Best posts made by surreality

@Cobaltasaurus I've had that one happen, too. I left one night, schedule said one thing. (It was always posted on our register, couldn't avoid seeing it when we turned in our keys for the counter doors literally right on top of it.)

After I had left that night, they wrote in a change to the schedule that had me coming in six hours earlier.

No one called. No one said anything. So I come in when I was originally scheduled to come in, and oh, the screaming.

I ask when the change was made, and this conversation actually happens:
Me: "When did this get changed?"
Coworker: "Last night!"
Me: "After I left?"
Coworker: "Yeah!"
Me: "Did anybody try to contact me to let me know this?"
Coworker: "No, you're supposed to keep track of that yourself!"
Me: "How, exactly, when it's written in at midnight when the store is closed and no one informs me? Am I supposed to call in every morning?"
Coworker: "That's not my problem, and of course not! We shouldn't have to waste our time answering that!"
Me: "Did anyone try to call this morning when I wasn't here?"
Coworker: "No, why would we?"
Me: quietly "...I am so glad I am moving to a different state next week... "

Nobody saw a damn thing wrong with any of the above. Clearly, if this was never a problem for anyone before, the remainder of the staff had vastly superior psychic powers to my own.

Of course, were that actually the case, I suppose they would have known the place would end up closed in a few years due to consistent horrible mismanagement, which certainly didn't surprise me.

Shame, too. It was generally a really nice department store, and their fat lady clothes were less-than-typically depressing (but $$$, so the employee discount had been nice).

@Arkandel said in The Shame Game:

@VulgarKitten It's not the same at all! If someone asks for a FTB and the other person objects that person is a moron. This is known.

This is the objective truth -- people know someone pushing after FTB is asked for is a jerk -- but that doesn't stop these people from slinging a whole lot of 'so and so is a tease/prude/backward/etc.' anyway.

There is a sad quantity of people who tend not to let silly things like facts get in the way of a good story when they want to tar-and-feather someone.

@Arkandel I would have... completely lost it.

We lost Ancient Cat last year. She'd been with us about 20 years, which was about half my entire life at that point. We called her my 'overly familiar' for a reason, because she was up in my business quite literally every waking moment and more or less hated every other living being on the planet with the exception of two and regarded them with some epic haughty disdain. (Cats are already impressive in this regard, but damn did Ancient Cat work a fine withering stare.) Us, she adored, even if she sometimes made it seem like it was grudging, which... dammit, was just ultimately all the more endearing.

Not going to lie... this has been a hard year, but. The sad does fade a little, and the good memories really, really do stay.

@HorrorHound said in An open letter to Fallcoast:

Con:

• All the werewolves could hump each other.

There's a reason that's actually solid gold amazing, though: staff need no longer give a single solitary fuck about anybody else's single, solitary f-- you get the picture.

But really, as a former werestaffer? I was stupendously happy it is now in the books that I did not have to care about wereboinking, ever.

That there was one sphere that required staff to give a damn about who was or wasn't TSing was, at least for this hobby, pretty epic on the bleah scale. And that's in addition to the many, many reasons OP changed it themselves, the vast majority of which get a Hell Yeah! from me.

@Arkandel That whole 'pain is weakness leaving the body!' is the talk of morons, yes. Again, I think fire would cure them of this silly notion pretty quickly. Perhaps permanently.

@Collective I would build the shit out of that earthquake-eaten hotel, don't even tempt me.

Watch Wicked City for a good example of why I am keen on this specific blend, though. Also, no magically solving every mystery with google and a smartphone.

@ThugHeaven The soundtrack is so 80s Carpenter film it's giving me nostalgia cramps.

@tragedyjones This is why I keep harping on everyone re: 80s game. Dork.

@Kanye-Qwest Yuuuuuuuuuuuuup!

And let's not forget the cavalcade of idiots that define interesting as:

• Something no one is supposed to be able to have, but they get to. ("I'm the exception!")
• Being more powerful than everyone else. ("I'm better than anybody else can be!")
• Gets to be a dick to others without any consequences. ("But being a complete cockmunch is my concept, you can't make my character suffer in any way for playing my character!!")
• Thinks the concept is such genius the rest of the unwashed masses just can't understand when it actually makes no sense. ("You would realize it's brilliant if you weren't so stupid!")

I love the last group the best. When they hit the grid, they are simply baffled as to why their character -- inevitably a deaf-mute leper trisexual princess/rabbit-hybrid with Tourette's from c.1500 Zanzibar who tries to murder every second person she encounters due to the horrible curse of Azzzzblatt the Destroyer on her saintly family line -- isn't the most popular character ever.

@Apos said in RL Anger:

@surreality said in RL Anger:

I used to have people page me out of the blue and ask if they could masturbate for me on Skype on my Reno staff login, no joke. I was in a whole world of: "I don't know you from a hole in the ground and just did an app for you, I... where is this even coming from?!" (Even my chars were a bitchy artist and a dorky folklorist, so it's not like I had a pile of TS-bait chars or something to suggest that's what I was there for.)

In my heart of hearts I want to believe they were immediately site banned. I want to believe. I really do. I don't get how behavior that if someone did that to a clerk in a gaming store would likely get their ass kicked becomes 'well, shrug it off, the creeper will go away on their own. What can you do, the internet amirite' in a MU.

My response was totally sincere:

"Was that a mispage?"

When the answer was 'no', I just... guys, seriously, take the opening to save face, at least, I mean come on, now.

@Swaggot <pat pat> You just keep on keepin' on there, in those interesting times, man.

@Ganymede Randomly, when in Italy in 2001, my folks and I went to one of the places that was historically rumored to be one of the entrances to the River Styx. (No, really!)

Not only was it pretty dang neat, but I got to tell my friends, "My parents dragged me to the gates of Hell for summer vacation," and mean it. (Which is one of those things that should be in the 'RL things I love' post, for real.) It also featured a tiny little old man who handed us actual torches to carry through the caves while he led the tour; his family had owned the land for years and whatnot (you can see him in a write-up of the place here).

PA has nothing on that. Nothing.

Back to the serious bit:

#1 Have a solid idea of what you want the game to focus on. Know why you're choosing what you're choosing in each instance.

• PvP? PvE? Blend of both?
• Consent? Non-consent? Hybrid?
• What type of roleplaying do you want going on? Social, combat, smut, adventure, exploration?

#2 Be able to answer all of this before considering theme and setting if you're going to create an original theme/setting, and especially if you're looking to use your own system. This is because the themes and setting you choose should be consistent with what you want the experience of the game to create. (Ex: If you want fluff, sunshine, and rainbows, you're not going to choose WoD. If you want grimdark danger, you aren't going to run a ponyverse game.)

#3 When working on themes and setting, think about how they encourage the kind of play you want going on.

• Consider incentives for the kind of behavior you want to encourage. This can be for anything from 'agreeing to an outcome that isn't advantageous to the character to foster further roleplay' to 'smote the most monsters this week' to 'ran a public event open to everyone on the game'; there are endless potential examples here. These incentives are usually XP, but they don't have to be, and not all games use XP anyway.
• Consider the power levels appropriate to what will create the environment you want. Is it a super-powers game? Underdogs game? Skilled normals team-up game?

#4 Explain all of this as clearly as possible. Avoid nebulous policy and unspoken rules. Explain the reasoning behind the choices made, even if it's as simple as 'because I want it this way'.

#5 Organize this information in such a way that people do not have to dig around desperately hunting for it, or are likely to miss something important.

#6 Have an actual playtesting period. While plenty of folks think things can just be done on the fly, this is not ideal, and causes needless stress on whoever has been putting the place together as they scramble through the opening flood while bug-hunting and fixing-on-the-fly at the same time as helping players through the basics.

@Roz That is actually my very, very favorite Shakespeare quote.

@Sunny That's pretty much exactly it, IMHO.

Generally:

Another thing to keep in mind here, and especially on this point: know your weaknesses.

I can be very good, or very very bad, at explaining any given thing.

Sometimes, this is going to mean 'time to crawl off to the dev cave and write the whole thing up because it's easier to point to it than to half-assedly explain the same thing a dozen times to people who ask before the draft is done'.

This doesn't make it carved in stone or impervious to input. It's just what more or less my entire life has shown me to be the case: sometimes, the example needs to exist before the concept can be most easily understood.

(Also, I get extremely frustrated when half a dozen people ask for info on something that isn't even a rough draft yet, and I know the above principle is going to kick in hard. I end up spending the hours I should spend writing up the draft explaining the same thing over and again to casually curious folks that the draft would answer ten times more clearly and allow them to direct their questions at specific aspects of it rather than as broad and nebulous concepts, and that gets to be a monumental waste of time on all sides. )

@GangOfDolls This is a lot like my mother's entirely psychosomatic 'allergy' to smoke.

We tested her more than once on it. I'd be in the back seat of the car, flick the lighter, not light the cigarette. Wait.

Sure enough, still with the <hack hack hack put-upon-voice> "My god, aren't you done with that horrible thing yet?"

At which point I would stick the unlit cigarette up between the seats to show her it was unlit.

Took about five instances of this to cure her 'allergy', but... hallelujah, SHE IS HEEEEALED PRRRRRAISE JESUS! <cough> (Or whatever god presides over 'I call bullshit', but I don't know which that is off hand; if there is not one, one should be made up post-haste.)

She is also absolutely from the Mid-West, which makes this especially funny to me.

@Roz said in Making a MU* of your own:

I've had players get mortally insulted at the idea that staff is not in the business of making every player happy.

This is, I think, part of the reason the 'customer service model' for staffing is not particularly viable.

...especially because there are plenty of players who will never be happy no matter what you do (or don't do, or do to someone else, or don't do to someone else, etc.).

@Vorpal said in Dead Celebrity Thread:

Can this year fucking stop already? We're running out of celebrities at this point.

We have plenty of Kardashians left. Can we nominate people? I suggest we sacrifice a member of the K-clan for each point of the pentagram, just in case.

@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.

I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.

So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.

@October said:

I may as well list all the crafts I DONT do rather than do, but school and moving has are my face so it's all boxed up.

...this. So much this. My house is art supplies holding hands. Seriously. There is an antique four-harness loom on the porch the size of a four-poster queen bed that no one has touched in 20 years but by gods, we have one.

I knit (passably).
I crochet (badly).
I dye yarn (now professionally, apparently... nothing like a job you didn't expect to have three weeks before you had it and RL giving you dots in a mentor who is surprisingly kickass and wouldn't be out of place in WoD for a second).

I went to college for costume design and can sew, make patterns, and do a disturbing number of techniques of surface embellishment when I can be bothered to touch any of it at all. (And if I can ever be bothered to sew these days, I can be bothered to embellish.)

I bead like a crazy person. Branched fringe and 15/0s all over the place. I may or may not have actually started salivating while on vacation and I found a shop with anodized titanium-plated hematite; you weren't there, you can't prove it! Nobody saw that!

I used to draw/watercolor/pen&ink passably well, but haven't touched it in so long because...
...I love to dick around in photoshop too much, and for a while have been doing skins for 3D models. That's been slacking over the past year because my house has been eaten by yarn and skein winders. (If you ever wondered if THAT bitchy surreality is THIS bitchy surreality, the answer is... uh, yes, actually, since I know some of y'all seem to use the software it's all designed for.)

All of this was still totally OK because 'I don't spin' because it's not insanity until then, we're all safe because see there's a still thing nobody in the family does yet...
...until about a year ago, when I started spinning. There's usually a little motorized spinning 'wheel'/machine about the size of a toaster on the desk. I spin between poses at times and people now get to think that is a euphemism instead of the knitting between poses.

@lordbelh said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:

The only times I run things that include my character is if it's an impromptu bit of plottage that only's come about because we were bored with a social scene and decided to do something more with it. Occasionally that'll span over a few more scenes, and involve the kind of character centered progression that are usually lacking in regular PRPs.

I would separate those sort of 'prps', as well as in general any kind of private character development 'prps', from the public 'affect the world at large' style prps or staff run plots. The latter types shouldn't involve your own character, especially if you're a staffer. As for the former.. if its all about you anyway, you might as well tell it any way you like.

^ This kind of thing I have never had any issue with, and think it would be a shame to lose if people get too antsy about the subject.

I've done this, too.

<OOC> surreality's alt says, "Hey, anyone mind if I have an injured dude stumble into the bar to start some kind of random chaos?"

<OOC> surreality's alt says, "...anyone up for a random bar fight breaking out in the corner?"

<OOC> surreality's alt says, "I have a one-shot monster-of-the-week plot with bigfoot I'm going to run in a couple of days that's public and posted to +events and will be set here, anyone mind if I throw in a sighting of the mysterious beast on the other side of the park and some people running up to freak out about what they just saw? Was thinking of asking on channel to see if anybody else wants to join the scene, if that sounds like it could be fun, and it might get a few more folks involved or signing up."

...etc. I have zero issue with these kinds of things, but I think one of the key things here is to ask first. (And in the last case, make a genuine effort to be inclusive.)