@Coin said in Kushiel's Debut:
@Pondscum said in Kushiel's Debut:
I think all we really need is to close ALL GAMES and make one giant melting pot game so we lords and ladies lovers can go smack the fuck out of those WoD and Westeros bitches.
It's all fun and games until people from Shang show up.
What are you even talking about? That is already more or less the best description of Shang on the forum to date.
@Ide I'm with @Nausicaa (who seems to be with @Thenomain) on this.
I'm not interested in someone else's 'objective' benchmarks, because everyone is going to have different criteria there, and that doesn't make them terribly objective.
I think these things are good to have as goals, but I don't consider them to be benchmarks for success, in the same way that I don't think they'd be benchmarks for success in a tabletop game. If someone is operating a game as a business, for profit (as some do), the above benchmarks may be more relevant or potentially necessary, but outside of those cases, I think 'the majority of participants are enjoying the majority of their time spent on the game' is a reasonable measure of success.
After all, "make a place where people can have enjoy doing <thing>" is a common staff goal, and "make a character I can have fun playing" or "enjoy roleplaying with other players" are common player goals. I'd say they're the most common, if I had to guess. (Rare is the person who makes or joins a game with a different intent, but they do exist; the profit example is one, and the 'Gold of My Own' is another, even if the latter there is still someone seeking their own personal fun through a roundabout method.)
@silentsophia Pretty much this.
I'm not down with the generalizations that kicked this off. This is mostly because I have a notable distaste for generalizations and think they make people look narrow-minded and bigoted.
I realize these statements are essentially conversational shorthand for many people, who don't feel like 'wasting' the words to say something more like, "It seems to be fairly common for many of <group> to do/think/say/behave <thing>," but I don't consider the spending of those words to be a waste.
It's the difference between blindly insulting a group based on group membership alone, and observing that within that group membership exist individuals -- potentially even a majority of the membership -- that behave in a certain manner.
It's not an insignificant difference and it's a sticking point for me personally. I recognize that most people intend the latter even when stating the former; otherwise their logic is shot to hell with the first individual that does not demonstrate <behavior>, and most folks aren't that dumb. Unfortunately, not 'wasting' those words makes the bigots and those using conversational shorthand generally indistinguishable without spending so many more words on the subject than they would have if they had bothered to be clear from the outset.
@Taika Not exactly possible, really. It's why it'd take a whole site to handle properly without raising more questions than it answers, rather than a single tutorial. There are too many moving parts.
@Taika How to construct templates was one of the ones I was considering. (There's a lot involved in those, not just the wiki code, that's all preference/taste-based/css-foo/etc. that is less 'here's how' than 'I have a bunch of options up, grab your favorite, be sure X is installed'.)
Sounds like a plan, though. 
"How to come up with a cool concept, realize it's probably too niche, and bury one's head in the sand: an autobiography" will sadly have to wait since between RL business chaos and being in the grip of phase one of the above... yeah. 
I may write up something on wiki-fu but is there anything in particular people really want in that regard as a priority? I eventually plan to make an actual wiki of 'copy stuff from here at will, here's a lot of instructions' but that's more like a year-end goal, so I'd rather target toward 'this is a current actual common need' if I decide to tackle this.
@Ganymede said in Kushiel's Debut:
Let's pull out some undisputed facts: 2-year plot; limited seats "at the table"; game-wide effect. I hope you can see why other long-term players might be miffed at being excluded.
This is what I'm looking at as the 'lesson' to take away from this thread. (Not saying 'y'all need to learn a thing', I'm saying this is what I'm going to keep in mind after reading about what went down here for myself.)
Mostly, if something has broad interest and impact, create space for more involvement.
I am not super familiar with the setting, but I would think there could have been something like 'oh, each X gets 2-4 representatives' rather than one only, perhaps, and it is a small enough change conceptually that probably would have gone a long way to preventing this from becoming an issue. That, or 'each only one needs X support people around them for special tasks X, Y, and Z also'. Something. There's always going to be something.
Is that a nightmare hassle to organize and arrange? Well, yeah, a lot more than getting five people together is. But if you have a two-year time frame to wrangle that it, sooner or later there's gonna be a window that will allow for it.
@Deviante For which staffers everywhere doubtless love you more than you will ever know! (Though I doubt they're boring. I've rarely seen a boring one from anyone, honestly.)
@Deviante It's a running joke. 
Someone actually did this to poor @mietze back on TR. I was her admin (though not at that time) so when an app came in that made me go, "...uhhhhhhhhhh..." and I referred it up the chain to her, that tale of OMGWTF emerged. (No names attached.)
It is not terribly uncommon for people to include some pretty graphic details of this kind of thing in backgrounds, involving everything from rape to sexual slavery to prostitution to 'why is this even here' line by line depictions of someone's first time, stuff that essentially runs the gamut from a porn variant of Hostel to Brazen: The Life and Times of a Woman Ahead of Her Time and Every Single One of the Men Who Loved Her. It's common enough that a number of games include something like 'if you have graphic sexual experiences in your character's history, do not go into graphic detail in your background' in policy.
Lord knows I do.
@Sunny I figure if there was a giant warning flag, you'd mention. Since there's not a mention, this is probably the most mature retirement I've seen in an age, so to you.
@Sunny It's also accurate, really. It's a hilarious take on it IMHO, but it's pretty fucking accurate.
It's a pretty good example of the difference between 'give a shit about the final result' and 'just tossing whatever crap out there', which is best described as the application of artistry or not.
Is it by default? No.
Can it be? Yes.
People get confused as fuck-all about what is and isn't art. Even self-professed artists.
It doesn't have to be good for it to be art. There is, obviously, bad art.
Some of what is and isn't good or bad art is subjective. Some isn't. There is objectively good and objectively bad art.
Whether you like it or not doesn't define whether something is good or bad art.
What you like and what you don't like defines your personal taste, which is a trait attached to you, not the art.
The art can be good even if you dislike it. The art can be bad even if you love it.
There is unquestionably artistry involved in the creation of a game, a scene, or a pose.
Some people are objectively better artists than others in this regard.
This will still, going back to the matter of taste, not really mean a hell of a lot in the long run. Good art will be ignored, bad art will be adored, mediocre art will be abhored, and any and all combinations of the above, all at the very same time. Sometimes by the very same person in the same head.
There's a specific artistic principle one of my profs hammered into our heads (or more accurately, tried to hammer into heads but it didn't stick unless people intuitively understood it already) regarding 'level of finish' that I think the hobby could learn a fair bit from. Unfortunately, he was a great teacher, and he couldn't explain it in a way people could understand, and I am a crappy teacher, so I don't think that's a tangent I'm qualified to go off on.
What you're describing with the 'queen' scenario seems like something that could be handled with something else, kinda. I hate always pointing to Shang, but they have the +gov setup, which lists available positions. If there's an NPC in the position it's noted, if it's open it's noted, and if there's a PC in the slot, it's named. Something like that might work out for what you're wanting.
@Thenomain I do think something that could be hooked into a command on the game would be fantastic, so consider that request seconded.
I would still have the DPL extension, even with Semantic Mediawiki, really. (Specifically, the third one. It seems to behave itself most reliably -- there are THREE of the buggers listed in their extension vault.)
It has a few output format options that are, well, they're useful and pretty and alternate outputs can be customized from the same dataset in ways that make me happy.
(It's also how I'm working up that wiki-side CG script thing I keep mentioning. The actual page? Is a reference page full of notes about the stats in addition to a character sheet to aid in chargen and specific reference. There's an alternate 'sheet only' pretty output format for the character page, and finally a text only CG output script (currently staff-side setting from the input players put into the wiki form) That's something we probably don't want to lose and I really like how DPL handles it.)
@faraday You can host the MUX and mediawiki droplet on DigitalOcean for $10/month without a single hitch, on the same domain, in the same place, with the full functionality of mediawiki with every bell and whistle and then some, with semantics and DPL. It's just no contest to me. DigitalOcean steers everyone away from the $5/month package anyway and toward the $10 (their tech people rambled out the reasoning for it but it was over my head) for anything other than the most basic html-only websites, so that's what you'd be paying there anyway if you were hosting with them.
(For another $2/month, you can have automatic backups that will include both the MUX and the wiki together. That's another reason I would steer away from having the game and MUX hosted separately, really.)
Edit: Think of it this way: you've gone above and beyond on MUX code. Someone who wants only the very basics can get by with the SGP stuff thrown in to the base MUX install. You have very sound reasons to want something better than that, even if that could do in a pinch for a novice. It's essentially the same thing; there's a better option out there that has more integration potential, more flexibility, and is ultimately going to be easier for people contributing to this effort to create distributable content for. (@Roz, I suspect that's going to be us in some respects!)
@faraday That... yeah, if you are having to pay for game hosting one place, and wikidot as well? I'd nope the heck out of that, especially since that'd probably kill the ability to have the same domain name for both.
@Cobaltasaurus said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
- The ability to decide whether the wiki is open to see or only members can see it.
It's worth mention that I think this may be able to be altered to some extent based on namespace. Or, at least, even 'locked down' members-only wikis can have a specific intro designated as 'open to public view' (which may just be the main page, I would have to double-check that one).
I strongly suggest admin-only user account creation. The one wiki I accidentally left open to letting people create accounts was flooded with spam pages almost immediately.
I'm also reasonably sure that if there's any MUX/wiki integration, both the wiki and the game would need to be on the same server. I mean maybe it could be otherwise, but I don't know how wikidot, which is on its own servers, is going to feel about people having external non-user sources from another server (the game itself) yanking from or shoving to its server.
@faraday I've had too many users not really be able to handle that kind of template input, not understand how it works and just delete it, or break it.
Forms can be set to the default or required method to edit the page (the template data) in semantic mediawiki. This prevents the template itself from being broken when entered onto the page, and ensures that the page is consistent with other pages of its type, as that type of page is essentially confined to by-form edits (no freeform editing).