Posts made by surreality

@arkandel Because there's more or less one enforced reaction to "I have stabbed you," if the roll to stab succeeds.

Think of how many different ways, "I cast a love spell on you!" ends if the roll to cast the spell succeeds, and how many examples there are in fiction of this going in very different directions than the caster intended.

None of that is new news.

The goals are different, and they're different stages, in a sense. Stabbing is one stage: stab, there is damage done. Love spell causing love is one stage. If the caster was content with the amount of interpretation that's left up to -- from slavish devotion to happy sex toy to possessive stalker -- that would also be a one stage goal. But that's not what people are typically trying to accomplish; they want it in the specific form they want and only that.

This is roughly on par with insisting that because you succeeded on your roll to stab that you now get to pick where the damage happened (without ever having to call a shot or take a penalty to hit or higher difficulty or whatever) and simultaneously sliced through the character's belt so their pants fell off and they mooned the crowd.

This is a not insignificant problem.

@lotherio I think 'college age' is a good target zone for this. Higher end is in early/mid20s, lower end is very late teens. It's the 'still formally learning, but learning to adult and be on one's own' at the same time.

My brain went to a 'The Magicians' place a little conceptually, also re: visualizing age range, and that seemed like a good combination, for whatever it's worth. If that's the general vibe you're aiming for, just with a different setting/adversaries/etc., I think you picked the right target range.

@killer-klown said in Vampire Requiem 2nd Edition Bloodlines Question:

@surreality
One, I said 'the main reason it didn't work on Reno', not 'then main reason Reno created the HR'

Uh-huh. And done now. <clicks the little eye thingie>

This is more writing-focused, but it is entertaining and may be similarly useful: http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/backstory-idea.htm

I think I linked it elsewhere recently, as it's what I use to come up with random filler for test templates for wiki and whatnot as well because once the wiki code brain is on, the 'I need random examples of what might be on a character sheet as filler that doesn't need to be a huge chunk of lorem ipsum text' part is so, so very turned off.

@killer-klown Having checked the forums and seeing multiple instances of multiple tells being standard -- more than two -- and no one from their staff or even other members or whatever piping up about how it was not meant that way? Sorry, no. I don't agree with you, and the community at large doesn't really seem to, either. (I eventually stopped looking because omg the link to something else that came up in a search almost got posted the Random Links thread in terms of WTFery.)

If you want to play semantic games instead, I also see 'sts may require' rather than 'must' re: any merits (which would actually include the moon birth and such ones are only optionally removed) 'in that case'.

I cannot actually believe you are trying to rules lawyer me still over rules I wrote out of some desperate... something, so I'm just going to sorta wave you off at this point and engage no further, because I'm not going to clutter up someone else's thread with one of those gross instances of 'somebody telling the actual author what the author's intent was'. You are, in fact, being that guy right now.

@sockmonkey Gods, that really is the same as with boobs. (You'd think the squishy factor would help, but NAWP, rib cage width and depth and pokey pokey wires too long and all the nope nope nope.)

In a kinder, gentler universe, we could just inflate or deflate the bastards with helium to float under their own power and autofit any damn frillybra or fancydress or maybe something strapless we flounce across, but no, we gotta live here.

@miss-demeanor I think some places -- I don't know if they're one of them or not -- are able to generate an embedded tracking code in the stuff as it gets sent out, so they can track it back to the sharer if needs be. I know the digital content place I was working with for ages looked at something similar, but with the kind of product we were making, it wasn't feasible at the time (and may still not be, it's been years since I checked in). One guy who was doing software and selling through his own site had some method of affixing a serial# of sorts to the files and was able to track folks down this way, but it was a different sort of content, and he was very clear in warning people about this up front before they purchased anything at all. (The data he was able to get to the rest of us was pretty horrifying. Stuff he'd sold, say, 23 copies of at a whopping $12/each after spending months coding it in 2+ years got downloaded something like 6k+ times within the first three hours, and that was just the people who clicked to open up and use the thing that pinged his tracker, not just the folks who left it sit in a file of things they'd maybe look at some day. Sooo many reasons I stopped doing that kind of work.)

@ganymede said in Vampire Requiem 2nd Edition Bloodlines Question:

What a lot of 1E games lack is focus or direction for their bloodlines. It's not enough to just be flavor; if bloodlines are to be meaningful, they have to be acknowledged and affixed within the setting somehow. So, in my opinion, game designers need to pay heed to what they want to do with the bloodlines, and not be afraid to reject requests to add more.

This, times several thousand. Though not WoD, just going through the skills listing for a project over this weekend has been a nightmare -- there's a lot of them that are meaningful in a larger world, but in the setting I picked (for a reason, dammit)? No. So they aren't going in.

I added this line to a file earlier tonight, and sleep dep inspired or not, it's staying:

Things being developed by an entire team of dedicated researchers in a mysterious secret lair in Japan with billions in funding behind them or similar experimental weirdness you found on youtube and dialed up past eleven are not even going to be considered no matter how many links you send to show how plausible it is that you cobbled one together in your root cellar; don't even ask.

^ Do not be afraid to do the same. You will have to at some point. It is easier to get it out of the way up front.

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

A creator just doesn't have to chase down all the rabbit holes.

...and again, no one has suggested they must.

Have you ever staffed on a game set in even in the modern day to see the kind of tech crafting requests that come in? Because they are often meaty and dense as hell.

Any old TR staff may recall the ancient lore of Job #1, the job so full of technical jargon and debates about hacking mechanics that it went on long past the time at which the characters who opened it had been frozen for more than a year while this was debated and kicked around.

This absolutely happened. And that's modern day.

Take someone from the early 1980s and drop them into today through a woo woo time vortex of woozy-woo. Tell them to drive the brand new car that has a fob/dongle instead of a key, relying only on navigation from the GPS service on their smartphone, and to let EZpass handle their tolls for the express lanes. "You must get from NYC to D.C. in five hours. Good luck."

Most of us could do this... that guy? Is fucked.

@apos You're welcome to keep having that opinion, but you're not going to convince me to join you on that hill. After 20+ years of watching such games come and go, and hearing precisely the same thing from everyone else who has watched such games come and go, with you as the sole exception?

Sorry, but no.

This 'story rich' vs. 'data available' thing is also not an either-or prospect... at all, and no one is suggesting anything on the level of '30+ years of fiction's worth of exposition' like Star Trek.

You keep setting up all of these strawmen and they aren't helping make your point in the least beyond the 'you have a limited amount of time like everybody else and you must use it wisely' which is complete 'duh' territory to anybody who has ever even played on a game, let alone staffed on one, or tried to create one, especially create one from scratch.

@apos What @faraday and I keep trying to tell you, though, is that the audience for an OT sci-fi game pretty much demands that, and will not even consider play without it.

You can say 'tell them no' and insist that it's the only way you'll get the game done, but it will then fail for one of the following reasons:

1. You get stuck in the trap of filling in all the gaps you left and have the same problem of not being able to do anything else when people do show up, and when you tell them 'no, that's not important,' they additionally get offended and leave because it was important to them.

2. There's not enough information for the target audience to show up to participate in the first place, so no one ever shows up and you have all the time in the world to twiddle your fingers watching the tumbleweeds blow.

That's the problem.

@rnmissionrun Oh, definitely.

I think that's the thing, though -- it needs to be written down in the first place. Then, all you have to do from there is point to a link with the answers. Then, if someone still has questions, their questions will (ideally, if they bothered to read it, and not everyone does) they will be more specific and much, much easier and faster to answer.

Anybody doing anything OT who isn't either writing everything down where everyone can get to it (in an open setup) or where fellow staff can refer to it as needed (in games with secrets, which almost all do in some respect or another) is making way more work for themselves than necessary.

@rnmissionrun Again, though, that's an existing property. Even the people who don't know it have dozens of people who do they can ask, rather than having to rely on staff to answer them.

Few casual players on an OT game can do the same, and as a result, there's a heavier burden on staff in this regard (though from what I understand, @Roz is a special exception and deserves lots of cookies for being awesome this way, more OT games need people like this, and they should be appreciated a lot when they appear).

But, again... there are several solutions to this problem, depending on the kind of game you want to have and what you want people to be able to do within its framework.

ETA: Also, people have really unrealistic expectations re: the time required to create a truly quality game. An OT game is always going to take longer than almost anything based on an existing property, whether it's using an original system as well or not.

@apos Except... no. Not even slightly.

That's the model you're extrapolating this advice from, and you've gone so far as to make a lot of incorrect assumptions in the process about why people do or don't do things to the extent that it's starting to become offensive and obnoxious.

You're also making the assumption that the game's intent is to be top-down with staff-led plots, which also is not a given as many games strive to empower players with information their characters do not have in order to enable them to run plots and storylines for themselves.

The above is actually the norm for non-OT games based on existing systems, in which players have vast amounts of information about the way things work than their characters do.

Look, @faraday and I have had a huge argument about this before re: 'what is essential and what's too much and what's too little in a sci-fi setting' and we're still both agreeing wholeheartedly that your suggested approach is not appropriate to this circumstance. That should definitely be telling you something.

What you're describing about 'you have to be able to effectively manage your time' is definitely true; too much of the rest relies on a lot of underlying assumptions that are steering you more than just a little bit wrong in terms of your ultimate conclusions. (Proper time management an essential for any staffer or creator, whether they're running plots or not.)

@apos Basically, what you're describing is a model similar to the tabloid method:

1. Tantalizing nebulous headline!
2. Loose, variably interpretable 'facts'.
3. Let people's imaginations run wild.
4. Deny more factual data, creating a craving for more factual data.
5. Make the acquisition of more factual data a reason to keep coming back in hopes of finding another kernel of information about the story.

This is not a new methodology. At all.

Further: all aspects of a game are an ecosystem. All of them. From a methodology like the above to the RPG mechanics it uses to its setting to the OOC policies it employs to the amount of data it has available to players.

If that is not the methodology you want as a part of your game, you're going to have to vary the way you handle all of those other aspects as well.

Similarly, if you want a different setting, you're going to have to vary all of those other things to some extent as well, because all of these pieces are part of the interlocking mechanism that is your game. You cannot simply swap one out and leave the rest as is -- you can't even adjust one without adjusting the others.

This is really not hard to understand. It's not. It is hard for me to understand how it is that you aren't understanding it.

@aria It may have something to do with where your local datacenter for your ISP is. I get some weird results that keep telling me I really really want the Lowes or the Home Depot or the Bloodbath and Beyond and the Target and all that half an hour downstate, while there's locations a spitting distance from here.

(This would be less annoying if it hadn't screwed me up more than once checking to see if something was in stock before heading out... only to now have to drive 40 minutes south to fetch it because it auto-selected my ISP's local location rather than mine... )

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

so they can make their head canon click.

This is sorta the point. Some people are not going to be able to get interested in playing at all unless they are able to wrap their heads around how things work.

This point varies for different people.

Wanting things to make sense in a way they can understand is not a bad thing for someone to want.

ETA: Also, I have to disagree with the 'want to detail every little thing' being the problem. I'm one of those people that loves detailing every little thing -- and I know even my level of Tolkien disease (which is nigh terminal) is not enough for the average sci-fi genre fan if I was going to make an OT sci-fi game.

@faraday Modern or historical-feel fantasy settings also build on mostly established knowledge in ways future settings don't.

Nobody's going to be asking 'what's a horse?' or 'what's a sword?' -- they may ask 'what's a bloorglebeast' if that's what everyone's riding in your world, but you can tell them, "It's kinda like a horse with scales and feathery bits instead of a mane!" and that's going to cover 99% of anything anyone is ever going to need to know about the noble bloorglebeast.

You have to tell people what a phaser is, and what it does, if all of your players playing security personnel are going to be armed with them.

You have to tell people what a pod is, and what it does, if that's what your little transit shuttles are called, and you need to establish how many people fit in one and how fast they go and whether they can survive re-entry to serve as landing pods or how long their life support lasts if you're stranded in one or or or or or or or...

...and I'm a very much self-defined not tech-heavy person, but even I could go on and on about the things people would need to know -- because their characters would know it and live it and breathe it every day -- before they even made those characters.

You can't just fudge that base level of required info, and 'what kind of story you want to tell' has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The higher the tech level of a game, the greater any individual character and player's agency is in it, barring the rarest exceptions. (The 100, for instance: all that high tech is useless if it's all broken and scattered as non-functioning debris across the landscape, at which point you're not really telling a sci-fi genre story any more, you're telling a survival genre story set in the future with technology existing solely as plot mcguffins or set dressing. It essentially has more in common with The Walking Dead than it does with Star Wars.)

@autumn I would potentially murder that person and claim aliens did it. Just sayin'.

@Miss-Demeanor Most standard brands don't go beyond DD. You're lucky to find a DDD in them, outside of specialty retailers.

And just because I never imagined that there would be a segue that involved Aliens AND Large Bra Sizes... this is fucking awesome and makes me smile. (I don't care if this is the wrong thread for loved things, that is just not a segue that comes along every day, y'all.)

@lotherio Pretty much this. I'm not the only one telling stories in the world, even if I am the world's creator. I want to create the tools required to enable and encourage people to tell their own stories in it as well, that are meaningful to them, and this requires providing them with information and tools that enable them to do that.

This may mean having all of the information about everything available from day one, with 'what you know IC' clearly marked out and 'what you will want to look at if you want to start crafting plots based in X aspect of the setting' marked as necessary (that isn't required for the non-scene-running player to know, or for the characters to know; in many cases this is stuff the characters explicitly do not know!) for that purpose, and so on. This creates a cohesive framework onto which others can build.

"What the players need to know about the world because their characters would know it" is a bigger pile of text in sci-fi than it is for nearly anything else, particularly if they are interacting with technology in almost any way.