Posts made by surreality

@Thenomain said in World Building: What are the essentials?:

I think these two things are critical, because there is not going to be any complete information, and a lot of people are not used to having agency within a certain role.

I agree with the two points mentioned in full, but they aren't actually what I'm asking here.

I'm asking: as a player, what information do you consider important to help provide that more complete resource for everyone involved.

How it's presented and how it's shared or pointed to is step two, essentially. I'm talking about step one: what information do you include in the first place?

The person building the world has their ideas about what is or isn't important, but they're one person (or a small group). @Apos hit on this well in Random Bitching. They are building and creating and there is a great deal that 'if X, then Y is obvious!' going on in their heads that isn't necessarily apparent to a third party (whether that third party is a player, a staffer, or even a co-world-builder). These are the 'well, duh' details to the creator that is sometimes completely opaque to the end user, and are actually important information that should be made readily available.

I'm asking: as a player, what specific information do you look for either when constructing a character, or in the day to day roleplay of that character within that world?

Or theme, if we’re also talking about that.

I'm with @WTFE on the theme/setting gripe. What story themes you want to have in the game are obviously a factor in constructing the game world, but world building is not 'building a theme' in any way. Your setting should support and reinforce and enable the story themes for the game, but the game setting is not the same as the game themes at all, and really shouldn't be used as interchangeably as it often is. For instance, WoD's theme is 'supernatural horror' and its setting is 'somewhere on or off the planet at some point in history'; both are factors in the experience of the game, but they're not the same species of animal at all.

This is not intended to be a how-to on world building in general, or a how to best lay out that information. (I'd love to see one of those, but this ain't it.)

This is a pair of questions for discussion:

As a player, what information do you want and need about a game world to effectively play the game (ex: be able to formulate a character you feel fits the world and knows what the characters should know about it)?

As a player, what kind of information do you find gets in your way more than it helps you accomplish this?

Note: 'Too much/little information' is something that can generally be handled structurally, same as 'well organized' or 'easy to find/reference' information; 'how much' is something that varies for everybody, so this is not about quantity, but about the specific kinds of facts and information you are seeking.

Not the broad strokes, either. Everybody knows you have to cover basic history, basic setting, or include a writeup of what factions are present and what they represent. This is about specifics.

For example: a game will have titles for various positions within its governing structure or within a given faction; most do in the real world or any given group with any structure at all. This is information characters generally would know as pertains to their society or faction, and likely use in day to day roleplay in many settings. It's not necessarily the first thing people think of outside of a L&L game, though it's relevant in many more (military, nobility, secret societies, etc.)

Something of a side tangent, but also, I think, relevant and potentially helpful:

Is it important to you, as a player, to have information available that distinguishes 'what locals would know' vs. 'what out of towners/new arrivals' would know?

If you're a new arrival, what kind of information is useful to you about your character's original culture? (This is more relevant in original settings than modern 'real world' setting games for obvious reasons.)

Does it help to have information about what misconceptions, rumors, etc. from your character's original culture's perspective about the game's setting?

A general 'display images default/collapse default, click to display image' option would be even more ideal; we've had some enormous ones from time to time (and other times I just don't care enough about what's being talked about to look and scroll scroll scroll past a dozen of them in a row).

For anyone who has not seen this quirky company as yet, I would like to share with you: The Whiskey River Soap Company.

I wish this was not pink, because then it would be an ideal substitute for 'Imaginary World Problems' (aka M*ing).

...is also worthy of note.

@Auspice That is wonderful! Congrats!

Speaking of heads in jars, there is a distinct reason I enjoyed Agents of Shield entirely too much this season. (Y'all can send a few spare Zach McGowans out this way if you get an overflow, guys, I'm super charitable that way. )

@Aria We hit our deductible real fast. 5 days into the year, 'hi, you're almost dead, come stay with us for two weeks... ' was a thing that happened -- so in part I'm trying to not dally 'cause since we're past our deductible, and halfway up to our annual max out-of-pocket on top of that, well, it's time to Do Things if they Need Doing. I'll have him check that (since most hospital networks are covered I'm betting they will be) and poke privately for more info once he gets back to me. Thank you muchly.

@Aria Shit, we could probably grab coffee some time. We're right between Wilmington and Claymont, right south of there. I will have him check on the PA network covered sites when he's home next, definitely.

@TNP Definitely. The plus side is that while the options are limited for basics like the GP (correction, there's one GP and one homeopath), but they have been extremely chill about covering what's recommended. Most won't, for instance, cover a penny of the difference in cost between a shared and a private room in the hospital, but since the hospital told them: 's'all we had at the time, guys' there was never so much as a whiff of objection. It may just be that it was because they recommended it, and we didn't request it -- but that's the kind of thing most places won't cover either way.

@TNP He isn't. I don't have a car, and he works out of state four days out of the week, far enough away he has to stay there overnight two nights out of the week.

So long as they're with the main hospitals here (ChristianaCare), they're in the clear. Otherwise, we're pretty much screwed. Thankfully, most of the doctors in the state are affiliated with the hospitals (small state), you just need a referral for the specialists or a surgeon, which you can get from the ER, an in-network doc, or an out-of-network doc (though they will double check the out-of-network ones). That we have an ER visit and four visits to a surgeon already on this one is fairly well established so it's not a new case.

@TNP We have some odd limits and restrictions; basically anybody at either of the main hospitals in the county will be covered but almost no one else is at all. My husband's insurance is issued from work, out of state -- so while we live in Delaware, his insurance covers almost nothing in Delaware, only New Jersey, save for the big hospital chain here. (No, really, there is literally one dentist listed in the entire county we could see, and one -- one -- GP. We just pay our old one out of pocket.) So it's stickier than it sounds that way.

@Aria Irony: Mine are stupid big and I find it generally funny and harmless, but I was like... 'eh, you know, if there's some duct that is being a nuisance, I may as well have them remove that and just do a reduction and cut all the mess out as needed'.

...they cannot even do this without the tests, which they can't do until the horror movie FX department calls it quits.

@TNP Yup. That's next, first thing in the morning. We're calling the GP for a specialist, rather than 'the surgeon the ER assigned to us', and hoping insurance will cover it.

@TNP It is. And I should actually mention that to them pronto, because endo runs HEAVILY in my family. I had enough of it at 20 that it was a certainty pregnancy was never gonna be a thing.

@Aria Our left tits should absolutely bond over coffee some time and trade war stories, definitely.

It went from 'what in the actual fuck is happening here' randomly lactating (when I am not and have never been pregnant, guys, this is trippy as fuck) at certain hormonal shift times o' yon month, then? Blood. Because that's so much better and less disturbing. Then it backed up, and they've been hacking at it ever since in various ways for the better part of two months.

They are concerned it could be cancer, but can't check with a mammogram until it drains completely, and it keeps filling up with blood faster than anything heals up at this point. Like, I do not have this much blood to spare, I'm pretty sure.

It gets most of the way there! Then that monthly timer kicks in, and it's time to be a blood fountain again as the cycle begins anew. And this shows no signs of stopping, which means the tests never being able to get done. Which... pretty sure that's something to be concerned about!

Y'all, I clearly TL'd werewoof too long, I have developed a Tell in RL apparently.

My Surgeon
"...you have old scars other places not from antibiotic! Is perfectly good medicine. Not giving you different one... you don't need one any more anyway, is perfectly fine now!"

MOTHERFUCKER, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE THING 'PERFECTLY FINE NOW' UNLESS MONTHS-LONG, EXCEEDINGLY PAINFUL NIPPLE STIGMATA HAS BECOME A THING AND SOMEONE IS ABOUT TO BUILD A SACRED SHRINE TO MY LEFT TIT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

@Kanye-Qwest I don't know what his plan was. The guy always had a plan, but what was he trying to do?

I would bank on it having something to do with taking over yon floating wonderland of splat and marrying Sansa once she was installed as head of Winterfell, frankly.

He clued it he may have to sow distrust amongst the siblings once Bran repeated his own quote back to him, after all, and might know more still. That bit I would bank on being buckets of CYA. Bran didn't want to be lord of Winterfell any longer; he had his own gig. That leaves it between the girls. He has sway over one of the girls as it is, and it isn't the one who just turned up as a magic death machine. Giving the magic death machine a reason to come after Sansa in some fashion gives Sansa reason to suspect -- and potentially dispatch -- her sister, or bind herself even more closely to her 'mentor' than to her kin.

@Arkandel They really didn't have any question in mind of his guilt. Or of the threat he posed to them. It had already been strongly implied that Bran had seen everything he had done with the recitation of the 'chaos is a ladder' line in the earlier episode. They have a real means of determining the truth or falsehood of accusations in the form of a dude who can actually see the actual past to verify whatever could be necessary.

Not really feelin' the injustice.

Sure, he could have asked for a way out -- combat or the wall -- but. Everywhere he's been, he has been an insidious threat, full stop. Even at the wall he would have remained no less a threat than he had consistently been everywhere else. Hell, they could have Man in the Iron Mask'd the dude in an oubliette and he still would have been a threat and everyone was painfully aware of this.

We're also talking about execution by someone with an actual hit list of those she deems responsible for her father's death, that she aims to carry out no matter what anybody thinks about it. Even if he made it through that scene in some manner with an 'out', dude was just not going to get past Arya the moment she became aware of his part(s) in betraying her family in pursuit of power in the longer term without more complex machinations that they likely have time to explore in what remains of the screen time for the series. This may end up being a different path taken in the books, since they are known to be divergent, but for the medium and intended limitations, it makes a lot of sense.

Edit: In my head, the last scene of this series does still somehow end with Littlefinger rowing past Gendry, still rowing in circles, with an awkward wave as Westeros burns behind the both of them.

@Ghost "Planet Starbucks."

@Arkandel I have to be able to empathize, at least to some minor extent, with at least one character.

Barring that, there has to be some hook of other interest -- for instance, if a book included egregious costume geekery I might like it for that reason.

Some authors I'll give more leeway than not. Clive Barker can almost always hook me in, even if it doesn't happen immediately (rare), so it's worth getting to page 200 before the wow hits, because I have a reasonable certainty that even if delayed, the payoff in terms of 'wow factor' is going to be there.

I don't ship character pairs. Not in books, not in series, not in movies. It's just not my thing. I'd rather see the story play itself out as intended and appreciate it for what it is than set up additional hopes or expectations like this that could otherwise interfere with my enjoyment of it.

I did, for a while, watch Black Sails more or less end to end more than once. Because holy hell is that show amazing.

I used to go through the full run of the X-files (which we had on DVD at the time) when working on projects with my old job, since it was more or less familiar background noise, in much the same way. Same with Millennium, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who ever even liked that show.

I miss certain campy 80s and 90s series, though, that I wish were available on Netflix or Amazon or similar, even knowing they were typically dorky as can be. 'Friday the 13th: The Series' and 'Poltergeist: The Legacy' -- both shows that had absolutely nothing to do with the movie series they namedrop, amusingly enough -- are on that list.