@faraday I have to admit, I got annoyed about this once. Once. One game I was on, I had a whopping two characters, both using PBs I hadn't seen in circulation before.
Within two months or so, both of them were duplicated on that same (edit: small, even!!!) game.
I'd never complain about it to the players personally, bear them any ill will, or stomp my feet like a huffy princess to staff about it, but that really did feel pretty shitty in that, "Aw, jeez, come on... " bad luck sense.
@wildbaboons From what I'm seeing mentioned about 'on sheet' traits, things like hair/skin color/eye color are actually written up on the character sheets like any other stat.
Suggestion: if there's a target set of features that would be genetically relevant to a bloodline, suggest a real world regional origin for intended features/appearance rather than just a descriptor word for skin color?
This is not to say there aren't people of every skin color everywhere, but with just a color listed, ex: 'umber' or 'bronze', you could end up with a fairly wide mix that runs into a different problem, namely 'do all brown people look the same to you?' -- which can very understandably and reasonably cause offense, too.
It's much easier to smack the smart-ass who picks the blondest dutchwoman ever as 'Southern African' upside the head over this than to repeatedly have to explain why someone from India and someone from Bali and someone from Spain may all be 'bronze' in theory, but that doesn't mean they're interchangeable based on the word choice or indistinguishable from one another. (It also might make it easier to find characters of mixed heritage when and where relevant, since someone could search based on the target countries of origin, whoever is doing the searching.)
Another quick update:
If you're doing the multiple linked wikis/wiki family with shared resources on one droplet as described here, do not symlink the 'includes' folder. This one needs to remain independent in each of your separate wiki install folders. If it's not, an update to one crosses over to all of them. (Don't ask me why, because I don't know. It says you can do this, and, well, you can't without it glitching up, at least with 1.31, and before anyone else tears their hair out, well... there you go. I left serialized and vendor alone as well, and it's keeping the installs properly distinct.)
@kanye-qwest To be fair, they have a natural disadvantage here.
Most people are spared the public sharing of that particular look. It is... well, ^ that's about right in almost everybody's case.
Probably best to wait to hear an answer or get direct clarification from someone on their staff and not guess either way on that one.
@insomnia OMG. Now I'm super weirded out, because clearly I dodged a bullet. I went to UofDE around then for a year. (Mentioned toward the end.)
Like, how in the actual fuck can I feel like 'whew, I may have had Spider, but at least it wasn't that'?
Just my two cents (read with the 'generally not a fan of rosters' truckload of salt):
I like picking my own PBs.
I would not feel personally comfortable changing the PB of a roster character unless I was the first person playing that character.
Faces especially have a certain 'mood' to me and often inspire my characters. As in, 'I see the image and totally know who that person is in my head'. If that didn't match up with the description or sheet for the character how I'd envision the image chosen in my head, I might not be inclined to pick up a character that would otherwise be a great fit for me to play with a different PB. With a blank slate I can fill in, or if I have an image in mind, I can browse through the descriptions of the characters and see what fits that face I have in mind and have developed a feel for the best. (Most of my characters are inspired by an image that has an instant 'click' that fills in a personality and story; it's much harder for me to go find someone to fit a specific concept. Plenty of folks are completely opposite of me about this, so I wouldn't consider this one any sort of major concern.)
Another heads-up: apparently Mediawiki dropped a new version with a lot of changes today. If you're just starting an install, keep the usual caveats in mind. It specifically notes:
1.31 has several database changes since 1.30, and will not work without schema updates.
Someone with a high level of clue re: how Mediawiki interacts with MySQL should probably take a peek to see if this changes how games will be interacting with it to avoid any surprises that might be lurking in wait. (That person is not me.)
Depends on the game.
While WoD/CoD has settings like this, so do other systems. This is a stat, like any other stat. That makes it very hard to omit. Things like Nature|Demeanor/Virtue|Vice/etc. have concrete mechanical effects within the system. As a result, I don't see these being something that can be hand-waved off to be set up later. Changed later if something else is more appropriate? Sure, provided the changes are kept to a dull roar.(1) Anything that has a mechanical effect is hard for me to justify hand-waving entirely in chargen, particularly if it's something that can be changed with relative ease at a later time and evolve reasonably with the story.
Background isn't as important to me as concept as it is initially envisioned, some of their initial goals as a player, and explanation of anything unusual in the character's history or on their sheet. The last is fairly sweeping and covers a lot of ground; this could be a high stat atypical for the concept, a stat typically high for the concept that's low, or something very unusual for the character as described. For instance, I'd want to know why someone's 16th century English noblewoman knows the ins and outs of the magical practices of the Mayans or similar, because that's not exactly normal. (And while PCs are generally exceptional, that's not the usual way 16th century English noblewomen are exceptional.)
I don't like the 'any unspent XP/starting points are lost' approach. At all. Never have. It's too easy to overlook something, realize very early on in play that it's missing and would be something the character would have, or with that small tweak they could fit perfectly in a needed niche in the game with a minor tweak that benefits not just that player and character, but may be the glue that keeps a group cohesive when that character can be tweaked to suit the group, or become the missing piece that completes their collective puzzle.
(1) "Dull Roar": Whatever terms someone is comfortable with to avoid changing between every scene to and for whatever provides the maximum mechanical benefit, because we all know that guy is out there. Somebody may be happy with 'no more than once every three months', or might like 'change at will if you think appropriate when the character fails (or even faces) a breaking point', logs of justification -- whatever they think is suitable. Similarly, things like touchstones should be somewhat malleable; X may fade and Y becomes elevated in importance as the story unfolds, and this is reasonable. It becomes less reasonable when this becomes a case of 'oh, well, that wasn't a big deal any more, now this other thing is' when it's presented to staff after something has happened to the original thing.
@arkandel I am going to use at least one of 1-3 in the next desc I write, on principle. And definitely 6.
Another good reason for the world to hope I never play again.
@wizz Thank you for giving me a fine reason to never dedicate my body to science.
The bits and pieces still worth a damn to whoever needs them, sure.
Otherwise, yes, absolutely this moment.
@skew Digitalocean has the ufw firewall installed by default on the LAMP droplet one-click-apps; it's newish but I've seen it going back to around the start of the year from what I recall, at least.
Info on it is here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-16-04
That's the 'how to set it up', but the LAMP Ubuntu droplet has it installed and active by default, so if there are other adjustments you want to make, that covers other refinements/etc.
@ganymede When I was tinkering with making something there, I did the same: kept a fair bit in reserve. Made a mortal with the intent of later going through a becoming. Went with top tier, made a skilled mortal with the lion's share of her XP in reserve. So can confirm this was viable, at least back when. Never got around to playing, but was approved under those terms and with that plan mentioned and discussed and so on without anything but positive encouragement.
@ganymede It essentially treats 'power level' like it would, say, 'sphere' or 'faction' relative to alt limits.
I like that on the whole.
There are a bunch of things I'd like to see handled that way on games. They could have overlap with other 'rarities', but as an example, 'no more than 1 alt with resources 5' (or equivalent for whatever system is in use) would do the coherence and relative sanity of any given game more than a few favors, that's for damned sure. (It was on the list in my head, anyway.)
@thenomain It means that there are going to be different power levels you can target for plots/etc. There will always be that handful of high-powered characters -- and newbies aren't shut out of it by default. Those people (edit: the day one created dinos), if they have alts, will necessarily also have lower level characters for mid-range or lower level storylines.
This isn't something to overlook in terms of its value. It means on Player's Day One, they can be involved with the same big bads as the dinos.
At the same time, simply being a dino doesn't mean someone is necessarily going to be a big bad themselves, because they may have used their higher tier character slot up for a different alt.
Without this sort of breakdown, a system that works like TR/FC's ultimately means that all of that dino player's alts are all big bads, and all newbies are stumbling over their own feet with starting stats. Though the newbies of today catch up in six months to the dinos of yesterday, tomorrow's newbies face the same slog.
I think the tier chunks functioning similar to the concept of alt limits is a viable call, with small gains (if any, since 'none' is a viable option) going forward from there based on whatever structure someone is interested in implementing (you do you, theoretical game designer, you do you).
I also think this is a good way to provide a means of handling the 'I want my character to advance and progress as the story flows and in the directions it dictates' in a way that unbinds that growth from a standardized XP gain setup, in that someone could arguably make one character with the highest available XP amount, spend only a portion, and then have an on-hand bank larger than would normally accrue over time to spend from at will and as the story develops.
This lets the people who want to start as experts start there, and the people who enjoy the story of their evolution into expert (even if it's in a somewhat condensed timeframe) to remain within the same general point ranges of one another without much hardship.
Some systems give you a generous amount to start, but wipe or lock anything unspent at chargen, which encourages someone to spend everything then or lose it. Some folks don't mind losing it, but it does put them at a notable system-based disadvantage compared to those spending the whole lot. It has a way of cutting off the people who like the 'getting there' story if they leave things unspent once the learning curve kicks in. The alternative is a lot of random 'uh well I guess maybe s/he's good at making pancakes so I'll throw a point into pancake-making?' useless nonsense if they do end up spending the points just for the sake of not wasting them, which will sometimes end up creating an interesting opportunity, but more often than not is just as much a waste as not spending them would have been.
@coin Something Pacific Rim-like was what leapt to mind when I first saw the thread title. You have good options for various power levels and team sizes, a fair amount of campy fun, a dose of mad science, and plenty of opportunity for classic action and rescue heroics, and a variety of interesting roles available other than 'ace pilot' (and even then the focus on teamwork is a plus here).
It's sci-fi, but the world itself is not so far advanced (it is the true universe of handwavium, like whoa) as a part of average daily life that everyone needs a crash course in quantum physics just to make their morning coffee.
@sockmonkey said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers:
If you ever consider bringing it back, perhaps instead of having a direct effect -- all these condemns = immediate social loss -- there can just be a threshold that needs to be attained. If someone reaches X amount of condemns, it gets put on staff radar. And then they can make the call whether or not it's worth a prestige adjustment.
I'd suggest something in addition to that: Someone using the command X number of times ends up taking a hit, too. Ex: if all John Doe does is talk shit about everyone around him, after a while, people are going to start taking a less positive view of John Doe as well, even if people generally share the same negative view of whoever he's talking about.
@thatguythere The crackdown on nail files and umbrellas -- gods, just typing that makes my eyes roll so hard they start to cramp -- was because our principal was paranoid, pretty much. We were a pretty small school. The district closed the even smaller high school in the area just before my senior year, with it's 9-10-11s being split between our school and another in the opposite direction. The entire senior class came to us. (Even then, the total population from 9-12 was around 600ish? Not per class... total. And that's after absorbing all the seniors from the closing school.)
It had been known this would happen since we were sophomores, and at some 'all the sophomores in the district go see some historical movie or other' thing, there was a single fist-fight over it all, since it had been announced the week before. (The smaller school was small, but very tight-knit, with a very strong sense of community... partly because it was so small. It was also the poorest school in the district and there was a not-unreasonable amount of 'the district just picked us because we're the poor kids, the snotty fucks!' going around.)
Needless to say, out of paranoia that -- heavens help us all -- another single fist-fight might occur, the principal more or less cancelled everything that could be cancelled. Zero field trips for anyone to anywhere that year. Two school dances: homecoming and senior prom, when there had been one a month or thereabouts in previous years. Pep rallies? Zero. And so on. This wasn't a budget thing -- it was 'to ensure there were no chances for any tensions'.
We eventually had a sit-in. They threatened to suspend anyone who attended it and expel those who organized it... but when 400+ of your 600 students all cram into the lobby and peaceably plant their asses on the ground in spring, after months of not a single hint of an altercation ever occurring, well. That didn't happen.
And it probably would have looked really embarrassing for the school to expel the entire senior AP English class, who collectively wrote up the basics as an outline, which our teacher offered to proof read for us. (She never snitched, either; she was proud as hell of her 'trouble-making deviants'.)
It's really not too hard to handle for some things; it can be mentioned in a setting file somewhere. 'We don't plan to have any major advances in technology occur within the game, and any major developments or changes requested will be denied.' (And so on.)
This is one you can even make and keep very vague: 'The game we wish to run has been designed as presented in the news/wiki/whatever, and any major developments or changes that would massively alter the world would change the essential nature of the game as intended, and that everyone on it came here to play. Requests that would fundamentally change the physical, social, or technological landscape and reality of the game will be denied.'