Best posts made by surreality

@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

@arkandel - The way we handle it in Arx is Voices/2nds in command, who act with the voice of the faction leader. Spread the love and share the burdens, because it shouldn't and can't always be THAT ONE GUY who stands AT THE NEXUS OF ALL DECISIONS. It's not feasible IRL, and it's certainly not feasible in a game.

This is pretty much the only way, I think, this can be managed -- and agreed that means 'RL or on game'.

This is also a really handy way of handling NPC-run factions; it means there's a set number of folks who ever have to deal with that NPC directly, or interpret whatever 'demands from on high' are sent in a memo/missive/directive to the remainder of the faction (or to those delegated seconds to implement -- or not! -- as appropriate and/or interesting).

@kay The @ on that file just makes my day. That totally needs to become a bigger thing than the thing it apparently already is.

There's some core stuff I still don't really know how to do on setting one up. But organizing one? There, there's ideas, dangit.

@bored Also, let's be honest -- not all game developers bother to consider an important question: "Is someone taking on this IC leadership role we've designed for this setting going to have to spend the equivalent of RL full time hours doing the job?"

If the answer is "yes" -- or even "maybe" or "Mmn, maybe about half that?" so far as I'm concerned -- it's time to look at structuring that group in a different way that allows for a number of people to share those responsibilities and spread them out more.

This applies to NPCs (almost) as much. (And I only say 'almost' since multiple people can contribute to running an NPC if necessary.)

I remember hearing about games in ye olden days that used to have requirements like 'you need to be on at least 2 hours every day to handle this job' and similar crackpot bullshit that, hey, maybe it worked when we were all in college or high school, but is beyond laughable to most people these days -- and for good reason. Some were a little more lenient, but still had things like 'at least 12 hours a week available exclusively for faction management' and so on. It's just not practical for people with actual jobs and responsibilities in the real world beyond what the average college students we used to be had at the time.

So in a way, I think we've not really examined that specific question as much as we should have. We all remember ye olden days of faction heads being around all the time -- because most of us had a lot more free time then -- and many of us still think of that as the standard baseline, on some level, for what a faction head is or does, and if they're not able to do that, they're a do-nothing failure.

It isn't so much that they've failed -- though some certainly do! -- as that we haven't, collectively, taken as many of the steps as we really need to take to redefine these roles in a much more manageable way for the audience we have. Importantly, this includes 'bringing in new people' and 'fresh blood' as part of that audience, not just 'let's cater to the current crowd and ignore what someone new might bring to the table'. When presented with what looks like an overwhelming or unreasonable amount of work? Yeah, you're not going to be keeping as many of those new people as you might want to, because, 'fuck THAT!' is absolutely a thing -- and it's how most of us would respond to those ye olden days requirements now, were someone to attempt to enforce them today.

We're not (typically) doing that in policy, but in terms of our hopes and expectations? A number of us still kinda are, and I'm reasonably certain that's where a lot of the stress about 'do nothing faction heads' comes from.

@auspice That sounds like the amazing-as-fuck doctor that replaced the previous omg-you-are-such-a-shit doc for us a decade or so back. He's maybe 15 years older than us and is not a douche; the previous doctor was a former Navy doctor and his practice was almost exclusively elderly patients. (Since my grandparents and parents went to him, I ended up stuck with him, too, since he was who we knew and who was originally covered when I had their insurance.)

Previous doctor: "Take two tylenol 2x day, that will be $40."

Period. Always. Often enough, I would spend a week half dead taking Tylenol before I'd even go in because I knew what he'd say, and I could tell him: "Tried it, did nothing." Changed nothing. I think once he gave me antibiotics too weak to kick the flu I had and I had to go to the ER. Once, a scrip for 5 painkillers -- because I broke a rib. He refused to believe I broke a rib until he pressed down so hard on it, it popped in and out of joint under his hand and I screamed so loud it cleared his waiting room. In both cases, despite knowing I was broke as fuck, he refused to ever allow generics -- it was always the brand name. Those 5 painkillers were over $200. -.- Everything from migraines (which he refused to believe I had despite my grandmother having them and several other extended family members of mine having them) to bronchitis was 'because you're overweight'. ?!?!?!?!?!?!?! If I was a pettier soul, I'd track down his grave to pour a urine sample on it and leave a pile of monopoly money for the $650 or so his favorite lab always charged to test it in 90s $s.

Current doctor: I have no idea how these two ever knew each other for one to take over from the other, they're so night and day. Current doc, knowing we're broke, hands us samples that he keeps piles of on hand for precisely this reason -- especially for short term meds like z-packs and so on. Always prescribes generics if there is one (thankfully, there always has been, and if it's between two options, one with and one without, he always tries the one with a generic FIRST). Does not instantly go to 'all of your problems are just because you're fat'. (He will say 'losing weight will help with your back' because DUH, but even he knows that's a duh and presents it as such. )

@tinuviel No more fucking on the beach though.

The weredolphins would be constantly in a state of protest.

@bored A lot of that is a design thing, too -- I'm guessing that Firan had a bunch of tools that would allow you to set up the various rosters/etc. and that the others would be notified, and so on. That's not the kind of setup a lot of games have, and it is something that makes a difference. (Namely, the more tools a game provides to make managing the workload easier, the more work someone can reasonably do.)

Picture the same on your standard WoD game, for instance, where none of those tools are in place. Suddenly, that 1-2 hours daily -- which is still a lot for most people's availability -- explodes, because it involves scheduling meetings, accounting for everybody's timezones, making sure you send @mail to everyone and that everyone reads said @mail, posting to bboards for the group (...which, again, no one reads), and so on. Add in the expectation that many have in a WoD setting that there's going to be some sort of 'depth of interaction' with the person giving the orders, and suddenly what even RL would be a five minute meeting becomes a 4 hour soul-and-time-suck.

So I'm guessing we're more or less saying the same thing here in most ways -- some games account for this in the way they set themselves up with reasonable expectations, and some really just don't. Essentially, there's a third option: bad structural design, and people are often egregiously blind to it.

Design involves a whole lot of 'moving parts' -- some are code, some are policy, some are game mechanics, some are world-building. They all have to work together or the whole thing can hit the skids. It's one of the reasons I squint at times about things being converted from tabletop to MUX, since the actual environment is so different; a straight conversion is almost certainly going to fail outright.

@auspice said in The Makeup Thread:

Are they really worth it?

FUCK YES.

(And I am a broke-ass idjit.)

The pair I have now replaced an older pair... but I've had these for 7+ years now, and they're the needle-nose tiny points type. They replaced another pair I'd also had for years. (Someone else used them to unwedge an ingrown hair -- without permission or even asking, no less. I'm sorry, but fucking hell no motherfucker, those things were instantly dead to me, and I'm queasy just thinking about whatever of my eyebrow germs they impaled themselves with, gods-know-where. <turns a vivid shade of green>)

I have way too much Italian ancestry to not use them regularly, either, so it's not like they just sit somewhere gathering dust for months at a time. They're good, solid, though eyeball the little sleeve thing real closely, because I did once encounter a pair that weren't perfectly aligned, and they tended to nip off/snap a hair rather than pluck it.

Have had their needle nose, flat nose, and angled varieties over the years for various things and splurged on a travel set I <3'd them so very much.

@botulism Am glad to see this happening. I would love to see more people doing this for every system every so often.

@faraday Sadly, beating our heads against walls is pretty common.

We all remember 'that one time it was awesome', and most of us try to structure things in such a way as to attempt to enable that to happen again, or foster it happening more often.

Sometimes, it works well enough to make something more frequent, or easier. Those are baby steps that are worthwhile, definitely.

But by the same token, I agree that the 'but but but that one time!'-ism isn't good to expect. (This goes both ways, too; people shouldn't be crafting policy based specifically on bad acts by folks like Spider or Rex, for instance, either.)

It's like trying to replicate a 'happy accident' in art. Sometimes, you find a new technique. Most of the time, though, you just have to be glad it happened once and any attempt to recreate that is going to fail spectacularly.

@auspice This is what always gave me the hives whenever my folks would gripe about me allowing other people to stay here. (Pre-Spider, nobody had ever done any damage or harm. After Spider? Yeah, I get the reluctance.)

While they're the most Fox News watchin'-est pair imaginable -- literally all day every day -- they go on often and at length about 'Catholic virtues of charity'. (Unless it might benefit somebody not white or straight or also Christian, but... <pained sigh to end all pained sighs>)

They finally shut up (until Spider) with: "I don't have cash to give, but I have space to spare, and I know people who need it, so get over it."

We've had folks moving cross-country looking for work and new homes, we've had someone fleeing an abusive marriage and a looking to start a new life, we've had people thrown out by their own families for reasons of different faiths or coming out as bi or recovering from a permanent injury -- the list goes on. Some folks brought people I barely knew or never knew before, so that crowd does include total strangers.

As a result, I just can't get the NIMBY attitude, since we've even had people crashing in the B that stands for Bedroom sometimes, not Back Yard.

Now I really wanna go to Maine 'cause I collect beach pebbles. I hate you all now.

@arkandel Like that wasn't going to get 80s music junkie me to post a link to this at warp speed.

(Bait, taken.)

@packrat D'awwwwww. So much personality in that pic, too.

"I am a noble, wise, and dignified creature."
"Heeeeyyyyyy, what's dignified meeeeeeannnnnnnnnnnnnn? (Love me!) Hiiiiiiii... "

Completely adorable.

@templari Oh, I would.

If you think I'm kidding, the beach we normally go to for pebbles, we don't just go for pebbles. We go for 'random debris'. Because the town used to extend two more street blocks further out into what is now ocean (complete with the wreck of a concrete ship -- ah, the things you couldn't make up if you tried!) and it's a good day when we find something that looks like it was part of a ship, or a weirdly ocean-pebble-smoothed 'this was part of the brick of somebody's house once or piece of weird old Victorian bathroom tile or whatever.

It's a really good day if we find a piece of rusting concrete ship hulk debris or a weird chunk of furnace slag or shiny hunks of coal from some submerged house's now horseshoe-crab-filled coal cellar.

Otherwise, mostly rocks, because nifty fossil coral and other weird little fossil bits and whatnots turn up sometimes.

We are very weird people. Very weird.

@arkandel Pretty much this.

High-ranking leadership, really? I have come to see as part of the game's setting. They are as much a part of the world as the grid. They are essentially a public utility, and exist for the benefit of everyone.

Using the playground analogy, they aren't costumes to be taken out in the toybox and put on by individuals, they're more like the swingset or the slide that's making the active play space (the grid) more enjoyable for everyone.

Sure, they can get blown to hell once in a while -- but like grid squares, we generally do not do that without good reason these days. There's a reason for that.

@packrat Double d'awww! I have always had pairs, and almost always there's 'the dignified one and the derpy one', and somehow, that's just so completely awesome. Our giant flurfmonster is our derpcat to end all derpcats, but we love our derpcat a lot. (We now sorta have 'the whiny one and the derpy one'. Our dignified one was Ancient Cat.)

@sonder

OH DAMMIT NOW THERE WILL BE SOMEWHERE I HAVE TO PLAY.

I see what you did there. Sneaky!

If there's an Eternal from the 80s who thinks she's Cyndi Lauper or 80s Madonna wardrobe-wise, tripping over her feet and completely incapable of getting laid if her life depended on it, that will doubtless be me. (Note to self: Molly Ringwald must be the PB... )

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

I dunno if I should continue participating, as I am immediately (by my second post in this thread) coming back to the same 'arguments' and questions that I posted and came to in the other thread.

I am kinda in the same boat here.

I'm also trying to tinker with my thing again, and really? Not up for the hand-wringing and doom-saying and wish-listing.

I just know I'm working on something I think is kinda cool. I may need some help eventually, I may be able to figure most of it it out myself eventually, somehow. It is rather a lot of work, though, so I'd really rather step out on this kind of discussion for a while, because these discussions are not often inspiring any longer, they're incredibly demoralizing rehashes of the same hand-wringing, doom-saying, and wish-listing.

That said, want a real, simple suggestion for MUX/MUSH/etc.?

Set up a /me <pose> alias or command. This is one of those commands that exists in some form in a variety of messengers and so on that a lot of folks are used to from daily non-gaming life.

Currently, this requires both code and aliasing within the client software (in my case, Atlantis), and that is a pain the ass. (I managed to do it once, but probably not well and I couldn't tell you what I had to do in the client to make it work, as I don't remember.)

But, really. There you go, one wee hurdle taken out of the way that opens up access to a lot of people already accustomed to text mediums with immediacy.

(And how many times have all of us been skyping and then try to /me a pose in a game window? Yeah, I didn't think that was just me.)

@cupcake said in RL Anger:

Apparently he also asked another pregnant lady, "Do pregnant women use hormones as an excuse to be dramatic?" some time ago.

"Some might, but it's hard to imagine it's anywhere near the number of people that use a woman's pregnancy as an excuse to ask her rude, absurd, invasive, and disgustingly stupid questions."

(I work from home for a reason.)