Posts made by surreality

Opposition. Opposition forces. Competitors. These things strike me as being more what some are talking about -- people competing for resources or status or attempting to prevent someone else from having one or the other or both -- for whatever reason than what I think of when an antagonist is described as per the above. Characters in this group may behave in extreme ways against other characters, but it's as possible for them to all be acting from a 'good' motivation as it is for some desire to burn the whole world down or go full-on Mr. Burns. Some of the most amazing story conflicts can arise between two 'hero' types with different ideas about how to bring about world peace and happy ever after for everyone, for instance.

Generally speaking, I don't like the label antagonist for a number of the reasons described in the thread. It has nothing to do with worrying that someone is going to be mean to someone else IC, and more or less everything to do with the idea that there's a default set of traits that are acceptable for characters to have and one that 'others' them into a category of 'bad guy' that just doesn't work for me. It feels, on some level, as though the very messy, murky, muddy grey of reality in which people are made up of good and bad traits is not relevant on a MU, and that strikes me as pretty silly (for most settings; I can see some classic four color superhero settings going this route if that's the vibe they're going for).

The black and white breakdown of traits doesn't just impact your 'antagonists', either -- it limits your 'protagonists' as well by limiting the motivations, beliefs, practices, opinions, etc. that are open to them once it gets to a certain point.

There's a distinct difference between designated (or otherwise) antagonist characters and conflict RP. There's a difference, too, between conflict RP and actual risk, even.

I'm also with @Ghost re: reward for risk. I very firmly do not believe in tiered basic gains based on risk level for a variety of reasons. Most of all because risk involves activity, it's easy to reward that on an activity basis. Someone who is generally risk-averse may find that activity worthwhile; tiering it all presents an obstacle in that regard. Second, some generally risk-friendly players may consider some specific activity uninteresting; forcing their participation based on what's essentially an arbitrary ranking is, well, it's meh. It's just meh. Third... what's stopping someone from setting themselves to maximum risk and just sitting back on their butt and letting all the free extra XP roll right in? Absolutely nothing unless that reward for risk is tied to a requirement for activity.

This is one of those K.I.S.S. situations, and @Ghost nailed it.

One of the greatest teachers I ever had was my 8th grade English teacher. One of our segments at the time was sci-fi, and our project for that semester was to build the very basics of 'a planet with life'. We didn't need to get into the details of why such a world was in its Goldilocks zone and such, or why it didn't need to be on the technical angles (we were 12-13 year olds, after all, and this was the 80s when it was less common for 12-13 year olds to know that stuff), and our actual focus was more about building an alien culture.•

"What conflicts exist here?"
"What do people understand about the world, and what are its mysteries?"
"What do people think they understand, but get completely wrong?"
"Do they know about other worlds and cultures? If so, how do they get along? What do they think about others? Why?"
...and so on. It was a good list of questions to consider, and it was over 5 pages long. I sincerely wish I still had it.

One of the worst exes I ever had gave me some of the best world-building advice ever, which is also mentioned here: "It doesn't matter if it's not going to come up. You need to know the answer in order to properly determine cause and effect for the world."

It becomes amazingly easy to come up with cool stuff when you start from the beginning -- the real beginning beginning, like 'how did this world come into being' -- and follow cause and effect chains from there. Options will suddenly explode in all directions, and that is a good thing.

• (I am that asshole who wrote thirty-odd pages for a 2-page project and oh, did I ever get something of a squint when I picked that paper up after it was graded -- but with a giddy sort of eye-twinkle, like that crotchety old coot just knew what I'd be doing with the rest of my dang life right then and there. He wasn't wrong, I suppose.)

@Arkandel Ideally, you can build a framework to consistently crowdsource ideas and additions not just at the start, but throughout the progress of the game.

That framework is just one hell of a lot of work, since it not only includes mechanisms for doing it functionally, but clear and understandable examples and guidelines for doing so. None of those things are at all easy to construct effectively in a way that doesn't invite the 'too divergent a notion of what is/isn't possible or is thematic' problem in for tea and crumpets on the regular.

@Autumn said in What do you WANT to play most?:

@surreality said in What do you WANT to play most?:

@Autumn This is both reasonable and... not at all reasonable to me at once.

Expecting a 'this is how the world works' document written by an unpaid amateur writer to be as engaging as a professionally written novel by one of the most popular authors of fiction writing in the world today is just not the most realistic expectation to have.

Of course it's not. It's not an expectation I have, either! Original themes have some advantages. Use of existing media for themes also has some advantages, and "better-written and more engaging material than an original theme is likely to have" is one of them.

It's not that either is "better" in the abstract. It's just one of those things to be aware of when you're settling on a theme for a game.

I think this is part of the issue; it's a combination of both of these (paragraphs). My actual advice on this is actually pretty harsh but is something I think holds quite true.

If first you decide you want a game and have to decide what you're going to do? Use something that already exists. Don't try original theme/system unless the idea is 'big' enough in your head that it simply will not leave your poor brain alone long enough to not annoy the heck out of you at least a bit with how often new ideas and directions to go pop into your head/drag you out of bed/blindside you in the middle of dinner with the urge to write something down.

Which is essentially to say, 'this is the level of attention that went into those worlds, you're not going to get away with much less than that just because it's a different medium/expression'.

There's stuff that can be crowdsourced for it, but I think without a really solid foundation to build from, and a solid understanding of how your pet reality works, things become disjointed and glommed together very quickly. "That sounds cool!" is only one part of the process; 'how does it work' and 'does it even work in this reality at all' are more important and are things that a lot of folks (including some game designers) overlook or forget. You can only, "...uhm, MAGIC!!!" so many times, after all.

@Misadventure When I attempted to do that on Reno1, the typical cluster of loud voices simply screamed there was no plot.

Clearly, I needed to put THIS IS PART OF A SPHERE METAPLOT, GUYS! in highlighted red ANSI in all of the events for it that those very same people never bothered signing up for.

Did they still whine and bitch that there wasn't anything? Of course they did. In fairness, Reno1 at the time was not designed to have one, but there was an idea for one anyway to give people things to do.

Probably would have been fun if anybody actually ever showed up to do it other than @Scorn and one or two other folks whose MSB ID's I don't know off hand.

@Autumn This is both reasonable and... not at all reasonable to me at once.

Expecting a 'this is how the world works' document written by an unpaid amateur writer to be as engaging as a professionally written novel by one of the most popular authors of fiction writing in the world today is just not the most realistic expectation to have. From another perspective, this is like expecting the script for a GoT episode, consisting of names, basic stage directions, and dialogue to be as engaging as an actual episode of the show or one of the books it's based on; it's just not going to happen.

World information (or a script, or stageplay, etc.) and a story that reveals that information as the story progresses are completely different animals and one is almost always going to be considerably more engaging than the other: namely, the one where there's a story being told at the same time. That's the role the players take in the game: it's their story being told in a setting, often with characters they create themselves (unless the game has a roster setup).

A single-author setting also only has to take into account the things that affect the story they already know they want to be telling, usually from the outset. If you, as the author, know you're never going to go to Keep X, what it's for, who lives there, where it is don't matter; that information may be relevant in a game world players are going to explore in their stories and you'd better have those answers unless you want to open that up to players to create themselves (which, IMHO, people should be a lot more open to doing than they often are). There are questions players are going to have that as a single-author of a story you don't ever need to consider for an instant, let alone have an answer for, because you are in full control of the story and whether that ever becomes relevant or not; it isn't the case for a world built for the purpose of others telling stories.

On the flip side, if you build in too much story? You run the risk of considering your players to be actors following a script, and that way lies railroading and the entirely wrong sort of attention to detail.

Someone writing a novel is essentially preparing a stage, costumes, props, dialogue, and stage directions for the participants.

Someone creating a game world has to create a much more fully-fleshed out stage, costumes, props, directions for how the world will react to actions taken by the participants, a handful of improv scenarios, and the willingness to let go enough to allow those improv scenarios unfold as they will.

It's the difference between writing a bed time story and creating a playroom; while they have some elements in common, they're just not the same at all, and expecting all the qualities of each in the other is a bigger (and inherently more problematic) ask than most folks realize.

@Thenomain Darkmetal would have been Rathe, and the rocket/missile/fireball whatever that 'made a u-turn'. Someone was attempting to send one at him, and he virtual adepted his way around slinging it back at the source. I vaguely recall the pose of it, which had been paged to me back then; it did end with something something 'Hey, <magely weapon of mass destruction>s don't make U-turns!'

The instigator/ultimate victim may have been Lloyd? Maybe. I know they were hanging out/doing a best of enemies thing at the time, from what little of the time is left in the brain; the thing I'm thinking of was almost 20 years ago at this point. (Rathe's player was another former roomie who was here with three other folks who all moved in at once; that might have happened at a computer next to mine or was shortly before they got here or shortly after they left, but I just cannot for the life of me recall the specifics. It was around that time period, though.)

@Clarity PK from a distance. Usually done through +jobs/rolls with staff, with no warning or chance to prepare defense. Think of a sniper with magical curse or fireball or 'just randomly teleport you to the bottom of the Marianas Trench', more or less.

This is one of those things where sometimes you log in to find you're now dead IC.

At the moment... WoD, but only because I have a whopping one character I can be dredged out of the mothballs once in the bluest of moons to play simply because I her... and she's been played all of twice, total.

Over all, and hence the vote: original theme. I've spent more time and put in more RP hours on games like Nightscape, Shangrila, Ghostwheel, Castle D'Image, Cybersphere, and similar places by a huge margin than I have on WoD games. While old games are old, I put in a lot more hours on them than I can be bothered to invest in a WoD game.

In terms of practical hours in the hobby, most of my time these days is spent staffing/developing stuff for games when I'm not rambling about stuff here, and there, too, 95% or more of that time is dedicated to an original theme/system game, with the remaining 5% giving wiki advice or helping pitch in with that for folks if they ask.

I think there was an incident along these lines on Darkmetal. At least I know Rathe did something re: teleporting some kind of explosive something or other back to its original source when someone tried to throw either a fireball or an enchanted rocket or something like that at his lair to take him out; he either teleported it or redirected it successfully at the source.

Details are hazy, but I just recall it ending in something-something about 'fireballs don't make U-turns!' and the person who sent it initially wondering what happened to the earth-shaking kaboom they expected while watching his lair until, well... it found them instead.

4am.

Landline rings.

Somebody's dead, that's the only reaso-

-robocall for a mortgage scammer.

At 4am.

I simply do not have adequate profanity at my disposal to properly describe what I think of this one.

OK, so this is sort of a game thing. (I will call it my stereotypical Libra balancing act for bitching about something game and not game related at the same time in Random Bitching? I'm just gonna run with that.)

...I think I got the code I've been fighting with for about a week to work, finally. Which is the kind of thing that will probably make all of the competent coders look at me like I am an idiot, but I already completely own that when it comes to code•, I am a complete idiot, which is what makes this tantamount to a sheer miracle.

I know that writing this will surely jinx the shit out of me, and it will break in some new and creative way that makes the game implode into a pile of pixie dust, but for now, I am going to cheer and chair-dance to myself because I now have the fussy, anal-retentive +where code of my middle-aged cranky bitch dreams.

•...and many other things, too, but for now, I'm sticking to talking about the code. <cough>

@mietze Shang is so weird like that.

On one level, it's often horrifying.

On another, it's proof that human creativity is still alive and well, because damn some of the things that crop up are absolutely that above all else.

I am perpetually torn on this one, really, but lean toward the latter.

@mietze Shang had a Shenissa that was... well. A giant green psychic penis in a cart. She was a mistress, of course.

Gods, why in the hell does my brain keep these things?!

Ending with vowels or vowel sounds in general, I think, with the sometimes Y included there.

Male names tend to end in consonants more often.

It probably has something to do, somewhere along the line, with the 'harder' consonant ending and the 'softer' vowel ending, yadda yadda western civilization gender stereotypes, we humans are dumb yet wily like that.

In fairness, the suggestion I have for someone to be able to common sense fix the problem the current mediawiki install has on digital ocean is not a best practice.

I am reasonably sure there's a more secure way to do it than the one I laid out through some back end, and the one provided does absolutely have risks (and big ones).

For someone without heavy duty SQL/mediawiki/server experience, however, it works and will fix the problem without incident most of the time. That describes me, really. I only know the fix because I ran into the same problem, and after digging around about how to go about it, that was the only answer I found.

At some point, you have to do what works and hope for the best, especially when the argument about how to get something done takes up more time than researching how and getting it done.

@Shiggy said in RL Anger:

@surreality said in RL Anger:

Your point? (Other than 'here is a visual representation of an attractive woman, and I am not going to bother with any other qualities she might potentially possess beyond her physical appearance, because that's the only relevant thing to know about any given woman' apparently.)

You go on trying to introduce the persecuted white male argument. (And in this case, also tumble face first into a bear trap labeled 'proof I am more sexist than I realize' in bright neon letters.) I find it boring, pointless, and tiresome.

Liking attractive women: the height of misogyny. Insecure about your appearance, much?

Reading comprehension check: see bolded section for remedial lesson on multiple relevant subjects.

I like attractive women, too!

Also: nope, not really!

<headpats and hits ignore>

@Tinuviel ...it really sounds like she's way too busy to be dating! But hats off to her for having rockin' time management skills to make room for Ricky boy on that social calendar.

@Shiggy OK? She's adorbs. Your point? (Other than 'here is a visual representation of an attractive woman, and I am not going to bother with any other qualities she might potentially possess beyond her physical appearance, because that's the only relevant thing to know about any given woman' apparently.)

You go on trying to introduce the persecuted white male argument. (And in this case, also tumble face first into a bear trap labeled 'proof I am more sexist than I realize' in bright neon letters.) I find it boring, pointless, and tiresome.

I do not care how you feel about that issue any more than you probably care that I see you as equal to the shrieking insanity you linked from youtube from the opposite end of the spectrum, and I have no more desire to discuss your feels about it than you do with the yelling dude. (And I don't care about his feels, either.) Do you care? Nope. Do I care if you care? Nope.

Not gonna lie, I am actually amused that the WORA drinking game came about in 1999... and would now be old enough to vote in the US if it was a person.

Hey, if corporations count... <thoughtfully taps chin>