@ShelBeast said:
@Thenomain We're all going to have to get used to it sooner or later.
He's mocking me because there is no 2nd edition of CoD. Mocking me. Watching me. Here's there, now, reading. He'll start explaining that all comic books share a single continuity. It will end in blood and madness. Mostly blood. Mostly ... his.
Or I'll put intentional easter eggs into BitN and he'll never find them.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
Spoiler: People are gonna be dicks.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being afraid to try things because of what people might do. I see no harm for trying, and it fits (or at least doesn't break) our staff philosophy of letting adults be adults.
I'm not assuming it's going to be a rousing success, but I do know that being an optimist once in a while allows me to learn quite a lot on how to implement something on similar lines in the future, or even in the now.
I just read something that is pretty personally horrible.
"Java is everywhere. On your phone, in your computer, on your Blu-Ray player, even in your car!"
I won't be able to sleep well tonight.
Follow-Up:
The Chrome browser does not support NPAPI plug-ins and therefore will not run all Java content. Switch to a different browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari on Mac) to run the Java plug-in.
Okay, let's try this, then:
In Windows 10, the Edge browser does not support plug-ins and therefore will not run Java. Switch to a different browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer 11) to run the Java plug-in. Select the More Actions option located at the top right of the Edge browser and click on Open with Internet Explorer.
Oh, phew, okay, I'll sleep easier.
@ThatGuyThere said:
you could very easily
Spoken like a true comics nerd.
For the rest of us, we'll wait for the movie.
@RDC said:
I think it's more a passive-aggressive way to tell staff you don't like their behavior.
Then staff should stop passive-aggressively pissing on the game by spending 99% of their online time dark.
Joking aside (mostly), I would be happy to find a more solid way to say, "This behavior is okay, in some circumstances and not others" without being a dick when someone crosses the line, especially when the line is not black-and-white, which we Mu*ers seem to worship beyond reason.
I've thought of a few ways to make this clearer, myself. For instance: On-Duty, Off-Duty, and Too Busy For Anything But What I'm Doing Right Now. I don't see that it has to be passive-aggressive, and I don't see that a useful tool needs to be taken away.
Experiment away, it doesn't really affect me much
It may surprise you, but your points of validity and consequence are making me think about this far more than your throw-away statements.
Blah blah blah. For someone who wants there to be people taking themselves less seriously, you got pretty defensive, brah.
Me, I'm fine with any cliche as long as it's done well. I think it was @skew or @tragedyjones who pointed me at a forum thread asking what people didn't want to see in a villain in their games and it was apparently like a list of everything from TV Tropes. We're never going to escape labels, so why the hell are we fighting it?
So that's my wish. That we stop fighting the whole concept of what is or isn't fun and that we do our fucking best with it.
Oh, except Rick and Morty. I vote this idea wins.
(edit: except that Deadpool was still a shitty video game. Nothing can stop that. Nothing!)
@surreality said:
Sometimes having the idle message set just scrolls your screen much faster, since it adds another line to every page that keeps on coming in.
So when it scrolls off your screen and you don't see it, you have every justified reason to say, "I had an Idle message up." As Belh says, if they complain, the fault is theirs, not yours. You can't help them at that point, nor should you be beholden to.
@Misadventure said:
Re: Ricky and Morty -- sounds to me like the request is for other players to play victims. Not too likely.
You would have to take the concept into the theme and setting, of course. Even being around such a comedy duo would be hilarious and as was mentioned you could use NPCs as targets. The question of why the cops and FBI aren't all over the situation would need addressed too but sure, why not.
@Misadventure said in Star Wars: Insurgency:
Set Luke idle 2 hours on +who.
Set Luke Dark.
Login BB-8.
@tel BB-8=Tatooine.
Login Rey.
[...]
This is true. If @Cobaltasaurus has a choice between "on fire" and "not on fire", she will choose the former.
So WoD is now going to become a big-brand trademark now, huh. Cheaper than trying to get rights to Underworld, I guess?
Or have a system which automatically undarks staffers.
In other news, I have killed +job/approve and +job/deny. I cannot tell the low-level animosity I've had for these two switches, but for some reason +job/complete has never mailed. Ever. It's a silent finish-and-close.
I don't know where to put this patch, so I'm putting it here for now.
@va me=<main jobs object>
&MLETTER_COM [get( %va/vc )]=
[name( %0 )] has been completed:%r
%r
[last( get( %0/COMMENT_1 ), | )]%r
[repeat( -, 75 )]%r
[ansi( h, Comments added by [name( %2 )]: )] %3
@edit %va/cmd_job/complete=
{ You have completed [name(%q0)].; },
{ You have completed [name( %q0 )], adding the comments: [trim( %1 )]; }
&cmd_job/approve %va=$+job/approve *=*:
@pemit %#=Please use +job/complete.
&cmd_job/deny %va=$+job/deny *=*:
@pemit %#=Please use +job/complete.
Yes, it was just that easy.
Enjoy.
Note to Self: @Coin thinks being right three times is "a lot".
@Arkandel said:
How do you put that into practice, what does it mean? What do you actually do?
There is no specific right or wrong way to "play for those around you"; this is why our discussions on this heavily rely on talking about "the table", or context, or situation. Taking the second part of what I said out of context of the first part destroys both.
How do you do it? Pay attention to the rules and files the game has put forth. Pay attention to how your character operates. Pay attention to what the scene is about and who else is in it. Then formulate your response in a way you think is best for the other people.
The only thing that @Halicron says that I didn't that I think is important is "give other people something to react to". And yet this isn't always true, it's one of those rules you'd give to someone to get them into the mindset so they know why you give other people something to react to.
That is, I don't think rules (or even guidelines) of behavior are any good without known goals, and that was missing from the twenty rules.
Here, just for you, Ark, I will break all of these rules. For everyone else, go ahead and skip this. I'm doing this to yet again tell Ark that he's being contrary just to be contrary, and it's something that everyone can do and that it often misses the point. You will see me miss a lot of points, below. Yeah, I know that.
There are twenty of these. Gonna take a while.
- Try to address the environment around you.
I don't think the environment needs to be important except to get the scene going. If you miss it, if you want to essentially turn the role-play into an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk, then do so. He's a popular writer, good at what he does, and he very rarely points out the environmental context. If he can, you can too.
- Agree upon the use of tense and stick to it.
This is a bugaboo that people have but you're not writing for awards. Generally people will gravitate toward a single narrative and tense. It kind of bugs me when people mix second-person and first-person, too, but this guideline is more "how to write english" and not "how to RP well". If we're going to have discussions about being able to let go bad spelling, then we can let go other elements of grammar.
That said, learning to English in a written medium is pretty important.
- Try to describe your character's mood but do it without having us read your mind.
I do this a lot, so go ahead and ignore this guideline entirely. I absolutely suck at getting across the subtle details that body language and spoken inflection get, so you get mind-reading powers. I do try to make it interesting and not the horrible OOC-fueled metaposing that everyone hates. Don't OOC-metapose in the mind-reading tricks.
- Try to develop some character quirks or routines.
I like this one. It's good advice that should be in a "how to make a character" post, but I said I was going to break all the rules so I'm going to break this one too.
Having a quirk or a routine does not make you a better RPer. You need to apply it in a way that other people can appreciate (positively or negatively) and react to (ditto). It's disingenuous of me to take this out of context, but Ark's implied I've oversimplified so I'm purposefully removing context.
- Use props.
See #1: Aaron Sorkin.
- Be descriptive.
Our hobby comes from the tabletop environment, and I can count the number of times over seven years that we were told to "be descriptive" or that the actions of the players have played into the game as a very low number of times. What we enjoy is the discussion afterwards where we imagine how it played out.
Sometimes the pressure to be Pulitzer-award-winning writers or people turn their nose up at your pose is so annoying. You don't have to be descriptive, you just have to be interesting.
- Divide up your actions into small pieces.
As much as I dislike power-posers who are responding to everything in the room at once, a lot of people like this, so many that I know that I'm playing Grumpy Old Man when I complain about this. I grin and bear it because that's the context of the scene, but enough people don't do this that it's how I'm breaking this rule.
- Know a little bit of what you're going to do in your next pose. Not all of it, but some of it.
This answers such a huge peeve I have, especially when @Ganymede says to "pre-pose".
Uh, I can't break this one. Someone help me out on this one.
- Be proactive.
It's okay to be reactive. If someone jumps out of the dark scary woods and goes, "RAR!" then your job is to run away going "Eek!" Your job is to let them be the big bad wolf, and that means falling into a more passive role, and let me tell you this is a hell of a lot of fun.
- See step 9.
No.
- Get a sense of timing.
What's described with this seems boring to me. Sometimes your response to someone's gabbling on is nodding, mmhmm, and letting them babble on. This very specifically undermines rules 9 and 10.
Halicron's applying to reality in this step ("For talking, it's very easy to fall into the trap of carrying on two conversations at once, but really, who does that in real life?") undermines even this rule. In real life, a conversation is usually dominated by one person but can be interrupted mid-stream. We have no cultural training on Mus to let this happen. I know if I spit out a thought in five-second intervals I will get interrupted by someone posing by Mu Culture Rules, which are spit out as much as possible at once. But my thought of going 'thought, pause, thought, pause' would force the other player into the role of nodding and smiling and being passive until they feel like jumping in.
I think this is okay, but by these rules, I'd be wrong.
- You're playing with people.
See #11: You're playing with pose robots. If I were playing with people, I could be passive, I could flex between short and long poses, I could offer cues in any way I wanted.
- Know your character.
I've addressed this already in #4, but let me add a bit here. I hate games where they demand that you come up with a life history of the character, all their motivations and dreams, before getting to test these ideas.
- Be time-courteous.
I'm not going to break this rule, because "be courteous" is never bad advice, but if I'm multi-mushing it's nobody else's business, but if someone asks why I'm non-responsive they're asking to change what I assumed the acceptable behavior were for the scene and I can either ask them for understanding, tighten up my pose time, or retire the scene. Why isn't critical.
- Avoid powerposing.
Again, "be courteous". However, I'm being grumpy gamer so let me grump: Don't avoid it, just don't do it. But like all rules, if you have a good and trusting enough relationship with the other player it's up to you if you want to break it.
By the way, power-posing is not: I pick up your unconscious body.
- Play in theme.
Huh, @Arkandel, sounds familiar doesn't it? Doesn't it?!
- Plan for Consequences.
Prepare to fight against Consequences. Just as people use "Consent" as an unreasonable defense, people use "Consequences" as an unreasonable attack. People will use their OOC distaste for things you did to create an IC situation against you. I've been the victim of this, myself, and knowing how to fight against Consequences that your character is involved in is just as important.
That is, this rule is broken without the trust to go with it.
- ME ME ME
Again, sound familiar, Ark?
- IC is not OOC.
Utter and complete horseshit. IC is OOC. OOC is IC. You cannot, cannot disconnect the two. The expectation that we put a wall between these two concepts has caused more harm than good.
What is meant, though, is that the character is a puppet, a thing, a toy, not an extension of the player. We use the character to act out a narrative, and that bit of information is why I have any problems with most of rules 1-18. By our culture's expectation of putting your heart and soul into the poses, into the role-play, we fuck our brain over when separating character and self.
- And lastly.
I think I've made a decent case that having a bunch of rules isn't enough. It can confuse the issue, it can give people too much to juggle without having a goal to work toward.
And lastly, our mutual goal is to engage in social role-play. How we do this depends primarily on the "social" aspect, since we all have a fairly common ground on what a "role" is and what "play" is, though I'm sure Ark could pull one of his famous, "nnnrrrr, weeeellll it deeepeeeeeeeeends" like someone who hates people coming to common ground.
@Halicron, I don't disagree on a lot of what you said, but I was challenged that your approach was better than mine. The only point I have a strong emotional feeling about is #19, because I have seen people use this specific wording point to attack others. Far too many times have we, as Mushers, come up with rule but not the guidance for it.
We don't tend to come to common ground on our own. We don't know what the expectations are. We also, as a hobby, do a shitty job of communicating this up front, or helping people ease into it.
The fact that I can disagree with most of those points was my goal, my own version of "nnneehhh, it depeeeeeends". I feel a little bad about it now, but I don't think I'm going to change how I pose, or what I think is important in scenes.
This is training. Both /approve and /deny have a certain connotation to them that /complete does not, so rather than letting the staffer think the context is maintained, force them to use the correct command and, therefore, the correct context.
There's also something strange that happens when you use @force on an object that gets set 'halt' when the game super-lags. Not likely to happen, but has happened.
@Thenomain No, Admiral was saying they watched the trailer with OMFG's Hello overlaid and it was an improvement.
Well yes, of course it would be. <.<
I don't know what you guys are talking about. >.>
... Exit, Stage Left!
@Lithium said:
@Thenomain I'm going to disagree that IC is OOC and OOC is IC, but I think we're talking context.
And I'm going to tell you that you're wrong, and this is a lot of (but not entirely) why:
I guess we could redefine IC/OOC separation as: Play true to the character, not yourself.
Everything your character does is because of what you decide about the character. Everything. Ev-er-y-thing. There is not one single aspect of the character that doesn't come from you. If your character runs from a fight, it's because that's what you want for the character. If your character stands on a table and strips, it's because that's what you want for the character.
You choose whether or not the character exists today by deciding whether or not you log in.
I think it's too late to talk about "IC/OOC Separation". It's been used too often to mean something that can't exist. For the same reason, we don't talk about "OOC Masq" anymore, because we've gone beyond the original label and thank effing god we did. Too many people using it as a weapon, too many people trying to shoehorn an idea about it based on how they expect it to be used versus how other people expect it to be used. Putting a label on a concrete thing or generally accept concept helps, but putting it on something that we want to be is just wishful thinking.
an off duty flag doesn't really preclude getting pages
As most of us know, neither does the dark flag. I know something that does, tho.
@lock/page me=me
There's also a way to turn of @mail notifications. I'm starting to get tired explaining how code works as a defense, and not to people who actually want to know. Learn this shit before going all attacky about how it works, people.
Trying to use code to fix a symptom as if it'll fix the problem is poor form.
::facerub::
Guess who said the following over a dozen times?
Using code to solve a social issue is tricky at best and should only be done if you know what you're doing.
Or this?
I see no harm for trying.
Or, in another thread, this?
You can't responsibly break a rule until you understand it.
If you need a hint, they are all the same person.
Code is a tool implemented to aid a workflow. That's it. That's what it does. It is not there to solve a problem. People are there to solve problems and use code to help implement the solution. Notice I didn't say "to implement" but "to help implement". It is, I will be blunt, ignorant to assume that code, once written, never changes. It wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry if code was write-once, solve-thing. Hell, even @Coin is happy to go into the Muxifier and make some changes so that my code workflow is improved. We tweak Myrddin's venerated bboard code so that our workflow improves. When we broke TinyMUX with our overbearing code-heavy "solutions", it was @Chime who upped one number, saw what that broke, and fixed some others.
So sure, say my idea is shitty, but don't put code in the spotlight for something it can never do.