Posts made by Thenomain

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

I hate static descs and would much prefer just tossing a brief note in my set pose about what my character's wearing

This is what I see more than not these days, but I still use descs to get across mood and general persona via the description.

Back In The Day (tm), it was multidescers. Descs were not static, and you looked at someone as your part of joining the scene. This has changed, obviously, but expectations and games need to shift as informed by what people are doing.

I, for one, welcome our not-using-multidescers-any-more overlords.

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

For example, Ares has a whois <name> command that tells you their full name (including rank and callsign) and lets you look people up by first name, last name, or callsign. 90% of the time you don't need the whole spammy finger-style profile, it's just the clunky way we've gotten used to for figuring out "who is this person again?".

$ whois thenomain
No whois server is known for this kind of object.

$ finger thenomain
-bash: finger: command not found

Dammit, @Chime, what's going on here!

Anyhow, yeah, we can draw from our elder Unix roots for this stuff. And we should. So much of this has already been solved.

$ who
thenomain  pts/0        2017-10-25 16:22 (xxx.central.biz.rr.com)
thenomain  pts/2        2017-10-25 19:29 (xxx.central.biz.rr.com)

A lot of what we use looks familiar for a reason. We should continue stealing ideas that make more sense than what we've been doing, no matter of its age.

@auspice said in RL things I love:

@thenomain said in RL things I love:

Uni-Ball Vision Elite .5mm

For rollerballs, I'm actually a fan of the Pilot Precise V5.

It doesn't handle the angles I like to write in, and the internal ink delivery slowly leaks internally and I get a less consistent line very quickly. It is a finer line, but I drag my hand all over the place and it's too easy for me to get smudge lines, especially if using it with a straight-edge.

The gel pens give a thicker line even at the .5mm (which is why I would never .7mm on a gel pen), but they settle almost instantaneously.

I admit, the Pilot Precise V5 is hard to beat, and I used it as long as I can remember caring about which pen I used (from Junior High at least), until I found the Vision Elite. Also, the Elite has a smoother, more rounded feel against my fingers and it's fatter so it's easier to manipulate with my thumb.

Not that I've thought about this much.

(edit: That's such a lie. Pens are as personal as shoes, and for exactly the same reasons.)

@auspice

My pen is the Uni-Ball Vision Elite .5mm and no other. It doesn't blot when my horribly small and scratchy handwriting flies across the page or stays in one place too long, and I'm more likely to lose the pen than run it out.

Elegant it is not, but like a Golden Retriever never judges nor fails me.

@arkandel said in Transfer of MSB tonight: 7:30 EST:

@thenomain Oh, hrm. It was a plugin, so that'd explain why.

I'll restart nodebb in a couple of minutes to activate it.

Mmm, doesn't look like it's in correctly.

Asked on the Dragonlance thread: Did the ability to create polls on new threads disappear in the transition? I never had, so I could just be missing the icon in a new thread.

Thanks.

@ganymede said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Again, just keeping the record straight here. I said nothing about removing +finger or +sheets or any of that.

Well...fine then. See if I invite you to the "misinterpretation dance" this year. I think they said this year? Or did they say it should be put into gear? Nnngh, maybe I heard them wrong, dammit.

Mega Follow-Up Post! I am burying the lede because I'm responding in order.

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@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

This is like a "which do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla" type of question. You're not going to reach any sort of consensus here.

Well yeah, this is Soapbox. I am, however, getting this conversation out of the X-Men Utopia thread. It comes up from time to time, so let's get our opinions in order.

Personally, I prefer to have the wiki/website be the primary source of all information, and have in-game commands for essential quick reference. But that matters to anyone else about as much as the fact that I like chocolate (i.e. it doesn't matter at all except insofar as what you'll find on my games or ready-built into Ares).

This is my opinion too, but what I consider "essential quick reference" changes. Being able to pull information into both is my perfect world.

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@sparks said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

My answer is 'both should draw from the same source'.

Sure, but when I say it I have Faraday calling it vanilla v. chocolate. Also, I may be hungry right now.

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@arkandel said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@thenomain I don't see a reason it would be exclusive to either.

Because this is how @Ganymede phrased it in the X-Men Utopia thread. I will concede to @Tempest that it's not that hard to list and review a bunch of stats on a wiki, but my complaint as stated is that hitting the wiki just for some information is disruptive and/or tedious, as agreed upon by: Ghost, Ixokai, and Apos,

Most people agree that both sources is best. This includes myself. Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

I mean, that's not to say that mob rules, but I certainly think people are happier with a mix of both.

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@surreality said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

All the <rubs her temples> for you, @Thenomain.

For non-tech-brained people like me

You can make MediaWiki do things that absolutely baffle me. That takes a hell of a lot of technical skill. Don't sell yourself short. Making things easy is hella hard.

@surreality

Will do.

@Tempest

It would be easier to store all of this in a database and find some way to pull the data into MediaWiki (like this one.) This would mean that either system could pull the data, but crazy Surreality wants her own way. Why? Did I mention that she is crazy?

Mostly it’s so that the wiki is chargen, which is admirable but from a data storage standpoint is still cat-lady levels of crazy.

@ghost

It’s also easier to come up with descriptions when you aren’t limited to trying to find people who fit. When I played Vera on HM, there were many pictures of her, but no two were the same. One was Elisha Cuthbert, one was Aviril Lavigne, all of them made by other people.

This was fantastic. It was fun to be a part of, and it couldn’t have happened without a wiki.

I have as of yet to play a character where someone could simply find me a played by and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I do love wiki pages for log lists and character flavor, but nothing I would need to just find out about them. I do wish that the character info sidebar was available on the game as finger. Hm, maybe something to approach Fate’s Harvest about....

Alright, let’s keep this productive, and help poor X-Men Utopia out by removing this from their thread.

The core question: Should character information live on the wiki only?

I say a staunch no. In situations like a scene or when I’m new to a group of people, it is tedious to have to look each one of them on a wiki, even using a client that can recognize a URI and create a link out of it, most of the time it doesn’t work, this assuming the player has taken the time to enter the correct information.

There are ways to mitigate these issues, but none of them are as easy as typing +finger bob.

@ganymede

It is insanely difficult to make something like that work. @surreality worked on it for a while and I think she came close?

@ganymede said in Alternate Game Systems:

@thenomain said in Alternate Game Systems:

Really I think my point was more that games need to teach you how to play it.

So your objection to Falkenstein, if there was an objection, is that no one taught you and your troupe how to play it?

I mean, I presume you had the core book. I recall it pretty plainly showing me and my troupe how to play it.

Again, I tried to use examples to explain what I meant. I understand the mechanics, but that's not always the whole story. We didn't "get it". I don't think the CF rules gave enough to "get it". Good luck understanding why anyone would play poker until you understand that poker is more than the card combinations. Good luck understanding why people watch baseball until you talk to people who like watching baseball. You can find out on your own, but if someone started with a reason, with the explanation, wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't you have a better idea if you want to play it, and if you do how it's best approached?

Sure, you have got a good point. I mean, Changeling: the Lost seems pretty clearly a game about trauma, but people keep trying to play pretty princess with it.

Well, people did that with Werewolf: The Apocalypse too, and that has the word "Apocalypse" in the title. You never know!

@ganymede said in Alternate Game Systems:

@thenomain said in Alternate Game Systems:

The point, however, was that it wasn't fun. It could have been, maybe, but it wasn't.

You mean you and your group didn't find it fun, right? Because me and my group found it a lot of fun.

I'm just talkin' Falkenstein here, man.

I kind of hoped my original post where I said it was just my group would have transitive properties so I didn’t have to say it every time. Sheesh.

Really I think my point was more that games need to teach you how to play it. Even board games. Can you imagine a group of people reading the rules to poker and trying to work out why it’s supposed to be fun? Or chess? It can be super fun to work out the mechanics from scratch, but it can also be frustrating as hell.

And this is why a lot of people refuse to switch over their game of choice. The payoff is uncertain for the work involved.

Nerd humor.

(reposted with actual image)

@rnmissionrun said in Mac OS Sierra Client:

In that case, I'm glad that I held off on updating to High Sierra!

Except that it broke on Sierra, which comes before High Sierra.

Mind you, my advice to everyone updating any OS is to wait a few weeks or a few months to see what breaks in the new version. The number of things that iOS 11 broke that devs had two years to fix just baffles me.

@bobotron said in Alternate Game Systems:

Re: PbTA
My experience with this is very limited, as I found 'narrative moves' to be... a bit odd, personally. Like, the 'narrative moves' are already things I'm doing/RPing in general. I don't disagree with you; I don't have problems with losing socially or physically or whatever. But a lot of people do.

This is one of the reasons why I think that each game should have a clear explanation of what playing the game is about. "Apocalypse World is a game about the difficulties of survival in a post-apocalyptic Earth. ThenoMUX focuses on life in the remains of Boston after the Psychic Maestrom and ensuing nuclear war (or was it the other way around?) reduced most of it to rubble. Technology is blamed, even hated, and fought over by two of the most powerful factions, while green mutated human monsters roam between old neighborhoods. What do you want? How will you survive?"

Or something.

This has nothing to do with alternate game systems, other than this late mention that in PbtA games, especially Apocalypse World, the stats/moves are little systems tied irreplaceably to theme and setting. I still like that idea. More than most system ideas.

@bobotron said in Alternate Game Systems:

@thenomain
Re: Computer Aided

Because, as I think has been discussed before, who has the time/energy to code WoD in such a way that everything is automated (and then how to account for RAW vs. interpretation, etc.).

I'm not sure if that was you agreeing or disagreeing. Because I have. Because MUDs have. Not WoD specifically, but certainly there are games with high levels of complexity in their code, even when it's a far lighter touch at the user's end. They may not be finished all in one go, but who expects a system to be finished at time of game open? Certainly not Electronic Arts.

Re: PbTA games
I think the biggest problem with PbTA games in a MU* environment is 'moves', and that they're meant for Player vs. Environment narrative

Except for the moves that specifically say, "if against another character", where the move acts slightly differently. NPCs don't get agency, but PCs do. It's a beautiful solution for the "I roll my Persuasion against you" situation.

And if you don't like playing a game where someone could force your character into a bad spot, you'd probably better just stay away from PbtA games entirely. Apocalypse World is kind of the opposite of a power fantasy, without being degrading and hopeless.

@lithium

It sounds like you'd have a single system which reads the settings of the world and generate it based on those settings. (Imagine how Places code works: It's all the same code, it's just using different settings.)

You have to be much more picky about its use-case, though. On a tabletop game, well, it doesn't matter if the entire world uses the same simple deck, because there are roughly 5 or so (give or take) people using it, including the GM. This is a classic example of a tabletop RPG not translating to a Mu*, because the coder is going to say something unhelpful like, "How do you want this implemented?" And then you go from playing a tabletop game to game-designing a LARP or an MMO using tabletop rules.

I'm in no way saying this shouldn't be done, but the question is still hangs there: How do you want this implemented?

@Auspice & @GirlCalledBlu

Okay, yeah, it does have a few benefits (that I workaround by always having BBEdit open). I was looking into a workaround when I found the reason Potato won't run here: https://github.com/talvo/potato/issues/455#issuecomment-287202932

This isn't something that can easily be rectified without looking into it, and I didn't; the project's last blog entry was June 1st which, unless things change, marks to me as it as no longer being developed. I wouldn't call it abandoned, yet, but until activity returns to the project it's unlikely that someone's going to fork the project to fix it; it has zero forks yet so no-go. Sorry.

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Unfortunately there is no way to set each text pane with its own color set or font. While I'm tempted to summon @Sparks in the Beetlejuice style, I'm sure she has a life that she also wants to attend to or something.

I mean, just because we don't....