Posts made by Sunny

@Ganymede

Why would I take your lunch money? I would much prefer you just spend it on me!

Being able to fit into skinny jeans again without looking like the Michelin tires dude.

@Ganymede

Yes, well. I have a lot on my plate right now. I sadly just got around to it at the wrong time. I'll check back in a while.

Darn. Okay! Thanks for answering!

So the wiki says that apps are closed, it looks like. Are there no new characters being accepted currently?

Eclipse Phase is REALLY REALLY cool.

We will be including Promethean, yep. We have a couple of options to make them viable, but one way or another the Created will indeed be allowed.

Yep! Changing Breeds is the one another wonderful game is creating the conversion for, and will be sharing with us. I'll be personally converting the Immortals; some of them don't have anyone working on them yet, but we're still going to act storywise and such like we have something, and then when we get it we'll add them. Mummy is, I think, probably the only one that we might not be able to hammer into shape via metaplot to make it play well with others, but we'll see.

Edited to add: I do still need subject matter experts for Demon and Law, though a few more of them for the other areas would be helpful as well. Vampire could use someone besides me; I need to pare my own focus down a little further. For vampire though, whomever does need to be able to work within parameters already developed.

Also, anyone who has ideas for a faction or family they would like to see added from the start, feel free to throw things my way. The sooner I have them, the earlier in the process I can work them into things.

The grid notes are complete; anyone who was planning on assisting with those descs, now is the time. Pop in and I'll make sure you're setup to get some descing done.

@BallisticOrange

We don't have a launch date yet. I won't announce that until I can be reasonably sure that I can be in the ballpark. That said, we're making steady progress. It's looking very pretty so far.

I keep getting asked what sorts of help we need right now, and really I need two things:

• People who can write a grid desc based on a couple of sentences about the area. The grid need more love.

• Brainstorming & Development - there's a lot of topics that need more ideas thrown at them, as well as ideas that need fleshed out.

@Tempest said:

@Sunny said:

It is a little teaser thing. I'm glad you guys like it!

No, that's my next character's background.

It could be. O:)

So what we're going to be doing is supporting everything eventually.

Those things which aren't going to get a GMC update, we'll be working on long-term; they won't be ready by game launch. We'll be starting out with that which has already been published, and as new systems come out we'll be integrating them. Anything that's announced for a release we're not playing at game launch. Many of the things that aren't, we won't be playing immediately just because it's going to take a hell of a lot of time to do (and in at least one case, we're waiting on another game to finish their conversion of something because they have graciously offered to share). The plan is to ultimately support everything, hammered and bent as needed to get them to work with the group. Some things will take more hammering than others. It will all be updated to work with GMC before it ever touches the grid.

We will be building all of the splats into the game world and the story, and keeping the metaplot progressing for them alongside the rest of the game's so that it's mostly seamless when we actually allow them into play.

It is a little teaser thing. I'm glad you guys like it!

Imagine waking up somewhere and not knowing where you are.

Who you are.

What you are.

You panic.

READ ME!

That's on a huge banner taped to the mirror with an arrow pointing down, impossible to miss. There's an envelope.

You open it.

Dear self,

You have no idea who you are. You will never regain your memory. You chose to do this; you chose this life. The reason you chose this place was that it's a hotel you could pay for in cash, a million miles away from anyone and anything that's ever seen you. This choice was not made lightly. Make a life for yourself. Live. Love.

Never, ever go to Bay City.

Ignore every sign that it leaves you. You'll see it everywhere, and it will seem like a good idea again, and again, and again. Don't do it. It's caught you twice already.

Don't make it three. I'll kill myself if I make it three.

Good luck,
-Whatever name you choose

@Coin Yeah, whatever. Talk to the hand. I wish I didn't adore you so much. I can't think of something mean to say that I would actually say.

My point was more that the natural storytellers are going to do their thing regardless of whether or not they're getting rewarded for it. That's what we do. Some of us go do it by building games, and some of us do it by running an OTT for a solo friend.

Here's a way to put it, I think, that might help clarify my position. I sort of touched on it before, but I'll put it out there on its own.

If it requires you to see behind the ST screen, no reward. If it does not, reward. If it does not require seeing behind the screen, run it from a non-behind-the-screen bit.

@Coin said:

@Sunny said:

since historically alternatives to XP haven't yielded very good results

I can't say I agree with this; games without stats still get PRPs pretty frequently.

There is a key difference in that there not being stats or XP at all creates a different atmosphere regarding plots and running plots than when there is. We can like it or not, but the attitude the players take is different. When no one is getting XP because it's not a thing, then it doesn't become a 'these people get it and these people don't' issue. So it's not really a good comparison.

(Boy, I am with the nitpicking of comparison lately. I apologize only a little.)

Geez, man. Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. I forgive you, but only because you're right. It is an entirely different ball of wax. But so is TR, and we're making lots of those comparisons.

First off I'll say I'm not going to address @Miss-Demeanor's points. Not that I don't agree with her in some areas, but she's not on my staff or my development team, and she's speaking of the topic in general, rather than how it relates to my game specifically. She doesn't speak for me; her conclusions and her input is her own. Now mind, she'd be more than welcome to the team if she wanted to be, but she's not speaking here as a game representative. I am, @ixokai is, and a couple of my other staffers may or may not poke in and participate.

I'd also like to point out that I do not agree with 'if you're running it, your PC can't be there'; it's not one of our rules. That's a separate issue. If I trust you to run it, I trust you to be in it. People aren't going to want to play in a PRP you're running if you run it about yourself, so misbehavior discourages itself. I will probably include this as one of my 'approval' guidelines; if you expect your PC to be involved, I'll need to look the plot over first. That's the extent of what I'd require, though.

@Arkandel said:

@Sunny said:
Alright, do you care to go over that point? I think the vagueness is caused by this:

@Sunny said:

Staff are players as well; they are welcome to run player run plots as a player as much as anyone else. But only staff is able to run game level plot. It cannot be done by players, for a reward or otherwise.

So functionally, there are two types of storytelling. Personal, and game maintenance. Metaplot and game plot arcs (key there: game) being game maintenance; everything else is personal. to some degree or another. Players are not responsible for game maintenance, for functions that are part of staff's baseline duty. If you are running game maintenance, it is part of your job as staff, and you get nothing for it. If you're running non-game-maintenance stuff, it should be run from the player side. If folks want to run a huge plot that impacts everyone / the entire city as a PRP, it's not off the table. It will probably be treated as multiple lower level plots because of the scope, which really ends up being a benefit rather than a drawback.

Game plot is something that advances the game's story itself. It does not belong in the hands of someone who is sitting on the other side of the ST screen.

fillers or one-shots to keep players going between long staff-ran arcs

I do not view player plots this way at all; I view them as not part of game maintenance/running/etc.

Nor are (or should) staff-plots always be enormous spectacles with a dozen people fighting to save the galaxy

One person or twenty two, the line isn't size. It's scope and whether it's advancing the game's story. Story, in my context, does not equal scene. You accomplish your goals as a staffer with game story far far far far far easier by spreading it out between little groups of 2-3 anyway. Then not only do they have the plot for playing about, they now get to get together with all the other little groups of 2-3 to trade peieces.

But neither is inherently superior or even preferable to the other.

Nope. They fill different roles. Different, not greater or lesser.

So alright, you don't want to incentivize it for staff due to ethics, which I disagree but can work with, and you don't want to use XP as an incentive which is an argument that has been made before, since you attribute the decline of staff-ran plot to player-ran stories being rewarded, although that seems like an empirical correlation since it's happened on some games but not on others.

This is not what I said. Or probably more accurately, that's not what I meant. I'm not rewarding anyone's plot stuff directly with XP; we're using a different system for that by design. You can still get XP with what you do get. I do not attribute the decline completely to rewards, at all. It did contribute.

What I'd be interested in here is seeing the alternative you plan to use in order to incentivize plot-running

System is still in basic stages of development, alas. We're using a 'player point' model; these points will be spent on a variety of things, including buying a certain number of beats in any given week. This is for a lot of reasons that have nothing at all to do with the discussion at hand.

since historically alternatives to XP haven't yielded very good results

I can't say I agree with this; games without stats still get PRPs pretty frequently.

XP has its flaws but it requires minimal staff resources, can be quantified and it's easy to keep track of or adjust over time.

Agreed. I have no problem giving people XP for running plots; I think it's a great model. I'm not using it, but it's a great model.

@Thenomain Agreed.

@Arkandel said:

@Miss-Demeanor I find the idea of hard separation between staff and players to be a regression.

I haven't staffed ever since I was on TR; that's partially because I dislike the limitations that poses me (suddenly all my characters are 'staff alts') and because I don't need to be in order to help the games I've been playing.

It is. However, TR rewarded staff players for running staff plot, and was one of the two games that really sent the trend for it to work that way, so to compare the policy to TR is an odd comparison. I straight up quit the day the post went up on the staff bboard saying that as a staffer, I was no longer allowed to participate in the metaplot on my characters. Some of what I'm doing is to actively make sure that staff get to participate.

However by bringing it to these radiant forums it's all going to get debated anyway, which is what (I hope) we're doing bringing our own ideas, points of view and methods to the table.

Believe me, I'm loving the discussion and getting the input. I disagree, but that doesn't mean I don't love talking the damn thing into the ground with y'all. It's been a really productive discussion.

My method is this: Define a goal then figure out the most efficient system that achieves it.

Mine, as well. There are just some hard limits that any game that I run has to have. I genuinely cannot personally abide rewarding staff for doing their job, and I do view this as a reward for doing their job. People have moved the goalpost; I'm putting it back to where I am comfortable with it being.

it sounds a lot like players would need to jump through hoops to run plot with a potential sphere-wide impact

Exactly the opposite. While we aren't running spheres as such, if someone wants to run a plot that impacts a single global faction (vampires, werewolves, etc), it's a review plot. Which means they put in a notification to let us know what they're doing in general, and then do it. They never actually have to discuss it with staff unless it hits one of the points that knocks it to approval, which means before it gets run, someone has to sign off on it. I have a little template for folks to fill out. It doesn't ask for a lot of information, just enough to know if I need to address anything with the player before they go forth and conquer.

arbitrary divides between staff and players

No. It's not an arbitrary divide. Staff stuff goes on staff bit. Player stuff goes on player bit. Start, stop.

staff-alts run plot to get the same rewards as players is viewed as a problem

No! No, no, no. It's not a problem at all. If they're running a PRP though, they need to be doing it as a player. It's a player-run-plot. Staff stuff goes on staff bit, player stuff goes on player bit.

To justify it, we're invoking arbitrary definitions of staff ethics.

This was basic shit prior to the new big games. I ran a huge game in the early 2000s; it's hardly an arbitrary definition. It's internally consistent with the rest of our system. Is it reverting to ye olden days in this respect? Yep.

Staff are not rewarded for doing their job. It is out there very very clearly I hope (see the above definitions) as to what goes on a player bit and what goes on a staff bit; if your ideas don't ever require a staff bit I would not want you on staff! There's absolutely no reason for you to be spoiled; the stuff you've run it sounds like would be something I'd sit down with you and have a conversation about, then just send you forth.

Running the game's plot is part of game maintenance. It is a staff duty, and it needs to be limited, and for everyone to reach maximum enjoyment some information must stay behind the staff wall.

This has absolutely nothing at all to do with trust. If folks aren't willing to start from a position of trust, they need to not be on my game. I'm in firm agreement with @Coin on that point. It's a lot more like separating the personal and the professional aspects of the game. Business goes in X spot, pleasure and personal stuff goes in Y spot.

Discussing the playing whole families thing and all of that...is a different story entirely. I've already had a couple of very fun discussions with my team about how liberal my alt policies are.

Now.

One of the basic approaches we're coming to the table with on Dust is to limit the stuff that staff actually has to actively do as well as lowering the barriers to play. We're going to be using a review based system, rather than an approval based system. Experience spends, character approvals, personal plots, all of these things are things that are submitted, they go somewhere they can be looked at. If there's no problem, clear it off the list, yay done. The simple stuff (recommendations for roleplay, experience spending, pool stuff, weekly goal stuff) just posts to a bboard. Everyones' is handled the exact same way. It posts, we glance at it as we read all of the relevant bboards, and if nobody sees a problem it was a post that took you 2 seconds to read. All eyes on everything.

Characters go through chargen, make themselves, and go out into basically soft RP; they can participate in any roleplay that does not involve the use of dice (without the presence of staff) until they've been reviewed. Once they've been reviewed, we clear them out of the queue and wipe the flag and let them know, but we will be doing our best to avoid keeping anyone out of RP to wait for staff to look at them. That should take some of the pressure off, too.

Buildings are going to be handled with a softcoded system, much like temp room code save the things aren't temporary. It'll check if the person has permission to build from the room they're in, and then dig them a room. Once they say +done in any given room, again it goes up for review. If people want to have rooms that are not reviewed that's perfectly fine, but dice may not be rolled in them as the location is not yet an active part of the game's setting.

This is going to create some hiccups, and I'm building justifications for those hiccups right into the game's plot. It's all being designed together from the ground up with consistent purpose and intent: reduce the work for staff and reduce the barriers to play and plot-running for everyone.