Best posts made by Tez

Definitely still alive!

The bulk of us tend to be in the US, and somewhere between 3:30 AM to 6:30 AM on a Sunday morning (depending on timezones!) is not what you would call prime time. Obviously. I went looking for our mudstats page to give you a better idea of our most active hours only to discover we don't have one yet, because the last game added was added 150 days ago.

A better measure of activity might be the logs page -- http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/Category:Logs -- and if you haven't checked out our consent policies, I would -- http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/RP_Policies#Consent. We're limited consent, which is a very fuzzy middle ground between pure consent and no consent.

@loke

Sure:

http://lostandfound.riverdark.net/wiki/Staff_Policies

Full credit to Meg, Roz, and Sao for their work on it, both in the original draft, and some of the revisions. That is viewable on our wiki's policy page to all players.

I've gone back and forth on this one, a little. Like @Jaded said, if you do fudge, I think you need to be up front about it. Like @Ganymede said, knowing your players and what they prefer is key.

When I was on Firan, I rolled openly whenever possible and never fudged rolls. When running games with friends, I'd fudge or toss out dice if they weren't doing what I wanted them to in the name of making players more awesome. On the Transformers game I staff now, I not only roll openly, but I've changed the code to be even more transparent.

A lot of this has more to do with the game culture, and the game history of the players, than it does my own feelings. Both Firan and (past) Transformer games had strong PvP elements and a real problem where players had good reasons not to trust staff. Unfortunately, GMs are all too often dealing with borderline hostile, mistrustful players -- and I can't really blame them. Players need to be able to trust you, which is why I shoot for transparency, first. If I'm gonna fudge, I'm telling them.

@Coin

That's a reasonable point.

I can easily imagine one player ignoring the theme / mood / logic of a scene while other players are trying to have a different type of scene entirely. Sometimes keeping morale high for everyone means telling one person that they are being disruptive and to knock that shit off.

That said, making stupid decisions awesome doesn't always mean making them right. You can still fail in amazing ways. I'm pretty sure WoD even has that baked in to their systems, right? (I know nothing about WoD except what I've gleaned from this board.)

I second @Roz that they are super awesome. They are probably one of my favorite batches that @saosmash has written and I am LOW KEY INVESTED in the hope that one of them becomes my BFF, that's how great they are.