Posts made by surreality

@SG At the weak and espresso-strong ends of the spectrum, it's sweeter. In the middle you get a lot more bitterness and acidity and that weird... 'did I just chew on gravel, I do not remember chewing on gravel' taste going on.

@SG Weirdly, the stronger coffee helps me avoid them. It has to be insane strong, though; espresso rather than coffee, really. (Bear in mind, I also have ADD, so various stimulants sometimes soothe/balance everything out rather than causing the jitters. It's the entire premise behind ritalin, weirdly enough.)

I can deal with espresso and I can deal with weak, but damn the middle of the road brews (especially light roasts) always tastes horribad vile and acidic and harsh to me.

OMG, the hell, Skype. (Anyone else who is on right now is probably watching the mad mad bounce-fu, so.)

@WTFE I am just going to sit over here envying your laser etch rig really hard. Reallllllllly hard.

Also: that is oddly perfect.

@Thenomain said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Here's my take on "one user among many": You can have brilliant ideas that would help the many. Sometimes you have to defend those views, but just because you're not "the many" doesn't make those ideas any less valid.

^ This.

In addition to the popularity fallacy, there's a real excess of doomsaying about ideas. New = not worth the time because it's unproven; "sorta reminds me of a thing that didn't work 20 years ago" = ...as if nothing has changed within the hobby in 20 years?/may not actually bear any resemblance to the thing 20 years ago in implementation or circumstance...

...I could go on, because this list is endless, but won't.

@Thenomain Wouldn't this be supremely easy? Like, have a 'is hangout' attribute on the room parent and thus all other rooms? Default to 0 for no, 1 for general hangout, <name of group> for 'yes, but for <name of group> only'.

@WTFE If you can get past the 'omg that is so 90s trenchcoat and a katana' brain that generated the gun fu, it's a pretty powerful flick. The scene with the room full of 'artifacts', as it is discovered, is strikingly well done.

Similarly, there was a piece of crap horror flick that was part found footage part 'documentary' about kids who got abducted by aliens and disappeared (the faux documentary part is the families investigating the disappearance, the found footage part the last evidence they find) had one of the most impressive visuals I've seen in a long time: after years when these kids had been gone, they showed a picture of a blank wall in the house of one of the families, which had the vague outlines on it that indicated that there were once a number of small pictures there, that had now been taken down, as the families spoke about trying to find resolution in the narration. They later pan down to a box with the framed family photos in it, but the simple image of that wall was surprisingly profound (and it's sad that the 'explainer' pan down is necessary, but lowest common denominator, I guess). Most of the movie was garbage, but that was a very finely crafted sequence.

@Ganymede An even more poignant one for us geeks: Equilibrium. As in, we are totally those people who, like the director, probably made up gun katas in the back yard as little kids, or would have if we'd thought of it first, or likely as not totally did this shit on games in the 90s, because it was the 90s, and the time in which everybody did ridiculous shit like this on games. (I actually really like this movie despite recognizing it as completely ridiculous at the same time for the gun fu.)

@Rook ...and this is yet one more reason that if I ever pick that project up again I really am going to poke.

Seriously. Someone else's egregious laziness is not and has never been my problem to solve.

@Rook No lie, when I hear the argument about how it's unfair to put hooks in room descs as being 'denying access to story seeds to people who can't be bothered to read room descs', I am reduced to gibbering in Even Cant at the galling entitlement it entails. They have the same access as anyone else, and it's exclusively by their choice that they aren't choosing to use it.

People are weird about descs and just not reading them.

I am more or less insane when it comes to grid things. A grid build could easily take me a year putting in full time hours if I'm doing it 'right' to my way of thinking. I end up using season switches for elements of the descs, time of day, weather effects, hell, even a diner menu will actually have different 'specials' on the menu set to switch by the day of the week. Even if any given desc is short to read, it's going to be different on the regular, because it being different to account for the world differences is going to be built in.

It also means... this takes forever. Forever.

It makes me less inclined to add useless grid rooms. If all of the above is going into it, it is damned well going to have a story and hooks built into all of it, too, and it's going to be a place that's potentially useful and is a good resource for players as a location with story ideas built in, but not ones that are so overwhelming that the place is useless for anything else.

Edit: Oh, yeah, the point. I have been told multiple times that this is wasted effort because nobody reads room descs. Further, that it's unfair to put story seeds and hooks in the room descs because the people who can't be bothered to read the room desc might miss them.

@Pondscum I hope they throw the book at them. No, fuck a book. I hope they throw every volume of the encyclopedia at them.

@Arkandel said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

The only time grid is important is when a game is already very well populated as then the chances of running into people randomly are vastly increased; in those cases yes, you want to encourage your players to be out and about instead of stuck into inaccessible RP rooms.

I actually think this is pretty relevant, though it's actually more relevant when the population is small. A small population means even fewer options open to all on the grid for random meetings and getting involved, because people will still be off in RP rooms. On a small game, this can be crushing, because then there's never any action on the grid itself.

You really want some viable, cool options on the grid. Temprooms have a purpose but I think they've sometimes been overused and have definitely contributed to the empty grid syndrome more than any private home or business do. This ends up making it ultimately harder for people to connect up IC, in the long run.

I actually support player-owned businesses a lot, but I do think it's reasonable to put a cap on certain kinds. Building a whole business for someone not playing the owner of it, just so they can have a backdrop for their day job (which I have also seen) is, I think, a lot more frivolous, by contrast. (Either talk someone into playing the owner, or pick a job at an existing place.)

@Wizz said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

I don't think everything should be 100% soulcrushing grimdark 100% of the time, like @Coin pointed out that doesn't even make narrative sense.

This. I see too much of an emphasis on this. When the game is nothing but a series of compounding losses, it is not fun; people lose hope and playing feels futile to all but the hardcore masochists. Likewise, a game without any losses or struggle is not fun; it grows stale and boring, fast.

@Quibbler I would love that. Especially if it's one of those crowded little corner market type places that is perpetually grungy, they owner is always sitting behind a counter framed in bullet-proof 'glass' with the booze and the cigarettes and the register, and isoften the only light on on that street at all hours, save for maybe an after-hours club or similar.

@Auspice "That they needed to make additional films to patch the gaping plotholes in the first, if this was not designed with the intent to be an ongoing series or trilogy where an expectation of this kind might be set up, it only serves to reinforce this point."

@Jennkryst I actually love flashback scenes.

If I had ever done the parody game (supernatural TV shows reality, essentially, complete with all the cheese and 4th wall breaks), people would have been able to get an XP bonus for 'gratuitous flashback sequence' (which is such a staple of the genre it's not even funny).

On a more serious note, Tailka had 'defining moments' as an option rather than backgrounds on her game, and I'd planned to steal and expand that to include flashback scenes like this for more serious projects, with extra incentives if it's a flashback to help a new character integrate with the existing characters on grid to best hit the ground running. It helps new folks get started, and fills in more for the existing characters -- a win all around, I think.

Maybe no one has taken up the offer, but, damn, there are really cool reasons they maybe should sometimes.

@Nasgarath I don't think we ever ran across each other, but cheers to a fellow member of the 1996 club, and best luck on the relaunch!

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

Then again it may be as simple as being firm in saying this game is narrative and meant to be it may not be everyone's cup of tea

^ This. More games really need a mission statement, where the basics are covered. If you intend for things to be PvE or PvP, cooperative or competitive OOC, narrative or code/system-heavy, etc. This is wiki main page material, or should be, right up at the very top.

And people need to read that and understand it applies to them.

Reno1 had one of these, and it was clear, concise, accurate, and damned good.

Then a notable number of people whined that it was precisely what it said on the tin. (To which I can only add another planting to the garden of facepalms at this point, though that was insufferably draining at the time.)

Farscape would have been entertaining as hell, I think. It had interesting factions, wasn't so heavy on the technobabble that can be an awkward deterrent, real threats, major weirdness, and all around a universe that seemed like it would be highly entertaining to engage with.