that's something staff could GM. We'd just come up with a purpose/use for that particular trinket on-the-fly.

Specifically, we might put a mechanic in the magic system to learn about and attune yourself to a specific trinket, and if people start that process with a specific trinket, we'd come up with the story for it. And if they just want to take apart the trinkets for the sweet, sweet primum to use in other things, that'd be fully automated.

@Jaded said in General Video Game Thread:

Just an FYI guys. If you're playing Anthem on PS4 or XBox the game is causing critical hard crashes on the consoles and in some cases people are reporting that their systems are getting bricked.

FWIW, it's likely not that the systems are bricked, but that the file table of the internal storage was corrupted due to an unclean shutdown; the same thing can happen when you have a sudden power outage and the PS4 shuts down abruptly in the middle of a game.

Normally, when the PS4 boots, it does a file system check as part of the boot to catch any minor issues. But if the storage table is corrupted to a point where it cannot boot the OS... no boot sequence, no disk repair.

However, there's an easy fix: hold down the power button on the console for two seconds, and you'll boot into the PS4's built-in recovery mode (which is not part of the system partition). Select 'Rebuild Database', wait, reboot, et voila! Your system is back. For UNIX sorts, it's basically a manual fsck. (If the controller doesn't work in rescue mode, just plug in a USB keyboard and use the arrow keys and enter.)

So it's not as serious as it could be; the systems aren't permanently damaged or anything. And it's worth knowing this trick anyway in case the same thing happens during a power outage.

Still a horrible issue, though.

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

When I got there it was all destruction, and chaos and the world was crumbling.

quietly takes notes