Posts made by surreality

@tnp This sometimes comes with some unpleasant side effects, though. Like the oh-so-pleasant liver stones.

The docs last year initially told me they normally would not have tried the kind of surgery they were going to try on me (which has some weirdnesses to the specifics, I guess) because I am overweight, and like most others, they assumed it also meant my blood sugar was shit, my cholesterol was through the roof, etc.

...but they were doing every test under the sun for days, and saw that absolutely every one of my numbers, save for blood pressure being slightly high at the higher end sometimes, were not just OK, but really, really good.

The really, really good on the cholesterol, though, is due to the liver stones, though, they suspect, for I am a protein whore.

@auspice That is one of my favorite gifs ever.

@admiral http://musoapbox.net/topic/1770/turn-off-gifs/53
http://musoapbox.net/topic/1770/turn-off-gifs/59

@ortallus Go, go watch now if you haven't already. You will probably love it. It was stupidly good.

@faraday It's just one task, which isn't even a full skill. Expertises are similar to specialties in WoD, which tend to be fairly specific. They're add-ons to a skill -- areas of expertise that only apply when relevant, providing a bonus to the roll. In WoD, they're freeform, which leads to twenty tons of confusion and a whole lot of people trying to get away with overly broad things sometimes or things so vague and nebulous that it's squint-bait. These essentially do the same, they just aren't freeform; there's a preset list of them.

@ganymede Both of those are in. Once I have more than just the weirdest scattering ever of the expertises in I'll toss you the overview link when I send it to @Seraphim73.

P.S. Will want to pick your brain for appropriate expertise categories for Law task. As in, I doubt 'Civil, Criminal, Contract, Prosecution, and Defense' would cover all the bases. (Or maybe it would? Maybe that's too fussy already? I dunno. But will be asking when I get there, as fair warning. )

@ganymede This is what I ultimately went with (in the wee hours of last night when I thinnnnnnk I have the default list in, and now it's just adding piles of weird specialty-type things and tagging them wherever they're relevant). It's 'Convince', but the writeup covers it:

The ability to tell a convincing story and be believed by others. Whether the story or explanation is completely true, partly true, or entirely false doesn't actually matter, though expertise in one of these areas may add to the character's effectiveness in the task.

...then people can basically take additional expertise in things like 'pokerface' or 'lie' or any number of other things that can apply to which direction they're trying to take it to apply when its relevant to what they're trying to achieve. (Expertises are more or less like interdisciplinary specs in WoD, apply where relevant, they can just have more than 1 level invested in them.)

I like the versatility of this in that it lets someone decide they're maybe only so-so at telling a convincing story, but damn, do they have a great pokerface whenever that's relevant (sometimes when trying to convince someone of something, sometimes when actually gambling, when trying to hide emotion, etc.), while someone else may be able to sell any story they like (focusing on the 'Convince' task) but their focus is specifically on that alone.

I'm not good at explaining things just now, but I think that is something I'm going to stick with as one of those 'tailored to this environment' things, though it's not one specific to social systems at all. Namely, it gives people different ways to really customize their characters and make them unique and versatile -- which is easy as pie when you have maybe 8 people around a table, but damn do people start doubling up at record speed on a MU* in ways that can be frustrating. Everybody likes to have something they're especially shiny at, which is totally reasonable and human. It gives people more room to have 'their thing' without nigh complete clones in abundance. I'm not super keen on indulging snowflakeyness, but I don't think it's bonkerstown or overboard for people to like being able to have a niche that the system reflects to some extent. So, in the above example... either of those people -- Ms. Pokerface or Mr. Convince -- would be good at that the same thing in one case, but would diverge from there based on where they chose to invest their points/focus.

Umpteenthing the Altered Carbon recommendation.

Another one that would make a fantastic game setting, too.

Some typos are best typos.

Trading email with my mother this morning, re: my father's birthday, and if she has any plans I should ready myself for:

"Today is super bowel. Not a good day to go out."

I love you, Mom. So much I totally just pretended I didn't see that in the reply, but it still made me grin and giggle because sometimes a well-placed typo is just priceless, and thus I had to share with the fellow language geeks here.

@seraphim73 It's tragically more complicated than that. I'm still fussing with it through the weekend, but will toss you a link to the WIP some time this week if you want a peek. (Seeing it would explain it better than I can in summary here.)

@thenomain This topic is actually something of a relief to me because I know there are some things I will want to ask you about in the future, and 'would be willing to send $ for help' was something I wanted to ask about.

(And since the stuff I wanna do is more custom, I... would be looking at higher numbers than that or multiple instances of such I think on the whole 'cause... yeah.)

Long story short, I don't find this unreasonable at all.

@rnmissionrun The husband uses one of those silicon skins over his keyboard to help keep it clean.

He had me try one, because I go through keyboards like kleenex. (With all the long-winded bullshit I type, I realize this probably shocks no one.)

I am so brutal on keyboards that it lasted less than three months before I had worn right through it. I mean, I have stupidly acidic skin on my hands (has eaten through fine leather gloves inside a day before), but... uh, just keep that caution in mind in case you are similarly hard on keyboards.

If you're not, though, one of those might help, and they're reasonably cheap.

@apos That was pretty much how I was looking at it, yeah. I had to pause to wonder on this one when it came up earlier in terms of the dice roll itself giving it away -- and then thought how freaked out I get if somebody accuses me of doing something I didn't (and how freaking out makes it look true), how people fail lie detector tests all the time due to anxiety, etc.

Question: do you think it's necessarily relevant whether someone is telling the truth or a lie when it comes to convincing another character about the story they're telling?

Yeah, I'm still working on skill names. And one task is, arguably, the one that would be used to lie -- to sell a story. Of course, sometimes it's just as hard in the context of any given scene to convince someone of the absolute unvarnished truth. (Circumstances in a game can often be fantastical or strange enough that the truth and any lie someone tells about it would be equally hard to believe anyway.)

I'm thinking of just calling this task 'convince' (and then people can get expertise in lying, or being extra earnest, or whatever else can be associated with it). That would, arguably, not tip off the other player as to the truth or falsehood of the story just by seeing the name of the roll as it happens, which could arguably be a plus.

Thoughts?

@arkandel said in Social Systems:

As for metagaming, the definition of it (for me) is playing the MU* as a game-within-the-game. Of course it's a collaborative experience, but I don't view "getting my OOC friends to vote for me in the upcoming IC election" as collaboration, for example.

I don't think anybody thinks that's in the category of 'fair play', or 'is just innocent collaboration'. This is the sort of thing Spider calls fair play and innocent collaboration while we all roll our eyes and groan loudly while we pause to ponder our life choices and why we're wasting our time on a game with a Spider infestation.

Are the lines thin though between that and 'my OOC friends are who I usually play with, so they're my IC allies as well, which means they're more likely to vote for my character' thin? You betcha!

And I think this also means treading with care re: making the accusation. This is another of those areas where everyone seems to go the 'guilty until proven innocent' route, and that's not helpful to anyone; it only breeds more distrust and hostility.

That said, I am actually far more likely to 'play nice IC' with people I don't know from a hole in the wall, because I have no idea how well they handle any sort of conflict -- whether they'll roll with it and we'll both have a blast, or if they're a thin-skinned lunatic who is going to explode in my face and make me miserable for months IC and OOC over it. I'm probably not going to want to go within miles of even mild conflict with that stranger's character until I have some idea of whether they're going to remain chill and we're going to have fun pursuing whatever the story of that conflict ends up being, or whether I'm going to be buried in pages every time I log in for the next six months filled with whining and screaming about what a soulless monster I am from Bachelor A that I picked Bachelor B that now-long-ago Saturday night (or that Bachelor A picked me instead of Bachelorette C from Bachelorette C, etc.).

@bobotron Pretty much, yeah. You have to encourage the culture shift, though. I mean, without one, we have what we have now -- and what we have more or less doesn't work.

It requires staff who are willing to put in that work.

I'd also say that tagged player volunteers could often serve just as well in this role in regard to the 'what people will and won't try to get away with in front of observers' front. With some vetting, you can get further into that re: player volunteer oversight GMs being considered reasonably impartial.

In either case, a reporting system of some kind is something I'd recommend, most likely a log submitted by the GM and signed off on as accurate or not by the players involved, so staff is aware of what's going on. It would be useful in all cases, really, to have a standing record of incidents like this that might provide useful information re: patterns of attempted abuse/reliability or impartiality of a GM/etc. (Some kind of autologger would be handy for this.)

@bobotron said in Social Systems:

@surreality
All this is well and good, but...

1. This requires players to understand that they CAN do this and NOT be bothering staff, and a willingness to do so.
2. It requires staffers to actually be present, around and able (or in some cases, WILLING) to adjudicate these situations.

How often do we have whinging about both points on this forum? Staff availability is the biggest culprit, from what I see.

That's part of what someone has to account for in designing their game on the whole.

1. Policy has to make it clear this is allowed and encouraged. (That alone will take out some of your worst offenders; they will be less likely to try to 'nothing scares me!' or 'you will follow my creeper script!' if they're aware this can occur at any time.)

2. Staff has to actually respond to this. As in, 'this is a required staff duty'.

3. Timestops are a thing. We have them for other rules, and they are in themselves a source of cringe -- but if you have to hold for a rules call on using a power, or a physical combat action, there's no reason you social interactions should be any different. (Again, amazing how fast some folks start to see reason when they realize they might be hung up waiting for 12 hours while waiting on an arbiter to show up; the urge to heel-dig in an unreasonable manner starts to fade rapidly when people realize it's going to cause them hassle in addition to the person they're trying to be unreasonable towards.)

@lithium What you're describing is actually pretty close to some of the stuff I'm tinkering with, re: the trio of 'health' tracks. It seems to be just common sense to have something along those lines in place.

I think it works better than the 'humanity/integrity/etc.' approach in WoD, at the very least, which has always struck me as a bit 'off'.

@ghost I still think, as a player, looking to have fun on a game, this is unrealistic.

The paradigm you're describing doesn't take 'am I enjoying any of this at all?' into account even once.

There are, yes, people who are simply miserable unless they're winning all the time and are never willing to 'give', etc. They're roughly as plentiful as the abusers are.

Can all of these assholes. Just boot the fuckers.

Don't punish the people who are willing to give or willing to lose or willing to play fair unduly by making them suffer through tiresome, tedious bullshit that wastes their time and is no fun for them in the name of 'that's what the game rules say should happen because Joe Insufferably Boring rolled that it be so'. If that's what someone wants, they should probably be playing an RPI.

Similarly, don't punish the people who are more than happy to work with the other player to find an outcome that both can live with when the other player 'loses' by banning all such things outright, or those who will take the time to tailor a reasonable scenario toward achieving the goal they have in mind that does not treat the other characters around them like props in their personal story to be steamrolled at will with zero regard for the enjoyment of the other players on the game.

Both of these attitudes are flawed beyond repair, and neither of them will work.

Finally, don't punish the people who don't feel like wasting their time hoping to stumble into something OOC that they'll find enjoyable when the hobby has consistently been moving in the direction of creating means and methods for players to learn more about the other characters around them OOC, in order to best find fellow players with shared interests, with whom they can maximize their enjoyment of the limited time they all have to play the kind of stories they want to be telling. Especially true as in precisely those same spaces, a player has absolute agency to write: "I am only interested in being approached for things IC and through IC means, and am only interested in communicating with your character IC," if that is how they want to play the game and is the way they will have the most fun doing so.

@ghost When you go on for pages on end about metagaming, as cheating, in the form of 'playing the player', and then explicitly list:

"If your search turns up something negative, don't ever RP with them again."

"If you know him and like his player, plan RP together."

...I am absolutely going to draw that conclusion.