Posts made by surreality

@Ghost Yeah, our parents' generation is horrifyingly racist sometimes, but at a certain point -- and your friend is definitely there -- at which there really is no reason to belabor this other than to make someone feel really horrible about their life before it's over, 'cause it's not like she's interacting with anyone else, from the sound of things, to be a danger out there doing any form of harm to people because of it.

My mother will insist on endless chronicles of the lives of the saints when it comes to that time; that would be destined to be such a hell on earth that I might eventually be able to claim actual martyrdom. My father would pick his (huge) collection of 40s pulp novels, which are probably also full of shit racist enough to make me choke on the regular, and it will amuse him greatly.

@Ghost Sounds like elder abuse to me.

I sincerely hate it when academics try to discuss these subjects in a mixed audience of fellow academics and those who are not. There are certain bits of phrasing -- like the 'all white people are racist' one -- that are conversational shorthand to the people who study the same subject, and the theory is actually entirely reasonable and it isn't even hard to understand. Unfortunately, that shorthand? Unless they already know the underlying theory, the shorthand is so jarring/insulting/off-putting that most people will immediately shut the fuck down and will have absolutely zero interest in what you have to say.

Do not even get me started on 'all heterosexual sex is rape', which is another excellent example of this frustrating failure to communicate in action.

@Ganymede This was a cyst that went over the top batshit. What you're describing about the gland isn't far off, though this wasn't reeking bacterial gloop, just blood and LOTS of plasma. Not the same location, but. It involved being told to 'hold that still for me please?' and feeling the forceps punching at my (holding things) hand from way deep down in flesh, from the inside.

They had pulled over 60ml of the same (blood and plasma, oddly no gloop, which surprised them as much as it did me, thank heavens for small favors?) with needles two weeks ago, and the moment the antibiotics ran out (after not shrinking it any, but at least it wasn't getting worse), it was twice its original size inside two days. This time was the scalpel and the forceps and the stabbing with gauze.

Body horror is weird and just disquieting. I have no problem PMing the details but there's a lot of gross and I don't want to, like, generally squick out the universe.

This is not so much anger as... extreme body horror?

Minor surgery Monday, and it was just so much more disturbing than everything in the major surgery earlier this year combined on the body horror, making it the official Mondayest Monday I can recall.

Today was 'unpack gauze and refresh dressings'. Dressings were fine for the past two days to change! Not fun or pleasant but totally cope-able.

Today, though. Today. So I thought it was just a small square of gauze to pluck out.

I was wrong.

So.
Very.
Wrong.

I like you people too much to discuss the details, which are sincerely gross. Even the people I really, really don't like, I still like too much to inflict the details of this on, but holy shit, I'm eyetic'ing so hard the blinking could kick up a fucking breeze.

I think she's asking for build help and a ST/story design person rather than an Evennia coder, y'all, but I could be wrong.

@Lisse24 said in MU Flowchart:

I tried 0 to Mush. I failed. I don't know why things didn't work. They just didn't.

Last I checked, DigitalOcean had a fairly persistent issue with their basic mediawiki droplet that makes everything break if you change anything unless you add a specific line to LocalSettings.php that... you have to actually already know it needs to be there or you'll be at a loss.

I think the structure of the MUX files is also different now than they were when the tutorial first went up, and there's an additional level or two of nesting you need to dig through to get to the files you need to get it up and running.

That may not help precisely, but these are real hiccups and issues that are not a sign of anything you're doing wrong, so please don't let them be a discouragement in that sense, or make you feel like you can't do it.

If you ever end up trying to go that route again for whatever reason, feel free to nudge and I'll check on the tweak things I had to do from one of my old backed-up droplets to give you the mediawiki line you need and whatever else, if I can.

@faraday I think you're almost safe with an either/or here -- system or setting as one people are familiar with. Or, at least, those seem like a far minimized risk. I'm sure KD got more people than they might have simply because they used nWoD as the base system, they just scrapped the world. Similarly, you could have a familiar world and a new system and be about on par there.

I had enough references to stuff people are (or could easily become) familiar with that I wasn't too worried on people grasping the vibe of the setting I had been working on, on the most basic level. Everyone's probably seen at least one Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or some bit of Black Sails or similar shows or movies. 'Pirates, 1715, just if all those creepy legends about sea monsters and ghost ships and all the rest were real'. Not too hard to grasp the basic concept, which felt safe enough on that front. On the era front, it would have had a basic history primer section for folks who wanted to work recent historical events (or be from a place and know what the deal was with said place) with links for further reading if people really wanted to dig in to that aspect more without clogging the wiki with it, and so on, with notations re: anything that diverted from actual history so it wouldn't trip folks up. (This is in addition to 'here are all the cool things about this imaginary setting we made up for you to knock around in' specific setting files.)

@Thenomain I am still a big fan of the 'mission statement' concept on the front page.

Paragraph about intended game tone (sandbox level, metaplot or not, PvE or PvP, competitive or collaborative), paragraph about setting, paragraph about game system. That's 'this is what the main page should be' to me, at least, and it should provide the basic information that would let a potential player have a fairly good idea, at a glance, of whether or not that game is likely to be fun for them or not, based on what they do or don't like in a game.

This is what I'm generally talking about re: 'at least skim something to get a basic idea' -- but you're absolutely right that people need to present this right up front, square one, and not enough people do. (I still think Reno1 did a fantastic job of this, and @tragedyjones deserves props for that.)

Below that, a list of links to basic quickstart materials, walk-throughs, and essentials like policy, setting, and game system info overviews for folks who want to look further before making a final decision.

This crosses over with the 'data organization' thing, but each of those sections, IMO, deserves a 'summary' page, organizing the links to further information in one tidy spot as a quick overview, with links to the further details on these things from there, rather than piling everything into a page and expecting people to slog through it all in one go.

@faraday There are some quick cheats to make it pretty on the MUX, and break it down into digestible chunks there that are invisible wiki-side. (It helps.) You basically tell the MUX to translate a certain style of page transclusion as 'continued in blah 2 (or 3, or 4, etc.)'; you have your blah 2 page on the wiki as well, but it just shows up as a seamless continuation of the text on your blah page, and you train your dpl indexes to ignore blah 2 and only list blah.

There is definitely some initial setup involved there that's a pain in the rump, but once it's done, it's pretty, clean, and easily digestible for both formats thereafter, and super easy to set up the wiki-side files.

Things I regret not doing before I quit:

1. I wanted to spend a month or more planning the most absurdly over the top wedding ever. The kind of IC wedding that involves dozens of people doing dozens of things that would be so hearts and flowers over the top it would put people into lethal levels of sugar shock. At the last minute, the loving couple would realize this, and elope whilst fleeing a mob of angry bridesmaids in mauve taffeta, groomsmen content to keep the strippers all to themselves, and frustrated florists in abundance. (Fellow players would be warned of this in advance so nobody actually would put themselves out with actual prep work OOC for a thing that would never happen, because I am not that kind of jerk.)

2. Play a dude convincingly. (I can NPC dudes just fine. I cannot play a dude PC to save my ass. WTF, seriously? This doesn't even make sense to me; how can this be a thing?!)

3. Play one of the two WoD CB concepts that should not be. The first was a frumpy, bitter data entry chick stuck in a dead-end job with no friends, and desperately wished to be popular and that all the world loved her. Transformation: Grumpy Cat. Now, she's rich as sin pimping her catness all over the interwebs, and is loved by all, but still cannot get a date to save her ass. The second was a Mantis Shrimp CB artist, like a female Bob Ross, with Emma Thompson from the Harry Potter series as her PB, who would punch through walls in dire fury when her happy little trees were just not fucking happy enough.

@Mercutio There's definitely overlap and cross-referencing, but it wasn't set up quite like that, or at least the way I was working on it, it wasn't. If I ever pull one of the old cores up again, I'll c&p it over.

One thing I was doing, and will continue to pursue if I pick up a project again, was +game.

'news' and '+help' and '+blahhelp/+jhelp/and all of those other abstract permutations of +help' were in one place with an annotated index under +game.

It pulled the data from the wiki, so it all remained consistent, and it meant that the information all had to be on the wiki -- and from the wiki, it would be imported direct to the game.

This was all broken down by namespace, and each category of information had a namespace. 'Theme' had one, 'Code' had one, 'Policy' had one, 'World' had one, 'System' had one, etc. +game would pull up that list of topics (which had a brief description of what information was there beside the name of the section).

+game Code would thus pull up a list of code help files and information, much like the things often found in +help. +game World would pull up the index of information on the setting, +game Theme would pull up the index of game themes, and so on.

To me, this was and is easier. Different? Yes. ('news' and '+help' gave a message to use +game instead to help folks acclimate.) No more need to wonder which ooc command was going to bring up the info you wanted to look up, it was all under one universal index, but was conveniently sorted by topic (so there was no crushing flood of everything in a pile where a policy was next to an XP spend command, and so on).

I don't know if this idea is useful to anyone, but keeping all the OOC information people may need or want under the same reference command is, to me, common sense, and especially helpful to folks new to the hobby who aren't already familiar with the byzantine collection of news and +help and help and +shelp and +jhelp and +ohlookanotherhelp, etc. It makes the information easier to find, and, I feel, ultimately organizes it better in a way people can drill down on organizationally to find what they're looking for much faster. (I admittedly did not fuck with 'help' itself, since that would have meant copying all of that info over to the wiki, but odds are high I would have eventually because I'm just too damned OCD like that.)

@Roz said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

I think that the real point is that, no matter what your setting, you should write your helpfiles for newcomers, not experts. If you're building a wiki for a WoD game, yeah, a lot of your players are probably going to have a lot of WoD experience, and yeah, you have source books which is where a lot of this stuff lives and you can't put it all on your wiki because copyright. But make it easy for newcomers to understand what the path is.

Even beyond this, people really do have different takes on WoD in terms of its general themes. For some, it is a wholly bleak place where everything is merely a spiral into endless decay and suffering and life is cheap and character deaths are commonplace. For others, it's a dangerous world with things that create awe and terror all at once, balancing horror and wonder as the characters navigate that strange reality full of enormous risks and rewards that are sometimes even more dangerous in the long run. Others still take the 'resist the darkness at all costs and preserve your humanity despite nearly impossible odds' route, losing and gaining ground over time in that pursuit.

All of these are equally valid interpretations of the game's tone, and all of them can co-exist on a game fairly well. Often enough, though, staff will pick one of these and focus on it strongly or exclusively -- and that has an enormous impact on the kinds of stories told and the experience players will have there. Making known which of these -- or something else, if you're aiming for something else entirely -- you aim to highlight or blend in your game is important information for players to be aware of.

Re: wiki vs. MUX: I'm of a mind that information should be accessible in/from both. It's important to have it on the wiki or website for people to be able to find out something about what the game's about before plunging in, to avoid wasting their time if it's just not something that appeals, which they could have found out with a quick glance over this or that basic primer.

The identical information should also be available on the game for reference as needed or for the people who do prefer just to read all of that on the MUX itself if they're so inclined.

It is a very good thing that files can be tugged from wiki to MUX these days through a variety of means, because this also means that information is consistent in both places at all times. (Consistent information wherever that information is going to appear is important.)

@Sparks said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

I think some of this may also be that Aether, Firan, and Arx all built incredibly detailed worlds and libraries of lore, because they had no shortcuts. No "just watch the show/read the books" or "well, it's <City X> but with werewolves." They had to put together all the lore, and either present it in a nicely consumable fashion, or conceal it but provide a good IC reason that players would be unaware of some of it.

This is just it, I think. Original themes absolutely need this -- as do less common canon themes, really -- but this is the very thing that kinda kickstarted this general tangent: being concerned that doing this would be wasted effort due to too many people insisting: tl;dr. It's required effort on the part of staff, really, for things to work, IMO. It's also where the 'can't be bothered to skim over things before jumping into chargen' is the biggest problem -- for the person doing that and everyone around them, staff and fellow players alike.

Do not want to be sitting here on pins and needles waiting for the surgeon to call back and see about scheduling an appointment, but this is unavoidable.

Dear Denial: you work so well for most of the people I know when it comes to real problems being shunted off for far too long, why are you absolutely no help to me now? Augh.

Edit: Dear Denial: Please, come visit, put up your feet, stay a while. I could use your help pretending this whole body horror incident did not just happen, because I cannot even with it.

@faraday The deepest irony is that it's often the same people who are saying both things. Mind-blower, you know? Internal consistency, it's a thing! Heh. It's kinda no wonder those are typically the folks never satisfied.

Your system is another proof that innovation is entirely viable, and while I haven't learned it myself, it doesn't sound like it's horribly difficult to learn if someone wanted to play on a game that employs it.

@faraday I don't think anybody should listen to them, for exactly the reasons you're describing, and @Three-Eyed-Crow is as well.

It's just exhausting to hear people who cry out for innovation in one breath, then insist no one should try something new 'because some people don't want to learn a new thing' in the next. It's essentially demanding the impossible, and is an internal contradiction.

'Some people won't' is a given with anything, and that is OK -- it is regardless of the thing they won't do, really. By extension, though, 'some people won't' isn't a reason for some other people to do it. Some people won't play scifi -- is that a reason to not make scifi games? Hell no! And so on. Any choice made is going to have 'some people who won't' based on that choice, even choices that are entirely neutral in one direction or the other (consent vs. non-consent, PvE vs. PvP, etc.).

@Arkandel I've had dozens of people I've had dev discussions with tell me this over the years, and in talking with others who work on such games, there's a lot of people hearing the same.

If I had a nickel for every time somebody told me to 'just use WoD or don't do it' -- which is a system I think is actually crap-awful for MU -- I could have paid all of my hosting bills for the entire time I was doing dev.

Edit: This is not presented as risk. It's presented as 'there is a group of people who have a bad behavior, and because of their bad behavior, you should not do something new'. And that attitude is garbage, as it doesn't call out the bad behavior for what it is, enables and encourages that bad behavior, and stifles innovation of any kind in the process.

If that's what people genuinely believe, they need to stop asking for new things, or resolve their cognitive dissonance on this issue.

@Arkandel said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@surreality said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

It should never be a reason people are given to not create original themes, settings, or systems, and yet it often is.

I don't see why people wouldn't create original themes. But they need (and do, I think) knowing the risks; it's easier to make a nWoD game today, right now, than to make a brand new kind with its own mechanics and lore. The number of reasons range from how easy it is to find code made for it, to recruiting staff, to attracting and keeping players... but I doubt any of us will dispute it's a fact.

That doesn't mean such games are doomed. Arx is one of the largest games right now, and it did its own thing. But for each of those there are probably lots of original MU* which are either non-starters or prove to be dead on arrival.

And Arx precisely proves the point that people should not be told to NOT create these games because of this potential problem. Yet this regularly occurs, not as a warning of risk, but as an insistence that something is doomed to fail or should not even be attempted.

"My friends invited me," is common, sure, but it doesn't turn off one's critical faculties. Those friends should be helping you acclimate if they're going to extend the invite, and they should be pointing out things you need to know, or telling you important things re: what the place is about.

And they do (or did in my case) but it's still a fact learning a new system is harder than not having to learn a new system. And I think it's also an acceptable assertion that not all players enjoy learning new mechanics. We can argue this is right or wrong, but if it's a fact - which I think it is - then we have to figure out ways to deal with it, not chalk it off as their problem.

Of course learning a new system is harder. The first time someone plays an established system, they have the same learning curve, however, and it wasn't an obstacle to them then.

If someone doesn't want to learn new mechanics, it is on them to say 'no' to a game that requires them to do so, not on the game's creators to refuse to do something new or eschew anything that isn't repeatedly trod ground to benefit that person's laziness and/or preference.

Further, 'some people don't like learning new things' should never be touted as a reason to never try new things. It is. Regularly. And for a hobby that screams for innovation on the regular, there is no faster way to shoot innovation in the face and ensure it doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it could.

This is broad, and in constructive, both for a reason.

1. What information do you expect to have readily available about a game when it opens to players? (This includes games opening for beta testers; basically: when the doors open and players may begin to arrive and create characters.)

2. Where do you expect to have that information available: on the MU, on a wiki that can be browsed before accessing the MU directly, both?

3. Do your expectations differ if the game is an original setting, theme, or system, from one based on an established property or system? If so, how?