Posts made by surreality

@apos That's not remotely what happened. Not even close.

@kanye-qwest "Asked nicely"? That's how you describe the several pages of screaming and finger-pointing and accusations of sexism and racism that came up when Ghost called saosmash this word? No one in that thread asked anyone else anything nicely. "Nicely" is not a word that could be applied to dang near anything in that entire exchange, which sprawled on for several pages over a period of days.

There's a reason people groan and roll their eyes whenever the word appears, and it's not necessarily because they're wounded by its use or offended by it, it's that precious few people want to deal with another round of that.

@arkandel It comes with another caveat: 'the process of social admonishment' == 'popularity contest'.

Right and wrong are very rarely determinative; 'how many friends you can rally to all scream at the same person at once or attack them', on the other hand, frequently does.

I met my husband in a tabletop group, a few years before I started M*ing. I met other folks through LARP before that as well.

While we were together -- we didn't get married for almost 20 years after he moved in with me -- we had an open sort of thing for a long time, and I ran into some folks through M* in that period.

Some things went great, and I'm still friends with those people many years later in some cases. Some things went spectacularly wrong, too. All in all? Ultimately not any different odds than I ran into meeting people in person first outside the hobby. The problems that would crop up tended to be the same problems, even if they sometimes manifested in slightly different ways.

@faraday Yep, that. My preference as well.

RL, I talk about scheming in this context. I hate scheming against people. I love scheming for people.

@roz Most posts have been clear on that front, so I must have missed any broad assertions that there's a 'one true way' from a wide array of posters.

That said, I do think people do this anyway, all the time, as a normal part of gaming. While people talk about how annoying it is that somebody didn't read the books/watch the show/read the theme files for the game they're playing on, most have or do.

Almost universally, these documents or source material include a wide array of very important things that the players know, and the characters (or any specific character) do not or cannot.

The majority of players are already accustomed to this. It's already baked-in. If someone says or does something they wouldn't know as their character IC, wrists get slapped for it; that's also already baked in. We have all survived this or we wouldn't still be here doing this at all.

As a result, ultimately, this is not a question of people being able or unable to do this, or us not having means of dealing with it if the issue arises. It's a question of how fine-grained we want to get regarding transparency or secrecy.

It will work differently for different games and different players. This isn't really a matter of it being exhausting to suss out, though.

"Dude, your char wouldn't know that, that's not public info." "D'oh, my bad!" is not a world-ending crisis.

Neither is, "Hey, how would your character know that?" "<reasons>/Oh, shit, you're right, I wouldn't, sorry! Reposing now!" "OK, cool!"

Both of the above are pretty common in healthy game communities, regardless of their stance on this. Fostering a healthy game community in which the above exchanges are the beginning and the end of it, without snarling accusations of cheating at people who simply brain-farted, or people being terrified to provide any RP hooks that hinge on secret information IC, is far more important than any call someone could or ever will make on how fine-grained they go on providing information in the first place.

I am a fan of open sheets.

Not necessarily a fan of open secrets; that's more a 'per game' basis.

I think open sheets -- the stats and numbers bit -- are on the whole good for a game.

Depending on the system and setup, however, this could expose character secrets fairly easily. (Only Group B can get that stat, and Character is supposedly Group D, etc.)

I am not incredibly worried about the secrets aspect for any game I would potentially run. This is mostly because I think most people in the hobby these days will tend to use this 'to the good' more often than 'to cheat' -- to create good story rather than cutting someone else's story off at the knees. I admit I may be a horrible idealist on this point, but I would rather boot the bad actors and keep as much information (this includes theme/setting/world 'secrets' generally only known to staff) available for people to use as tools to collaboratively build stories.

That's also just not the kind of game everybody necessarily wants. Some people want a puzzle to solve in the world that they, as players, are solving along with their characters. Which is also cool, and would make the above solution much less viable. It's just ultimately a different style; some players will enjoy both, some will prefer one or the other, and provided the game in question makes their policy/staff decisions in line with the kind of environment they want to create, they'll be fine. (Both of these approaches are something I see as neutral; neither is inherently or objectively good or bad or better or worse.)

@auspice A really unpleasant note is more than warranted. That would be entirely legal! ...and deserved. Richly deserved. I'm pretty sure we'd all be willing to help contribute insults to the cause?

@auspice Don't touch it.

Like, seriously, there could be a body in it or something.

@auspice ...why can't that guy be my neighbor? Strength in numbers, for real. (I'm that neighbor on my block.)

@packrat Gigantic fluff monsters are awesome. Mine's on my chair, intermittently chirping at the screen like the flurfaderp she is. (I love my derpy fluffcoward. She's amazing.)

Disney Princess of Cats, I swear.

Disney Princess: sings, dances, and all the woodland creatures rush to do her bidding
Fluffcoward: trills, prances, and all the humans rush to do her bidding

...I think she's secretly much smarter than she lets on, because she's got that routine down to a science.

@insomnia It's times like that I wish I had the van from Ant-Man, with its very special horn. Because I'd punch that thing about five times in a row.

@packrat Towels and shirts on the floor are cat heaven. They will be sad with you unless you leave them. Nothing else can save them from the carpet made of lava.

@aria Apparently it's a condition that can be stress-related. I mean, if you sorta tilt your head a little and squint, you can kinda see it! All of us that were young and carefree in the 90s are getting to that 'oh shit, rent/mortgage/children' stress period of life...

It's still silly, but that one I almost kinda can get! Kinda.

Though when I see those it may as well be this:

@shincashay Many hugs. I am so sorry. Friend of mine's mom was a breeder, and they are the sweetest beasties ever when they're raised with love.

Hulu's were the worst for a long-ass time. They would have the 'this ad is completely not relevant to me' option you could click... but it didn't stop them from showing it to you repeatedly, over and over and over and over again.

That they would have so many two minute long individual ads for various bits of medication did not help. Really, I swear, Hulu, I am not your target audience for 'please go get a prostate exam'.

@jennkryst said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

@ganymede said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

We need the game first!

sigh We could ask @Thenomain really nicely, I suppose.

You can ask nicely. I will hold off on asking him for games until I have dollah-dollah-billz to throw at him. Or until we can convince him to take payment in that oldest of currencies:

Exposure!

I would consider this if the only things I had worth exposing weren't 20 years past anybody probably ever wanting to see the--wait, different exposure, never mind me...

Though on a serious note and all joking aside, I'm budgeting the bucks for some day just in case (...still a long ways off from being in budget, but I wouldn't ask until it was). Because it's been brought up and asked of us, and I'd feel like a giant ass doing otherwise.

I had pretty decent experiences playing Sabbat on Darkmetal, of all places. While I knew or sometimes associated with some of the well-known Problem Children, I didn't interact with them on those binges of insanity.

At one point I had a ghoul to a Tzimisce, and frankly, it was the most amazing ghoul-regnant mashup I ever played. He messed with her head something fierce, would appear in various guises to convince her that he had eyes everywhere, etc. Same player did some pretty dumb stuff as well, but I lucked out personally and still miss that dude's writing like whoa. (And no, before anyone assumes... zero TS or anything romantic there, he just loved scaring the shit out of her and convincing her that God was real and sent her an angel to give her divine orders, then would appear in various guises as 'other servants of the angel, checking up on her' whenever she'd veer off course.)

I forget if the Tzimisce I actually played was before or after the ghoul, but that one also tended to sit around philosophizing and being a complete basket case more than anything else.

Weird. Darkmetal... had depth. In the Sabbat, even. I told you bastards I'm a weirdness magnet, 'cause that shit certainly ain't normal.

@Jennkryst That's pretty game-relevant, so I doubt there would be much objection to discussing it as it pertains to the game, but I could be wrong.

@jennkryst There's some way to do it. I dunno if nodeBB does, though. It's also possible to host a forum through a wiki; there are extensions for that. But meh. The stuff to do full support for a wiki + forum gets into all these social extensions for messaging with all the 'friends and foes' and all the rest in ways that just vibe squicky; there are 'shouts' and similar that just... allllll the nope.

I have no problem setting up a wiki for people to post games live or dead categorized as such, and maintain a list of 'this is me and who I have been throughout the ages' stuff on their user pages if they want to that can be cross-linked to the games pretty easily to auto-populate and yadda yadda yadda.

Maintaining something like that is not problematic barring a basic 'only edit your own shit' ground rules on user pages, and a 'just the facts of a generic listing, keep the commentary and arguments on the forum' approach to the game listings. It's actually be less of a pain than all of the above to do and it's not like there are any judgment calls required there, so I'd have no issue doing that. <shrug>

The sticky wicket is getting our accounts here to work there. That is beyond my ken by several miles. Good luck with that. Supposedly it can be done, but I'm not going to pretend I even know where to start looking at the how.