Posts made by Sunny

"Do you want to do this FEMA course on grant management?"

The worst part is I COULD SAY NO.

...but I do wanna take it...

@rightmeow said in Tell me what you want -- work edition:

What has made you feel appreciated at a job you have worked at, currently, previously, or hopefully?

Exec calling my team out in a way that made it clear they actually understood what they were praising us for. Sincere recognition of actual accomplishments, not platitudes. It was hands down the best work moment I've had, having the executive team praise my team in front of everyone else in a way that made it really clear that what we were doing was helpful and it really mattered.

ETA: the gift card for Amazon with the handwritten note from council was nice, but seriously, the understanding/recognition combo was what did it.

Thank you.

@ganymede

Yeah. I do have a friend like that left. Most of them have died at this point. Gotta be careful with the ones still around, amirite? Sigh. Getting old sucks a lot.

@ganymede

I’m mostly bewildered. If this was due to one stupid comment that was not even that bad, not 10 minutes after I said I was really struggling with shit...it makes zero sense. But if there were other cues or I should have picked up on something... I mean, I didn’t. It’s possible, but I can’t even begin to imagine why. But I was blocked, and it does not appear to have been a technical issue. I am really bad at determining whether someone is actually my friend I guess. Idk.

I'm home puking my guts out today, still recovering from the death of another friend, and not little miss sunshine and -- apparently somehow nuked a friendship today by being snarky on accident. And I just don't have the coping skills right now to handle this constructively. To handle ANYTHING constructively. Getting through this is hard.

I mean, when inventing a fictional city, it's perfectly reasonable to also invent a reason why there is a million extra people in the state where one did not exist before. Perhaps they have fancy beehives, and the economic chain from those beehives supported -- and continues to support -- a million people. Those beehives don't exist IRL, so the economic chain doesn't exist, either, and so of course the city isn't there.

Presuming that somebody wouldn't invent a reason for the city to be in the first place alongside the invention of the city is...really weird logic.

ETA: Bay City, of Ashes, put a protected natural harbor in place of a not so great for commerce IRL bay. The landscape feature in the position where it was added a really solid, secure west coast port -- something which IRL is pretty lacking in the area. Which would absolutely, 100% lead to a population boom in an area where atm there's a couple of thousand people. This is part of making up a fictional city: why is it there? So 'there's no big cities there currently' is logically irrelevant. Obviously. It's made up for this.

My definitions are not everyone's definitions, but these provide a framework for things you need to address, for storytelling:

Theme: The overarching "feeling" element that ties all of your game's stories together -- hope, humanity becoming more, exploration, reflection -- whatever, this is short and simple and a bite sized marketing blurb. My game is about INSERT THEME HERE. Mind, this is NOT where you say 'superheroes'. I mean it could be, but superheroes as a /theme/ -- instead of a vehicle to get to that theme -- is not what I'd recommend

Metaplot: The background high-level long-term plot that plods along that provides a Background Reason for your other plots; the plot that creates the plots you actually run; the 'history', behind the scenes, what REALLY happened; the Big Picture -- this is the glue that holds your stories together that you don't interact with very much -- the Antediluvian sleeping under your city, the origin of the Hellmouth, the fact that it's actually the strain of grain that they're being fed on the space station that's giving everybody these powers...this is the story behind the story.

Chapter/Season Plots: These are the active day to day staff run "what is happening on this game" that your players can and should be able to directly impact. They should have a start, a middle, and an end. They should have LOTS of hooks for people to run PRPs from. They should give people stuff to RP about. So when you're deciding on your chapter/season plot, you REALLY need to consider beyond the story itself:

• what are my hooks for PRPs?
• what will people RP about, in relation to this plot?
• what RP will this plot create when I am not around?
• What impacts will this plot have on peoples' day to day RP?
  ** Where are the pain points? What can I do about them? What will stall people's RP about this?

DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR PLAYERBASE IN YOUR CHAPTER PLOT -- THEY TAKE TOO LONG TO RESOLVE

Episodic Plots: This is what makes the game go round. This is all the little things that get run weekly, from parties to monster of the week to scheduled events that feed into the above types. They are typically self contained, and keep people entertained while the Chapter/Season gives them things to RP about. You want to make these REALLY easy to run -- give people LOTS of easy hooks into your Chapter, and plenty of info with which to run them. You ALSO want to make sure it's really clear what they CAN'T do, because people always have an easier time when they know what their boundaries are.

@too-old-for-this

I wish I could help.

How will people find RP?

• What can you do to encourage/help with that?

What do you expect people to RP?

• What can you do to support that?

How strict will you be about your theme?

• How will you enforce that?

What level of safety do you feel it is your responsibility to provide to your players?

• How will you communicate that to them?
• How will you enforce that?

Does your planned IP need permission, or is blanket permission out there?

• Do you care?
• What are the consequences of the above answer, and how will you address them?

What is the role you feel a grid has in roleplay?

• How do you best execute that?

@phase-face

• Continuity/retcons
• Consent / FTB policies
• Discipline policies
• Character approval requirements
• Censorship of public spaces (IC/OOC)
• Chain of Command / Appeals of decisions, any attendant processes
• What do you expect your players to be playing?
• Rights / Expectations / Responsibilities, both for staff and players
• System
• Purpose/philosophy of game
• Game's pre-game-on history
• PRPs
• Advancement / player goals for character
• Realtime vs asynch vs both RP support
• Channels

..not exhaustive, this is from an old brainstorming list. Trying to find my 'Things to do when opening a mush' checklist but I have a...lot...of folders on dropbox.

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

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

(Sadly, a lot of things 'wrong' with me, come from parental abuse. And my therapist left my insurance network before Covid hit, so I'm flailing)

I know I'm a fangirl, but this may help a little. (Spoilers alert.) It's nice to see the subject of parental abuse treated so cogently for a younger audience.

I really think I need to watch this show. That analysis video was oof.

The member of the mush community known as Saffron has passed away. There's a zoom memorial happening on January 10th; please DM if you'd like connection info for it, I don't really want to throw it out in these waters. I don't have details except that it wasn't COVID, and I don't want to talk about it. I do know people around here besides me knew her and probably want to come.

Damnit. I love you guys. I'm sorry so many folks are having such a shitty time. I wish I was SURPRISED by that, but I am not really. I was hoping more people were doing better than me, though. Everybody else seems so chill to my...not-chill.

There's been a LOT, this last year, and the end isn't in sight. There's a literal crapton of stuff that qualifies in the () above, so this isn't just about tips for quarantine. My answer is basically 'very poorly', but I'm sure this group has some great ideas.

Please have some great ideas.

@carma

I don't think 'best practices for a command line interface' has much to do with target demographics. @faraday provided a pretty good explanation as to best practices on interfaces that are as much (if not more) of a consideration than the target audience. Yes, target audience is a factor, but it is not the only factor.

@auspice

It's way more good than it is bad, and I think that it exploding like that is part of the development process (so to speak). I am quite sure they learned an incredible amount, and I love that the little caption at the bottom was all "S9 Next!"

@auspice

Yes, that list!! Thank you.

The only way to describe what I feel about this whole thing is awe. Hopeful awe? This is really happening. Like for serious, this stuff is really happening.