Best posts made by surreality

@Cobaltasaurus said in Grid building theory?:

Frankly, my all time favorite grid never got used. It was my Caprona grid that didn't have exit names listed at all, they were put throughout the desc, and it was up to the players to move where they went. (I thought the exploration aspect as amazing. However, probably not helpful or ease-of-access-friendly).

This is kinda what the MOO approach was like; I loved that one for the same reasons. It vibed more immersive, somehow. It felt more 'literary' in a way, like it reinforced the whole 'interactive fiction, and details are important' vibe.

@WTFE I'd bet on it at this point. He cannot stop himself from talking about how he's the most persecuted of all God's creatures because he's a white straight male.

Indeed, I do not know how he survives a day on the street; maybe if he invests in a rainbow burkha and fake tits he'll be able to survive without being murdered to death by the rampaging mob.

@Apos That's definitely an option. It may not be much of one on my end, since while I'm a relatively OK wiki coder, I am very much not a coder.

I know there are ways of getting decent MUX/wiki integration that can be further explored -- I just don't really have the skills to accomplish that, unfortunately.

One of the options with wiki uses the 'input box' extension, which comes bundled with mediawiki now. I use it for a comments/bug/feature request thing on BITN's, and have managed to rig it up for something rumors-like elsewhere. It essentially creates a new 'section' on a pre-defined page, and lets people just enter text in a page box. It's super simple, and doesn't require any fancy code at all. It's just a matter of setting up the css to do it, really, in a way that formats something that looks less awkward than its defaults, I think.

@Shiggy ...which is the other classic Rick argument. BINGO!

@acceleration Part of the issue with the fear-based conditions is that a few of them include things like 'deliberately fail a roll' or 'do something that hinders the group'. Often enough, the rest of the group, OOC, will jump your shit for simply playing to the limits of what your character knows (vs. what you know as the player) that might lead them to making the wrong choice or a mistake, no matter how IC that action is -- when you're stuck with one of those conditions, it can be tricksy at best to handle it in a way that is not going to get you practically crucified OOC.

@Shiggy There's a simple fix for that one: stop trolling the forum, Rick. The drinking game is probably older than you are, too.

(Oh, gods, people. The WORA drinking game actually is old enough to vote now.)

@acceleration said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

@surreality
If players are actively bitching out another player or the ST (openly or not) in the middle of a plot, something is wrong with the flow of the plot. Engaged players will be busy thinking about how to salvage the situation or turn it to their own advantage ICly if the opportunity is created correctly.

Can players be bitchy, catty assholes? Absolutely.

...and there are some players who are, the moment something doesn't go the hero wish-fulfillment way, going to devolve into catty bitchiness and never come back. This is not a good thing, and it's not the ST's fault.

Do they complain less when they're having fun? Definitely.

...please stop speaking in universals. This is not always the case, and this is the problem I have with the way you're presenting your arguments: as if they're universal truths. They're simply not. If you don't prepare for situations that absolutely do exist -- even if you have not experienced them yourself you're getting reports here of others who have encountered these player behaviors -- you're going to get blindsided when they occur, or may not see the issue for what it is when it presents itself.

Can they have fun even when they're failing? My answer to that is hands down, yes.

Oh, we agree here in full. I enjoy screwing up as much as I enjoy succeeding, personally -- but I am also aware that not every player feels the same way, and players who do not feel the same way may behave differently in these situations.

This seems to be where you and I differ, @surreality , because my experience was that an engaging storyline would keep players, well, engaged and coming back even though one or two characters might have (quite often) made terrible decisions. I did see players choose to take dramatic failures and I didn't see people bitching about the OOC choice to do so (which may have just been me with the blinders on, but I'm judging mostly by the fact that they came back for more.)

I see this happen more often than not, too. Most players are absolutely down with this, and embrace the play style we both seem to agree is ideal (partly why I'm not quoting some of what's below, since it describes this in more depth), and believe to be the way the game is intended to be played: with success and failure as part of the story.

It's just that not everyone is on board with this. Some people take the first sign of adversity as time to take their ball and go home. Some people can't handle the idea of not winning, not being the hero, or of that guy screwed up my chances of being a hero!!!

Crappy players are, sadly, out there. Sometimes the ST can get them to come around, sure. Not always, though.

Pressure from other players to metagame toward a positive outcome is a real thing. It's been discussed here and even argued by some that players should behave in this way. (I don't agree with this, obviously.)

It's not something that's resolved with carrots, and is a case in which sometimes a hint of stick needs to be applied.

@Warma-Sheen said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

Tasks are supposed to be failed because of fear and groups are supposed to be hindered. A lot of people don't play it that way without some incentive to do so. And even with incentive, some people still don't do it.

^ This nails it. Some people don't like to lose. Or lose face. Or just not win. Or not be the star. They definitely exist in this hobby. Throwing in 'someone as a player is choosing to fail, which affects my ability to succeed' is going to be a complicating factor when dealing with these personalities. It's not that complicated a problem to recognize as one that definitely exists.

Not gonna lie, I am actually amused that the WORA drinking game came about in 1999... and would now be old enough to vote in the US if it was a person.

Hey, if corporations count... <thoughtfully taps chin>

@Bug-In-A-Jar With the way people set up wikis for existing games, the basics for the setting (any necessary canon, systems, links to dice rollers since sadly the experiments in that for wiki are not super viable yet, etc.) can go on the same site, really.

The cool thing is that you could technically link to location pages, character pages, any visual reference material/etc. right on the wiki, too.

The input box extension could handle adding poses to a page without things crossing or screwing up edits, since they're technically added as a new page section with its own distinct title/etc., so even if two people are editing at the same time, the wiki is handling the edits almost like two different pages are being edited.

The sad thing is less live chat options, compared to what you're describing. Most of the chat extensions for mediawiki I've seen are not per-page based, but are more a 'everyone logged into the wiki is in one chat room' type deal. Which could work, but is a bit meh.

@hedgehog This reminds me of a thing that never fails to press my 'I hate people, but that shit's funny' button.

Freshman in high school, make some of my own clothes and such (or mod things/etc.). Bear in mind, I graduated in 1991; the 80s had some of this, but not tons of it in the suburbs outside punk or new wave circles. More or less anything you didn't buy at The Limited or Express was, according to the people who thought they knew anything, was made of pure crap.

It was a big deal when my mother and I would go to this big fancy fabric store that was a couple hours away; it was one of those once-per-year-pilgrimage special occasions. That year, I pick up two colors of this pretty sheer fabric and made a long skirt out of it, layered one color on top, the other peeking out at the bottom.

Cue endless torment the moment I wore that to school.

Fast forward two years. I'm dragged along to that very The Limited that is my bane by a friend, and see a flash of something familiar. So help me god, it was that same skirt. Same fabric exactly. Same colors exactly. Same layer order exactly. Same cut and length exactly.

I spent the next six months cheerfully chirping, "Nice skirt!" at the people who spent $90 late-1980s dollars on the same skirt I made in less than an hour for $12 or so, and had been saying the same thing in a nasty-ass tone to me for the past two years.

Chirpy instant karma cuntbaggery is the best cuntbaggery.

@Sandor I'm gonna try and set up some stuff like this for the place I'm slowly tinkering on; I'll have a copy of the templates and stuff up there if you want to copy them over for a place. Setting a wiki up on digitalocean is SUPER easy -- and if it isn't a mux alongside it, even easier than the tut in the tuts section. I'll ping here when I have something workable and grabbable up.

@Bobotron My husband would make a point of dragging me to more anime cons and hinting that I can sprout tentacles. We just can't have that.

@Sandor Not WoD, no. I'm working on an original system thing, and want to have 'play by wiki' as an option for it. If someone does want to set up a WoD that way, I can wiki it up to a certain extent (though sadly not soon, even my project is in slow motion with RL work) and get the stuff required for the basics on PbW to function, though.

(I'm aiming for something a little more camp/adventure/less grimdark than the typical WoD. It's horror, it's just more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/Penny Dreadful-ish in intended vibe than it is Underworld.)

OK, that was... what in the actual fuck.

It is weird enough that the ice cream truck is already making the rounds.

It is irksome enough that it woke me up while I was trying to sleep off some painful dentistry.

But did it really have to be playing 'In The Hall of the Mountain King' in that super fucking creepy and always off key ice cream truck chime?!

I refuse to believe there aren't frozen human body parts collected underneath the frosty pops at this point.

I really liked @tragedyjones's approach to this on Reno, which is what I personally plan to steal forever after.

Nothing world-ending, but plots roughly structured like a season of a television show: the events are large and transformative, but not 'solve the riddle or everyone dies'. 6 months or so of something led by staff that has the potential to involve the majority of the grid if they wish to participate, and is primarily a spur to get things moving in broad strokes rather than a micro-managed true metaplot.

One season ends, there's some downtime, and then another begins with a different focus, ideally allowing others to become involved with a different specific interest.

@DarkDeleria said in Full spoilers: Iron Fist:

But after reading this, I see what my problem was: I'd been watching it with a typical superhero frame in my mind. Where he knows who he is, what his role is in life, and kicking ass one iron fist to the gut at a time. But that's not who Luke Cage is; that's not who Jessica Jones was either; and Matt Murdock has some pretty grey morals by playing lawyer by day, blind-vigilante by night. So--why should I've assumed that Danny Rand was going to be any better than these three fuck-ups forced into being the budding defenders they will become?

This is a really good overview of their whole collection -- and it's spot on. It's what I like about the series they've done on the whole.

Typically, when we see this stuff in movie form, there's that 'budding hero phase' that is more or less a training montage punctuated by a dramatic heartstring tugger of an emotional turning point scene and even when well done, it's fairly sterile stuff. Expanding that out into the gritty detail of the hand-wringing, the failures that aren't played for laughs or seemingly exclusively to build up the cheer for the underdog finally seizing their power at the end of the training sequence, is a big change... but it's a starkly human one.

@Lithium I don't think anyone is suggesting eschewing dice in favor of something else, as, yeah, the code for the rolls is right there and there's no reason to not use it.

It's more a factor of how much is left vague and up to GM judgment calls.

Here's how numbers factor in here:

• Larger group of players == need for more than one GM.
• Need for more than one GM == need for guidelines to keep judgment calls consistent amongst GMs.

A lot of systems, by default, assume there's only going to be one GM for the game. Shifting from one to multiple GMs, by necessity, means a lot of the deliberately vague 'up to the GM/ST' situations in the books are going to need at least some clarification or additional guidelines to keep a measure of consistency. (WoD/CoD, I am looking real hard at you here; other systems are more clear, it varies a lot, but the problem is universal with that shift in who is running what.)

If you're creating the system from scratch, minimizing the instances of 'the results are up to the ST' judgment calls also means players can handle more things on their own without the need for ST oversight (which is not always available and/or timely in our medium). The more players you have, the more that autonomy becomes important. The ability those players have to be able to reliably handle the outcome of a roll or power without the need for additional oversight or interpretation to get the results allows them to do more with less top-down guidance, and that's a critical tool for players that's often overlooked in tabletop game design -- since it's not relevant at the table; play stops and starts when the GM/ST starts the game and they're typically present throughout. MUX/MUSH/etc. has 24 hour game play. Heavily coded games take this into account by having the code handle it, but in the same way, a system with clearer, more defined outcomes and result parameters can be a huge help without the need for heavy code.

I am pretty much not a fan of the dick pic, y'all.

An ex of mine used to send them to me on the regular. This was wince-making in a lot of ways, but it made him feel fab, so whatevs. He was also very self-conscious about his (totally normal and not at all small) size to a pathological degree but still seemed unable to ever stop himself from whipping it out when on what had otherwise been perfectly normal chatter video calls sometimes.

Year or so after shit ends, I run into another chick online he was apparently cheating on me with. She talks about all the dick pics he used to send her...

...and how huge he was.

I make a joke about 'well let's just be grateful the firecrotch is out of our lives' because he was VERY much that.

And she was initially confused as fuck, because, '...but his pubes were like BLACK BLACK.'

At which point we both realized he had apparently scoured the internet for a sizable number of someone else's dick pics to send her to pretend to be the proud owner of a 12 inch cock.

@TNP said in Tips on Güd TS:

Most important: don't play a female (granted, this only applies if you're going to TS a gay guy)

It never fails to amaze me how many people try to force this anyway (from any given direction). It actively bothers me, and I'm bi, ffs.

@Auspice That beats my dad, who was so proud of the year he got a refund (it was the only time ever) he did the same -- and the check was for $1 exactly.

And my father is such a cheapass that he cashed it.

I would have framed that for posterity.