Posts made by Sparks

Star Wars: Rebels.

All of it has been superb, but tonight's episodes, Jedi Night and Dume, were just... damn.

@kanye-qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@sparks Barx, After the Oh Heckening

I was going to go with "After the Chickening", as I sit here watching my corgi gnaw on a chicken chewy.

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

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

I dreamed I joined a game where staff assigned you a character from a roster based on the outcome of a personality test. All the characters were dogs.

I feel like this is somehow Arx-related.

Can confirm, would run a pugmire MU.

"Barx"

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

I used to use Atlantis' MUSH text editor when I played on Firan but it doesn't seem to work properly for me anymore. This is okay as it doesn't have 256 colors.

FWIW, Atlantis 2 has an Evennia-friendly 256-color editor that can output both Evennia and MUX2 style color codes, does gradients for fills and so on.

(Of course, I need to actually finish Atlantis 2.)

@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

@surreality said in RL things I love:

My inner 5 year old also lost it, and I choked on my coffee, when listening to the mission control blow by blow, because so help me god, 'Falcon Heavy' really does not sound like Falcon when spoken very quickly over a radio, apparently. (The link here, it's reaaaaaally glaring in the first few seconds. Actual spit-take. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/videos/95856359-132.html )

The successor to the Falcon Heavy—the one needed for a manned mission to Mars—is actually known as the BFR. B is big, R is rocket, you can guess the rest yourself. (It should be ready for test launch in 2020.)

@surreality said in RL things I love:

Every part of my inner geek went 'squeeeeeeeeeee!' just about at once.

There's a starman waiting in the sky,
He'd like to come to meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds.

(For those who don't get the reference, the mannequin in the SpaceX prototype spacesuit driving the Tesla Roadster they launched to Mars is named "Starman", so as the launch succeeded, they played Bowie's Starman to celebrate.)

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

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

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

When I was on naratriptan, they'd give me three pills per month—and prescribe 'take one at onset of attack, and a second if attack continues'. Three pills.

The math just didn't quite work there.

I wish I could say I am surprised buuuuut...

UGH.

That's kinda how my sumatriptan is. 6 pills a month. Take 1 if attack hits, 1 if it persists.

If I end up in an attack cycle, I usually have 3-4 in a week.

Yeah, likewise. But at least 6 is divisible by two, so your doctors and insurance are at least doing something slightly more sensible than what mine allowed! "Take two per attack" and then issuing only three pills still confuses me.

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

@Sparks Fuuuuuuuck thaaaaat nooooooise. What do you take, out of curiosity?

Ergotamine. Technically it's not a migraine medication; it's for cluster headaches.

(Plus side, they diagnosed that my headaches aren't solely migraines; this stuff works much better than most things I've been on.)

Luckily, my copay is only $8 for my migraine medication but annoyance is: I only get 12 shots per month. They are autoinjectors which .. I get that most people prefer not to have to deal with handling a needle, especially not in the midst of a migraine, but jeez: GIVE ME THE CONTROL. Because these autoinjectors are fucking crappy and don't fire a lot of the time. Like tonight. I had to go through /five/ shots before I got one that actually fired.

Oh, yeah, I loved that kind of shenanigan. When I was on naratriptan, they'd give me three pills per month—and prescribe 'take one at onset of attack, and a second if attack continues'. Three pills.

The math just didn't quite work there.

$320 for 30 of my migraine pills. This is with insurance.

Bleaaargh.

@auspice said in Dead Celebrities 2018:

Ursula K Le Guin passed away

This breaks my heart.

You are 80% Explorer
80% Socialiser
33% Achiever
7% Killer

Am I surprised? No, no, I am not.

That's... really weird. Can you send me a screenshot of the conditions and actions for the event?

@duntada Absolutely no one will remember to hit the button. It would require changing years of ingrained habits.

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.

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

@roz And it might mean that people would have to think carefully about appointing Voices who cover their own weaknesses. If you're a fighty lord or lady, then your voice maybe needs to be social. If you're social, you might want a fighty Voice for war-time commanding.

Voices are also meant to be there to handle things in your stead when you can't be, so there's nothing wrong with appointing a voice with the same strengths as you. (Neither is there anything wrong with appointing people who have complimentary skills to you!)

But if you are Prince Fighty McArmorpants and, as a voice or military leader, you want to convince the populace that, hey, blood sacrifice is really what's going to save us from the abyss, honest, you're probably going to need the charms of a Popular Pretty Princess or a skilled Whisper or someone diplomatic/social in order to sell that. It's meant to drive you to involve other people in things.

In that sense, it's not all that different than how if you want to go scouting in the woods for an elusive enemy, you probably want Lord Terry "Treehopper" Ashford of the Vista Glades who has perception 5, survival 5, and stealth 4 out there scouting the path for you, rather than having Prince Clarence "Clanky-Tank" Valardin in plate armor with perception 2 and zero stealth (but one heck of a set of combat skills) rattling along as the party lead.

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

It's clues and story lines. I just get a lot of 'We're rehashing this stuff.' after a certain point. Because /they/ have the information but /I/ don't.

This is what @theories are great for.

When I was playing Aislin, I made a point of trying to put together cohesive theories for the things I went over frequently, so I could hand out a summary easily (and even potentially share all the associated clues, though that was AP-expensive), and then we could semi-hand-wave the almost cut-and-paste explanation and focus on the inevitable Q&A afterwards. Especially since that Q&A was generally much more interesting and engaging RP for everyone involved than just "Aislin stands and lectures on a topic for about seven pose rounds."

Now, not everyone wants to use them, and that's okay too—RP'ing out the rehash can also be a lot of fun for the person just learning it. But if you find yourself constantly rehashing chunks of metaplot and unwilling to do so in order to involve others, shortcutting that is part of what @theories are really good for.

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

I think, maybe, that some of that stuff isn't as 'out of date' and resolved as people think it is, also. Sometimes PCs think they know/understand more than they actually do. If there's something that really intrigues you as a character, I'd definitely try and pursue it on your own, too - through an action or something. You might find something that surprises you (and other people, too).

I found, as Aislin, that even 'outdated' clues were still often relevant to things. Just because a given chunk of metaplot isn't the current focus doesn't mean it's not relevant to fleshing out the history of the world, or that it might not be relevant to future metaplot foci. Putting together the puzzle pieces is half the fun, and sometimes a clue fits in more than one place.

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

@sparks The reason so many find combat integral to plot fu, is because it is the one thing that doesn't seem impartial. Stats are on the sheet, dice are rolled, system is consulted, results are given. There are no vagaries to it. When a plot is more social, it is really easy to feel like someone doesn't matter at all.

I do agree. It's one reason I think any social combat system should be equally straightforward and clear, as much as possible. It's not an easy design to do, but I think it can be done right.

But what @Apos was proposing earlier in the thread wasn't even social combat between PCs right now, but giving a measurable, consistent system of social influence which can be used to influence NPCs on large-scale actions. Making social mavens useful to people, and making it worthwhile for families to let their social mavens spend money on being social mavens, because there's a measurable benefit to it.

If your pretty, popular princess cousin can use that popularity to sway the NPC masses to your cause when you need it, it's harder to begrudge her the money for that fashionable new dress before a big party!

It's these kind of situations that burn people on social plot fu, and it totally is a once bitten twice shy situation for many people because as we all know, people remember the bad much more easily than the good.

Sure, but I'd argue that just because a few people may react badly to something isn't necessarily a reason to get rid of it.

I mean, I think the same is true with some people when they lose a fight they think they should win in combat code. And then they get angry at the person they were sparring with ("clearly it's just because you have better gear!") or if there's no combat code they get angry at the GM who was arbiter of the fight ("clearly this is favoritism!") or otherwise obsess over why they lost their fight. I'm sure we've all seen that.

But that's not necessarily a reason to get rid of combat code and just do all combat or duels via consent and pre-arranged outcome.

Similarly, I think just going "some people will react badly to social stuff" is not a reason to write off an entire class of character from having a coded utility in the game.

(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!

@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.)