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.

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

So I get that it's sometimes not staff's game either, per se, in deciding what the culture is[...]

Whoa, hang on.

If the intent of this is to say that a game's culture will often be sort of what arises organically from the players who invest the most in the game, and sometimes that's different than staff expected? Yes, that's true. (Although I do think staff can curate the culture they want.)

However. I don't think that means it isn't still staff's game to decide what the culture should be.

We've had conversations on MSB before about how unhealthy it can be when a player sticks around in a game culture they don't like or enjoy; I feel like it's even more unhealthy when it's the staff who are sticking around in a game culture they don't like. This is a recipe for staff who either realize it's unhealthy and walk away, or—out of a sense of obligation—stick around and are miserable, which is generally a recipe for miserable and/or discontent players as well.

Staff who are miserable don't usually put their creative energy fully into the plots they run, or as much energy into any part of staffing. Staff who are miserable stop logging in regularly, stop handling jobs/requests, and so on. Staff who are miserable start viewing the game as a chore, an obligation, rather than a place where they can enjoy providing story.

So, from a practical standpoint, no, staff may not get to just dictate the game's culture to the gestalt player personality. But if that game culture deviates too much from staff's expectations/preferences, I think regardless of what that resulting culture actually is you just end up with an agonizing descent into game death.

And then it's nobody's game.

@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I do my absolute best to iron out the pros and cons from my perspective and then hand over the decision to her, though. She's Danaerys and I'm Tyrion.

***=Game of Thrones season 8 spoiler! Sort of!***

@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 Good or New Movies Review:

@ZombieGenesis I have... no desire to watch Aladdin.

I thought I'd have zero desire to watch it when I heard about it, but the more I encounter the trailer, the more I realize I was wrong. My desire to watch it is not zero.

My desire is, in fact, actually in the negatives; I'm increasingly uncertain I could be paid to watch it.

(Godzilla, though...)

I like the idea, but...

Aesthetic perks might motivate some folks sufficiently; there are plenty of people who will do something ludicrous and time-consuming in an MMO solely to get a particular title or equippable cosmetic. I've known people who will defeat 100 of a specific enemy in a specific place where they spawn incredibly infrequently and only during the night, just to get a title they want. (I might've been this person, on occasion.)

So I think the number who'll be incentivized may well be greater than zero, but I'm not sure by much. Because I also think storytelling is frequently more difficult—or at least, requires more investment of thought and creativity—than getting a particular MMO mission perfect or killing X number of enemies in a specific circumstance, and so I think the bar of "what will incentivize this behavior" is higher.

Sure I'll run this obnoxious stealth mission in the Secret World six times with my friends until we make it through without triggering a single alarm once, all just to get a rare dance emote (fistshakes at the Bank Heist mission in Tokyo), but if you asked me to write a novella? A novella that hits specific plot beats, and which directly appeals to the individual interests and tastes of these five specific different people simultaneously? If I had to do that in order to earn a rare dance emote, I think I as a player might very well decide the dance emote isn't worth that much effort and walk away.

@faraday said in Incentives for RP:

I think at this point I'm mostly in the "get off my lawn" phase of MUSH running. If I need to bribe you to get involved in plots, or be welcoming to new players, or support the others, then why are you even here? I'm just not inclined to cater to those people any more.

I admit, I view the incentives less as useful for "I want to get this player to go out and do things", and more for "I want these players who are already doing things to maybe think about including the player who is not, and is feeling stymied because they don't know where to start." Because even players who aren't being actively malicious or exclusionary can still tend to cluster into little clumps. You only have a couple hours a night to RP, and this is the storyline you're interested in? Well, you're probably going to keep RP'ing with those two folks. And it gets easy to almost not notice that poor Bob over there is sitting in the corner, seeing you three together on +where every night, and wondering what he needs to do in order to get into a story like that.

You're not wrong that all the systems are kind of inherently flawed, though. I feel like all you can do is pick the one that's flawed in the least-destructive way for your particular game.

@Sunny said in Incentives for RP:

How do I reward people for playing in public rather than being squirreled away in their private places all the time?

Get into the habit of dropping NPCs into public scenes and giving out plot information in them.

So apparently, sometimes this backfires.

turns to stare directly at the camera, a'la The Office

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.

So, apparently the first GoT spinoff series will be set thousands of years before in the time of the First Men, long before the Andals invaded (and certainly well before the Targaryens did). And I guess it's going to be about the war between the Children of the Forest and the First Men? Maybe the creation of the Night King, the rise of the wights, the first invasion of the lands of men and how they pushed the dead back and then constructed the Wall. Stuff like that, apparently.

That could be interesting, because it's a chunk of history that even Martin hasn't really detailed in any canon sources; we only know what we do of the origins of the Wall through myth and folklore thousands of years later.

But if they're going to do a prequel series and dive into a notable area of ASoIaF history that's been left awfully vague, you know what I'd really like to see?

The Doom of Valyria.

We know what happened: five hundred square miles of the Valyrian Peninsula literally exploded, the entire volcanic chain (the Fourteen Flames) erupted, spewing molten rock and dragonglass a thousand feet into the sky, the lakes on the peninsula turned to acid, and a series of unbelievably strong earthquakes then shook the entire Valyrian Peninsula apart into a bunch of islands. And the entire Valyrian civilization was wiped out in this unthinkably huge cataclysm.

We just don't know why. In the world of ASoIaF, septons and maesters and others have put forward lots of theories, but there's no real proof for any one of them.

So, tell us that story. Show us this nation that ran openly on magic, which had secrets and technologies that can only be imagined by the time of the series we just watched. Who hoarded this knowledge away from the other nations of Essos, jealously guarding their power. A land of mages and dragonlords.

Show us how high Valyria had risen over all others.

And then show us why it all fell apart. What did they do that led to their downfall? Was it their hubris, digging into even stronger magics they couldn't control? Was it rivalries over power, a collection of mages hoping to win a power struggle against a coalition of dragonlords, unleasing destruction onto the land of those dragonlords? Was it purely a natural disaster they never saw coming? (Nah, that's boring.)

You could even frame the story. Start it after the Doom, when Valyria and all its secrets have been lost, and the rest of Essos is wracked by warfare between the city-states as they jockey for power in the post-Valyrian world. And among this, someone stumbles across an injured wanderer (escaped prisoner, hapless mercenary caught up in the wars, whatever) and realizes, as they clean them up, that this person is somehow—against all odds—a surviving Valyrian who was still in Valyria when the Doom happened (unlike, say, the Targaryens, who were a minor house of dragonlords that heeded a prophetic dream and got out of dodge a decade or so before things literally exploded).

And as this mysterious Valyrian survivor is tended to and nursed back to health, they begin to share with the people tending to them the story of what exactly happened in Valyria (and slowly unveiling who they are, and what part they themselves played in things). So even people not familiar with the history of the ASoIaF world will go through the series knowing that the end of Valyria is looming somewhere in the future, knowing that whatever happens... something is going to result in that.

Anyway. I think if we're going to have more GoT set in different time periods... sure, we can see the building of the Wall. We could go much closer to the show and cover the Dunk and Egg stories, and that might be entertaining. But if heading outside of Westeros itself for a show in a different time period is even an option, I think a series like this is one I'd love to see.

@Thenomain said in Incentives for RP:

I am deeply sorry for helping create the +vote system that lead to this.

I mean, that's going pretty far back. The earliest one I know of from personal experience is Firan's @vote system in 1997 or 1998, and I know there were other games that used coded voting even earlier than that. I vaguely recall the original Tales of Ta'veren had some kind of vote-reward system around 1996, and I think Cybersphere MOO had a coded stats/skills system that used voting in 1995, which were themselves presumably inspired by wherever it is that +vote originated.

So it's been at least 22 years at this point, maybe 24—and maybe rather more, since I dunno which game you first coded it on—since +vote was introduced. Given the sheer number of games that have come and gone since then which have tried to emulate tabletop roleplay in various settings—i.e., with coded sheets and the advancement thereof—I feel like the concept of +vote would've been introduced more than once by now across multiple genres of game.

In other words, someone else would've come up with it by now anyway; I wouldn't beat yourself up about it. Especially not 24+ years after the fact, or however long it's been.

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

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

The more options you start packing into a single command, the less intuitive it is.

scene/start name/location=description/timeofday=event/posetimes=publicprivate/faction=scene runner/scene secondary ... is totally intuitive to me.

Ah, I see you're familiar with the syntax of our goal/rfr command on Arx.

(It's not quite that bad, but goal/rfr <goal>,<story beat>=<IC explanation of notable progress towards goal represented by story beat>/<OOC commentary for staff to take into account> is not what I would call an ideal syntax. It's just like... roughly the least-horrible syntax you can pack those things onto a single line with.)

The best part of moving towards web interfaces is that you can collect a lot more data at once for a single operation, in a lot more natural manner: web forms are very good at this. Single command lines in the legacy telnet interface are not.

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

@Sparks As @Thenomain often repeats like the cranky old man he is, code can't solve social issues.

The code facilitates, that's all.

Yes, agreed. But the point I was making was not that "code will solve all issues about finding RP", but that "I think that adding a +wantrp command which takes a summary of what you want to do in a scene does not actually facilitate finding RP in any meaningful way which the current Ares +scene code does not already provide." Given that the premise of the conversation was that Ares in specific needed such a system because +scene was insufficient.

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.

Seeing someone else's day just being made by some unexpected joy; that joy can be almost contagious.

This past Sunday, we held a party for a friend—the cousin of my best friend—who just graduated medical school. (She's now a neurosurgeon! With a breathtakingly large student debt!) So everyone wanted to hold her a congratulations/farewell party before she heads off to residency in another state.

Anyway, she is also a gamer, and her favorite videogame series is, by far, the Legend of Zelda games.

So her parents managed to go and get her an amazing custom made sculpture cake, which was an artistic pile of rocks a'la Breath of the Wild, with Link perched atop it, the Master Sword and Master Shield in hand as he stood ready, and a banner below reading "Congratulations on leveling up" and her name (with Dr. finally prepended).

It was an absolutely stunning cake—the most spectacular sculpture-cake I've ever seen in person—and seeing her expression as she realized what they'd gotten her was wonderful.

(Bonus: it was also delicious.)

@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 — I mean, we know what happened, we just don't know why. We know everything in roughly a five-hundred-mile square area exploded all at once and the Fourteen Flames started barfing molten rock and dragonglass a thousand feet into the sky, accompanied by lakes turning to acid and earthquakes so severe they literally shattered the Valyrian peninsula into a collection of islands.

As for why no one knows what the heck caused it, I see a couple of possibilities.

Maybe it just was a natural disaster like the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. No real cause at all to be found, no deeper story. Given the setting we're dealing with—and that Valyria was a place of open magic and long-lost secrets—this actually seems unlikely. Still, possible!

Maybe there were no long-term survivors; I believe all the main surviving Valyrian houses—House Targaryen, House Velaryon, and House Celtigar—fled before the Doom, after prophetic dreams of warning. I know the Targaryens at least got out of dodge about a decade before things literally exploded. We know that the loss of the population was so complete that many Valyrian talents (like the secret of making Valyrian steel) were lost in the Doom. If no one who was left in Valyria at the time of the Doom survived and the survivors had fled enough in advance, there may just not have been anyone left who genuinely knew what happened, and so we only have guesses and supposition to go on.

Possibility three is that if it wasn't natural—maybe one of the theories about the Valyrians doing something Really Ill-Advised and causing the Doom is right—and if the surviving Valyrian houses had an idea of what happened, maybe they concealed that truth because what was being done in Valyria was so bad that if people knew the facts retribution would rain down on the heads of all surviving Valyrians. Maybe the theory the Faith espouses is actually right, and the Valyrians literally were conducting rituals to reach down into the seven hells for power! At any rate, if this is true, then the surviving houses having concealed the truth even from their own descendants, the story is now long lost.

Those are the main possible reasons I see for the general uncertainty about what the heck happened.

@Kestrel said in Game of Thrones:

@Sparks That's even without diving into the fact that ...

***=Book spoilers that were not explicitly covered in the show***

click to show

THE BLOODRAVEN WAS A FREAKING TARGARYEN

***=NSFW content***

ETA: yikes, I spent too long submerged in those books.

So, one more thing that occurred to me in the aftermath of last night's episode...

***=One More Thing***

Oh, it was an excellent scene. But are you sure that's the right logic?

***=The spoilers now sit atop the Iron Throne!***