@ganymede I didn't get the impression the cat was quite at that point just yet.
For instance, our lazybot is also getting a little rickety, is around the same age, and she now requires meds -- but the vet never once suggested it was time for her to move on or that she was horribly suffering in any capacity.
If it's time, or likely nearing time, your vet will definitely say something to that end.
...yeeeeeeeeeeah, that was the read I had on it, too, and if the critter is not suffering and miserable, 'put it out of its misery so I won't be bothered by people who need to learn manners' is just not the kind of solution that works for me, because goddamn.
Having to take my own cat to that final appointment a few years ago still has me caught in the sniffles once a week after a couple of years now, she was such a beloved member of the family, and she probably would have fallen over on her own a day or so later she was deteriorating from out of nowhere so damned fast, losing over half her bodyweight in a week and going from hopping on the back of the chair to being unable to move.
There's compassionate euthanasia, and then there's 'kill someone's beloved pet so you won't be inconvenienced by rude people once in a blue', which is a really ugly sort of callous even as a fucking joke.
@arkandel Pretty much this.
High-ranking leadership, really? I have come to see as part of the game's setting. They are as much a part of the world as the grid. They are essentially a public utility, and exist for the benefit of everyone.
Using the playground analogy, they aren't costumes to be taken out in the toybox and put on by individuals, they're more like the swingset or the slide that's making the active play space (the grid) more enjoyable for everyone.
Sure, they can get blown to hell once in a while -- but like grid squares, we generally do not do that without good reason these days. There's a reason for that.
@arkandel Like that wasn't going to get 80s music junkie me to post a link to this at warp speed.
(Bait, taken.)
@insomnia The remake would make for a more lethal drinking game than the forum one even if the only rule was 'take a drink every time someone mentions the phrase "two hundred years".' And it only lasted a single season!
@faraday Sadly, beating our heads against walls is pretty common. 
We all remember 'that one time it was awesome', and most of us try to structure things in such a way as to attempt to enable that to happen again, or foster it happening more often.
Sometimes, it works well enough to make something more frequent, or easier. Those are baby steps that are worthwhile, definitely.
But by the same token, I agree that the 'but but but that one time!'-ism isn't good to expect. (This goes both ways, too; people shouldn't be crafting policy based specifically on bad acts by folks like Spider or Rex, for instance, either.)
It's like trying to replicate a 'happy accident' in art. Sometimes, you find a new technique. Most of the time, though, you just have to be glad it happened once and any attempt to recreate that is going to fail spectacularly.
@jaded That makes sense, yeah, and was the general understanding I had of it. I'd never dug into it, though, to confirm.
@lithium No lie, these days, with the current administration (and, frankly, for the past forever, even), I can't say I wouldn't be terrified of what could happen if the standard infantryman could be prosecuted for just being in active service.
Do people report people who weren't in leadership, though? (I'm asking because I genuinely don't know.) As in, if somebody was Random Infantryman Jackass, vs. Commander Jackass/Colonel Jackass/etc.
@bored A lot of that is a design thing, too -- I'm guessing that Firan had a bunch of tools that would allow you to set up the various rosters/etc. and that the others would be notified, and so on. That's not the kind of setup a lot of games have, and it is something that makes a difference. (Namely, the more tools a game provides to make managing the workload easier, the more work someone can reasonably do.)
Picture the same on your standard WoD game, for instance, where none of those tools are in place. Suddenly, that 1-2 hours daily -- which is still a lot for most people's availability -- explodes, because it involves scheduling meetings, accounting for everybody's timezones, making sure you send @mail to everyone and that everyone reads said @mail, posting to bboards for the group (...which, again, no one reads), and so on. Add in the expectation that many have in a WoD setting that there's going to be some sort of 'depth of interaction' with the person giving the orders, and suddenly what even RL would be a five minute meeting becomes a 4 hour soul-and-time-suck.
So I'm guessing we're more or less saying the same thing here in most ways -- some games account for this in the way they set themselves up with reasonable expectations, and some really just don't. Essentially, there's a third option: bad structural design, and people are often egregiously blind to it.
Design involves a whole lot of 'moving parts' -- some are code, some are policy, some are game mechanics, some are world-building. They all have to work together or the whole thing can hit the skids. It's one of the reasons I squint at times about things being converted from tabletop to MUX, since the actual environment is so different; a straight conversion is almost certainly going to fail outright.
@bored Also, let's be honest -- not all game developers bother to consider an important question: "Is someone taking on this IC leadership role we've designed for this setting going to have to spend the equivalent of RL full time hours doing the job?"
If the answer is "yes" -- or even "maybe" or "Mmn, maybe about half that?" so far as I'm concerned -- it's time to look at structuring that group in a different way that allows for a number of people to share those responsibilities and spread them out more.
This applies to NPCs (almost) as much. (And I only say 'almost' since multiple people can contribute to running an NPC if necessary.)
I remember hearing about games in ye olden days that used to have requirements like 'you need to be on at least 2 hours every day to handle this job' and similar crackpot bullshit that, hey, maybe it worked when we were all in college or high school, but is beyond laughable to most people these days -- and for good reason. Some were a little more lenient, but still had things like 'at least 12 hours a week available exclusively for faction management' and so on. It's just not practical for people with actual jobs and responsibilities in the real world beyond what the average college students we used to be had at the time.
So in a way, I think we've not really examined that specific question as much as we should have. We all remember ye olden days of faction heads being around all the time -- because most of us had a lot more free time then -- and many of us still think of that as the standard baseline, on some level, for what a faction head is or does, and if they're not able to do that, they're a do-nothing failure.
It isn't so much that they've failed -- though some certainly do! -- as that we haven't, collectively, taken as many of the steps as we really need to take to redefine these roles in a much more manageable way for the audience we have. Importantly, this includes 'bringing in new people' and 'fresh blood' as part of that audience, not just 'let's cater to the current crowd and ignore what someone new might bring to the table'. When presented with what looks like an overwhelming or unreasonable amount of work? Yeah, you're not going to be keeping as many of those new people as you might want to, because, 'fuck THAT!' is absolutely a thing -- and it's how most of us would respond to those ye olden days requirements now, were someone to attempt to enforce them today.
We're not (typically) doing that in policy, but in terms of our hopes and expectations? A number of us still kinda are, and I'm reasonably certain that's where a lot of the stress about 'do nothing faction heads' comes from.
@darinelle said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@arkandel - The way we handle it in Arx is Voices/2nds in command, who act with the voice of the faction leader. Spread the love and share the burdens, because it shouldn't and can't always be THAT ONE GUY who stands AT THE NEXUS OF ALL DECISIONS. It's not feasible IRL, and it's certainly not feasible in a game.
This is pretty much the only way, I think, this can be managed -- and agreed that means 'RL or on game'.
This is also a really handy way of handling NPC-run factions; it means there's a set number of folks who ever have to deal with that NPC directly, or interpret whatever 'demands from on high' are sent in a memo/missive/directive to the remainder of the faction (or to those delegated seconds to implement -- or not! -- as appropriate and/or interesting).
@faceless My money's on 'self-loathing Wolfblooded hunter with prepper tendencies and a lifetime membership to everything Alex Jones'.
@packrat I am so sorry to hear this. Best to you and yours today; much sympathy.
I am impressed by my ability to stall and find things to do rather than finish getting ready to go out to be swarmed by relatives.
If I'd picked 'cleaning the house'... ah, well. Next time.
@aria said in Um...What?:
So I guess what I'm really saying is that the best part of having been in the same committed relationship for almost a decade now is that we generally only have two people's awkward, disappointing, or just downright weird romantic ideas and behavior to deal with -- each other's. And after this long, at least we know what to expect. #truelove
Finally, someone who understands why me and my husband are married!
I think "I didn't know we were dating!" is the appropriate response to this no matter what.
1, it's true; 2, it's a hell of a slap in the face if they thought you were, and this twit sounds like he deserves one. And, well, 3, if they did mean to send that to someone else, they can 'd'oh!' and you can both laugh about it later.
@derp It just strikes me as funny since WoD comes up as 'what we should use because it's what people know', and... in reality, not so many people actually know it, as playing on any WoD game for more than five minutes tends to prove.
