Best posts made by surreality

@Ganymede said:

I wish I could just hole up in my office every day to plow through my work, but I have this fucking phone that just won't leave me alone. And e-mails. And people keep walking into my office.

I deal with it.

I'm all for removing the DARK flag for staffers entirely. If you're working on something, have an &idle message up.

There's an entitlement thing on a lot of games. "You are connected, therefore you can do my thing right now, even if other people are ahead of me in line, even if you are asleep, etc." Oh hey let's chatter for half an hour about the weather even though you're trying to set up somebody's stats who has been waiting patiently... who will scream at you until you're cringing if you misplace a dot due to the distractions or have to ask a question you lost the answer to in the mountain of spam now on your screen.

Sometimes having the idle message set just scrolls your screen much faster, since it adds another line to every page that keeps on coming in.

I got it a lot at work, too. Customers have zero qualms emailing at 3am and bitching by 3:15am why they don't have an answer yet.

@kitteh said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

So if people want games with social rolls, game designers need to go back to the drawing board and 2.0 their whole concept of these game systems. Nearly everything we play is a WoD-clone, with the same stat-skill conventions and minimal focus on social stuff beyond 'maybe you can put one virtue and vice.' These arguments will always go back and forth fruitlessly under these conditions.

I won't go into any real details of it now, but 'having that on the sheet' is something I'm tinkering with in the notWoD OT/OS project.

It was one of the very first considerations, actually.

It does work both ways, though, in some respects: while there's some stat things that give you what are 'core ideals/drives/haven't decided quite what to call them yet', they can work 'against' someone, too. If someone took something like "I will not allow my children to come to harm," they get a big bonus to resist anything that'd make them do harm to their children.

A person who tries to make them do something else that might be objectionable -- say, 'go kill that creepy molester in the van who has been eyeing your kids' -- may get a bonus on their attempt to convince that character to do it, for the same reason. It will be more compelling to them in a way that someone without the same core personal ideal has, even if they both have the same innate reaction to the idea of killing someone generally.

I think it helps people generate story that is a lot more in tune with the character's identity as the player envisions it, even if some of the story is horror, or involves Doing Bad Things, etc.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Random funny:

@Arkandel out of curiosity did it work when I reported it? Cause I saw it and went "wtf" but he was still around for a day.

Ditto this. I saw the 'hide things people' go up after that iirc, but that one never ended up behind a tag despite it being the one I think I clicked.

@Arkandel @Ganymede It is weird that I agree with both of you at once on a subject that you're on opposite ends of... again, I suppose.

I think there's a difference between constructive criticism and outright bashing that is relevant here, though -- and they aren't really the same thing. Yeah, you can dig through the bashing to try to find something useful, but it isn't always there.

A lot of folks seem to expect that if so much as a single question is asked, suddenly it's design-by-committee on the whole. (And no one on the committee agrees about 95% of anything.) They're also generally only working from the one question without much comprehension of the whole. That makes the criticism a little less useful, too.

(Speaking of which, I need to revive a thread when this damn painkiller wears off a tad and I'm not typing in a brain fog. )

@the-sands Not so much.

And definitely not when the author is sitting right there and can tell them: "Knock it off, you're being obnoxious, deliberately obtuse asshats," when people get into it. Or, you know, if it actually is too vague, there's a snowball's chance in hell of it actually being properly and promptly clarified in the direct source material, rather than in some rambling forum thread from six years ago, twelve pages into the same stupid argument, after which someone says: "Just go whichever way you want on it for your table," -- which is roughly as helpful as a jug of salt water to someone dying of dehydration.

@eye8urcake Not enough hugs in the world, but sending as many as I can manage in spirit. Holy yeesh.

I have two basic bastardizations of Vector I could potentially talk someone through, but to be fair I mostly just puttered around until things changed the way I wanted them. One's a 'wtf'-looking hot mess of confused notes, and the other is for a sekrit project, though, so please PM if you want to take a peek. The latter is definitely more workable for a page layout generally, and requires less puttering about with graphics.

In fairness, I am not sure who did Eldritch's pages, but they would be the folks I'd ask for advice. They did a stellar job with them. I am a chronic charpage-putterer and I'm still leaving my charpage template totally alone to blend with the rest of the site as designed, to give you some idea.

@thenomain I half recall a few instances of that as well from there. Like... how the heck am I supposed to know that <blah blah blah blah> unless it's written down somewhere on the game if it's not something from the books?!

Obligatory psychic talent: required of oWoD players, apparently.

Ammonites.

@Coin The way things are going this month, you'd seriously start to think people really don't want new games.

@seraphim73 Yup. (And at some point I am going to try to borrow you and @faraday or something because y'all and math are friends and math's mean to me, she won't let me sit at the cool kids' table. )

That really is about the size of it, re: the answer.

And the truth is, his answer was a good answer -- for a table, or a place where you have some say in who is or isn't there.

The issue: oWoD, in it's 2E days. So we're talking early-mid 90s.

Celerity would, when you spent blood, be able to take additional actions in a round because you could physically move faster than other people.

Makes sense, right? Simple?

Well, sane people understood this was intended for use with physical actions.

But the text did not say that.

The text just said actions.

Cue every rules-lawyering wanker from the early-mid 90s insisting that because it did not specify physical actions, of course you could cause chemical reactions [Celerity] times as fast, learn things [Celerity] as fast, perform spiritual/magical rituals intended to last X number of rounds in X number/[Celerity] rounds instead, fire off Dominate [Celerity] times per round... (none of which were typically physical actions).

His answer was the right answer. It just was no help.

<takes the shot>

"Oh, honey. That's why you don't play with people that stupid, it's not good for you."

Observe the complete lack of any actual clarification in this answer, and... <clink> ...cheers.

@JinShei That is awesome. I will see if I can find it in the library of doom over the weekend while we do some cleanup in there. Mine's from 1991, so there's likely new editions of it since. (Amazon is not showing 'the big blue book', which is how we referred to it back then, which is not a surprise... )

ETA: I say that, and then... https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Apparel-Through-Flat-Pattern/dp/0870057375

@Tempest Nobody's telling you to be quiet. We're just, you know, mocking you right back.

And I just wiki for them if they want me to. Story-wise, traditional staff-wise, and even 'make a character and play'-wise, I have no dog in this race. (So you can stop directing all the 'you's at me, anyway. It's like watching somebody throw a dart in a game in a bar and hit a bullseye... on the Target bag of the soccer mom unpacking her minivan in the suburb three streets over so far as your accuracy goes.)

@jennkryst said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@surreality said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@kitteh said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

So if people want games with social rolls, game designers need to go back to the drawing board and 2.0 their whole concept of these game systems. Nearly everything we play is a WoD-clone, with the same stat-skill conventions and minimal focus on social stuff beyond 'maybe you can put one virtue and vice.' These arguments will always go back and forth fruitlessly under these conditions.

It does work both ways, though, in some respects: while there's some stat things that give you what are 'core ideals/drives/haven't decided quite what to call them yet', they can work 'against' someone, too. If someone took something like "I will not allow my children to come to harm," they get a big bonus to resist anything that'd make them do harm to their children.

Sorta like FATE?

I couldn't tell you; I don't know the FATE system. Enough people talk about it, but for some reason it bounces off my brain in full.

Possibly? Maybe?

More or less the sum total of what I have absorbed about FATE:

"I think you should use FATE but I know you won't because everybody hates FATE for no good reason." - <lots of people>

I ultimately have no idea why I should be inclined toward using it, or why everybody hates it, but that's the statement that pops into my brain more or less any time somebody mentions it as the most oft-repeated thing about FATE on the forum. It has unfortunately stuck and wedged itself in there pretty good re:

'Self, what is FATE?'
'FATE is what some people think should be used but everybody hates it.'
'Why, Self?'
'I'unno. <mental shrug, meanders off to play with navel lint>'

@Derp 'Tis the big blue book!

In all seriousness, it's fantastic. Once you have your base flat pattern created, it shows you how to do all manner of variations based on that.

It sounds complicated until you do it once or twice, but a LOT of it is tracing things off, pinning your base pattern down and spinning it to connect different bits or add splits in different areas, etc. It's actually pretty fun.

One of the things I did was make a mini base pattern for an antique doll* I had way back then, and went through doing the examples in the book based on that. It was a pretty easy way to figure out the basics without using tons of materials up in the learning process. I dunno if that'd be useful to either of you, but it does help. (Also a quick fun way to make doll clothes as gifts for any family kids and such that play with them and such if that's relevant.) It meant being able to do quickie tests with a simple pad of graph paper (and you could use normal cheap copy paper, even, but graph paper helps to keep the lines straight you want to keep straight) on the bus on the way to class and such.

• Technically, I still have her... somewhere. She is very creepy. Ended up on the cover of a horror anthology ages ago a friend of mine did a photo collage for. Mwahaha.

Anybody who wants to give VASpider a chance to reform is welcome to do it -- on their game. Their time, their money, their investment, their time spent building trust amongst their playerbase, their risk. It's just a risk that has the potential to fuck over all those other players who trusted them, in addition to losing all the time and money invested in their project if she hasn't really reformed.

I'm not willing to count on someone who just pulls a persecution act and behaves abominably as a matter of course, and does not see any fault in their actions beyond the most fickle lip service to the notion, having seen the light.

I wouldn't take that risk on her, not only because I don't feel like wasting my time to build something I find cool only to have it scragged by a crazy person, but because the risk wouldn't be exclusively mine, and would also be shared by all the other players who chose to trust in the project to participate. The latter is a considerably bigger issue but the former alone would be more than enough for me to nope the shit out of knowingly allowing her on anything I ever run, if I ever decide to pick stuff up again.

I will also be incredibly pissed if staff on FH get screwed over because they trusted her, because they put a lot of time and effort into this place from what I've heard.

I simply do not believe in allowing a repeat offender to keep shitting all over that kind of effort, and claiming they just can't help themselves because they have <laundry list of medical symptoms that mean they're an explosive diarrhea factory at all times>.

@thenomain said in Repurposing a Tabletop RPG for MU* Play:

And yet, we do. We love it. We want more of it. People over and over say, "I would love to play <rpg system> online!" that we should identify the challenges and methods of overcoming them so we don't end up with more WoD Tabletop Shoehorn Madness.

I'm going to say the dreaded words, Theno. I'm sorry. But I gotta, because... it depends.

I sincerely believe that sometimes it's not the system people want, but the game world. Again, WoD proves this in its own case: the tabletop system and the LARP system are very different; people enjoy both and many times the same people enjoy both.

That isn't actually about the system at that point -- it's about the world and it's general vibe that was made, because the system isn't the actual draw, as it's different in both.

You can even narrow this down further, because it isn't just setting and flavor (even if these things are bigger than I think they're given credit for in many cases). Look at what the game allows players to do. Not the mechanics of how they do it, but what it allows them to do. This is also a major draw for many.

For example, again, take the WoD setting. "I get to be a monster that eats people" is a draw for some folks. "I get to turn into a <something else>!" and "I can do magic!" and "I can be that human that discovers all of this stuff is real!" are the draws. If you set up a game that doesn't allow for their specific personal draw, those people are going to lose interest.

For plenty of us, "Be someone who has to contend with the realities of that different world and the challenges in it" is what we genuinely believe and what we'd intuitively answer. This makes it sound like that means everything is fine as it is on its face -- and it's true to a point, but what those challenges are and which people are interested in splits dramatically, and it's essentially the same as the '...but not... ' or '...but not without... ' elephants in the room that are being overlooked, and shouldn't be.

(Also, glad you didn't delete this post. It's a conversation I know I've tried to have here before and it's one I think is valuable for all of us to consider.)

@SG Will always upvote Burn Gorman. Always. One of my very very favorite 'that guy's.

There is one thing worth mention, re: TS: be very clear where your lines are drawn and write it out.

If it's OK for characters to be sexually involved off-screen, and this is implied or mentioned in play, but 'the action' is not permitted, say so. If not, say that, too.

Define what you mean, too. If it's just intercourse (including oral) being written out that's a problem, say so. Be aware that many people expand 'TS' to include any form of physical affection beyond hand-holding or a kiss, and let folks know where your line is as clearly as you can. If a swat on the butt, or passionately pinning somebody to a wall to kiss them until their toes curl goes against the intended spirit of the rule you want, make that clear to your players.

Regardless, best of luck. I'm not an anime game fan, but it looks like you've put a lot of thought into the ideas and such here, and that's very cool.

@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@surreality said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@seraphim73 Yup. (And at some point I am going to try to borrow you and @faraday or something because y'all and math are friends and math's mean to me, she won't let me sit at the cool kids' table. )

Any time, I'm happy to talk game design, even if most of what I do is by feel and brute force, rather than crunching the numbers super-hard.

"Oh, honey. That's why you don't play with people that stupid, it's not good for you."

Observe the complete lack of any actual clarification in this answer, and... <clink> ...cheers.

Yeah, that's not just a bad game designer, that's a bad listener and a bad person. Cheers. And yes, bottoms up.

The funny thing is -- from a totally different perspective -- it's one of those 'differences between tabletop and online' examples that's huge. Like, he's not actually wrong? 'Don't play with utter wankers' is definitely good advice, and it's advice that works at a table, but we're really only coming back around to 'ousting the wankers from a game is not a sign of a psychotic dictator PHB' mentality in MUville.

It was just so not helpful. (It does show just how much oWoD was designed for tabletop, though, as that was a stock answer for many issues: "don't invite that person back," etc. There's a reason I've been saying that for like... ever.)