Posts made by surreality

Up is a little more handy, I think. Up probably cuts down on a lot of 'me, too!' spam/filler.

Note to self: you eventually need to stop giving people chances when they keep letting you down over and over and do not seem to give a fuck. At least learn to not give a fuck back.

@Ganymede said in The Cat Thread:

He's scared to death of the outdoors. And other things: our children; mice; stationary objects.

The fluffy stupid one is like this, for us. She once sneezed, startled herself at the noise of her own sneeze, zoomed backward in a panic, crashed into the headboard on the bed, and promptly launched herself out of the room for parts distant.

We did not see her for another 12 hours.

It is a minor miracle we were able to stop laughing by then.

@Misadventure Check to see, perhaps, if there are any local shelters with slightly older (not ancient, just not necessarily kittens) litter-trained cats they want to adopt out in pairs.

No, really. Even cats 1-2 years old are still very young for cats, but hard to adopt out, especially in pairs.

Not only will the shelter love you, but they are past the 'kitten hyper' stage, and may not harry the older kitty as much. They also have their personalities already, and you'll have a better idea if they'll mesh well with your current kitty.

I've done this twice (two pairs over the years), and never regretted it. The two kitties I have now are actually sisters, adopted like this. Old pic but relevant cuteness:

...they are giant derpybutts and we them.

...and generally on-thread, we lost our Ancient Cat last year, in the midst of The Year From Hell.

This was Ancient Cat:

She was our puffy little snarkbomb grumpybutt. We called her my 'Overly Familiar'. That my overly familiar was a little ball of snarkitude with creepily human expressions should surprise exactly no one. We still miss her wee whiny face. (Sadly, all the pics of her being equally adorable are actual film and therefore are not handy, meh.)

@Tyche ...meanwhile, most of us who remember college from about 20 years ago are doubtless thinking: "Are you fucking kidding me? I would have killed for even crappy grocery store sushi as an option in the dining hall, fuck you so very very much."

We bastardize everybody's food, dammit. It's what we dooooooooooooo. Nobody is really especially singled out on this particular front.

We've done it to pretty much everybody. Even European cultural foods are very different here from the originals in notable ways. (Paging @WTFE re: American Chinese food vs. actual Chinese food, to insert appropriate and better-informed rant here. )

And now I miss European yogurt. Again. No, our 'greek yogurt' is not the same thing ...closer! But still not it. Fuck you so hard, college kids. COLLEGE KIDS!!! </Tucker and Dale>

ETA: So I guess the RL thing I love is European yogurt, because fuck me, how could someone not?

@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.

I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.

So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.

@Roz We got everything but the heads, with one of our previous cats.

We had this mental image of her giant, calico cow-print fat ass lounging around in a smoking jacket in a room filled with trophies, a snifter of brandy, and a cigar for years.

To this day, we think most of these creatures were simply caught off guard, potentially laughing to themselves, because they did not expect the twenty-two pound blubber-bomb with fur and markings visible from space (especially in the grass) to actually try to pounce on them.

She also believed she was invisible whenever she stuck her head under a throw rug. She was a very special snowflake.

I just finished this up today, and it isn't MU* code -- so it didn't seem to fit there.

Anyway, these are pretty easy. Note: the text will hop around a little when these expand, but life goes on; you'll have an automatically expanding/collapsing section (default collapsed) with the potential spoiler content hidden. (It may flash visible for a fraction of a second, but that's javascript for you.)

Add to the bottom of Mediawiki:Common.css:

.spoiler .mw-collapsible-toggle,
.mw-content-ltr .spoiler .mw-collapsible-toggle {
	float: left !important;
	padding-right: 8px;
}

Create a new page, titled Template:Spoiler

Paste in the following, and save the page.

<includeonly><div class="spoiler mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" data-expandtext="View Potential Spoilers" data-collapsetext="Hide Potential Spoilers"><div class="mw-collapsible-content"><br>
{{{text|{{{1}}}}}}
</div></div></includeonly>

To use the template on any given page:

{{Spoiler|text}}

Text: enter whatever text you want here, can be multiple paragraphs, but cannot include = signs or | symbols.

If you need to use a pipe symbol (for a link or similar stuff), create a pipe template if you don't have one already. That one's easier -- create a page called Template:!

The only text on the page should be a single pipe symbol:

|

^ Yep, just like that. Save it and you're done. Then if you need a pipe symbol anywhere in your spoiler template (or any other templates on your wiki), you can pull it up with this: {{!}}

A lot of wikis have this set up due to other code requirements, but just in case yours doesn't, that's how to do it, and what that thing is.

Hopefully this helps somebody out.

This thread, on the whole, is extra fascinating on a really weird level -- namely, the 'the kind of games we all come from/are used to' shines through in a big way. (This isn't a bad thing.)

I've actually had a handful of plots emerge organically in the way @ThatGuyThere and @Ganymede mention. They have tended to be things that don't tread into 'requires elaborate permissions' territory, for the most part, or were things it was pretty simple to just ask, 'Hey, can I... ' in a job to a member of staff I knew I could effectively communicate with. (Note: not a 'buddy' or similar, just someone I know I can effectively communicate the idea to clearly, and know they'll ask me the right questions if they have any, etc.)

The more a game can facilitate this, the better, IMHO. The only way these work, though? It isn't so much about the staff, unless the staff are amazingly draconian and don't allow players to do anything at all, ever. It's about people being willing to pick up the ball and toss it back and forth.

You just have to think local pick-up game scale, not world-altering national championships, for the most part, and it will generally all work out just fine. Not everyone's satisfied with 'local pick-up game' scale, and generally that means they'll need more support/approval/etc.

@FiranMEH And if someone wants to organize something fancy-as-fuck for their IC debate or IC wedding -- there's a reason there is a wedding planning industry, after all, that is as valid as the 10 minute wedding prep, and there's a reason no candidate for public office these days does so without a team of people working with them or speechwriters on hand -- with prepared speeches or whatnot, they should absolutely be permitted to do so if that is the kind of scene they want to run.

No one is saying that is required, but it is a real option that people may choose to pursue, and if they do so, they may not want to do so on the fly. Yes, plenty of game systems do in fact provide means and mechanics to allow people to gather a crowd, invest resources through whatever mechanisms the game allows for, etc. in allowing for such scenes to happen, or acquire the sort of influence that would make these circumstances actually occur reasonably in the course of play.

I've already been quite clear that I do not consider this kind of scene a plot.

@Kanye-Qwest I just downvoted it for shitty overgeneralization and uselessness re: the conversation on the whole going anywhere productive; I am a simple creature, but goddamn do I hate oversimplified minds.

(Read: Wow, it's so much more complex than that, @FiranMEH, but you keep on doing you if it works for you!)

@Arkandel Some types can -- others can't without setting some things up in advance.

Though I've flinched through almost every one of them I've ever attended on a MUX, I wouldn't, for instance, improv the average MUX wedding out of the blue. There's usually a shit-ton of stuff that requires setup time and whatnot involved in that sort of thing. The same is true for a scene set at an IC political rally or debate, performance or competition of some kind, too -- there's prep involved there on the part of the people running things despite these being 'social events', and often on the part of many of the players involved as well, that is the kind of thing best allowed to have some advance notice.

@Arkandel Social scenes allow for a lot more 'come and go' than plots, though, in a way that makes it a lot easier to find an excuse to step out (if it becomes too much) or join (typically without a need to pre-plan for it or sign up in advance). It makes them a lot more flexible, but also limits what can be done with them in some respects for the same reasons.

I mentally break them down like this, by the numbering provided:

1. This is a plot, consisting of multiple, ongoing scenes. It may or may not be a series of +events.

2. This is a one-shot, typical of the 'monster of the week' style encounter, self-encapsulated. It may or may not be an +event. It is not a plot, as it is not ongoing. People still tend to call these plots, they're just one-shot-plots.

3. This is a social event. May or may not be an +event. Not a plot.

All have value, purpose, and all require planning and prep. All should be valued by game runners, because they have purpose, and they all require planning and prep. Not all of them are valued by all players equally, but they don't have to be -- different strokes for different folks and all that.

@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@surreality It could work, it's mostly technical limitations that might prove pesky.

For example, other than the dice-roller I mentioned above (which it has to be tied to your in-game stats since STs can't be expected to go check if the 9 dice you rolled were actually your strength+melee sum)

This is super easy on an open-sheet game. The roller part, no, but the checking, yes. The roller code for wiki is craptastic, but there are still viable options there.

you also wouldn't have notifications when someone posts something new but you'd need to keep hitting the refresh button, people would need an account per character or I'd need to remember 'surreality' is playing 'Leia', there is still no nested view for those walls of text unless you get really fancy with templating, etc.

Already have a log template with calculations that spits out commands for XP awards on a per-participant basis, shows up in a list of logs pending XP awards by staff for review, and turns off that tab on the log page and removes itself from the pending list in three clicks once it's handled and processed. CSS flow stuff is not even a thing to worry about.

Oh, and are there modules which would show lists of such 'discussion' pages per character? If I'm on a bunch of separate PrP threads I would want to see them all in one place, but only the ones I'm on, not every one in a big long list.

Not sure. I'd have to look at what extensions are there. Thing is, there are other ways of doing that, and doing that fairly easily. You can even have them set up so the only ones that display are within a certain date range/etc. really -- nothing older than 4 weeks, for example.

In other words there will be a point where you'll need to consider what you are gaining this way and if it's worth the tradeoff, just like any other system you're introducing. What are you hoping the benefits are?

I think you need to not worry about what was and think about how to replicate it elsewhere, but at what is possible and work from there. It's just a different approach. What exists and how to interpret it into something else is already a limited framework compared to what's possible.

@Arkandel I know I plan to set some things like this up. People are just going to have to deal with everything being more or less in the open. Anything that by necessity MUST MUST MUST be private is going to have to be stuck in a +job of some kind, but everyone being able to have eyes on as much as possible is a net positive, IMHO.

Granted, this also applies to the various bits and pieces of information that normally would be staff only (in large part, anyway) re: setting/world/etc. as they're resources that should, IMHO, be open to the game at large if aiming for a highly collaborative environment.

There's a lot that can be handled with the use of spoiler tags to help people avoid info they don't want to see if they want to preserve suspense.

@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

What I mean by 'thread' in this context is anything a group of players can look at asynchonously then add to. It should probably be write-only (if someone's being abusive we don't want them changing what they wrote before) - the idea is STs might not be online at the same time as everyone else, or some OOC research or communication with third parties might be needed, etc.

This is entirely (and fairly easily) doable via wiki. While it isn't write-only, it keeps track of edits that can be compared/checked/etc. with no loss of data, so there's instant accountability.

The only thing it isn't is private, so everything is open to everyone's view. (Which has upsides and downsides.)

@WTFE Shang has that for its rental rooms -- and I think there's a room parent out there somewhere that even uses that command name and structure. How to set it up on a game these days... I wouldn't even begin to have a clue; building permissions are nothing at all like I remember with most setups.

Sorry to hear about that, @Fantom. It looked like a project with a lot of promise, and what is there does look great.

@Thenomain I find it vaguely useful if traveling, because they have a simple way of ordering takeout, and I am lazy.