Posts made by Thenomain

I also love making fun of people who sorely deserve it, but perhaps that should be another thread.

@Gilette

Yeah, but @Misadventure is a fatalist and a simulationist when it comes to RPGs. (Oh shush, Mis, you know it's true.) What matters is whether or not you have a connection to the character and you feel that character is telling a story. If you are not stopping the end of the world, then who cares? Well, too many people care. Coffee Shop RP is also about planning, connecting, maneuvering, and figuring out what to do next. It matters every bit as much as you want it to matter.

It stops mattering only when all RP stops mattering, which I'll outright say tends to only be when staff stops allowing RP to matter or when players stop allowing their own RP to matter.

I've seen both. Either staff get so tied up in their own approval process that they end up being little more than gatekeepers of fun, or players don't enable themselves to step up and just do things, sometimes random things, sometimes meaningful things.

On the player side, tho, it's as meaningful as you, the player, make it. There is a limit, yes. There's always a limit. But if you're not willing to say to yourself, "I'm going to play the SHIT out of this concept," then you're participating in the second form of Meaning Nothing.

@Bobotron said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Gilette
We code census commands; I wonder if there's value in having players set, say, short plot hooks they're interested in on themselves that can be seen by a +census-style command?

Did want to note: It is trivial to let people set their own attributes and have some code read them (@doing for WHO, anything for +finger), it's collecting and collating that information that's not. What if one person enters "Grind the Goblin King to dust," and someone else enters, "Attack the Green Menace"? They may both refer to the same thing, but the code will need to be told how these relate or you'll have to have someone whose job it is to collate this into something more actionable.

I am assuming—perhaps erroneously—that we're still talking about tools to collect plot information and updates. I see the idea as a nice idea but a potential headache on all staff involved.

Coffee shop RP is important. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

@Misadventure

Central Story is exciting, but not the bread and butter of Mushing. When I've seen it work best, the central story is part of the setting, part of the history, not part of the day to day. When you're paying a tabletop RPG, your characters may be participating in the main world events, but it's just as exciting when they are just trying to get through a tough situation. If that situation is a side effect of the world and its problems, then you are participating in the central story as much as someone trying to Fix The World. Hell, the best settings can't be easily fixed that there is a plot for it.

I know that you know this already, but it was a good jumping off point for this concept. The world is screwed up, so what are you doing in your section of it? That's plotless plot.

@Ganymede said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:

I mean, it's really as simple as "Shrike is an Arrow that enacts street justice! Come join!" And we get our kicks by just playing pretend.

Cannot upvote this enough.

I miss it when people don't recognize this. So many meaningful yet "plotless" things can happen when you stop relying on "plot".

@Ganymede & @Coin

I feel that I've made some of the wisest choices possible by accident: I've taken the general boost that gives you food bonuses for 20 minutes, and the general boost that sets one rune-power boost permanent when you boost it at one of those power stones. And yes, light-attack is my preferred, so I've been putting points in that attack form. Shield, Slash, Roll, Run.

The game is pretty adamant that you know how to focus on the monster information, and it's pretty clear that you really should be doing every side-quest. ('Suggested Level: 10'? I'm not even at the Suggested Level 5 that you think I should be at for being in this zone!)

It's a fun game. Glad I picked it up.

So I started playing Witcher 3 and, yeah, it's pretty amazing. I'm not yet absolutely pulled into it, and the combat system is leaving me feeling like a noob. I was once pulled out of the amazement of an absolutely stunning sunrise, mist rising off the land, peeking through the trees ... to notice it was 3:30 am. This seems appropriate to the latitude, but man I was shocked right out of my socks.

Mostly it's the combat system that's kicking my newbie ass. I'm certainly one thousand percent more impressed than I was with Fallout 4, with about 4 hours of play-time. I've made a potion, had a dwarf make a leather jacket, killed a ghost with a long tongue, and gotten the sense of the various mechanics that make up the game tied into the storytelling.

Yeah, I'm impressed with the overall. I'll have to ease into the story, since so far it's fetch quest, learn more, fetch quest....

@Arkandel

I think it's important to explore ideas, tho, which is why I like discussion boards like Soapbox. How forcing people onto the grid can help stimulate RP is an important design consideration. How it can be accentuated, issues in design, this kind of back and forth can also be important.

Me, I don't think there's anything left to say, but that doesn't mean there isn't.

@Arkandel

Arx has their method. They've explained their method and defended it, and this is the Arx thread I think once the case is made it's up to them to make their own decisions.

If any of them are Mudders, they know about speedwalk. On Mush it seems like the polite thing to stop if there's a lone person in the room, say that you're just passing through so that they don't feel ignored, and move on.

I also believe that any game has the right (and duty, really) to re-evaluate their decisions if they discover that their method isn't working for them.

My post was mostly to say to everyone reading that there are options, ideas, and important considerations when your goal is "force people to use the grid", which is what I'm reading their goal to be. Does it enhance RP? That debate's happened, and the answer is "it can so sure, why not". There is the other side of it, which is "if people don't want to, they won't". Pros. Cons.

I just want cookies.

@Arkandel

cough+mapcough

At least one that knows where you are, or some way to easily tell that you're at a certain uniquely identifiable location. Then you wouldn't even need to give directions. Say, 'Hey, I'm at D24', and like any person in the real world, they'd check out where D24 is and get there.

A good directory system is a decent way for someone to translate analogue to digital, which is what this comes down to. Any way to get from "I'm at the Dead-End Cafe in Montreal" to a meaningful instruction is a bonus.

@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

The code used in most nWoD MU* these days (it could be @Thenomain's, I'm not sure) works really well.
Basically the Storyteller does something like +event/create Orcs attack!=<Synopsis>/<datetime> which gives it an id, announces it game-wide and adds it to a list players can review with +events. So if it's #3, they can then sign up for it with "+event/signup 3. Once the date is past it's taken off the list.

Very Important Note:

This code belongs to @Cobaltasaurus, from start to finish. Her concept, her code, her updates. I've added comments and suggestions and when she disappeared for RL I've done some bug-fixing and Thenoisms, but events code is Cobalt's contribution to the hobby.

That is all.

@Coin

@Coin said in RL things I love:

@Kanye-Qwest said in RL things I love:

@Misadventure I am blunt. Super blunt. What little wit I possess is sarcastic and a bit acidic, and I don't hold back when people get in my space with bullshit or smalltalk. I'm mean. I like to argue. I have resting bitch face.

All adorable qualities. Just look at that face. You just wanna pinch her tough widdle cheeks!

You realize you're flirting with Bane, right? I mean, dude, seriously! Get a grip!

The only unusual cards that I've really wanted to play with for game design reasons are Hanafuda cards. I used to play a computer game using these cards back in the days before time, and when I could no longer get it to run I was truly disappointed.

@WTFE

It baffles me how many times I hear business suing over Yelp reviews. Do that many people trust it? Because when I first heard about it, I thought: Well this is going to be a cluster of nonsense. How can they have any reputation?

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

Fanboys are destroying the rating system by making it untrustworthy.

You make it sound like Internet rating systems were ever trustworthy.

What colour is the sky on your planet?

This is why I like Rotten Tomatoes. They're not a rating system, certainly not a fan rating system, they're an aggregate rating system that while may not be as accurate as you'd like, it is clear about what it is.

Fans are fickle as fuck.

@Caryatid said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I said it felt more like an actual world to me. Not that the developers' goal was to create a real life setting. I was speaking from my personal perspective. I am not staff there. Etc etc.

My bad on this.

The last grid I tried to learn was Haunted Memories, and they had both RP rooms and travel code. The grid was written short and sweet, both descriptive and sprawling at, what, 40 or so "main grid" rooms. Someone will probably correct me. The exact number isn't the point.

I didn't feel like I was being crushed by words and ideas that all competed for my attention. It felt painted and alive, and I know exactly what you're going for.

The Reach almost hit this, and I used the grid quite often. Almost every other game I've been on since HM has felt like it was trying to do too much. This is part of why I think a temproom system is so useful. It should be tied to the grid system, so no matter where it's made the system can still report where RP is happening.

I'm not tackling the travel code part of this discussion, because it's just as right as it isn't, and as I said above, if you hit the golden mean then that's all you need. How you get there isn't so important to me as the overall experience.

@Caryatid

Before meetme there was travel.
Before travel there was taxi.
Before taxi there was speed-walking.
Before speed-walking...well, there's been speed-walking since there were Muds.

I'm not saying that the design consideration isn't well-considered. It is, but people will skip whatever they want. In fact, the more you write, the more that will be ignored. Only time will tell if you've hit a golden mean, but your post didn't seem aware of history and I wanted to pop on to mention what people have done, what people can do, and to advise not to put all your eggs in one lack-of basket.