Posts made by surreality

The super specific scheduling of exact time and date makes me a little uneasy, too.

Talking about, "I have time this week on Day Evening, Day Evening, and Day Afternoon, and Day Before 5PM <timezone> when I have an evening event I'm signed up for, do any of those work for you?" is something that's almost essential these days, though couching it this way does make a pretty big difference to me -- less like scheduling dental surgery, more mutual respect that people have lives and some times are better than others to meet up.

My favorite option is still perfectly summed up in this image:

@ghost said in What is your turning point?:

Once, someone tried to talk me into making a very specific character, only for me to find out that character concept was an actual character on another game whose player she'd had a falling out with, but still wanted to continue that story.

Since this is in constructive, I can really only say: that's pretty awful and unsettling.

You know me well enough, I think, to fill in the horrified flood of metaphors and creative profanity that instantly inspired in my brain, though.

@Tinuviel My favorite RPers are the people who can run with something crazy along those lines -- sometimes characters that grew up together, knew each other a long time, or just spend a lot of time together off screen.

A gem is someone you can toss something like, "Ugh, don't get me started on last night," at, and over the course of the scene the details of something that never got role-played and was just off-screen is fleshed out via improv. Typically involves at least some degree of humor.

"Ugh, don't get me started about last night."
"I still say that waitress was into you!"
"Do people into you usually pour coffee down your shirt?!"
"...if they want to see if it'll get me out of it, maybe."
...and so on.

The people you can spit something like that out with without any pages or consultation in a comfortable back and forth? TREASURE THEM.

@thenomain You aren't. I have had it happen.

It's about 50/50:

• They're inviting me because they want to play with me and <game> looks like a fun place to do that.

• "I am having so much fun on <game> and am already really busy all the time there and there's no lack of stuff for me to do yay that's so rare you should play here, too!" and then them never having time to do anything with me because they're already fully engaged re: the time they have available for that game with what they already have going on. Sometimes they may intend to play with me and just don't realize how thin they're already stretched, others, it's just "I'm having fun here and I think you would, too" with zero intention of playing with me there.

I don't actually mind the 'I don't intend to play with you there' variant in most cases, provided the person makes this clear from the start. Otherwise, it feels too string-along and just becomes a frustrating mess.

@wildbaboons The most infuriating incarnation of the time waster:

"OMG, sorry, I forgot!"
"OK. Want to aim for <later date and time>?"
"Sure!"

<repeat the above past the point at which credulity is strained, or this person's memory must be worse than a pasta strainer>

<after a few rounds of this, when later date and time is within a few hours>
"We still on for a scene today?"
"OMG STOP NAGGING ME OMG, what, did you think I would forget or something?!"

-.-

Yes, yes I did, actually. And that's the version of events that's giving them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't just being a cowardly jerk!

Good question! I can really only answer 'historically' at this point, since I haven't been playing lately.

There is rarely one thing. There are things that can tilt the scale in that direction, though -- and it's always one of them that's the straw that breaks the camel's back, barring over the top crazytown antics (which are thankfully somewhat rare).

Things that work against someone:

• Consistently disrespecting my time. This means not bothering to ever tell me if you're not going to show up, or making plans only to blow them off to go chase someone else.
  Annoyingly, in my experience, this is often to go chase TS with someone -- confirmed, not guessed or speculated upon. I wish these people would just tell me 'I'm not interested in RP with you when there's available epoon to plow!' so I could go do something else and not set aside time for them. (Because I wouldn't.)

• Pressuring for OOC personal hookups/etc. This is a total no-go zone, and I'm up front about this. That... changes little, for the determined idiots.

• OOCly stalking me around the MUX. This could be +where-stalking, 'I see you are unfindable what are you up to?!' or the other variations on, 'how dare you be in a room with someone with a name that might be male!'

• As a sub-heading beneath the last bit, if someone has a bad thing to say about literally anyone I'm in a scene with that isn't them. This isn't always an accusation of something, and it usually takes a few weeks for this one to surface, since one instance of it is sometimes harmless.
  There are less-than-awesome groups someone can fall into a scene with, and being warned that you've just slipped and fallen face-first into a toxic clique is not what I mean here. It's more the weeks-long progression of 'I see you're in a scene with Bob and Sandy, did you know that they totally cheated back on <game>? (Insert pile of gossip about Bob and Sandy here, repeat the next day when it's Tom, the next when it's Susan, etc.) This is a more insidious sort of 'I want to control who you play with' that's more subtle than the direct freakout over 'OMG YOU ARE IN A ROOM WITH BOB AND YOU ARE MAH PROPERTAY' but it is absolutely the same sort of bullshit control tactic with an extra dose of toxicity.

• Does not share attention well with others. Must always be the star/winner/focus of any scene they're in, no matter what it is or how many people are involved.

On the plus side:

• Creatively interactive. Picks up on hooks and throws them back. Does not always do the most predictable things (or the same thing on endless repeat).

• Sense of humor + does not always have to be perfect IC all the time. A sense of humor, and a sense of self-effacing humor (without getting into slapstick or self-pity) is a huge plus and adds a lot of fun to playing with someone for me.

• Shares attention well with others, and creates opportunities for others to have the spotlight.

I like that explanation for intelligence, actually.

It's harder to 'play dumb' than it seems -- and frankly, most people in this hobby are well enough above average intelligence. (And some people won't 'play dumb' if their character is less intelligent than they are, and some will go so far as to say that making the choice as a player to play to the low intelligence stat -- something a lot of folks consider the only 'fair play' of it -- and screw up sometimes is actually player-level unethical if it ever in any way impacts any other players in some way.) That really does sidestep that neatly.

That said... any time something is set in a different era or non-standard-earth modern world, I do lean toward inclusion of some kind of 'common sense' stat. We wouldn't think to boil our water every time before we use it in most cases, for instance, but plenty of people who came before us knew it was necessary, and so on. Similarly, your character may reasonably know that everyone from <fictitious country X> doesn't eat meat, while that setting detail may not have made it into somewhere visible (or simply have been forgotten OOC when it would never be forgotten IC) and thus asking for a steak dinner in said vegan land would be a bad idea, etc.

@magee101 The only space opera place I was playing on was Otherspace, well over a decade ago. Recently (like, the last two years or more), only WoD, that teen place for one scene, and pirates.

8th Sea: Someone mentioned it directly before there was a thread, but it was here.

That short-lived teens game: Ad thread here.

FC: "Well, we could try Fallcoast?"

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.

Part of what's confusing about the wiki family page is that it's describing multiple methods -- and a fair bit of it is not up to date.

I have managed to make it work through this method:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family#Multiple_wikis_sharing_common_resources
I can confirm that the list of things they say you can share is no longer accurate; I can't recall which of the folders isn't viable to share off hand, but at least one of them is no longer shareable by 1.30.x.

That may not be what you want, though; which option you go with is going to depend a lot on your end goals.

Are you looking to run one game with access to multiple wikis? If so, look at that option. (This is what I was doing when I was able to make this work -- a core wiki with the RPG data, a private staff wiki for issues and behind the scenes metaplot notes or dev, and a player-side wiki. If this is what you're doing, you or whoever is doing your setup probably also want to look at Interwiki to port data from one to the other easily.)

If you are looking to run multiple games that are completely independent from each other, potentially run by different people to provide general hosting, you or whoever is handling your server foo should take a look at the Zero to MUX thread; Nemesis describes means of setting up multiple users and handling the installs more distinctly that way -- and you would explicitly not want to use the 'shared resources' option described above, as your various game runners may want to use different extensions or combinations thereof (some of which have a habit of breaking or losing support between mediawiki updates).

You're less looking for a mediawiki person here, and more looking for a server admin. This is better news than you may think; more people are familiar with server foo than the weird minutiae and vagaries of mediawiki in particular.

Suggestion: list the extensions you want to use here. Some have additional requirements and dependencies, and these requirements may better inform your server admin how to handle your setup.

@aria That is amazing. I don't know how they do it, but so help me, I think 'Something is Not Quite Right' is a feature of cats, rather than a bug. It's just a bit like a crackerjack prize.

@aria Your dog clearly needs to meet my scaredy cat. They could confuse each other into endlessly entertaining panic. (She once sneezed so loud she startled herself into a backward scurry, bounced ass-first off the headboard, wondered what 'hit' her, and launched across the room to not be seen again for hours. It would not surprise me to discover that she had simply teleported herself into the future out of sheer baffled terror.)

@thenomain said in New Vampire Release:

Wait, Mark Rein•Hagen is involved? Did they find him couch-surfing in California?

He is most definitely on this couch.

@Bobotron I had to cough a little at the fashion bit but will reserve comment save for: "stiff, ungainly, ill-matched, and awkard 'meh'". I could frouf that out in a proper critique but it'd boil down to that in the end. Theno will probably hate me for this, but I otherwise love the page layout and splatter dynamic. Personally would have tilted it the other way, though, for ease of reading. (LTR we visually read indents more easily than outdents.) Just... none of the photo contents at all. Or the bodywrap words.

Making sure to fully redo this before having to go to the DMV to replace a lost driver's license:

...go ahead, motherfuckers. Go ahead and just copy and paste 'brown' again.

(Fuck you, WB of the WoDiverse -- that shit took five hours. And, no, there's no retouching or color adjustment; it is that fucking bright.)

...actually, dumb as this may sound, has anybody talked to Chime about any of this?

I know TR was set up with a MUX (real time chat and private messaging, channels, private discussion spaces even possible even if it's just a place to make temprooms off of to chat with someone that way for brainstorming or whatever else), a mediawiki install (permanent data), and a forum (not nodeBB, but I think one of the other standard sorts that gets used a lot without much issue).

I know she's not hosting any more, but that... actually nails all the criteria described and then some, would add a fuckton of functionality and additional options, and even if she's not hosting, perhaps she could offer instruction for a means of setting something like that up?

@arkandel So help me, I wish there was some kind of wiki-based solution to the problem. I would feel at least a tiny shred less useless in terms of ability to help if such a thing was indeed a thing. There are 'forum style extensions', but it's not the same thing, I don't think. If I knew of any that I had hammered around to see how they work/etc., I'd let you know, since arguably it could potentially solve the 'ad thread' thing with just an ad page for a game with autolinks to various threads or pages about it, people could set up their user pages with their shout in the dark style things, etc. But it's still just not really at all the same animal, and there's no protection from one person editing another person's words. (That, in a nutshell, is the core fail.)

This one is hard, yes.

Lyrics describe personalities so much more than appearance to the extent that I seriously considered writing a parody TS pose instead based on the one song I know of that does have physical descriptions in it... <shifty-eyes>

@sunny We may have our differences, but I am genuinely -- no snark whatsoever -- happy to hear this, and was sad to hear you were thinking of leaving the hobby all together. (I figured you were just busy off playing somewhere and didn't have time for forum bullshit.)

I've been in the same boat and had been feeling much the same.

Sincerely, I hope these recent trends take root. They seem to be good things, and I hope they continue to get better.

"We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are."
-Clive Barker, Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament

"I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one."
-Guillermo del Toro