My character contracted vampirism within the first hour of gameplay,
Fucking Bethesda.
My character contracted vampirism within the first hour of gameplay,
Fucking Bethesda.
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
@Thenomain said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Mostly each nWoD game line ended up with a couple dozen exceptions to the XP spending (many of them based on social orders and magical groups) that would have needed coding around. My decision at the time was: If the XP cost system couldn't determine which of several tiers of XP costs a stat would be, it would calculate the most expensive option. Players could submit non-calculated costs but they would also have to explain why.
Yeah, this is a difficulty. Its not insurmountable, but it is for sure an issue. With the move to a flat XP system (which TR never included, since it as the game of quadrillions of XP), I think NWOD won't have to worry about this as much.
Nnn... no. CoD is too young to see what, e.g., the various Werewolf Lodge powers are going to do with xp spending (far worse than the Changeling Court xp mess!), but they still exist in a level that is worth banging your head against the wall.
For instance, in Mage, if you have a teacher for some of the Arcanum, you can spend some XP but not others. If your Gnosis (power level) is too low, you have to spend more XP to buy up the higher Arcanum levels. Demon has a few tricks like this one too.
Sure, none of this is insurmountable, but...yeah.
All of this is designed to answer @SG's question: Is there a chargen framework, or a simple Chargen out there?
Of course, people like you and I are more likely to look at chargen as a code challenge because we know how hellish it is to throw numbers at a sheet and leave human beings to double-check the math just in case. I still stress that this is the easiest and quickest way to build a CG, but far from a desirable one. When I was coder for AetherMUX, I went in and touched and tweaked something in their insanely simple chargen about once a week and it was finished before I started there.
@Alzie said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
I remember the time that automated XP Spends were proposed. Essentially, it wasn't so much objection as it was the insane amount of exceptions. By the time the exceptions got added in the number of categories that you could do by yourself were so minimal that there was no point to it.
The way I remember it was something like: It was the fifth time that week that some staffer had entered the wrong xp cost and I threw up my hands and yelled that I was going to fix it "if those staffers couldn't do simple math". (WoD's exceptions-based XP math isn't simple.)
Then about a week passed with me essentially bringing over what parts of my own system that would work with Reach's, staring for about two days at how I might do the exceptions, and declaring that even the increased function invocation limit and buffer would not be able to handle the number of lookups I'd have to do for some of this (maybe it could; I wasn't going to spend time right then finding out), and leaving the framework for future users.
I mean, look at Reach's/Fallcoast's job format when you submit an XP spend. It's a list of four or so commands for staff to run with a reminder that they really should double-check these things before doing it. If nothing else, that should click in people's minds that it took four separate inferfaces to process one XP spend, when most reasonable systems I can think of only require two. (Update the sheet & log the change.)
This has been a Thenomain's Old-Man Reminiscing special presentation.
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Was TR's codebase really that unstable? I figured it ran forever and had so many players and since I didn't really ever see much in the way if issues, that there weren't really many.
Because four excellent coders (well, three and me) did some amazing things to make sure it looked that way. Key work that @Glitch did on the system was the only reason I could do anything remotely close to the xp spend calculations, but it involved more or less starting a second stat system on top of the first.
You said mostly like three times, I feel like there's something on the order of 165% of reasons why the xpreq never went to full automation
That's pretty close to correct.
I just thought of another one:
Mostly each nWoD game line ended up with a couple dozen exceptions to the XP spending (many of them based on social orders and magical groups) that would have needed coding around. My decision at the time was: If the XP cost system couldn't determine which of several tiers of XP costs a stat would be, it would calculate the most expensive option. Players could submit non-calculated costs but they would also have to explain why.
Things like "is this vampire power major or minor based on bloodline" were easy and probably already correct, but things like "my legacy means that the third specialty in any one skill is half cost" were not. It took a while to get people used to typing 'xp/cost' before submitting, but all in all it cut down on a metric ton of bureaucracy.
I generally trust people, but unsupervised I suspected people wouldn't speak up if they were being under-charged, but would make sure to self-check values if there was any chance of being over-charged. A healthy number of people complained about this, but I consider off-loading small issues bureaucracy to the initiator, where it can be minor, rather than a central processor, where the small bits add up, to be a fair design goal.
If I could have made the system more precise without losing what little sanity I had left, I probably would have.
(This counts as my writing design notes, right?)
The Reach never got full automated XP spending because the code staff was too busy putting out fires on a daily basis, but mostly because the setup had the system as largely inconceivable for fully automated spending, but MOSTLY because staff could and wanted to keep half an eye on spending patterns.
But mostly because it didn't seem critical to code beyond what was there. Even with what was there, there were non trivial moments when staff needed to take a more direct involvement in the spending.
There was no one answer, other than there being so many hours in the day and so much anyone can do before burning out and that "good enough" is a legitimate goal. (edit: Which itself isn't a single answer.)
@Misadventure said in RL things I love:
I tried really hard to listen to game design podcasts.
I find game design easier to read in small bits where it can have focus, not rambling. Rambling game design is hard to listen to. And so:
I heard that @skew is leaving Fallen World because nobody will join his harem.
@surreality said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
@Thenomain It's true, though!
I'm wary of the black-and-whites
My solution to people abusing summaries is not to throw so much mud ("it depends") on the ground that there's no momentum.
Also, look around you. How many of us do you think are so inelegant that we wouldn't just posit a correction. Okay, around here that might look like dog-piling, for instance on someone who incorrectly assumes that "staffer A is staffing on two games" means that a game is losing its staffers.
To bring it back to the advertisement and topic.
Radio Drama.
I don't care if I'm listening to it as podcasts, it's very clearly radio drama. Some of the stuff that's out there is amazing.
I'm listening to:
Non-drama (more legitimate podcasts):
You?
Sorry, I was responding to what you quoted!
And of course everything can be mitigated. In other news: Fire may be mitigated by intelligent application of water. Yes and no: It depends on the amount of water. Yes and no: You could also do it with dirt. Yes and no: Aigh it's the endless downward 'maybe' spiral!
@surreality said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
Yes and no? (Stereotypical Libra answer, of course.)
Sorry, mate! This time I'm going to say, "And an utterly wrong answer." The more presence one has, the more likely that presence will have an effect on things relying on presence. The larger the side of a barn, the more likely you're going to hit it. This isn't a debate question, this is statistical and physical fact.
Statistical likelihood is not a guarantee. Just because it's unlikely to happen, I can't guarantee that the USA won't be going up in flames in a few weeks' time.
@surreality said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
@Thenomain I getcha. I think that happens on games with multiple alts, too. It is more a factor of the person than the prevalence of games available, though, I think.
But the more characters you're idling on, the more likely you'll hit a scene.
@Ganymede said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
@Thenomain said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
The only people I know who have left FW are Incrociare and his crew, and the activity that they brought.
They left two people behind. How kind of them.
I really did like that crew on the whole. There were things that drove me bugnuts bananas, but I could say the same thing for each and every one of you.
And your moms.
@Arkandel said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
I'm curious, when Incro left... did he give an actual reason?
Not on the boards. I'm even just assuming that he did. If he did to staff, a) I don't know and b) it'd be between him and staff.
@surreality said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
@Thenomain said in Welcome to Fallen World MUX!:
Behold the return to, you know, where we were ten years ago.
...in some ways, this is not a bad thing? <hopeful smile goes here>
In this sense, I meant that people can and do play multiple characters at the same time. It used to be damn near epidemic, complaining about people not paying attention to one active scene because of another. I'd complain about that, but not be terribly disappointed by it.
I don't see why it's not possible on Mushlikes. The "Dynamic Space" system is easily tweaked to do things like this. Some people have managed systems that have had both random and stable elements in it.
Maybe this response more for @ThatGuyThere.
I sure started on Mushes coding Mud-like automation, so yes, it's extremely possible.
Anyhow.
Boudica: Wondering where you went. Only had a few scenes, but they were intelligent and downright fun. Hope things are going well. Etc.
The only people I know who have left FW are Incrociare and his crew, and the activity that they brought. (note: Other people may have left, I just don't know them. That reminds me...)
Mind you, one game has Mage, one game has Werewolf and Vampire. I bet if someone opened a Changeling game, that even more people would play on two different games.
Behold the return to, you know, where we were ten years ago.
Not less forgiving.
Less forgetful.
As in fuck "forgive and forget". Forgive and remember.
Those who forget the past...
It's okay. As someone who never finished it the first time, I'm not thrilled with the changes. Everyone still looks like rubber and wood, so.
@Meg said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:
Eagerly awaiting the ending. You have us all in suspense.
This web site is horrible on the iPad. I tried very hard to cancel the post, but I guess it went on without me.
Now I can't remember what I was going to say. I think it was essentially an extended "me too" which is why I canceled the post.
Late to the clam bake: Whomever said "talk first, make people aware
@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:
Also, don't say 'trust me'.
Wow, you've gone from conversational to confrontational in short order. For someone who spent almost the entire post positing what I may have been thinking, I can imagine where these trust issues may be coming from, but maybe a little less of the defensiveness.