Posts made by surreality

@Catsmeow Pretty much that. Like... I have had the chance to get to know some folks in the hobby (some on the forums, some who never have been) well enough to know where plenty of bodies are buried re: RL stuff. I'd still never repeat that stuff, even if I dislike the person intensely.

Something game-ethics related? Yeah, if somebody wants that to not get out, they really need to just not tell me, because I can't just... not say something, even if it's telling them, "That is so not OK," and if it isn't knocked off? Yeah, I will say something. So if somebody wants to be an unethical ass on a game, seriously: don't tell me.

RL stuff, though? That's somebody's life, not public entertainment fodder. I realize a lot of people don't bother making that distinction, so there's probably all manner of 'fun' stuff I've shared privately with people that has made the rounds, which is partly why I'm a cagey cow these days.

I just... kinda can't do that. So I figure there have to be other people who are the same, just like the people who think any given personal RL tidbit they find out is a new toy to play with. At least there's consolation in knowing it goes both ways?

@Catsmeow Exactly. It's like... ok, so you want me to believe I'm some special exception to your universal shit-talking addiction? BWAHAHA. So cute.

@Catsmeow The ones that get to me the most are the ones who will smack-talk the shit out of absolutely everyone who crosses their path, but insist, "Oh, but I would never do that to you!!!" like you're supposed to believe that shit for a hot minute and trust them completely.

That statement always strikes me as being especially precious every time I hear it, and if you read 'precious' in that sort of condescending 'bless your heart' 'all the headpats and fake smiles' tone, it's still nowhere near as 'I just sucked on a lemon filled with battery acid that murdered my grandmother and am trying to smile through it all' as it really deserves to be.

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

I will just leave this here.

@tragedyjones Another thing you may want to look at is gameline-specific breaking points for minor templates, for those splats that have them. I was working with that idea for 7D in that minor template players would need to take at least one breaking point specific to their role as a minor template. Some have this built in to some extent (vampire), but not all. All this would really entail is a list of examples to give people ideas.

<shares coffee/vodka/tea/xanax (pick your favorite) in empathy>

It really is an eye-opener when that hits. I have had... more than a few shocked spit-takes over the past few months, including a round or two of that one.

@Lithium DigitalOcean is $10/month and can be set up to include the wiki pre-installed. You just have to add the MUX. @Glitch's Zero-to-MUX thread covers the steps, and it's pretty much that simple.

@HelloProject That's why I decided to not bother with WoD/CoD any more, either.

In my view, it is easier to write something from scratch that works for the capabilities of the environment than force a square peg into a round hole. It's what I'd been working on for about 2-3 years now practically, and for about 10 years or so before that as an idle tinkering game project.

On the redundant commands and hidden indexes and all that issue, this is one of the first things I was working on addressing.

I have not read through all of this.

One of the design considerations about WoD/CoD is how conditional it is. If these conditions -- and I am not even talking about the conditions game mechanic here -- were constants, it would be easier.

They are not. They can be as capricious as 'I feel like using my use-once monthly bonus now'. Yes, there are definitely ways that you could code that and track it. Now multiply that work for the dozens of things to which this applies, few of which are handled in anything even resembling a uniform manner.

The system is explicitly designed to be as versatile and flexible as possible, and is heavily reliant on judgment calls to be made on the fly. Which is why you have the roll setup that you typically see; the game is designed for a single ST and a tabletop environment, unless someone is using the LARP rules instead. That there are different rules for the same core concepts of a game for tabletop and LARP alone is significant, in that it recognizes that the tabletop version has substantial issues when someone tries to directly apply it in a LARP environment, and the same holds true for a MU environment (even if some of the problems vary somewhat).

This is one of the reasons it can be great for MU if people all know the rules and don't mind the code complexities designed to preserve as much of the intentional versatility and flexibility as possible of the tabletop experience, but that I feel it's a bad choice for a system to use if you want one explicitly for use in an MU environment for this same reason. WoD/CoD can be streamlined in its code, but doing so generally will also require some mechanics or rules shifts in the form of house rules -- which means you just replaced more complex code commands with a new pile of rules and exceptions to learn.

@HelloProject For reals, you're not the only one who has wondered if I was cursed. That, or 'must have been Mengele in a previous life' or some shit.

Weirdly, more than a 'who I was and where' list, I should totally add the 'list of seriously WTF crazy shit' here. I'd be writing for days, but shit, why not.

Ghostwheel:

• First meetup/MOObash, got unexpectedly grabbed and kissed by the guy with one eye, without his glass eye in, and ended up so startled I didn't close my eyes, and ended up staring into the hole the whole time before yelping and running. Did not want to kiss this person ever in the first place.
• First game I was on where staff was so hopelessly corrupt at times that the whole lot of us would get fired once in a while, only to have the sane people re-hired. Kept getting re-hired until intentionally breaking the 'cannot relay info presented to us as staff' rule when the wife of one of the staffers, who kept logging in his bit to create and code special twinkerbelle items for herself and @setting her stats higher and said as much to me explicitly on my staffbit knowing I would never be allowed to say anything about it, kept trying to rally the players against all of the staff because she insisted that the staff was cheating (which they weren't at the time). Posted log of convo to a public board, immediately resigned. Was asked to stay anyway, said that I damned well knew I broke the rule, I did it on purpose, I was not sorry, and if I got a pass, that would actually be improper (even if the action itself was the right thing to do), and I wasn't going to be the girl saying 'the rules apply to everyone, really' and then have a rule broken for me, no matter why, because that would have been hilariously counterproductive.
• Watched detailed discussions of zoophilia take place on public channels, and a 40-something drunken divorcee and a 13-year-old nymphette have a years-long flame war over who was the best e-lay, and a themewiz send an underage boy recordings of her masturbating while calling out his name, and a 50-something Pern addict seduce another 15-year-old boy only to leave him when she dubbed him 'her abuser'. Did not have nearly enough popcorn for that shit. There is just not enough popcorn in the world for that shit. None of that involved me, but damn was there a lot of whining from a lot of people, all the time.

Seriously. That was the intro to the hobby. Even most epic Shang drama can't hold a candle to the day to day WTFery on Ghostwheel from the mid-90s.

Cybersphere:

• Yay rape incident.
• Do not even remember the dude's name, but some dude I had talked to some on there for a bit lost his internet, and I had an old AOL account I wasn't using but was still on its $10/month or whatever that we'd never gotten rid of, and I still used it once in a blue to talk to some friends. Told him he could use it, and what limits there were on that (since we had the cheapest it had some weird special condition or something) but he totally ignored that, so we ended up with a bill that was literally hundreds of dollars out of nowhere, and just shut the whole thing down.
• Shit started to go really well, then my grandmother got sick RL. I needed to be with her, so had to drop everything. Couldn't really get back into anything afterward.

FurryMUCK:

• I was only there for two weeks, if that. While by all accounts this is more than enough time for something to go mind-bogglingly wrong, nothing did. That in itself is somehow inherently weird.

...to be continued, I suppose. I suddenly need a drink.

@HelloProject You don't even know the half of it. It's why other than lingering around here a little for another week or so to make sure I catch up with some folks and clean up some loose ends, I'm pretty much done.

I am more or less the hobby's canary in the coal mine, I think. Maybe it was foreshadowing that I turned bright yellow and then almost died earlier this year? ...weird how I totally missed that symbolism entirely until just now! Signs, man.

@HelloProject I still actually have two logins on Shang that will probably be maintained. One is because I have friends I only know there, and don't want to lose touch with. That's Muse. So if anybody for some reason wants to track my dumb ass down, well, that login is on all the time and is on an autoreconnect, even though it stays dead idle most of the time. (I don't really pay any attention to the screen.) If nothing else, a message can be left.

There's another that is basically a placeholder. It has a name and an alias of two characters I played for years. When I left Shang a number of years ago, someone took the desc from one, the name of the other, set their &quote to something I had said IC in public that was not a generic quote but was a character-specific IC statement, and used a pic I was using for a PB of a character on a completely different game. They then proceeded to play coy when my friends would page them and ask if it was me, and tried to get RL information out of them about me and about my friends. The only reason I eventually went back to Shang at all was to create a 'storage' login to keep those names and info and identify myself in a way that would hopefully prevent that from happening again, because even if I don't play it, my friends don't deserve to be tricked by an asshole who is trying to get personal information out of them. I still don't know who did it, or why, but for reasons I hope can be understood... I will not be sharing the name of that one.

I'm only kinda tangentially around at the moment while tapering off stuff, but I gotta admit, I would have been down with something voice-side and open to all simply because I'm one of those people that writes like I talk... but until somebody hears me talk and can spot what's tongue-in-cheek and what's serious a little better, which is much easier to do when I'm speaking, I'm really fucking easy to misread. I try to be cognizant of that, but it's not always successful.

...and, as a final update, I'm out, folks. I'll check in for the next few days for any PMs or whatevs for skype or email info if anyone wants to keep in touch, but the pending situation that had everything on edge went... poorly. I can't be around any more. I won't be doing game stuff going forward, or playing anywhere, so if that's the interest (which would be understandable, duh), I can't be that person any more. Sorry, folks. I really did try.

For the folks I have met here, and through this hobby over the past 20+ years, thank you. Even the people who drove me crazy gave me great stories to tell, in the end, and I thank you, too. (Even Spider and Jeurg.)

The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
Thank you to all the people who let me believe this for as long as I have, and may your world be made of many stories worth telling for many years to come.

Be well, and know I'm sincerely grateful.

@Auspice ...that is amazing.

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

<facebook>"Share" if you remember random emitters for everything from weather to room ambience; "Like" if it made you grit your teeth.</facebook>

I actually love these and always have. I also recognize that many people don't. That's why I support everyone who loves them to definitely use them -- but to please have a way that the people who hate them can turn them off, since they can get repetitive, and make them opt-in at the outset. You can always do special announcement/custom things that everyone really needs to see (like a game-wide announcement that a bomb just went off, etc.) unfiltered in a different way so folks still see the stuff that's relevant/genuinely unique and important.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

If, for some reason, I want to see 3D, IMAX 3D is the only one I can see without intense migraines (or was, prior to this current migraine misery I'm experiencing).

...holy crap, I thought I was the only person this happens to. (I had always thought it would be worse, but it's so much less evil for some reason.)

@HelloProject I'm writing up my own system, but I'll take a look there and see if there's anything I can suggest.

There are alternate systems, too -- things like 'luck points' or 'karma points'/etc. that don't necessarily apply to character advancement, but allow for rerolls or temporary perks, and so on, in a variety of systems. I'd want to handle that the same way, too, so it's equally relevant there, in case it's relevant in your case.

(I am still in a mental place of 'I want to do a thing with that! ...now how to think on how to do--<flail, note it down, will pick at it later>' on any specifics on that. )

OH. Speaking of. This is actually relevant generally: if you are going through a hell of a time RL for whatever reason, step away.

No, really. (Still learning this one the hard way; stopped playing beginning of the year, paused on the project earlier this month.)

If the game is open, find someone you trust to maintain and keep in touch enough but not too much.

If it isn't yet, remember that it isn't a race, and you being in a good headspace is more important than deadlines you get to set for yourself anyway.

@HelloProject When I'm less bleary-headed and whatnot, I can pass along info on how I was going to do it, though really... @Coin more or less covered it. There was a small trickle of 'daily XP' people would get on their charbit (0.1xp/day in a system with similar costs to CoD, so around 36.5xp/year per PC bit unique to that PC bit, which is definitely a trickle), but anything earned through activity (plot participation, random 'everybody gets XP for a holiday', contributing neat new content for everyone on the game to use, etc.) would go to a core player bit for the player, to distribute as they choose. Could be saved up to spend on a new character later, etc., too.

@Coin said in How Do I Headwiz?:

I am more and more in favor of XP being a player thing and having players distribute the XP among whatever alts they have as they see fit, logistics and logic be damned.

I it when the ideas I want to run with that everyone initially decries as totally the end of the world and clearly I am just a stupid idiot person get more than me behind being willing to try them.