Posts made by Tat

For the record, I also had this bug for weeeeks, and what finally made it go away was getting an actual notification that I could then dismiss.

@krmbm

This whole list is spot on, in my opinion (as someone who played Pern back in Ye Olde Days and briefly revisited it a few years ago). The one that really stands out to me is:

Provide non-Thread conflict. HT originally had this by way of the Oldtimers vs. Nowtimers plot, but that's unraveled, and you can start to see the game devolving into typical "Pern" stuff: Impress, get a boyfriend, have some babies, rinse, repeat. Instead of trying to write Pern's conflict out (color hierarchy, gender issues, non-riders mistrusting riders, etc.), use these as fodder to help drive a story.

This is where most Pern games honestly lose my interest. Pern is weird in that a lot of the obvious conflicts have been written out of the theme. War isn't really a thing (Fax apparently having been a bizarre exception due to the lack of dragons at the time). Technological advances are (usually) considered unthematic. Most Pern games don't do a lot of with crime.

You REALLY need something to keep things moving when Threadfall becomes the same old hat. Politicking can be great if you have players who do it well, but to me, a good Pern game is one that says yes, you can advance technology, yes, there are mauraders who aren't easily stopped by dragons, or a Weyrleader who simply refuses to get involved, or... something. Some story. Some external conflict. Something to RP about.

I think it's good to spell out things that are specific to your community. We actually have a bit that's sort of 'how we RP' that lays out some of the norms of our game that new players have gotten hung up on, but that fall outside of policy (for example, please ask before joining an ongoing scene, even in a public place).

When I say not to spell out every detail, for me that is less about these sorts of 'understood M* norms' and more about understood /being a decent person/ norms.

So I don't think you need to spell out not to call someone mean names and all the places you might do it, or to play staff against each other, or to tell lies about other players.

That's shit that I feel real comfortable giving you a talking-to for whether it's written down or not, because that's about being a decent human being, and I only want decent human beings on my games.

That said, we also always give people a chance to correct behavior, so the only potentially unforeseen consequence is a chat with staff. If it keeps happening, then it's not unforeseen, because you've been warned.

@faraday said in [Request] Policy Template:

Just outline your general expectations, and beyond that, use "dinner party rules". It's my dinner party. I don't need to provide each guest with a comprehensive list of unacceptable behaviors. If you're being a jerk, I will talk to you about it. If you persist in being a jerk, I will ask you to leave.

Totally agree. In fact, I find that the more rules you have, the harder it is to police things, because people become rules lawyers.

I swear the policies we use get slimmer and looser with every game we run, and most of it boils down to 'play nice with others or we'll have a chat', with a few clarifications as to what that means to us.

My personal philosophy of a grid is that it should be large enough to give people a clear vision of your setting and to spark ideas for RP, but not so large that no one can remember where things are or that they can get lost.

Couple this with a couple of flexible TP rooms (or whatever you want to call them) that can serve as anything players want, and re-visit your grid in 4-6 months.

The last game I ran had a grid I really liked - but several months in, I realized that while we had a lot of great different social spaces, we didn't have good spaces for characters who were quieter or introverted to publicly run into other characters, so we added some. Players are great for identifying what's truly missing after some play, too. So are those TP rooms - is there anything that's getting used consistently?

Generally the idea of breaking a city down into 'districts' and then building rooms off of them works really well in my opinion. We're set in NYC (primarily Manhattan), and our grid has Harlem, Upper West Side, Central Park, Midtown, Greenwich Village, Mutant Town, Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Queens.

If I were going to do it again, I might leave off a lot of those northern bits, because they get very little RP. Our focus is in Mutant Town, and so the areas around there get RP. Do you know where the 'center' of your RP is likely to be? I'd build that up more and go thinner in other areas.

As far as San Francisco in particular, it's nice because it's already got neighborhoods with really distinctive personalities. Check out maps and then look them up on wikipedia for flavor.

Offhand, I'd probably do:

• Chinatown
• Mission
• Downtown
• Fisherman's Wharf (maybe 'North Waterfront' with this a room in it)
• Haight Ashbury
• Castro

If you want slightly bigger, you could add:

• Presidio
• Soma
• Sunset
• Sausalito
• Oakley
• Berkley

In terms of 'too long', you can actually cut a lot of length out of your individual rules, too. I once had a class about designing information for students, and there were a few rules of thumb that I always keep in mind when I'm writing policy.

• People skim. This means more bullets, fewer words.
• Don't be polite. This is informative, not social. Don't say 'please' and 'thank you'.
• Write it to say what you want, edit out half the words, then cut even more. No words that are not necessary. This usually means cutting adjectives and adverbs.
• Examples only when needed for clarity.

For example, I just cut that last bullet down by about 6 words. 'Absolutely no words that are not strictly necessary' is not actually clearer than 'no words that are not necessary'. It's just prettier.

So here's an example:

Rule 5: Don’t harass, stalk or abuse other players or staff OOCly.
If somebody tells you not to bother them with OOC communications, stop. If they ask you to stop page them, stop paging them. If a staff member makes a decision you don’t like, kick it up the line to the admin, if you must, but once that staffer indicates they are done discussing the ruling, stop. Don’t use alts to do this. Don’t use your wiki page to send snarky messages. Don’t continue the dispute on channels. Just don’t.

Rule 5: Don’t harass, stalk or abuse others.
If somebody tells you not to bother them with OOC communications, stop. In cases of conflict or dispute with a staff ruling, contact admin, who will mediate.

Literally the same policy, half the words.

Sometimes examples are necessary for clarity, as in your sexual policies, but most times they are not. 'OOC communications' covers paging, wikis, and channels. In fact, having too many examples often makes your policies have less bite, because people will say 'but it wasn't listed!'

@Lithium said in Chime's MOO thread:

@Chime I wouldn't discount the option of coding mux like commands into moo, it'd make it a lot easier for people who are used to that code to jump into the game and get involved. If the commands aren't what people are used to they tend to simply walk away.

Or make a really solid tutorial so that people can get the information on how to use the code upfront

When I helped run MOO games, we always aliased anything we could to MUSH or MUX (or both) commands. People seemed to appreciate it, and it took us very little effort.

The big hang-up in MOO for players was always @mail and the concept of mailers rather than bboards. I always really preferred it (noteditor so dang powerful), but others found it really frustrating.

@Lithium said in Code Teachers?:

@Chime I really need to dig into moo, it might be the codebase of choice for a project I have which is to do a Sword Art style of game, with autonomous bots without being so crazy fast paced as a diku mud is.

I just always feel the need to chime in to say how much nicer coding in MOO is than MUSH. I cannot describe how much I prefer it.

I miss MOO.

@Taika said in Code Teachers?:

@Lithium - Yeah, but if you can't think of how to get to that pretty chart you want to code (what attributes to pull, how to order them, adding commands to set new ones, etc), you won't get far either, I would think?

I actually think that developing this - learning how to /design/ the code, how to break it into all the pieces you want, and conversely, learning how to troubleshoot it to find the pieces that are broken - is the hardest thing to teach when it comes to coding.

There will always be some adjusting along the way, but if you can learn to tackle this early on, to design well, to think about your product in pieces and then to break those pieces down into pieces, you'll do much better. And it's much easier to tackle one cog than the whole machinery at once.

The best way to learn to code, in my opinion, is to pick a project and start. Just go. Stare at other people's stuff, maybe start by making adjustments. Change a color, add a column, see what breaks and fix it. Then do a simple command. A +who, a +finger. It's impressive how fast it gets complicated.

If you can find a mentor who you can ask questions of, even better. I often find that by talking someone else through my sticking point, I solve it myself (this is actually a thing - google 'Rubber Duck Debugging). Even typing up a post on a forum can help you find that spot. But it's also really useful to have someone who can point you in the direction of stuff you didn't know existed, or to just explain @switch to you in a way that makes sense, or whatever dumb (or not dumb) thing you need.

But the vast majority of learning to code is just coding.

Pro tip: Keep a copy of the old code until you're REALLY SURE nothing important is broken.

Putting in a shit ton of time and work on a plot and watching players get super excited about it and run with every little detail you throw at them.

@Chime

Thank you. This is wonderful and useful information.

Oh good! I like to be useful. We do have a few other extensions that are pretty essential to how we use the wiki (for example, a faux-blog and threaded discussion pages), but the ones I listed will definitely get you the basics and, I think, are very popular and so should be kept up to date when mediawiki or PHP needs updated.

Now I'm considering that we should probably update and I'm thinking about what that might break and it makes me so very tired, so I can't imagine doing it for dozens of sites.

So now that I'm home and have a bit more time to devote to something other than flailing about how much I love Semantic Wiki, I thought I'd take a look at what the original post actually asked. SO.

For game owners

I think the things @Cobaltasaurus set out are good ones - game owners need to have at least some basic level of control over who's editing what, and in some cases, who's seeing what.

I'd add:

• Mostly hands-off admin after primary set-up
• Well documented

I'm personally less interested in the 'easy to get up and running the way you want' than I am the 'easy to use once it is' - I'm happy to put in a lot of work at the get-go to get a wiki that doesn't require much upkeep or handholding on my part. I get that not everyone thinks this way, though.

For a game's power users and/or staffers

• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Well documented

I'm not saying that a wiki should be able to do ANYTHING you want, but flexibility is one of the things that sets mediawiki apart for me. The array of extensions is simply INSANE.

In addition, because wikipedia runs on it, as well as wikia (for better or worse, probably the second most popular wiki site), there are tons of tricks and tips documented. There's also an active, responsive community to ask questions of.

For a typical game player wiki user

• Easy to post and create content
• Easy to find and read content

This is where Semantic Wiki blows everything else (that I know of) out of the water. The forms alone have erased a lot of staff effort helping people understand fill-in-the-blank templates. But more importantly, the ability to build targeted searches makes it really easy to find old information. Since we started keeping logs on the wiki, the ability to search in detailed ways has been very useful.

For hosting providers like me

I don't have much to say on this one - we simply went from paying for space for a webpage to paying for space for a wiki. I installed it (a process I found absurdly easy) and customized it (definitely a lot of work to get to the level we're at now, though I keep stealing things from old wikis at this point).

I'm definitely curious about where your frustration points are.

If what you're aiming for is a game-in-a-box that includes a mediawiki install, I'd probably suggest a basic install with a few additional extensions up and running, and a depository somewhere of easy-to-tweak templates for commonly used things like character pages or logs.

The extensions I'd call must-haves are

• Arrays
• DPL (IF not using Semantic Wiki - I'd consider Semantic advanced MediaWiki'ing)
• Parser Functions
• WikiEditor
• Input Box
• Confirm Edit with QuestyCaptcha plug-in

A handful of these I think you can actually choose to install on mediawiki install these days.

If you're being really nice, I'd also include a skin that isn't the god-awful Monobook.

I'm not sure if this really gets at what you're asking - these are the reasons we stick with MediaWiki and why I like it, anyway.

@Chime said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:

I suspect there are a lot of important data-entry things with forms that can be useful even for games with no automatic integration; i.e. DPL views and the like that pull form-submitted data to generate code to paste into the MUSH.

If you get into Semantic Wiki and Semantic Forms, you don't even need DPL. I think we use it in one location (I'm not actually sure we need to, even - it's a holdover from an older wiki), but for the most part, Semantic actually does that pulling of data better and more smoothly.

If you're interested in seeing it in action, I'd be happy to show you how to mess around with Special:Ask on our wiki.

@faraday

Never done the height thing, but then again - I've never had a desire to Have listed all characters by faction, though, or by school class (junior/senior/etc.).

Ha, well. It's not really my thing, either, but we did used to have a player who kept one manually, because it was their thing.

That's just an example, though - almost any piece of data in a plot, log, character, user, or NPC page is searchable and sortable. Birthday, date of death, age, plots involved in, logs involved in, plots GMed, affiliated org, previously affiliated orgs, mutations, aliases, the location of logs, the short introduction at the top of the page-- The possibilities are immense. We use a lot of them.

The first wiki I did had templates like what you're talking about - just fill in the blank. A lot of people did them just fine, but we definitely had a lot more wiki hand-holding prior to semantic forms. Like, a LOT more. We have very, very little now.

It's not a huge deal if all you're doing is character pages, but if you're also posting logs, it gets really nice.

Did I mention that forms can autocomplete? So for example, you don't have remember the file name of a character icon. Just start typing the first few letters (we suggest people name their icons with a character prefix) and all the options pop up.

@surreality It's probably easier to just show you.

Basically semantic properties act like database entries, allowing you to then search by those things. You can do this to auto-fill a list, as in our census page or our organization pages, or you can make a searchable form, like our log search.

I can use templates to assign semantic properties behind the scenes (IE, a player never has to know that it's being done or how to do it), and then I can use those semantic properties to create lists of just about anything.

I will probably never do another game without MediaWiki because of the power of this single extension. I spend a lot of time retroactively kicking myself for not doing it for the first game I built a wiki for - we filled out a lot of this shit by hand! We used to keep a list of character birthdays - now I can generate one automatically in like 5 seconds.

Want to see characters by height? Sure, no problem. How about every plot an NPC's been involved in? Yup, we can do that. What about every log involved in a plot? Also done (for example).

It turns your whole wiki into a searchable database that /players don't have to know how to use/. I'm not actually sure which part is more awesome.

@bored said:

@Tat Were your players ambushed by gentrifying hipsters on the way to their drop?

The were ambushed by mutants styling themselves after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on the way to the delivery.

So. Sort of?

I've been using Google Draw (as @Roz mentioned) for so long that I literally can't imagine not using it anymore. Sometimes I'll have a small scene and think 'nah, let's not bother', and then halfway through I end up throwing one together because both players and GMs want one for clarity's sake. It's so valuable that sometimes we'll be in a big party scene and someone will request a map so they can know who's where.

I think it saves a lot of headache in terms of trying to get everyone on the same page and helps keep the focus on RP. I love Google Draw because you can make lots of shapes and colors, and everyone can edit at once and move themselves. So you can easily tell bad guys from good, dead bad guys from alive ones, have special icons for turrets and drones and giant moving mutant puppets - whatever you want.

I've also sometimes screenshooted locations in Google Earth and used them as my BG to draw on.

ETA: Some live links in case anyone wants to see what it looks like at play (I turned edit off, sorry):

• https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U9oJvdLjX0uRJhPGYpuT9PJliPjiC0f44qWECFb1IfI/edit?usp=sharing

• https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1aBPSlBUjlNWv1Q2o0y8_n2jwXp-L7PeKjmHVhmzbRoQ/edit?usp=sharing

Well this looks fascinating, and I have access to an e-book. I'll skim along with you.

@skew said:

I'll also add that @tragedyjones came up with a pretty great game policy, called "Fake It".

On the opposite end of the spectrum from people ignoring your characters flaws, you should not need to possess every stat your character does. It is perfectly acceptable to fudge reality. If you want to play a doctor, you should not be penalized by a lack of OOC knowledge. Any time a character in a scene wants to fake it, they may declare so OOC and make an appropriate roll. People should endeavor to try and take the results of the roll into the pose. This is not meant to bypass RP, just allow a little fudging of reality. If the Doctor character wants to throw in some medical jargon, don't bite their head off it isn't real world accurate.

I like this a lot, and I've seen it often in play. We don't usually roll it (I play on very stat-lite or no stat games), but many times people will simply include in their pose 'She spends several minutes explaining the issue in intricate detail that's likely difficult to follow without a medical degree before turning to sum up, "You'll be in a cast for six weeks." '

Or something of that nature. This to me is an excellent way of acknowledging the gaps in your own knowledge rather than trying to stuff them full of things that don't make sense while still giving a nod to the skills your character has. It's a lot easier to googling treatment and healing times than the full understanding of the impact of a broken bone, because web resources are (largely) written for patients, not doctors, and that's the case in many circumstances.

@Lithium said:

@Tat If people don't get to use it (aka rolling the dice) then they don't know if their character is actually being /good/ at it or not in that instance. There are sides both for and against it, but without a dice roll it could be construed that no matter what, they were going to get the information anyways and thus the character taking the non-combat skill is just wasting the points to begin with.

That's why I will always allow a roll if there is a possibility of differing amounts of information. You want the story to progress, yes, but you also want the investigator to feel just as engaged and useful as the combat monster in their field of expertise.

I suspect we play on very different sorts of games. I don't generally think that investigatey characters feel less useful than combaty characters because neither one is the meat of the games I run - and people frequently play characters who are designed to fail sort of miserably at some aspect or another quite happily. It's pretty low-competition, which is a thing that I enjoy greatly about it.

On a game which relies more heavily on dice and stats measured against a common system, I take your point.