Best posts made by surreality

@kay I don't know you, but I don't care about that. We gotta do this.

@faraday ...I am spamming the world's largest reply ever to Ark, but had to totally pause and scrap that post just to at you for this.

If I can find the thing in Atlantis I set to let that slip through, I'll post it. If you nudge @Sparks, she may be able to put that in as one of the exceptions or similar in later builds? Hopefully. I really do think it's genuinely one of those 'little things that helps'.

@aria I gave the floufcat our 'apply to achey bits' ice pack, seriously. She's flopped over next to it like it's made of sunbeam and keeps headbonking it. It's kinda amazing.

@kay 80s anachronism, no game, nailed it:

@ashen-shugar I am beginning to believe this is how nearly all code is actually created, you realize.

@auspice MAC may also. They were able to match me, and I'm the same kind of impossible. I got 'we normally only sell this to Asian women who are very very very pale'. It lasted FOREVER. Not cheap, but it lasted long enough to make it more than worth it. I need to eventually get around to replacing that thing, I just have to do it when I haven't been out in the sun constantly, or it throws everything way off with the 'instantly tan forever because I went outside for five minutes'.

@shincashay Danke. I had about five days before mechanipus went down to scramble something together notice-wise, and then my computer went 'nope!' to finishing it up. (Because of course, right?)

Hopefully it will be properly fleshed out soon, since I should be able to get back to it later this week.

@packrat You could arguably break that down further, really. Instead of the flat cost for the secure holding, give an example of a standard secure holding (and the cost for that), with a breakdown of the things that make it that way, or what benefits it provides.

For example, maybe the 'secure holding' is 20 points; that's composed of the following: 5 points in loyal 'armed guards', 5 points in 'strategic/defendable location', 5 points in 'good will of the serfs', and 5 points of 'defensive weaponry'. Then let people pick which things they want to scale down -- or up -- from there, with a general example of what each 'point' purchases of that thing.

It is way too damned hot to be hungry at all, and now I am. Damn you people.

...for what it's worth, every single member of the staff gives a damn about preventing infestations of the passionately stupid.

We may not be able to accomplish that, but a fuck is officially given to that end.

Uh, not literally a fuck, because that would be a completely different sort of game. But the point remains, I hope (in the grip of sleep dep of epic proportions).

@ganymede said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

Bump In The Night is what you're probably thinking of. It had great players, a great wiki, and a great idea. The setup was a bit janky with the Conspiracies, however, and players lost interest in running plots for each other.

It had another issue. This also comes back around to 'the limited resource that is STs', but that isn't the only problem it involves.

An event would get listed.

It would hit max player cap on signups x2 within an hour, often within minutes, by the same people every time. This list wouldn't be identical, no, but the same 10-12 names absolutely dominated the list for a long enough time that prevented other people from having much of a chance at involvement in any of those storylines.

These things were typically listed during the day -- just dumb luck, really, but that's how it tended to go. Anyone not on during the day had almost no chance to become involved early on.

This persisted long enough to be an issue.

Yes, more STs and more events would be a help -- but there were a fair number of them.

People not signing up for everything and blocking others from getting a chance to become involved? Would also have helped.

By the time anything was done about it -- some kind of policy went in, I just did the wiki and RPed so I don't recall what it was -- many people had already given up, and felt completely shut out.

Yes, more STs would have helped. Players being considerate of other players wanting to have a chance to become involved actually would have helped a hell of a lot more.

Hulu's were the worst for a long-ass time. They would have the 'this ad is completely not relevant to me' option you could click... but it didn't stop them from showing it to you repeatedly, over and over and over and over again.

That they would have so many two minute long individual ads for various bits of medication did not help. Really, I swear, Hulu, I am not your target audience for 'please go get a prostate exam'.

There's different ways of handling that, too, that can make a difference.

I'm not familiar with the ones in use on Blood of Dragons, or what policies are in place there in general, but a 'there are not many of these things in the world, so the concepts are restricted in quantity; no more than one of your alts may be a thing on the restricted concepts list' sort of policy isn't crazytown in itself.

It'd ultimately depend somewhat on what's on that list for many folks (which I think is @Kanye-Qwest's objection re: females being barred from certain roles, if I'm reading right). On a modern game, those things may be something like 'supermodel, movie star, billionaire, royalty, rock star, child prodigy, lone wolf stripper ninja' (potentially even with caps per group if scaled reasonably for playerbase size and setting). Anybody could arguably play one of those things on that game, they just couldn't play more than one or overlap them.

I don't know if that's how it's set up or not, but a setup like that isn't inherently unfair or full of favoritism. Same with 'if you want a restricted concept it takes more app time to make sure it still actually fits the reality of the game', provided everybody has the same opportunity to app.

It's when only staff favorites get all the shinies or the chance to app for these roles that there's real cause for concern. I have no idea if that's happening or not, but that's the only case in which I'd be squinting at it by default.

@apos said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

@arkandel I noticed a difference too, with the pace being much slower on nWoD in my limited experiences there. I attributed the spacing to how the game system puts the impetus of managing rules more on the players themselves with it being less coded, which in turn I think emphasizes a strict pose order since the consequences of someone being skipped or passed over is much higher.

Writing the mechanics of a published, for profit RPG system into code that can fire and forget gets into very iffy territory, depending on the game company. Since the mechanics are reproduced on the game in a way that doesn't necessarily require someone to own the books, a lot of companies don't allow this.

More full automation of their systems is something most companies prefer to license to video game companies, not small fries like the lot of us. Depending on how they write their permissions, this may be apples and oranges, or we may all be oranges. We are usually all oranges when it comes to coding in the actual combat mechanics other than 'you have a dice roll simulator and a sheet simulator to tick off damage'/etc. that makes things much more on par with tabletop usage of those rules.

@aria Apparently it's a condition that can be stress-related. I mean, if you sorta tilt your head a little and squint, you can kinda see it! All of us that were young and carefree in the 90s are getting to that 'oh shit, rent/mortgage/children' stress period of life...

It's still silly, but that one I almost kinda can get! Kinda.

Though when I see those it may as well be this:

@yyrqun said in Blood of Dragons:

Sorry if I'm being a Debbie downer on what other people prefer for their own pretendy fun time. Just thought that there was an indication people didn't understand the limit/thought it was unfair and was trying to explain why the game has the policy it does. I apologise if I was wrong.

You're fine -- nothing to apologize for at all. It's more... you don't need to explain or justify any of it to me. I'm fine with it being how it is, I'd be fine with it various other ways, too. Other folks may not feel the same, and if they aren't fine with it, they can and should play somewhere else.

I don't play there myself (hence not having a clue about how things are done there) but it's less any issue like that and more Not Playing These Days + Not Really Into L&L Games In General + Not Being Super Into This Specific Fandom (no offense intended to anyone who is, I'm just not the level of immersed in/familiar with it I feel I'd want to be before playing on any game set in a existing world property -- same goes for Pern/Fallout/etc.).

@lithium ...thank gods thread drift is not part of the drinking game, or the hobby would die because all of us would be dead from liver poisoning. (Just in general, as in... this doesn't surprise me much.)

@packrat Gigantic fluff monsters are awesome. Mine's on my chair, intermittently chirping at the screen like the flurfaderp she is. (I love my derpy fluffcoward. She's amazing.)

Disney Princess of Cats, I swear.

Disney Princess: sings, dances, and all the woodland creatures rush to do her bidding
Fluffcoward: trills, prances, and all the humans rush to do her bidding

...I think she's secretly much smarter than she lets on, because she's got that routine down to a science.

It takes so long to write something hideously purple, the person writing poses in a saner length is likely going to be able to get more poses out much more quickly by comparison.

I suspect that will balance out more than might be initially expected on the whole, since the only benefit the purple people would have would be if they're writing as many poses as everyone else -- and while they may hold up a scene now and then with pose order issues, that'd be made up for rapidly by faster-paced scenes with shorter posers that the purple person isn't in.

@auspice Oh, please. I did almost exactly that within the past decade when a friend of mine was deployed overseas.

For some of us, that form of stupid is a lifelong disorder.