Best posts made by surreality

Waking up because of sudden, sharp pain.

Immediately getting hit by the sudden, sharp pain nausea wave.

At least I made it to the bathroom in time.

(So, it's gonna be one of those days... )

Admittedly, I still feel the worst about not pausing to wuffle the flouf, because she was in an adorable flopsy pose and I had to vault her completely in the zoom. She looked really big-eyes worried and was making 'the mommy is of concern' meows at me when she rushed into the bathroom right after me.

Why does that feel even worse?

@nightshade ...because maybe you're looking for something more like an RPI or a MOO, which is not the MUSH/MUX hobby's fault.

Plenty of people like the things you don't. They are no more wrong to like them than you are to not like them. So stop acting like they are; it's arrogant nonsense.

Depends on the game.

While WoD/CoD has settings like this, so do other systems. This is a stat, like any other stat. That makes it very hard to omit. Things like Nature|Demeanor/Virtue|Vice/etc. have concrete mechanical effects within the system. As a result, I don't see these being something that can be hand-waved off to be set up later. Changed later if something else is more appropriate? Sure, provided the changes are kept to a dull roar.(1) Anything that has a mechanical effect is hard for me to justify hand-waving entirely in chargen, particularly if it's something that can be changed with relative ease at a later time and evolve reasonably with the story.

Background isn't as important to me as concept as it is initially envisioned, some of their initial goals as a player, and explanation of anything unusual in the character's history or on their sheet. The last is fairly sweeping and covers a lot of ground; this could be a high stat atypical for the concept, a stat typically high for the concept that's low, or something very unusual for the character as described. For instance, I'd want to know why someone's 16th century English noblewoman knows the ins and outs of the magical practices of the Mayans or similar, because that's not exactly normal. (And while PCs are generally exceptional, that's not the usual way 16th century English noblewomen are exceptional.)

I don't like the 'any unspent XP/starting points are lost' approach. At all. Never have. It's too easy to overlook something, realize very early on in play that it's missing and would be something the character would have, or with that small tweak they could fit perfectly in a needed niche in the game with a minor tweak that benefits not just that player and character, but may be the glue that keeps a group cohesive when that character can be tweaked to suit the group, or become the missing piece that completes their collective puzzle.

(1) "Dull Roar": Whatever terms someone is comfortable with to avoid changing between every scene to and for whatever provides the maximum mechanical benefit, because we all know that guy is out there. Somebody may be happy with 'no more than once every three months', or might like 'change at will if you think appropriate when the character fails (or even faces) a breaking point', logs of justification -- whatever they think is suitable. Similarly, things like touchstones should be somewhat malleable; X may fade and Y becomes elevated in importance as the story unfolds, and this is reasonable. It becomes less reasonable when this becomes a case of 'oh, well, that wasn't a big deal any more, now this other thing is' when it's presented to staff after something has happened to the original thing.

I have been lucky. My only MU dreams I can recall have been either 'ooh good scene idea!' presumably inspired by whatever's going on on a given game, or...

...in the nightmare form, I am always coding. MUX coding, not wiki coding. (Sorry, Thenomain.)

(Wiki coding is a totally different set of nightmares.)

In the really horrible nightmare form, I am coding while a drama explodes and I have to mentally keep code and five or so people all having histrionic fits of flail at once that I have to mediate while everyone vaguebook snipes at each other in the peeves thread.

The above happened enough while asleep that I once had to erase 'fuck this, time to wake up' into a multi-page to the drama llamas before I hit enter, because it took a moment to remember, 'fuck, I'm awake :/' as it happened RL (sans peeve thread, iirc, but this was years ago).

@faraday said in Favorite Minigames:

• I've +scavenged seven times this month and all I keep getting is this lousy Cheese Hat.

Apropos of nothing, my dice and randomizer luck would guarantee I could start a Cheese Hat concession, which I could just scrape by on until I find that winning lottery ticket!

...five minutes before the server hard reboots and has to be rolled back a week.

No, really, this is completely my luck.

@shincashay said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

@cobaltasaurus And that's creative.

If I bump into them I do the whole doppleganger thing. "Hey, we look a like, we could be siblings!"

Cause it does happen. Not a big deal.

If I ever did the parody game thing, there was an XP bonus for either playing it up like this, or making a plot out of it, etc. Also for 'major PB change mid-stream and everyone pretends not to notice' soap opera style, since it was all about silly TV and MUX tropes and being silly and having fun with them.

@Goblin Sooooo bookmarking that. You definitely need this one:

(The writers must have seriously loved him, it was awesome.)

@thenomain I had a project that was a bit like this I considered for roughly a week, but I've considered it a few times since. It was pretty heavy on the navel-gazing, enigmas, and thinky-action/mystery-solving rather than being anything remotely like superheros with fangs or fur, though, so I already accepted that it wouldn't go anywhere.

It didn't involve hard resets where everyone starts afresh, but smaller changes to the world would have occurred based on character actions that would have a ripple effect of sorts. The entire setting, also, was essentially frozen in time, in a realistic-enough-to-pass-for-a-real-place shared Limbo of sorts, repeating one week somewhere in the vicinity of mid-October as a continuous timeline. People would remain where they were where they left off, doing what they were doing -- it didn't involve a timeskip backward formally in that sense -- but it was always 'the halloween festival is next week', etc. and to the local/townie population, this was absolutely normal and none of them ever realize anything strange about it. It was, essentially, a rolling mystery for players to resolve, and the way they'd go about it would tend toward being fairly personal. (It was also very timey-wimey weird in certain other ways.)

@misadventure It's the tiered costs. I haven't done it all in a while, but the math works out such that you could have two characters with identical stats, but depending on how you build them in CG and with CG or later XP, they will cost the same in starting points, but one will cost much more in (combined) XP than the other. The way it works is that you do exactly that -- front load the 'expensive' stat while having almost nothing else at all, resulting in what is more or less a one-trick pony that's anything but well-rounded.

The flat costs eliminate this, and since it's not going to cost more later, people are more inclined toward a more reasonable and rounded spread of attributes and skills.

Basically, if you ever want that 5 in tiered, it's considerably cheaper to buy it in CG than buy it up over time. You ultimately end up with people who have the same stats, but those stats don't have the same cost to get there, which is pretty meh.

I can't say I would ever support 'I want a respec now that I have enough points to min-max better in a tiered system without crippling myself somewhere', that's for sure.

@Goblin I just love that quote, even. It's such a grand quote.

My husband refuses to watch the show. REFUSES. WILL NOT!!! HE WILL NOT I TELL YOU!!!!!

...except when I throw it on in the background on Netflix when we're on vacation while I'm doing something else and then he's asking me every six seconds what's the deal with so-and-so because he immediately gets totally invested in spite of himself.

BUT HE WILL NOT WATCH IT! NOPE! NOT HIM! HE WILL NOT!

@arkandel said in Game Restarts:

The most time consuming part of any game is the code - that's what actually can actually take months depending on how much you want to customize... and there is no need to bring an existing game back verbatim in order to reuse its code. A game-runner can run a completely different nWoD Vampire+Werewolf game reusing another's setup with the exact same code, as long as they come up with a new theme and populate the wiki with it.

...yeahhhhhhno. As others have mentioned, there is a huge amount of work in writing up a good setting and concept with any meat on its bones at all. Using an existing property (like WoD or Firefly/etc.) essentially imports a lot of information that otherwise someone has to write up in some detail.

Beyond that, you generally only have to write the code once for most things -- unless you want to tweak to add something or it wasn't as ideally conceived as it may have been at the outset. You will never stop answering questions about a setting and world as they arise, often requiring additional notes and information added for all to reference.

@roz Most posts have been clear on that front, so I must have missed any broad assertions that there's a 'one true way' from a wide array of posters.

That said, I do think people do this anyway, all the time, as a normal part of gaming. While people talk about how annoying it is that somebody didn't read the books/watch the show/read the theme files for the game they're playing on, most have or do.

Almost universally, these documents or source material include a wide array of very important things that the players know, and the characters (or any specific character) do not or cannot.

The majority of players are already accustomed to this. It's already baked-in. If someone says or does something they wouldn't know as their character IC, wrists get slapped for it; that's also already baked in. We have all survived this or we wouldn't still be here doing this at all.

As a result, ultimately, this is not a question of people being able or unable to do this, or us not having means of dealing with it if the issue arises. It's a question of how fine-grained we want to get regarding transparency or secrecy.

It will work differently for different games and different players. This isn't really a matter of it being exhausting to suss out, though.

"Dude, your char wouldn't know that, that's not public info." "D'oh, my bad!" is not a world-ending crisis.

Neither is, "Hey, how would your character know that?" "<reasons>/Oh, shit, you're right, I wouldn't, sorry! Reposing now!" "OK, cool!"

Both of the above are pretty common in healthy game communities, regardless of their stance on this. Fostering a healthy game community in which the above exchanges are the beginning and the end of it, without snarling accusations of cheating at people who simply brain-farted, or people being terrified to provide any RP hooks that hinge on secret information IC, is far more important than any call someone could or ever will make on how fine-grained they go on providing information in the first place.

@Goblin It really was better than it had ANY business being. Not high art, but still way, way better than it had any business being.

Someone I know I convinced to watch some of it in spite of themselves (but will not out) put it really well: "He knows how to vampire!" Stefan, on the other hand, "does not know how to vampire." I found this charmingly on point.

My mother caught an episode once, and her commentary was adorable:
"So this is where television is hiding all the handsome young men!"
and
"So there are endless pretty men without their shirts on, formal gowns or historical costumes every three episodes or so, and there are vampires? No wonder you like this."

The husband refuses to learn character names, and thinks this saves him. Everyone gets nicknames instead. (This does not save him.)

@haven said in Game Restarts:

I am a fan of amnesia-based restarts.

Nothing says TS Roulette like losing one's memory.

The number of cheesy pickup lines that immediately leapt into my brain upon reading this makes me sincerely wish this was a thing. (As in, IC, everyone in town gets a regular brainwipe on some level, and is aware of this, but not of what's been wiped.)

@Wretched Yep. I'm fully behind things like this being made available as good ST resources.

It gives people a good sense of continuity, and staff can keep things set up in such a way as to ensure there are antagonists suitable for characters of every experience level on tap for people to grab that are properly scaled to the needs of the game at any given time.

Resolution: do my level best to not die.

(This will only make actual sense to a handful of people, but such is life.)

@lithium Seconded.

I am a spectacularly craptastic coder, and code is still faster to get done than writing out the relevant ins and outs of a built world.

If this is "quick and easy", (generic) you are a fantastic and prolific writer at a professional level, are using well-developed source material that you're relying on people already knowing in order to play, or (generic) you are absolutely slap-dashing the fuck out of things to the extent that (generic) you're definitely doing it wrong.

Well. We have joked since the first story that it's a weird miracle there hasn't been an orgy yet.

This is weirder. So much weirder.

I do not recommend archetypes, but... uh, if, I suggest porn archetypes. 'The Pizza Boy', 'The Sorority Sister', 'The Horny Divorcee', 'The Handyman'...

(OMG Bot, please don't hate me.)

@Rinel Much empathy, and all the hugs that are welcome.

I have had the happy week or two. I have. I know they aren't actually a myth.

It... kinda doesn't improve anything, though? I remember how I felt when I never had; I know how I feel know. The 'wow, it is possible and it exists!' is a boost that is absolutely counterbalanced by the deeper low of 'and it is not like that now at all'.

I think a lot of people that appear to be happy all the time are putting on a front, when it comes down to it. There's a lot of performative happiness out there, especially now in the age of social media. It's not... especially real, and a lot of it is pretty dang shallow.

(This is one of those 'the grass is always patchy shades of green and brown in everybody's yard' scenarios, at least in my personal view.)

@insomniac7809 said in Real life versus online behaviors:

At the same time, I think it's a bit harsh to assume that skepticism on Cosmo advice has to be sexist in nature, when people might be more familiar with relationship advice like "if he seems happy, it's because he's cheating on you; if he starts taking care of his appearance, it's to look good for the woman he's cheating on you with; if he starts sharing details about his day, it's to cover for what he was really doing (cheating on you)."

I think this kind of thing is supposedly what they're trying to tamp down/put the brakes on somewhat. It still exists, but it is no longer more or less their sole content aside from ads and things like their infamous 'ideas inspired by 50 Shades of Grey' BSDM sexual experimentation list.

(Do y'all have any idea how long I have to sit around waiting for rainbow hair colors to set? I have absolutely browsed. And sometimes been caught mid-spit-take for my sins.)