Posts made by surreality

...how many hours Zuckerberg is likely to get grilled by the senate today. This is the real popcorn for me, y'all.

It depends. (Take a drink, y'all.)

The old quote, "Character is what you do in the dark," comes to mind here, and I think there's great truth in it.

If you can't behave with ethics and common decency when your real identity isn't attached to your behavior, you don't really have ethics or common decency. You just have a fear of being identified and/or thought of as someone who doesn't have ethics and common decency, and fear prevents your true colors from wholly shining through.

Count me in the 'oh, great, a delusional manchild with a reasonably legit persecution complex, is still catty as a 13 year old re: his parents, a true believer in a great cosmic future under direction only he can provide, and phenomenal cosmic power. This is gonna be totally wheeeeeeee' camp.

If I wanted to see that, I'd just watch the news more.

@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.

This may have to be my next PC some day.

@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.)

@arkandel said in Game Restarts:

But for most games creating custom code does take considerably longer than writing theme. That's not as obvious these days since we have the option of using big chunks of existing code thanks to the efforts of coders like @Thenomain, @faraday, @Griatch etc, which trims down that time very considerably, but at the same time it's the very rare exception that a game-runner will take multiple months to do writeups of their setups and create the wiki assuming they are actively working on doing so.

I really don't see this at all, or think this is the case at all.

When I look at the games that are around currently, there is plenty of information about their setting/etc., albeit most of them rely on other core material. The one that immediately comes to mind that doesn't rely on existing material is 8th Sea, which has a lot of information about the (original) world available on the wiki.

Even BITN, which came together very quickly because for some reason 'make it fast' was some kind of weird goal for some of the people on the team (I you all but this was super stupid), and is the best example of a 'make it fast' game had the culture and information about every single main grid room documented on the wiki. Fallcoast and Fate's Harvest have plenty of information about their settings and the unique creatures that inhabit them.

I am sincerely just not seeing what you're seeing here.

@arkandel said in Game Restarts:

@surreality said in Game Restarts:

...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.

That work in writing up a good setting and concept with any meat on its bones?

That's the game. That's the whole point!

Yes, which is why it is not a minor effort or something that takes less time than code as you claimed in the section I quoted. Code can take months, sure. A good setting and world? Can very easily take years. The most time-consuming part of setup really isn't the code.

@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.

@auspice If there is ever a cat game, I need two characters. Smug-as-fuck Ancient Cat clone, and Tesla, the Disney Princess of Cats clone. Because yes.

If Ancient Cat had a human voice, she would have sounded like Maggie Smith. I know this. Complete with that magnificent way she has re: sounding utterly polite while clearly demonstrating epic levels of disdain or pained suffering at the stupidity being witnessed at any given time.

@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.)

Lying sack of shit liars who lie all the damned time, and think they're subtle enough to get away with it.

Protip to this type: YOU ARE NEVER, EVER SUBTLE.

@auspice Not gonna lie, I think Discord is perhaps the most aptly-named application in recorded history.

@bobotron You should, ideally, be able to set that sort of thing up with interwiki if you're using two different wikis on different hosts. It can be a pain in the ass in some respects, and I haven't hashed out all the fine points on it, but I was working on something like that before I pulled the 'fuck it' lever on trying to do something any time soon (since the asshole that more or less destroyed my desire to do anything in this hobby for the past year or so really hit critical asshole status a little while back and doesn't seem to give crap #1 about dragging that needle back from so far into the red where the evacuation sirens are going off and steam is shooting out of things that steam should not be shooting out of unless something's going to blow and take out the entire countryside).

The interwiki documentation is a little hazy, but I may be able to pull up some of the backups I have later in the week to talk you through how it generally works and some of the things you'd want to consider when doing it.

Keeping the same css and layout/design for both wikis is not necessary, but it's agood idea unless you're as anal-retentive as I am about how things flow and want to spend a lot of time making templates.

I was ideally setting something up that someone could later just yank the core materials over from the core wiki to theirs if they wanted to use the system, but it wasn't 'there yet' from my perspective on functionality, be warned. It sounds like you're trying to do something similar here, so feel free to nudge later in the week if you want, and I'll see what I can do.

<scrawls on the blackboard>

I will not let my mother's soul-sucking negativity, ignorance, and constant state of hand-wringing and endlessly vocal paranoia destroy the first inkling of a fresh artistic impulse I've had in 2 years.

<repeats this 1000 times>

<takes a picture of this>

<tries to sell it on etsy>

<realizes that according to her mother, it would be equally effective but so much better because it wouldn't cost anything>

<crawls off into a grumbling pile with the Tylenol and Xanax to Grumpy Cat the shit out of the rest of this day... and plan how to do that goddamn project some more>

@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.

Things like coded gambling and similar I can get behind, simply because it adds something IC that people can do together to the game world. Same with things like coded tarot and similar.

Thing is, most people I know just go to any number of available websites for these things. I know I've done it for tarot readings IC and it has universally been easier and more fully-featured than any text-based code, with zero stress on the coders.

Similarly, stuff like the scrabble game I described... odds are high a group of people from the game could all hop on a channel and head over to a website for that. I know The Reach did something like this from time to time with Cards Against Humanity, which was fun and OOC social bonding fu for players. This kind of thing shouldn't be underestimated as a means of generating community goodwill amongst players or creating opportunities for new people who don't know anyone there to chill a little with folks socially if that's what helps them get their comfort zone going. I'm completely down with the idea of setting up a game account or group or whatever on such places and putting a channel or similar on the game for that sort of thing, but in these cases, finding a way to do it on the game itself feels a lot like re-inventing the wheel... as what will probably be a less functional and feature-rich wheel.

I enjoyed the random monster slaying on the MOO I started on. It was random time filler if no one was around. These days, I'd be far less into it, and it would feel too much like work.

In fairness, I had just as much fun playing coded scrabble with other folks there OOC. I'd have more fun with this than the former these days, but I am not really inclined to install something along these lines on a game I would hypothetically be running purely because too many OOC social draws, while they may keep butts in seats, so to speak, around doing something sociable and harmlessly competitive and fun (which is a net positive on the community building front OOC), it's a draw away from doing things IC, which I'd want to be the focus. Granted... the way I would ideally set things up, this could potentially be harmless. I dunno.

@arkandel We are those nerds that love RP so much we never TSed on Shang. That's always gonna stand out! (Seriously, I should have guessed much sooner for name reasons, I mean, jeez, I felt dumb I didn't figure it out for yeeeears.)

@tinuviel said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

With a few exceptions, I'd say that many of our number are rather hesitant on the confrontation front - however mild it might be. Are we misinterpreting things, are we being too sensitive, are we being childish, are we, are we... we aim the blame for our discomfort at ourselves.

@arkandel said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

I know, and it's why we keep getting drama. It's a direct effect of people perceiving this hesitation as weakness so they prey on it.

It is also amazing how many people will know this, and deliberately exploit it. It's not just preying on the unwillingness to speak up, but to gaslight the shit out of people when they do.

It is dazzlingly common and it's something we (collectively) need to get better about taking action about -- in resisting, reporting, and continuing to state our boundary as necessary.