Best posts made by surreality

@Admiral As someone who notoriously hates Mage, I'd rather every game have Mage, and the mages be given 5x the XP as everyone else, than have that dude skeeving around being an abusive fuckhead on them.

Seriously. 5xXP Mage vs. that guy and that guy still loses.

And my take on mage is roughly: Mage is that kid with the huge trust fund, model good looks, super-genius IQ, and palatial home that mysteriously gets sent to public school to ass-fuck the grading curve along with everyone's girlfriend while driving the new Ferrari they got for their 16th birthday on the same day you finally managed to finish scraping together enough for an old junker you had to rebuild yourself and pulled it in the lot. I hate Mage.

@Cobaltasaurus I actually think mage is fine in the context of Mage-only games; it's just horrible (through no fault of the players, honestly, in most cases) in multi-sphere. It's 'this sphere is better at EVERYTHING than EVERYONE else' problem -- better at spirit than werewolves (when that is the full core of their character focus vs. it being one of many options for the mage), etc., repeat with pretty much every single other sphere in some form or another.

I'm a firm believer in the 'jack of all trades is master of none' principle, and Mage, as written, is, 'jack of all trades trounces all the specialists in every area of specialty at once' more or less as a rule. That's just how it's written, really; there's not a 'bad player' problem there. There are definitely players that exacerbate the problem, to be sure, but they aren't the core issue for me.

@Taika This is my shocked face. Can you tell I'm wearing my shocked face? I'm totally wearing my shocked face.

(King in the actual type name? Extra aggro-rapey? Antagonist class? Goddamn, the only way that would be more him would be if they were lion shifters.)

@Arkandel said in The Descent MUX:

On MU* it's almost unheard of for Vampires to have to deal with daylight at all. It doesn't even impede their roleplay as any scenes with them are automatically assumed to take place after dusk.

To be fair, that's more a factor of player scheduling than anything else, and the time distortion that always hits with posing. There's nothing stopping anyone from holding, say, a meeting they don't want swarmed in vampires at high noon in a sunny park, saying so, and holding firm to that, which means the players can absolutely self-enforce this weakness and use it to advantage -- even if that meeting has to be scheduled in RL time at a time in-game that would allow for vamp presence. There are plenty of +events, for instance, that run around 9pm EST, but are ICly taking place during the day to represent traditional business hours, since that's just the hours most players are on and available for them.

I'm more noting that there's not really a player-level 'check' that can be put on mages in that same way; people can force sunlight to be an issue by stating something as simple as, 'this will take place outdoors for an extended time at noon'.

Is there something similar to that for mage I'm just missing?

@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

What I mean by 'thread' in this context is anything a group of players can look at asynchonously then add to. It should probably be write-only (if someone's being abusive we don't want them changing what they wrote before) - the idea is STs might not be online at the same time as everyone else, or some OOC research or communication with third parties might be needed, etc.

This is entirely (and fairly easily) doable via wiki. While it isn't write-only, it keeps track of edits that can be compared/checked/etc. with no loss of data, so there's instant accountability.

The only thing it isn't is private, so everything is open to everyone's view. (Which has upsides and downsides.)

This thread, on the whole, is extra fascinating on a really weird level -- namely, the 'the kind of games we all come from/are used to' shines through in a big way. (This isn't a bad thing.)

I've actually had a handful of plots emerge organically in the way @ThatGuyThere and @Ganymede mention. They have tended to be things that don't tread into 'requires elaborate permissions' territory, for the most part, or were things it was pretty simple to just ask, 'Hey, can I... ' in a job to a member of staff I knew I could effectively communicate with. (Note: not a 'buddy' or similar, just someone I know I can effectively communicate the idea to clearly, and know they'll ask me the right questions if they have any, etc.)

The more a game can facilitate this, the better, IMHO. The only way these work, though? It isn't so much about the staff, unless the staff are amazingly draconian and don't allow players to do anything at all, ever. It's about people being willing to pick up the ball and toss it back and forth.

You just have to think local pick-up game scale, not world-altering national championships, for the most part, and it will generally all work out just fine. Not everyone's satisfied with 'local pick-up game' scale, and generally that means they'll need more support/approval/etc.

@GangOfDolls Those are VERY good. Thank you. Definitely will look at adding some guidelines and such about this.

There will be some more detailed NPC guidelines coming in general; mostly, 'don't use an NPC to be a dick to someone and think this is in a zone free of consequences' kinds of things.

@Tempest The consent policy needs the detail, because it's a new implementation of a consent policy. Without explaining it, there is no frame of reference for people to say, 'oh, it works like X!' because there's no X like it out currently there, nor has there been previously. Consent is not in any way part of 'don't be a dick'; the game has a consent policy. Consent is consent. It is its own thing.

Personally, I feel the dickery stuff needs to be there, too, as many people have observed, what 'don't be a dick' means varies dramatically from person to person, so I'm afraid I'm not gonna skip that. Plenty of people believe every single thing outlined there is perfectly acceptable behavior. More importantly, though, people new to the hobby may genuinely not realize these things are bad form, and deserve the warning before getting backhanded off the MUX for not adhering to a cultural standard they may not have encountered before or realize is dickish behavior, which is ultimately unfair to them.

@Arkandel That would be the Reno reboot, I believe. Wishing them all the luck in the world, the person who took it over is IMHO good/sane/creative/fun/practical/sensible/reasonable/etc., which is very much win.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/25/technology/developer-sexual-assault-virtual-reality/

This article just popped up in my news feed, and it's worth sharing here.

Of note:

Because video games are largely developed by men, harassment of the sort that Belamire experienced might not be top of mind in a game's design. Stanton said that's true of he and Schenker; while they'd given careful thought to the ways in which players might get in each others ways in the virtual world, they hadn't considered that players might be harassed.
"If VR has the power to have lasting positive impact because of that realism, the opposite has to be taken seriously as well," Stanton and Schenker wrote in their op-ed.
The benefits of virtual reality are frequently touted. At the WSJ Digital Conference in Laguna Beach on Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook thinks of it as "the ultimate empathy device."
Stanton agrees that "virtual reality is powerful."
"We do everything we possibly can to encourage that belief," he said. "But you can't have that kind of power and say that anytime something bad happens, it's not your responsibility."

While I'd say this is more dramatic in VR, it's also quite directly applicable to our hobby.

Some of the related articles note how this is not an issue until a female player suddenly appears -- and her in game appearance/avatar doesn't have to be any different from all the others (they're all identical) to suggest any sort of 'bait' or 'she must have been asking for it' logic, (which we see a lot of any time someone chooses a PB that doesn't look like ten miles of bad road in our hobby, and is about as classy as the 'but she was wearing lipstick, clearly she wanted it!' crap always is ).

Definitely worth a look, and definitely worth some thought.

@Ganymede The last bit? Oh, how I wish it wasn't.

But it is.

It so is.

Hilariously so.

@Pyrephox Yup, that. For some folks, 'taken' just means "not only will I get the object of my interest, I'll get one over on someone else on top and prove I'm superior!"

@Thenomain said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

Other people have made the point as well. There was a period where WoD players were particularly pushy about being allowed to do shitty things to other characters, and we did spend a great deal of time trying to find a way to balance IC theme to OOC behavior but here's the thing: We didn't see it that way.

When we started seeing it that way, we cut it out. In the last three to five years, a shitty WoD player is far more recognizable as separate from their shitty WoD character.

Now that there's coffee and some sleep and lucidity, I want to specifically address this, because it deserves to be mentioned.

Having been (referring to myself here) one of the loudest, shrillest, most pig-headed voices re: people behaving like monstrous shits and why it's not cool?

I have seen this change happening.

I have seen the attitudes around this changing.

All you really have to do is look at that example -- a dozen years ago, 'I played romance, she owes me TS!' was an actual argument to be had -- to see that things are changing in this hobby, and they're changing for the better in a number of ways on this front especially.

That deserves much more recognition than it actually gets.

Responses to things, action on things, are not always perfect, but that people's eyes are opening to some of the actual problems and viewing them as such is exactly why I posted this in the first place -- namely, we're not the only community that's struggling with it. It's worth looking at how other communities address it (even if I don't think their answer is necessarily one we could implement in the same way, there might be something about that approach that will inspire an idea here for folks to run with, etc.).

Also: having talked about this stuff with @Thenomain specifically from time to time when these issues have cropped up: dude, thank you for taking them seriously. It counts for a lot, and you deserve to hear it -- out loud, and in public. Even if we have different ideas of what to do about any given thing sometimes, that there's an understanding that something should be done at all? That's... actually a pretty huge milestone, should not be overlooked. It's one the community seems to be taking to heart, and taking seriously.

As much as I get frustrated and grouchy with this hobby and the community from time to time, on the whole? I'm pretty proud of the collective 'us' on this front, and there's good reason for it.

@Lotherio said in Wiki and You:

I think, for me at least, wikis are a tool that can help others find RP, or share stories and help the creative process of the shared environment.

This is my take on it also. I wouldn't call folks who are wiki-averse also change-averse, though, but there's a reason for that.

Like any other 'new thing being tried', some people hate the very idea of people trying it. Sometimes it's because something similar has been done badly. Sometimes it's because they like the old way a lot. Sometimes it's a misconception about how things work, or an assumption that things will be a certain way -- they can't see a positive way it could work, or one that would be seamless from their end re: what they're used to.

I saw enough of this in the other thread that I just didn't really bother responding beyond where I left it; I can either fumble around trying to explain shit that's above my paygrade to explain but can be done, or I can get on with doing it. (I'm better at showing than telling is the best way to sum this up.)

A lot of explaining was required to even get there, because what I've managed to get done was not done without help.

Explaining why doesn't always come across. I probably couldn't explain why now to most people who would have the capability to help me get there, because those people have vastly different skillsets, and a fairly large chunk of the principle behind it is 'make it easier on people who don't have those skillsets'. 'Develop that skillset' is not the best answer; for instance: what we have now is an advanced skillset (MUX/MUSH/MUD/etc. code), it takes a great deal of time to learn, documentation is often not written in plain or easily digestible language for a novice or requires understanding of concepts that the documentation assumes the reader already knows (when often they do not and it's not always explained elsewhere), and even as someone with reasonable intelligence who has poked at things a little from time to time, I have difficulty making sense of it at times, so I can't imagine how hard someone who is relatively new to this on the whole.

If there are alternative approaches that can reduce this specific barrier to entry in game play, and especially in game creation, I think it is wise to explore them.

The tl;dr of this: pretty much anybody can fill out a web form without needing any prior education in MU code -- using or writing it.

While explaining 'if we had this one thing... ' took a while before someone was willing to bite, a few discussions of what that one thing could do have (I think? I hope?) made some of its potential clear, at least to the folks who helped make it happen. (And that's just what I could envision doing with it in a short span of time, not 'the whole community throws in ideas'.)

What I know is this: with what's essentially one tweak to an existing tool, as a hopeless novice MU coder, I'm now able to take a piece of data from the wiki and format it for the MUX. +finger? Populate it from the same data that's on the wiki, and both remain consistent. Chargen? Fill out a form. Click a link. It takes the information you entered and creates the basics of your character page -- which you never need to touch or fiddle with again after that if you don't want to; a second link of the same kind for staff sets up your sheet on the wiki, which is in a staff-only editable namespace, preventing tampering and automatically providing a log of all changes to that page viewable to everyone for full transparency. And so on.

Wiki cross-references better than a MUX in a variety of ways. With one single change to a drop-down menu, faction maintenance, wanted concept listings, sphere/group membership, 'who lives in this region', etc. can all be maintained at once without further changes. If that information is also being piped to the game, again, you have one change that requires no formal code primer or cheat sheet for even the newest staffer on the team to keep things current without running through half a dozen MUX commands to accomplish the same thing. Again, these changes are visible on the wiki and the game after the few seconds it takes SQL to update. In regard to the amount of time this saves in terms of game maintenance (and everything staying properly updated across the board instead of something getting missed), it would be hard for someone to convince me this is in any way a bad thing, or is not useful, and that's without even considering how much faster and easier it is.

For instance, we're looking at something like this: Need a statted NPC or creature? Like creating a +temproom, make a +tempnpc. Just set the name of its wiki page when you create it, and it automatically populates its sheet, stats, and powers, for immediate reference without requiring notes, making it easier to run things on the fly. (This is 100% doable, it's just a matter of the doing.) Want to set up a Creature, Generic Thug, or other NPC like that that doesn't exist? Create it from drop down menus and save the page in minutes, tops -- and then it's a resource that the whole game can potentially use when/if needed just as easily as indicated above going forward; you've just added a valuable resource for the game and lowered the barrier to entry for scene runners by providing them with a helpful quickstart for a pickup scene to run on the fly or an NPC they can use when creating their plots.

@Arkandel If I could upvote that a zillion times, I would.

We have a system to buy physical equipment for bonuses, for instance -- armor. It gives us a bonus to resist physical damage.

We do not have a comparable system for social modifiers -- though the same one can 'buy' you positive modifiers (nice clothes, flashy money, though it offers almost nothing for social defenses).

You'd need a much more sprawling system than most things designed for tabletop to really account for some of it properly.

For instance:

• That armor purchase of a bulletproof vest has its armor ratings/etc., but in reality, could potentially give the person +X to 'intimidation by someone with a firearm', too, and be mechanically reasonable.
• Similarly, that gun purchase could give someone an intimidation bonus if it's used in the course of the attempt.
• Some percentage of a firearms stat might be a defense or bonus -- as in, "I know a lot about guns, and he's holding that all wrong; he has a +1 to his roll from his firearms stat, but mine is 3, so I get +3 to my resist, which cancels his advantage out and gives me an advantage," or with reversed numbers, "I know a little about guns, and I can see that guy knows how to use that even better than I do," giving an end result to the intimidation roll on the aggressor's part of +2.

This is a really loose example, but you can probably see what I'm getting at: it requires a somewhat more expansive setup than the kinds of systems we're usually working with, in which things like, say, a weapon's damage rating and durability also now have an intimidation rating and so on.

@Kanye-Qwest ...that would be a lot of inches. o.o

@Thenomain Agreed re: staff behavioral standards. IMO, they should always be a lot higher than for a player. A player screws up on ethics, the damage is usually pretty minimal unless it's an exceptional circumstance, and is almost always fixable. A staffer screws up on ethics? Just the opposite -- the damage is generally pretty big with rare exceptions and is usually irreversible.

I take a pretty hard line on staff gossip behaviors especially. Once that stuff starts, you're basically doomed. It will get out. People will find out. It is inevitable, it will destroy players' trust in staff in the blink of an eye, and once it's gone, there's usually no getting it back, and it hits staff as a whole, not just the guilty parties.