Best posts made by surreality

@insomnia Being a random, nearly forgotten entirely, specific-niche local god just scraping to get by would be amazing. (I'm getting flashbacks to Eddie Izzard's 'Jeff, the God of Biscuits' here, but that wouldn't be too horribly far off in terms of scale... )

If you stuck to stuff on that level, you could keep the power levels pretty easily in the range of the standard angel or demon easily, they'd just probably be less actually powerful due to being massively more specific. Like the god of some local creek's powers may allow them to heal someone or purify someone of illness or provide water-based foodstuffs or such, but only if they're standing in their creek and get somebody to chant some specific thing or another, if someone poisons their creek they'd take damage wherever they are, etc. It would be pretty easy to incorporate these as protagonist types or antagonist types, and the ever-more-popular 'sometimes they help, and sometimes they have their own agendas' type that the series is (wonderfully) full of.

Holy crap has it been a hell of an awful day, and it's barely 7am.

@the-sands Though we speak very different languages (I am Not A Coder so 90% of what you're talking about sails right over my head -- half the time I would likely grok the principles but don't know the terms) a lot of what you're talking about is likely very similar to a lot of the stuff I'm looking at trying to do through mediawiki integration whatnots; it just uses a wiki-family as the means of integration and web forms instead of having people run any server-side scripts. (Though it's a bit of a tangent, please don't underestimate how intimidating command line fu is to anybody who doesn't do it on the daily. It isn't that people can't or aren't willing to learn some basics, it's that The Fear of Breaking Things You Don't Know How To Fix Again is very real, and is a real hurdle to a lot of folks.)

Basically, my one bit of generic advice would be this: what you're talking about probably sounds like the user (game runner, not player in this instance) interface is easier than what we have now (and it is), but it's still probably going to be a little more daunting to non-coders than you realize. In part, because just talking in code terms that people aren't familiar with is going to leave a lot of folks feeling lost from the jump.

This, too, gets daunting as fuck. Let's not even collectively pretend otherwise.

Writing documentation is a skill. Most documentation is written for people who already have some notion of what they're doing; I'm slogging through a few hundred lines of that kind of thing a day and googling my ass off because I'm a determined bitch, but I still get the throat-catch of 'I have no idea what they're talking about and even less idea what I'm doing, I'mma break shit'.

Writing documentation for a novice anything is a lot more like teaching than just taking notes, and that's a skill, too. (A fairly advanced one, too, because it involves a lot of examining internal assumptions and externalizing them as simple explanations without overloading someone with extraneous details. I think the entire forum is well aware of how bad at this I am personally, ahem. <cough> This is partly why I'm doing a web-interface for things: it helps cut down my novel-length treatises on why we won't be creating pages in the main namespace in surrwikiworld and so on, or at least set those aside as 'extended notation' that people don't need to slog through, and goes with something that's relatively intuitive for most modern internet users -- filling out a web form with drop down menus and whatnot.)

This is hard, so please don't take what I'm saying as mean-spirited or meant to be harsh in any way. Just... be prepared to provide simple explanations for folks of what all the code terms mean -- and I mean down to 'what is a php script' because not everyone who wants to start a game knows that or has someone handy and willing to help who knows that.

Another thing to consider -- this is veering a little off the main question but is tied to @Derp's idea -- is to have certain things included in alt limits.

It's another of those things I wanted to try if I did something, for instance: 'no more than one of your characters can have Resources at 4+'. (I was going to allow 16+ for age, so another was 'no more than one character under 18', if this helps clarify the idea here.)

This wasn't tied to what kind of character it was or any other limit, but was basically a means of preventing someone from making 'and this is my stupidly rich X, my stupidly rich Y, and my stupidly rich Z!' No, pick your X, your Y, or your Z to be the rich one -- doesn't matter which, but it's going to end up being just the one.

It strikes me as a pretty simple means of preventing certain types of oversaturation that get a little ridiculous and skew things in peculiar ways on a game without locking down too hard on alt counts or creating other complications.

@Derp ...there are cheesecake cupcakes that are a joy and wonder to behold. More like mini single serving cheesecakes. Sometimes in little chocolate tart bowls, even. SO GOOD.

I maintain this is a better thing than either, with love (and pining for some of those because damn).

@thenomain It always was at any table I was at in high school before them, in D&D and so on.

'GM fiat' was always a thing -- maybe that was just cultural with my group, but 'if it doesn't make sense, do something else' was always common sense to the table and everyone I ever played with (even when sometimes we really wish they had some other, saner standard... alas, this even applies to crazypants GMs... ).

I would be interested, though I'm not really playing anywhere these days, so I can't promise a 'would definitely show up' here. (In other words, weigh anything I say with that in mind.)

I'm down with the era stated, but I'd be fine with modern day as well. 20s would be fine, too, for me -- Prohibition-era Superheroes vs. Gangsters and supervillain gangsters could be kinda neat, at least in my head.

@Wizz said in Good TV:

(...That said, The Mandalorian fucking rocks.)

^ This.

The husband and I have two things we won't watch until we can watch them together, and in both cases, it's HARD. It's this, and the new Harley Quinn animated series.

Also recommend the latter for so many reasons.

@faraday Yeah, I will agree that I think they're the first ones who said it up front -- or at least the first big name game. (Who knows what tiny games that came and went did while none of us ever noticed.)

Did Ars Magica have it also? I know WW was working on that line at the same time. (Ars Magica had the most entertaining merit that I still want to steal. 'Dead'. As in, 'everyone thinks you're dead'. You can't get by on fame or your name or your great deeds because... everyone thinks you're dead, so you can't be that person, that person is dead. This would translate in very big and potentially amusing (and whoa tricksy, thx bureaucrazy!) ways in the modern day.)

I don't necessarily think the game had to say it was OK for it to happen. I mean, I don't recall a single session of a game any of us ever played without something, somewhere, getting tweaked. Sometimes it was for humor, sometimes for narrative, sometimes for 'this just makes more sense', sometimes for 'this person is brand new so we'll tweak things a bit while they learn and they don't die on roll three after spending 4 hours learning what the game was and writing up their first character', and so on.

@faraday FS3's learning curve was a little slow for me, but I'm not into the free-for-all 'do whatever' from things like TR, either.

I'm with you on the 'sometimes you need to pick up something quick' skills, definitely, and I do think FS3 accounts for this. Some systems cut that off entirely, as in... 'what you built is what you've got and it's never going to change even a little'.

I'm also wary of anything that'd put someone in a coded position of 'by the time you learn to fire that gun you would be shot dead twenty times over'. For instance, if the system requires that the very basics of learning to fire a gun at a novice level take longer than the entire length of basic training for a branch of the US military (in which someone learns that and a whole bunch else), there's probably a problem.

@saosmash Please, please, please take this one seriously if it's ongoing and not just a 'this few hours is driving me bonkers'. I know it seems like a nuisance thing and not any sort of crisis, but I thought the same for years... and that's kinda why I'm in the midst of getting implants now. You do not want this, trust me.

If you can get something for anxiety, or even a minor muscle relaxant, for times like this? It's worth asking your doc. (Doc, not dentist.) Mouth guards suck, but if it's happening when you're awake, it's probably happening (more aggressively) in sleep; it really will help.

@arkandel In all fairness, dude mentioned a dislike for anonymizers for pass through logins to the server and whatnot earlier. It's not much of a stretch to extend that distaste to something like a 'there and gone again' email setup that's similar. If someone feels something is shady when looking at it from the admin side, I'd like to think they would be less likely to use those options as a player, too.

I'm not real fond of the pass through servers like this either, for the same 'even if this person is not up to something shady like evading alt limits or similar, they feel unsafe enough here to take this step' and I wouldn't want either on the game. (Needless paranoia is needless* and can also create a lot of trouble in a different way, if the people running a place aren't email spamming people.)

I don't care as much about the email accounts, since they're primarily for password retrieval and the wiki, and ultimately, someone using a there-and-gone is only shooting themselves in the foot, as I'm not inclined to hoop-jump for them to work around that past a certain reasonable extent.

• I'm not real worried on this front personally. The email used for BITN's wiki email sender is the same one I set up for the game I was going to set up around the same time (in short: we knew it worked and it's a pain in the ass to set up), and nobody's been stalked or spammed through it, so I have something I can clearly point to to say: y'all don't need to worry about that with me (if I ever do a thing).

ETA: tl;dr: If I can trust you to not wreck a wiki I spent a year or more building, and a game that probably took longer than that, you can trust me with a throwaway gmail account made for that game you're only going to bother logging into if you need to reset a password.

@thenomain said in Earning stuff:

What actions lead to what rewards are both set down by news files and the unwritten rules implied by the actions of staff.

Another thing we should do is endeavor to write the rules down, not leave them unwritten. Especially when it comes to what is expected from staff.

...so, to get any care in the state we live, we have to get the most expensive insurance option available from my husband's employer, as he works out of state. It eats about half his income, no joke.

I have some words for whoever at his office is picking the options, and while not all of them have four-letters, that's because I would be inserting FUCK into the middle of every other word that isn't fuck, fucking, fucker, motherfucker, or motherfucking.

@ghost It was so commonly used on Shang people flipped their shit when it was blocked in large numbers. Apparently, a lot of people use it default for MU*.

@thenomain Having nothing but a black hole when it comes to the most frequent issues doesn't inspire confidence in players (who should be able to see this rule information also) or give them any idea of how things will be handled, or what is even appropriate to approach staff about.

People need to know what they can report.
People need to know what they can ask for.
People need to know what they have to ask for if they want it.
People need to know what's off the table, period.
People need to know how their problems or questions will be handled.

Sure, some people will try to game that. That in itself isn't outside the scope of something that can be written down, like the classic: "If we have to make a rule based on something incredibly awful that (generic) you did, it doesn't just apply to those that come after you, 'cause (generic) you done fucked up hard."

@saosmash The muscle relaxants (if you start noticing a regular tightness or ache in your jaw, especially in the morning, this helps before bed) and mouth guard may still help. I realize I have horrible tooth genetics, but shattering a molar in your sleep isn't fun to wake up to, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. If it's something that happens a lot, it's definitely worth looking into to prevent stuff like that.

Admittedly, I ground through my bite guard in two weeks... clearly I'm part pit bull or something. As a result, I know the cheap ones from Walgreen's and similar work just fine, 'cause.. yeah, we weren't spending another $400.

@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:

So if someone told me "Hey, update your home network so that this guy you don't know can connect via IPv6 to your home server to play an online game" I'd:

Me: "I'm offering something free under the terms I'm comfortable doing so, and no more." (The end.)

Privately in my head: "Wow, the entitlement is really off the charts when someone's telling me to spend $120* just so they can join, too. Maybe I shouldn't bother doing this at all."

^ Because seriously, this attitude is not much different than, "If you want me to play in your tabletop game, you have to buy me all the books."

• Because maybe it's nothing to you, but $120 isn't something I have just laying around for my own fun, let alone to use on something for someone else's fun.

@Thenomain I think you're making a lot of assumptions here.

Beyond that, I think you're forgetting the 'some people are new' problem.

Someone new to the hobby may genuinely not know that they can approach staff with anything that involves harassment/stalking/creepy pages/etc., and only with questions about the mechanics of the game and how the game works. Plenty of game communities function in precisely that way -- including some of the ones I started out on. Someone cheating the code? Report OK! Someone harassing you with racial slurs and creepy come-ons every time you log in? "Sorry, we don't get involved in that."

So you can call it 'too fine grained' that I think it's worthwhile to tell people: "Hey, if you have a problem with somebody, whether it has to do with the game system or not, you can come to staff about it" is overbearing, but then I guess it's just a good thing I gave up dev, then, huh?

We have at least managed an appointment with the nurse practitioner in a little while. Ideally she'll be able to make a referral to Not That Guy, and handle my prescription refills. Fingers crossed.

It seeeeeeeeeeeeeeems to have calmed down a notch today, so I'm hoping they can arrange for a heavy duty antibiotic to knock it the rest of the way out over the weekend. Please please please please please...