Posts made by surreality

...hey, at least I'm not begging for a coder, right? (I promise, I'm not begging for a coder.)

Working on some server-side setup for a game wiki and am, frankly, way out of my depth. I have some of the basics covered from following @Glitch's tutorials and buckets of google-fu, but I'm still running into issues, and sooner or later I'm gonna break something.

I'm also reasonably sure that whatever it is I'm missing here is something someone with an actual clue would know to do, or is so obvious to someone who knows what they're doing that it's not even something people bother to mention in questions or tutorials.

Game is, if it ever becomes any kind of thing, a small crash test space for some OT concepts and systems that's presently living on my comp while I build it. (If I am going to break shit all over the place, I'd rather contain the chaos in space I know better how to control. It's not 'throw it on a server'-ready in itself, and that part I don't need to bother someone about.) Since thus far my 'poke the terminal app tentatively' experience begins and ends with getting that to function on the most basic level, well, yeah.

The game concept is pretty odd, would never be a 'next big thing' if it's ever even a thing, just so you're warned up front. It's a mashup of some 'Land of Lost Things' and afterlife/purgatory themes conceptually, shoe-horned into the systems a friend and I cooked up for a game that we want to work up in the future that would likely have broader appeal than 'Shit, surr's on one of her esoteric concept fusion binges again... ' (No, really, the other one's more broad appeal; it's why it's worth crash-testing the hell out of the foundation systems first! )

@silentsophia said:

Is your yarn acting up?

http://yarnshaming.tumblr.com/

Oh dear god, that is mad genius.

Now I'm going to wipe all this coffee off the monitor.

@Wizz said:

Really though, my main question is this:
At what point did "gonzo" weirdness come into the equation at Eldritch? I'm not saying
Please no, but it seems kind of a strange fit for WoD, where the mood is always a bit dark.

I don't know about Eldritch, but Reno has tried it with some success. I'm not sure if that's the same intention/direction, but anyone I've heard talk about it had positive experiences.

I don't talk to a heck of a lot of people, admittedly, but the once-in-a-while round of 'what on earth is that... ' with a bit of humor rolled in, even if it's humor on the OOC level for the players to enjoy while the characters are freaking right out, is something I've admittedly always found pretty entertaining and engaging on any given game. I tend to think of it this way: sometimes a little amusing weirdness can provide more depth to the dark, and keep things from getting a little too heavy on the OOC front.

I should be taken with a grain of salt on this front, though: I love some level humor in RP generally, no matter what the subject matter is. Every so often, a round of beer&pretzels-style 'wanna go blast the crap out of a bunch of zombie sorority girls?' is good for dispelling a case of my grumpy-cat-face, pretty much.

The dentist who does not suck can fix my filling with roughly zero notice, affordably. (The filling that fell out within 48 hours of the dentist who does suck putting it in.)

Bonus: maybe the lovely assistant who keeps showing me her growing collection of pinup girl tattoos will be there.

@Thenomain said:

@Bennie said:

It takes like three seconds or less to cut the BS I write in purely for my lulls and to read an actual point:

It takes even less time to not muddle your point and even less time not complaining that someone lull'd on your lull, you poor boy.

(Some people's children, I swear.)

He gets bonus points for missing the actual answers, though. I don't know what they're good for, exactly, but they must be good for something?

At least no one had the heart to point out he missed things like 'have a one night stand', 'indulge my addiction', and 'forget responsibility and enjoy myself' being listed as a short-term aspiration examples in the actual book. Something might have ruptured in there.

...oops.

@mietze said:

Fun times. I should have gotten a free cigarette after that one.

Hell, woman. Have a clove. I remember hearing about that one -- and there's no doubting you earned it.

@Bennie said:

Are the people paired in twos with a partner with goals like "Fuck Lola again" and online every day in a private bedroom going to be the ones pulling ahead

I'm going to give this absurdity more respect than it deserves by saying: I've seen places go on record saying you can't repeat the same short term aspiration over and over again. So you'd have to, say, fuck Lola, then Sherry, and go through Donna and Becky and Jessie before maybe most staff would maybe let you get around to Lola again. Which might have to be something more like 'explain Sherry and Donna and Becky and Jessie' to Lola then somehow still manage to fuck Lola again, which, you know, I'd probably give somebody, given the givens.

turning in all those beats and the dramatic failures at Stamina + Socialize for being a bad lay going to be earning as much as the people who are running plots for others or being organization important?

I'm sure somebody, somewhere, has tried this. Haven't seen it, but I'm sure somebody's doing it. I'm absolutely positive somebody poses really horrible sex on purpose for XP. (And, in all seriousness, three cheers to them, because that'd be such a refreshing change from all the people who have to be awesome at the sexy things all the time.) I'm equally certain that at least a few of these people aren't so cagey about sending TS poses to staff, as required for dramafail reporting, have no shame whatsoever and would have no problem doing it. Part of me is sad for them that the collective news files being shared amongst most games these days more or less say: don't send explicit content to staff in jobs or even BGs.

The disenfranchisement isn't just "I won't catch up to dose guyz." The disenfranchisement is when someone's getting some because I don't think that's valid RP, and don't understand the reality of the situation enough to realize how impressively improbable my fear of this actually is.

To quote many before me: fixed that for you.

@Arkandel said:

if someone who can simply afford to play a few hours every day can outpace people who can't, then some people would be alienated by that.

It would be a mistake in most cases to reward people with no lives to the detriment of the rest.

It's worth mention: there seem to be quite a few people who can spend plenty of time on a game daily or nearly so, and in some cases beyond a few hours, who have pretty active lives. Usually, it's somebody who can get online from work -- someone who is more a lucky bastard in some respects than they are a 'no lifer'.

I'm seeing the belief that regular presence on a game == no life recur a little more often than I think is wise to continue to foster as a universal truism.

Having a life usually involves multiple hobbies; in a few of them I've seen the you're not a real <hobbyist> if you don't... mentality, which is equally damaging.

By the same token, to take a simple example: I knit, but if I don't spend time knitting that week, my project is going to sit there not progressing, because socks don't knit themselves. Characters don't play themselves, either. So while "I can't be around all the time, and I don't want to fall too far behind" is a reasonable concern, once the idea that people who take issue with that are suggested to be 'no lifers' gets attached, it pretty ugly. It gets uglier when the suggestion that people not be able to benefit from their activity and contributions any more than someone who may be making absolutely none by eliminating any advancement benefits for activity -- because that's some pretty impressively entitled nonsense right there, and does devalue the contributions people make to the game. (It's also a recipe for a complete dino crisis, which leads to stagnation even faster.)

Balance between the two is pretty key.

While I agree with the 'play is its own reward' concept in theory, that's in theory. In practice it doesn't always work out that way. People show up to a plot you run that drive you bonkers, somebody needs the most boring PrP run ever but you have a few hours to spare and they're desperate to find somebody -- there are times the dangled reward carrot helps and is of benefit to the game in ways that, IMHO, don't compare to having someone who may log in once a month for two hours to play with the same one or two people each time not discouraged from continuing to do so. For that person, the 'play is its own reward' thinking seems to be more apt, since they're not making sacrifices of their game time (however much of it they may have compared to others) in the way those described above do.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Coin

sparkle

I should make a character on your game who runs around glitterbombing vampires.

Can I app in as a Twihard stalker fangirl, trying to stake all the female vampires with #2 pencils unless they tell me where Edward is?

@Thenomain, thank you for posting how to work that on TR!

I'm going to nudge the folks who inherited my big build there at some point to see if they want to convert the ZOMGhuge plook descs over to this format, since that's what I had originally hoped to do at the time.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

@surreality, you should drop that into a tutorial thread! : P

Once we figure out how to work it with the Thenocode places, definitely; we can pop up a thread and have the various working versions and label 'em with where they're known to work. I'd love that as a resource!

I'd honestly love to see that translated, especially if the place code being used at TR is part of the more recent core/code distributions going around these days. (Or just versions of it that work on other sites with custom place code, as people find solutions.)

It is an amazingly useful trick to keep down room count, while allowing builders a fair bit of freedom to really elaborate on the space.

On TR, I resorted to using extensive place descs people could look at. Not the same by a mile, but at least those spaces had some kind of detailed data that could be referenced. I'm not talking about places for things like 'table 1' or 'table 2', but for guest rooms, kitchens, and other 'it would be there, and if there is something unique about it that should remain consistent, having it referenced in a desc is important, but it's not a space that would be used often enough that a room would ever be necessary'.

I am not sure if this can be done with the style of place code that exists on TR; I tried, because there was absolutely a means of doing so on Shang. I used the heck out of it.

For a Shang room, once you had places set up, it went like so:

@desc here=[u(me/desc_place[match(u(me/placenums),%#,|)])]

&DESC_PLACE0 here=Normal desc you see in the room when not at a place.
&DESC_PLACE1 here=Desc you would see in the room when at place 1.
&DESC_PLACE2 here=Desc you would see in the room when at place 2.
(etc.)

This does NOT work on TR. (I tried back when I was there, no joy.) I don't know enough about code to tell you why it doesn't -- but perhaps someone with the proper code savvy can take a look at it and figure out a way to make the necessary adjustments to do so.

Mortal was by far the largest sphere on TR. If you included the psychics and thaum in it, which are non-aligned M+ types, when I quit staffing there, the M/M+ non-aligned census was almost exactly 2x the next highest (Mage or Changeling, I forget which).

@Insomnia said:

No one wants to play a human anyway

This part is not at all true in my experience. Mortal alts seem to have become more common than less.

Some folks don't like to do it, but 'no one' is miles away from the truth.

and most Mortal+ types are attached to a sphere, and have the conflict problems.

This part, still an issue, yep.

Option: have specific places flagged and noted as 'ST plot/interruption-ok'. Some of the bars, some of the parks, etc. Just an OOC note that lets players then choose to have the 'it took us a week to arrange for this meeting OOC!' scenes in places without it, and still allows those who are open to the idea or aren't going to hit a huge OOC obstacle if it happens can gravitate to places where something is more likely to happen.

(Or go with the reverse -- same principle applies.)

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Ummmmm... in the areas here in Florida that -have- bike lanes? Its a BIG no-no to put your car into the bike lane. Right turn or not. As in, cops will pull you over in a heartbeat for reckless endangerment if you pull your car into the bike lane.

Here, too. You pull into the bike lane, you get $$$$$$ tickets fast.

@Coin said:

@Insomnia, I kind of want to be able to drop in on people and just spring plot on them. I may do it occasionally on my game when we open and if they don't like it, well. I don't know. We'll see. But I consider myself someone who can entertain if people are willing.

I wonder how much of this comes from so many plots these days being combat-centric or 'monster of the week' style plots? I can see someone being uneasy about random lethal combat exploding around them 24/7, especially if the opponents are tailored toward the higher end of the scale. (On games like TR, they almost have to be.)

I would love to see more instances of something as simple as 'that week's monster is sighted' dropped on people in advance of whatever conflict is brewing in the fashion you're describing, then have media boards utilized to report the sighting via fringe outlets/etc. in a way that might drive more interest in joining the good ol' monster of the week event that particular week. I'm surprised I don't see more of this than I do, which does happen once in a while.

Obviously there's more that can be done with further-reaching plots, but even the simple ones can often be developed much more significantly than they commonly are.

@Thenomain said:

@mouse

I think staff should be rewarded by having fun, same as the players. Why, what do you think staffers deserve for running plots?

I'd say treat the staff the same as players in terms of reward, if rewards are given. If they aren't given to players running plots, don't give them to staff either. If they're given to players for running plots, give them to staff, too.

Then it becomes much simpler: whoever is running the plot, they either get a reward or they don't, and it's the same reward regardless of who they are.

I'm guessing there's not a user-side 'use previews, don't use previews' option? That'd resolve any quibbling, but I suspect y'all would have gone with that if it was an existing option.

I liked the previews for one reason: we are some tangenting motherfuckers. There are threads I don't think I ever would look at save for the glimpse of some tangent or related discussion growing out of the original topic that looked interesting from the preview.