Posts made by surreality

@thenomain He's talking out of his ass. There are a number of studies about venting, and it does have some negatives, but there are positives, too. (Ex: getting something out of your system vs. potential for a commiseration spiral, etc.)

@misadventure It's probably also possible to queue up a spend to handle concerns like the one @WildBaboons mentions.

As in, you could put 'raise basketweaving' into a queue, which holds the raise in reserve until the timer's through and you have enough points to cover it.

Could even potentially have a 'spend XP now? y/n' to cover it in advance, and it just processes it at the first available time, otherwise wait until that time has passed and the points are available, then it processes it.

Could potentially have something like a +pending command or similar so people can check the progress of whatever they've queued, and potential remove things from the list/etc.

Update: the old machine still runs! Yay! So for $64, I can have another machine up and running. (It's a machine that costs between $230-$400, too, so... not a bad deal there!)

@thatonedude ^ This. This trick gets used in too many jobs where people are smart enough to see right through it and know somebody's head-gaming them. Once you recognize someone's head-gaming you, it's hard to see it as anything but an insult to your intelligence.

@coin Unless they do it via this gif.

Then they get a badge or something. And possibly all my love forever for embracing the dorky cheeseball spirit of things.

@arkandel said in Respecs.:

Another factor here are common genre tropes; from training montages to revelations in dreams, depending on the kind of game these sudden bursts of insight would be more... appropriate.

Not gonna lie, I picture almost any XP spend as having its very own cheesy 80s style montage sequence.

I have seriously considered (albeit, for the parody game concept) requiring NOT a justification for spends, but that people submit a song for their 'I learned a thing' montage.

...even with learn times and all the rest I may do this anyway if I do a thing, not as a requirement, but as a generic fun dorky whatnot. Because fun dorky whatnots are fun when they're optional, and I think the fun to be had from silly little bits of characterization like this are vastly underrated on the whole.

@cupcake I would read that shit as the royal we and start emails back to her with 'your grace', which would either get me fired fast, or-- no, it would just get me fired fast.

@faraday Definitely a different thread, but I like learn times. I think they need to be more condensed to, yes, allow it to happen faster than it would in the real world in most cases, but not 0-60 in 0 seconds flat.

Some games have a necessary respec in the form of 'becomings' -- when through the course of IC events, someone literally becomes some other kind of creature. This is most common in WoD but it could be relevant in other systems, too. Some powers or abilities are only allowed for the group they started in, while others are required or available for their new one. If they're going through the process of that change, all the free -- and bought -- powers and abilities of the original group get dropped (because they must as they can no longer be used), and they get the new free or required ones for the new group. Most folks I've seen do this don't shuffle anything but these things and any other requirements around at that time, which I have zero issue with.

Typically this is magic woo woo powers of some kind, though, so in that context (read: 'this is really a magical transformation/superhero origin/etc.') it doesn't bother me.

Is this actually necessary? Objectively, no. You could opt to leave people stuck with a pile of things on their sheet they can never use again -- which could totally screw them on XP and leave things on their sheet that could mechanically complicate the coded processes of the game -- but I wouldn't be inclined to do this.

@misadventure It's the tiered costs. I haven't done it all in a while, but the math works out such that you could have two characters with identical stats, but depending on how you build them in CG and with CG or later XP, they will cost the same in starting points, but one will cost much more in (combined) XP than the other. The way it works is that you do exactly that -- front load the 'expensive' stat while having almost nothing else at all, resulting in what is more or less a one-trick pony that's anything but well-rounded.

The flat costs eliminate this, and since it's not going to cost more later, people are more inclined toward a more reasonable and rounded spread of attributes and skills.

Basically, if you ever want that 5 in tiered, it's considerably cheaper to buy it in CG than buy it up over time. You ultimately end up with people who have the same stats, but those stats don't have the same cost to get there, which is pretty meh.

I can't say I would ever support 'I want a respec now that I have enough points to min-max better in a tiered system without crippling myself somewhere', that's for sure.

@tinuviel Tragically, yes. It really needs to get added to the drinking game if only because it makes me want a drink every goddamned time I hear it.

So random, so dorky.

The husband and I collect (usually) totally worthless rocks at a local(ish) beach whenever we need a day of Not In The Fucking House.

There are rocks... every-fucking-where. Or were. They live in buckets outside now, for the most part, but the fuckers were building up again.

Years ago, we got a tumbler to polish some of the little fuckers. Yay. We got a second one for a different process, but it's huge and by the time it arrived, depression had whacked me hard upside the head and while we set it up enough to see that it worked, the other one had turned to concrete, full of stuff we really liked, now a waste of money and favorite rocks, so both were mostly useless.

I caved and ordered a replacement two weeks ago. It now has a place to live, it works, it's running with a pile of stuff. The holy shit big one has a place to live, too, and is no longer worthless provided it didn't break somehow after a few years hiding in the hall closet, and we might eventually get through the 'yard art buckets'. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

On a lark, I tried to see if I could pry open the old concrete one. No joy. Tried again this morning with the steel scrubber brushes and a wrench -- and got it. It wasn't actually concrete! Odds are good what was in it and partly done can be salvaged (which is happy-making because it was the best of our best stuff from back before the buckets went to live outside), even if we lose a few to the concrete-fu.

We might even be able to get the machine to work. Unlikely, but possible. One part will absolutely need to be replaced, but that's still a big plus if I can scrub the rest of the rust off the fucker, which seems entirely feasible.

Either way, I have been scrubbing and wrenching and getting drenched and sneezing through the worst dust ever and running out to get hoses and sprayers since 5am and...

...exhausted is good.

Exhausted and having recovered something we thought was a goner, no matter how trivial, is kinda awesome right now.

@coin I it when somebody else tries something I had a mind to try before I get around to it. (I sputter out on everything.)

I almost feel guilty for the 'ooh, I have wanted to try that, too, but better your neck than mine!' this kind of thing always inspires immediately whenever it happens, but not all that guilty any more. (The few things I've actually done/built/contributed never get credited/other people actively take credit for them, so 'hey, I thought of it/did it first!' doesn't even come to mind these days as a factor, since even when I do do the thing first, somebody else gets the credit for coming up with it anyway when it's copied later. )

@pandora That 'my eye is opening at an angle because my mascara has hermetically sealed half of my eyelid shut with what suddenly seems to have turned into tar, waterproof my sweet ass' feeling is the worst. It seriously is.

FWIW, those neutrogena makeup removing wipes are really fucking good for those moments. I swear by those things, and they don't leave that 'my skin is now so dry, if I dare smile or blink, my flesh will crack' feeling whilst getting even the worst goth hell mascara off in two sweeps. They are

@faraday Most games I've been on consider any change like that a respec -- so that may be where we're running into the difference.

@shincashay said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

@cobaltasaurus And that's creative.

If I bump into them I do the whole doppleganger thing. "Hey, we look a like, we could be siblings!"

Cause it does happen. Not a big deal.

If I ever did the parody game thing, there was an XP bonus for either playing it up like this, or making a plot out of it, etc. Also for 'major PB change mid-stream and everyone pretends not to notice' soap opera style, since it was all about silly TV and MUX tropes and being silly and having fun with them.

@faraday Thing is, all the pilot needs in various systems is somebody else to fly for. (Depends on the setting, obviously.)

WoD also really forces a lot of hyper-specialization, which is factor, too. To be very good at your special thing, you pretty much suck at everything, or nearly everything, else. You really are pretty much stuck with 'pick ONE'.

There are a number of things that can, system-wise, completely change or invalidate a character. There's a bunch of social fu or superpowers that can, according to the system, completely remake someone else's character with a dice roll (or sometimes a few). I find this equally crappy. Every player makes the character they want to play, and if it's not a character they're interested in playing any more, and it can't be remade into something interesting?

Not getting the chance to do one's specialization is different from 'you no longer get to play the character you were excited about playing because the dice say it will now never happen and cannot ever happen'.

Attrition is a realistic thing, too. Most systems don't do much with it, but I can assure you that, having not drawn in 20 years, I would certainly not draw as well today as I did 20 years ago by miles because I, like the hypothetical dancer concept character, am not doing that regularly any more. My skill is not frozen forever as it was at its highest point. If I was still investing the same amount of time in drawing as I once did, I wouldn't know many of the things I know today, but I would probably be a little better at drawing than I was then. If someone's not maintaining their skill level because it's impossible for them to do it, yes, it will realistically atrophy, but that means there's now time for other things, many of which, since someone's learning them at an entry level -- sometimes out of urgent necessity -- they would learn more rapidly than most XP gain setups are designed to represent.

@faraday I'd personally toss a character under those circumstances. If I designed a thing that could no longer do what they specialized in again, and they could not be reshaped into something else -- even if it's over some reasonable period of time -- there would be no worthwhile story to be had on that character any longer entirely aside from it being the doubled blow of 'not what I intended to play'; their story would be 'is miserable their life was wasted' barring the most exceptional circumstances, and I think we all get more than enough of that RL much of the time.

I'd make something else, probably after hoofing it off that game faster than the roadrunner.

@ganymede What Arkandel said.

Someone playing out the consequences of it means they're no longer a star ballroom dancer, and isn't ballroom dancing any more, and has all the other persistent mechanical penalties of leg wrack.

Losing the XP spent on it is punishing the player by forcing them to keep something that is no longer valid on their sheet, not inflicting consequences on a character.

Bear in mind, I think WoD/CoD has a lot of cognitive dissonance on this front; they have sanctity of merits, but in most of their setups, things like integrity/etc. can be bought up but lost IC (and the XP wasted) as well. (Edit: WtF2's Harmony is the exception here, and is more sensible a mechanic from my perspective.) I favor actual common sense on this front: if there's IC means of losing it, there should be IC means of gaining it back; throwing XP into the mix in any way muddies the waters and is internally inconsistent.

Some of this depends on the system, like many things.

Like, somebody stuck with a permanent leg wrack tilt in CoD might want to drop that Expression.BallroomDancing spec after a while. Yeah, they still know how, and how they became unable to use it is IC, but it's still now a waste of points that's additional OOC suckage for the player on top of the IC suckage of the tilt.

That stack of four boxes in my work room I have been whining at my husband to haul out of the house are now out of the house after three years of very noisy whining.

...two more stacks to go, one to Goodwill and the other to 'I don't care so long as it isn't here, goddammit'.