Best posts made by surreality

It's especially dumb 'cause in the case of things like policy files or house rules for an existing system and such, I have literally never seen somebody in this hobby say, "NO, YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT!" if they're asked.

@deadculture I ended up making a rule for myself that I wouldn't read any series until that series was complete (or as complete as it was going to be), in whatever doses it came in. (Sub-trilogy, sprawling series, standalone trilogy, etc.)

As a kid, there were the nigh-endless series like the Dragonlance novels, and as an even younger kid (we're talking 2nd and 3rd grade here) the Xanth novels*, and they just kept going... and going... and going.

I appreciate a good standalone novel for exactly this reason. The endless sprawl series style would get old well before it showed any indication of when it might be over, and that was unsatisfying and ultimately disappointing.

• I never got the 'dirty' humor as a little kid, I just saw endless puns and fantasy things that 8-year-old me found funny and cool. My husband and I picked up the audiobook of the first of them for a road trip with my mother in the car, since I hadn't read them in years, and... the results were predictably hilarious when she flailed about what filth she'd let me read as a small child.

Magic has been made to happen on this front, but I'll let the magician announce themselves if they wish to do so.

So very, very much on this one.

@Cobaltasaurus You may want to cook the fruit a little to reduce the liquid. Even if it seems to lose too much, it will leech it back from the milk, I'd think?

+1. Redshirt PCs are awesome.

They're also a great option for casual players, or new players who want to try out various spheres/factions on a game before they find a group they click with timewise/stylewise to make a more permanent PC.

@mietze If there's someone you can talk to regarding a restraining order, please start that process as soon as you can. I know that it is scary, but the more dangerous thing, ultimately, is that they don't have a record of who he is and what he's doing.

It makes it much, much more likely that these things that may seem 'small' to an officer taking a first call if he does something like show up out of the blue again are an escalation and continued unwelcome pursuit -- it will make that very obvious, because 'stay away' will be unquestioningly clear, and him just showing up will far more likely result in him being prevented from showing up again.

No questions, just a virtual hug in spirit for the passing of your friend, and lots o' empathy. Do what you need to do for you, since in the end, that is the important bit.

@skew It's giving us some quirky timeouts, so once that's no longer an issue, I'll pass it over to ya.

@zombiegenesis I would almost suggest 'start highish, drop automatic daily completely, allow for gain through beats' but I am likely way in the minority on that.

I have to adult a lot this week.

I am not looking forward to it.

I realize I am posting here way too much and writing far too much, because it is much more enjoyable to argue about shitty people who make my teeth grind than to handle the adulting I need to do this morning alone, and shitty people who make my teeth grind are not actually enjoyable to even think about much.

I do not want to call the asshole surgeon to tell him the same thing he's ignored the past four times I've been to his office to tell him that I can't have the test done he wanted done by this week -- because he completely ignored what I told him the last four times I've been there -- knowing that the best result I'm going to end up with is a rescheduled appointment and more of the same antibiotic that makes my skin slough off in peeling sheets in anticipation of having at least one of my breasts partially or completely hacked off in the coming months.

I do not want to haul 3 more boxes, each approximately 80lbs, or have to open them on my parents' lawn to haul in the slatgrid panels individually to drag into their garage with the rest of our show gear.

I am really not in the mood to price shit today, either, even if know I need to keep at that steady because I was too productive earlier in the year and have a huge stockpile of crap that needs pricing.

@Collective OK, that's pretty awesome. Now I sorta want one. Not the picture, but the thingie.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@surreality I was composing a post that addressed maintenance as you posted, but I don't think it quite addressed what you're saying. Wouldn't the 4 dot merit cost exactly the same for the mortal and the vampire? I would be wary about mixing apples and oranges, though I try to address that by suggesting to use the XP costs as given by the books as the basis for maintenance.

The human never has the opportunity to purchase the out of clan discipline, so there's no real conflict there. I prefer playing mortal, though that's immaterial here. I will say that if everyone, regardless of template, approaches the same limit or cap, where one spends the XP becomes very important. Items with high utility tend to cost more. Increasing Dexterity and Athletics will both make you better at football, but increasing Dexterity costs more and reflects that increased cost by increased utility; it can also make you better at using a sword or hiding.

I don't think the system benefits building tall (characters with a few but expensive stats) or wide (characters with many low stats), but it does make building tall and wide difficult. The only real variation seems to be with the innate abilities granted to a supernatural template at character creation. When given characters that approach a limit at 50 XP, this is dramatic. When given characters that approach a limit of 200 XP or 400 XP, isn't this less of an issue?

In your initial example, you're discussing a charge per dot, not a charge per amount of XP spent. That's what makes this a problem, because different dots have different costs. If the 'tax' on a dot of Blood Potency is the same as the 'tax' on a dot of Resources, you have a real issue on your hands.

It also fails to account for things like Professional Training, which grants a pile of 'free' merits, skills, specs, and things that otherwise will drastically increase the character's 'tax burden'. Not only would you be paying on your PT merit, you'd be paying on the two free dots of contacts, on the free specs, the free skill dot, and so on, in addition to paying the 'tax' on the merit itself.

I really just don't see this as a good idea. Diminishing returns on earning has been shown to work quite effectively. This kind of maintenance is a hassle, it's more work for staff, and I don't see a single upside to it that can't be resolved through much less complicated, high maintenance, and grief-inducing measures. I would not even consider a game that had this setup -- and I'm not the only one who's said as much. Meanwhile, people regularly play on games with hard caps or diminishing returns, typically without complaint.

I think the inspiration here is clever and insightful. I really do. I also think it's one of those aspects of RL that no one looks forward to and we all more or less consider a teeth-grinding hassle that is not something we'd necessarily want to be forced to do/waste time on, and I don't think adding that kind of hassle to the gaming experience is going to improve the gaming experience -- it's going to bring part of RL most of us loathe into it, instead.

To be fair, I do not loathe it in my case. Self-employed artist. I'm always learning new shit for work and am a font of useless skills and specs, were I to be written up in CoD. Everyone else I know loathes this, loathes having to spend a small fortune on it in some cases, and really, really hates it. My mother? Teacher. It was endless. My husband? Massage therapist. He has to do tons of additional 'refresher' training that is not cheap annually that's just a review of things he's already learned, he maintains nothing he doesn't do by working at his job day in and day out, learns nothing new, and is out money for the privilege of that waste of time.

Is this the kind of experience and frustration anybody wants to invite into their relax, unwind, and play a game time? I mean, really? It strikes me more as exactly the kind of thing we enter into the hobby to avoid having to think about or give ourselves the chance to destress from.

To my understanding, she did not come in to silence the discussion as a poster or a mod. The suggestion to move it to a new thread to contain discussions like it -- since they arise often on many games (which is unfortunate) -- that could be found more easily based on the subject matter.

It's important to a lot of us, which means it's to everyone's benefit that it not be lost in the middle of a thread about a game that will likely be so dead inside two months that no one would think to look for any valuable information there of any kind.

That was how I read it, anyway. I've made the same suggestion for the same reason on a number of topics, especially those about things we'd really prefer to only have to describe once and not have to repeat or spend forever searching out a link for with the forum's normally craptastic search capabilities.

@Tinuviel @Auspice This is how I feel about anything that has anything to do with the crockpot, too. If I'm not making a ton of it, screw it.

We make the beef stew in a gigantic pot, as the slow cooker is just too small, with an obscene cost's worth of meat in it. It never, ever lasts the week. Not ever.

Tangent: we have amazingly well-behaved cats re: human food. Aside from Ancient Cat having had this weird fixation on broccoli, they keep away from it, though sometimes they'd get sniffy at a bowl once empty. Except the beef stew. We'd get whined at to hurry up so they could have the bowls. Because we have the sense of humor of five year olds, the beef stew bowls have ever since been referred to as 'the bowly grail's.

@Rook I just sort of have to look at it and sigh and remind myself that I have cats and that means I can't have nice things.

Especially nice electrical zappy things.

The fluffball is already so zappy in the winter any time she crosses the carpeting that we named her Tesla.

Something might actually explode.

@Hexagon Mostly to do with paging, @mail, etc. I'd think. That could get tricky. Setting it up for display in room and other informational commands, though, is probably something that could be done pretty easily.

@ganymede With the "X is a serial sexual harasser" example... well, on one hand, you have that, and that's easily construed as a personal attack.

"There are multiple accounts that X has sexually harassed them, you can find the logs/evidence/accounts here: <link> <link> <link>" (where the links may be in a different area of the forum, pastebin, or whatever, obviously).

The important message is conveyed and there's backup to it, so it's not just talking out of the wrong orifice, and it's not name-calling.

@pandora This is all supremely awesome news.

Double bonus kudos on wrestling through all of the immigration stuff. A work partner/friend of mine went through the same thing with the UK and she said it's always a ridiculously slothful slog of hellish bureaucrazy -- she was wrestling with them for years. (From how she described it, it's pretty much this all the way down, so this is extra good to hear.)

Thank you, @Arkandel. I'm sure there's a lot of us who appreciate the return of that function.

@Hexagon It isn't that the idea doesn't have value -- for instance, I'm pretty sure you'd probably get traction with the RPI crowd on this one much faster than the typical MUSH crowd, since they're more into the code+mechanics-heavy simulationist experience, generally speaking.

It was pretty much a ton of work to put 60 characters through respec within a month. It is not something I would ever consider doing again as a staffer. We had the extra stress of the entire mechanics and system being new, but that wasn't the hardest part of the process: it was getting people to reply to their jobs and simply tell us what they wanted.

People don't seem to have a huge problem with 'work harder to advance beyond X point', as was the case with RfK's decreased value per beat, or even with oWoD/nWoD's multipliers in costs.

Paying more just to keep what you've already earned and paid for is a different animal, though.

Now, I actually do get the argument re: passive earning, and I think that's a very valid area to examine. People have looked at all manner of ways to try and figure out some way of making this 'fair' or somehow tied to activity (which some people feel is in itself unfair) or slow it down after a point... nobody has found a universally satisfactory answer to that one. I don't feel this one is it, either, though, even if I think the idea comes from a reasonable application of observation of the real world.

Looking at Reno specifically, I feel the starting total definitely allows players to make a pretty dang capable character. Maybe not their dream badass, but definitely a very competent and capable character, especially if they go for the background incentive. With that starting amount, personally, I would have dropped the passive gain from 2xp/week to 1xp/week, and let the rest flow from activity/beats/etc. That's me, though.

The average lifespan of a game lately doesn't seem to be terribly long (before it becomes a ghost town, and I'm not counting the ghost towns), barring a few exceptions (FC, Shang, Arx will get there I'd bet, etc.), and this becomes a factor, too. While it's not a bad idea to plan for what happens if the game runs for 4 years and players are getting 104XP passively per year for just avoiding the freezer, it's the kind of problem people seem to go to extremes about preventing with very low starting amounts, or incredible amounts of hoop-jumping to earn XP through activity, etc. to prepare for a problem that will arrive on a later day that is simply not in the cards for that particular game to reach. Often enough, these methods -- and the hassle associated with them, or the feeling of sucking at everything all the time and it being difficult to advance at all, or whatever else -- will actively contribute to the game not succeeding to become one of those games that lasts long enough for this problem to actively manifest.

I have ideas, but no answers -- at least not for this problem on any given oW/nW/Cod game. (I don't, heretical as this idea is in most parts, feel oWoD or nWoD or even CoD are terribly well-suited to this hobby, at least not without some major overhauls. Which then becomes a new problem, because fans of the game as written will feel like they're no longer playing the game they like as it is, etc.)