Best posts made by surreality

@Arkandel Oh, I agree. I mean more that I wish we had more general variety, which is a common wish/complaint/wild lottery dream.

I would like there to be a FC-style game. And an RfK one. They appeal to different players -- or sometimes the same player, but different moods. And so on. I want to see sandbox games and heavily plotted games. I want to see all manner of themes, settings, and options. Crowd size is just one factor, and it can work against you just as easily as it works for you, as @Apos mentions.

I know the history stuff is all there, and the museum/etc.

Local brand loyalty always amuses me a little. We have something somewhat similar here, in that most folks in the area don't go 'to the convenience store', they 'go to Wawa'. This is partly because almost every convenience store is a Wawa, but the lingering 7-11s and similar get referred to the same way bafflingly often.

Until very recently, 7-11 sold lottery tickets, but Wawas did not.

Watching people argue about this for decades at the front of Wawas was more entertaining than I should admit, because you just knew they said 'go to Wawa and get...', and actually meant 7-11.

@auspice There's also the technobabble problem. If it was reality, yes, all the science would have to make sense, and you'd need all the nitty gritty technical details to function in daily life.

We are not all technicians, programmers, etc. and for some, myself included, feeling like an engineering degree is required to get through a basic setting document turns something into an immediate 'not just no, but hell no'.

Just like people playing doctors on a modern day game need not know the technical ins and outs of heart surgery, there needs to be some leeway for handwavium.

You, RL, may or may not know exactly how your phone works down to the circuits and signals and so on, but you do know how to call on it, tinker with an app, send a text, and so on. This is the best 'target', I think, for people to stick with in terms of defining tech, and the best target you can expect players to understand. (Ex: 'Phone: makes calls, sends text messages, sends email, sometimes has silly games or other generic utilities available on it.' 'Zapper: small hand-held self-defense device resembling a RL TV remote control that emits a brief pulse of energy at settings of warning shock, stun, injure, kill.' And so on.)

Too many folks (and by this I really mean even one of these on your game is one too many) want to pry into how the circuit board is laid out and will not for the love of all things holy ever let it go until there's some specific answer that better check out as legit engineering and... this is really just not helpful, unless they want to come up with something cool that adds to the game world in a nifty way without giving them some kind of IC advantage (Ex: 'maybe that special fuel is the stuff that's only found in the caves on my character's property in alien land!' and so on), and contribute it to the game files.

It just makes things difficult, and I really wish there was some sensible solution to it.

@Three-Eyed-Crow This sounds like a story that needs telling. Not sure how many folks are familiar with the history there. (OK, I admit it. I'm not, and that reaction has me really curious! I am a terrible fucking person... but it may illuminate some of what people think is going on or help @Lotherio defend himself from being confused with the crazy.)

@faraday said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

@surreality My objection involves transferring obligations to any other player, whether they're a GM, or just someone in a pick-up scene. As I stated in my game's policy: if someone is sensitive to a particular topic, it's on them to figure out a way to establish boundaries. It's not on anyone else.

That's just it, though; I don't see how 'allow people to create a list that anyone on the game can refer to at any time' isn't just giving people a new means of making their boundaries known. Most games have rp-prefs in +finger, and similar stuff.

I just figure it's handy for people who are not always comfortable explaining themselves in detail when something has already potentially gone wrong, and being able to say, 'hey, I have a thing about that, it's here, can we work with this?' -- not 'hey, I have a thing about that, HOW DARE YOU GO THERE YOU MONSTER!'/etc.

Really, I think it would be much more useful for people looking to find people who are interested in the same kinds of things they are in the long run. "Oh, you like fishing RP, too? Rock on, let's meet up and do a thing!" So I'm looking at it from that angle, too, and would be putting in something like this for that purpose even if it didn't have a 'help potentially head trouble off at the pass/allow for an additional means of reduced conflict expression of boundaries and preferences' aspect to it.

@Goldfish If it makes you feel any better, the only soda we currently have in the house is 2 small bottles of Pepsi, something ridiculous like 5 12-packs of seltzer, a bizarre assortment of flavored ginger ales (blackberry, cranberry, green tea) and that one can of Squirt I'm saving like a bottle of champagne for a special occasion.

Because regions suck and you can't get Squirt here normally.

(Go ahead and make fun of that name, lord knows we do. But that stuff spoiled us horribly and we don't do citrus soda otherwise now in this house.)

@faraday said in Original Sci-Fi?:

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

Some folks -- myself included -- are far more interested in telling the human (or not human!) stories of how people are affected by the danger and isolation of being in space, of how to handle matters of scarcity (The 100 is a great example of this)

That's where the problem comes in, I think. Because yeah, The 100 tells some great human stories. But the science/tech in them is COMPLETELY F-ING RIDICULOUS. That show is practically unwatchable for me because the writers don't even bother with the most rudimentary levels of plausibility.

^ And the level of vehemence, that feels not only like shouting down and egregious condescension, but misses the point of what someone else finds interesting about it, is exactly the experience I have had on every single sci-fi game I ever tried, and seen in every conversation about ones that exist or are being built, and turns me off so hard I have completely given up on the genre.

I am not trying to insult you or say you did something crappy there, but 'someone is going to vehemently make me feel stupid for liking something that has cool X stuff going on, and that I like that cool X stuff, and I have no idea what Z things they're complaining about because the Z things are completely irrelevant to me' is a shitty feeling to have.

Since this seems to be the #1 pastime of sci-fi games, I consider them an unfriendly environment on the whole, often to the point of active hostility and ugly condescension in the same way the people who are obscure comics lore experts railing about how so-and-so is 'doing it wrong' in their portrayal of a character are obnoxious, or it would be obnoxious for me to OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG SO STUPID DID YOU SEE THAT HEADPIECE?!?!?! WHAT SERVING GIRL CAN AFFORD THOSE PEARLS; THIS IS CRAZY! at people enjoying an episode of Reign, and modeling something they do on an L&L game on that dubiously accurate ensemble.

It surprises me that we recognize that the latter two examples are absolutely jerk behavior, but the first, which is exactly the same things, is instead the cultural norm that is embraced and insisted upon for another genre.

@Kireek I figured you probably didn't, which is why I'm mentioning. It can come off badly, and it may help to keep it in mind if something like this starts to crop up again re: negativity/etc.

@Lisse24 I refuse to speed up for fears of that happening, though. If I see an opening that makes sense, sure. If not, no, no thanks, I'll wait for it.

Really, anybody who runs off to the chapel in 24 hours or less (and I wish I was kiddin', but it's happened, and plenty of people are close sometimes) on the regular is not somebody I would want to have to keep up with anyway in terms of feeding the level of instant gratification they're probably looking for. The whole thing sorta screams 'super high maintenance' in the back of my head.

Theno: my problem is that it could be changed before, and... now it cannot. It was giving the switch-dropdown option before, actually, on the options page.

I'm now stuck with something I can't unset -- and never apparently finished updating itself.

No, really, those screenshots are how it looks in every browser I have -- but if I log out? Things look completely sane and readable.

Is there any way to fix this short of having to create a completely new login? Because that would suck pretty damn hard.

@faraday There's also just making a policy that states 'unless you are more than passingly familiar with tech and science, don't make a tech or science officer on this game' if it truly is that important to you.

What you're missing is that things like clothing -- or the comic book history of a character -- are just as important to those players as tech and science are to you. Your immersion isn't any more precious and special as any of theirs is, and just like they don't get a pass on making demands beyond an everyman-with-minor-primers-and-research understanding on the player level, neither do you.

In short, no, science and tech aren't any different from any of those things, and this is exactly the problem I've been trying to describe as a barrier to entry, and a genre in which the behavior that is typically called out as negative is instead embraced.

Again, I don't expect people to even know there was once such a thing as a 'sumptuary law', let alone what any of those laws were, or why they came to be, but to me, 'sumptuary laws are a thing' really is, internally, very basic rudimentary knowledge about clothing. My internal baseline for 'basic', however, is far afield of the average person. Being aware of this is actually important, and managing expectations based on it is even more important, because no game is all about (generic) you and (generic) your sensibilities unless you say so right up front.

@Ghost I don't know whether 'I'm drunk off my ass at the moment' means mine are less, or more, up to that task.

I suggest we don't find out.

Most game settings• have very real unpleasant aspects of real life in them. Almost any historical setting will, for instance, and modern day real world has plenty, no matter how much progress has been made in many ways from some of the more popular historical periods to draw from.

This will be reflected in the characters played there, or should be to some extent -- even if this is just 'the character recognizes these negative things are real in the world they inhabit'.

Exceptions (toward more modern real world perspectives) almost always exist in any of them, and generally speaking, PCs are very often the exceptions in this regard. IMO, this is cool. Some people don't agree and think this breaks the game experience on some level, but provided people keep in mind that these are exceptional individuals with atypical views, that's more than fine enough; if they want a more harsh take on things, they can likely find someone willing to explore that with them as well in ways both players (players, not necessarily characters) will enjoy.

If the character exists in a world (Arx is a good example) where things are notably different, I would be more concerned with an insistence on exhibiting these traits -- because they'd be atypical.

Looking at the kinds of characters on a modern day setting WoD M*, though, there are endless gang members, hit men, mob characters, and so on -- and I wouldn't necessarily think the majority of the players behind them are idolizing these types or even glamorizing them in some way••, or that they're somehow unusual for the game world.

I would arch a brow a bit at the people insisting on including these things in a space where they are almost unheard of much more than a setting in which they are considered to be commonplace, where it may not give me a moment's pause or concern.

• I know the one I was looking at certainly did; in many ways it's considerably worse than anything people encounter today. 1715: not a lovely year if you weren't white, male, and whichever flavor of Christian your area took a fancy to in most cases. It doesn't disqualify it as a valid or fascinating setting to me, and I don't feel the people who would have chosen to play there believed that's the way things should be in the world.

•• Some do. Not something I find charming at all.

I'm guessing there's not a user-side 'use previews, don't use previews' option? That'd resolve any quibbling, but I suspect y'all would have gone with that if it was an existing option.

I liked the previews for one reason: we are some tangenting motherfuckers. There are threads I don't think I ever would look at save for the glimpse of some tangent or related discussion growing out of the original topic that looked interesting from the preview.

@Sparks : Atlantis has been so much better than Savitar was I never looked back once switching over, and I'm notoriously hard to budge on anything changing ever.

Very looking forward to new things, and very glad to know you're still out there!

@Sunny I think there probably is a way to go about this -- people can still be hurt/have bad feelings about something even if no one did anything wrong, and it's important IMHO to recognize and respect that. It is HARD AS HELL to phrase that without it being 'I'm sorry you got upset, I didn't mean to do that and I'm sorry it happened' even if you genuinely truly do feel bad and want to make things better.

That tends to be more, "I didn't realize that would upset you, I'm sorry it happened, I will not do that again, is there anything I can do to help make it better?" territory.

@Arkandel To be honest, the MOOs I started on were much like this. Cybersphere is, Ghostwheel was.

They were fun, and the 'busywork' things got you small gains and filled downtime like the old text non-RP games probably once did between running into other people, and random encounter pick-up scenes would typically ensue.

Sometimes, I really sort of miss that. It gave people reason to be out and about and wandering, which did give people more reason to randomly run into each other.

@GirlCalledBlu MUDrammer works pretty nicely, thus far. It's not super amazing, but it has worked consistently for me. I think there's a free and a paid version, not sure of the differences between them.

Something like this sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

I have two suggestions, though each has its own drawback.

1. Modern era setting -- we all know it, people can play with modern tech, etc. Drawback: it's going to be hard to prevent politics from coming up, and potentially starting the kind of OOC arguments and hostilities you probably won't want on your game.

2. Historical setting, even if it's fairly recent history. Example: Cold War 1980s. Tech level isn't so vastly different that people will not be able to understand it or wrap their brains around it, even if they were born in the 90s or later. Plenty of us lived through this, too. Drawback: History means "OOC homework", and some people are so gadget focused in their daily life that they can't live without these things as part of the casual day-to-day (rather than as their special spytech gear they can't always use openly), and these things may lose you some people in the process.

(And no, I promise, this is not just me loving the 80s! It's just the most obvious recent history example that stands out.)

@Miss-Demeanor said in The Apology Thread:

@Misadventure I'm not a millennial pansy that needs a 'safe space' from 'scary words', so no.

Yeah, sorry... I have to agree with @Misadventure on this one, the dismissiveness here is a bit much.

PTSD is a real thing, and if people could control what sets it off, I'm pretty sure 'those millennial pansies' be much happier about it than the people who are in proximity when it's set off and feel the need to look down on them for having a delayed emotional reaction to trauma.