Posts made by Thenomain

@ThatGuyThere

I haven't interacted with Vampire players lately, but the idea that players ask these things before or when entering a scene comes specifically to find a nice balance between them and the rest of the game. The culture clash between my culture and @faraday's is not unusual, but there is a social solution around a social problem that doesn't lean on the coder to fix it.

If the coder has time to make more commands, and the culture will use it, then it's worth that coder's time. Which is the summary of my answer to @acceleration. (With the caveat that sometimes we coders do things for fun anyway.)

@faraday said in [Poll in OP] Population Code:

@Thenomain said in [Poll in OP] Population Code:

it's been a long, long time since I knew anyone pressured to RP the weather description in the room, mostly because it's been a long time since I've seen the weather description in the room.

I think we're having another culture clash moment, because on the games I've played it's almost always been incorporated into the room descs.

Clearly your culture needs to cut that out.

@faraday said in Population Code:

@Thenomain - Not suggesting the code is evil or anything, just explaining why I don't like it and generally ignore it. If I were doing it as a writer's prompt I would make it an on-demand "suggest something to me" sort of thing, ala a Plot Generator, not something that gets chucked into every room desc like it's a part of the established world. But that's just me.

It is a "suggest something to me". It's suggesting to you based on a model instead of a random number generator, and that it's been a long, long time since I knew anyone pressured to RP the weather description in the room, mostly because it's been a long time since I've seen the weather description in the room.

I'm not saying you're wrong to not like it, I'm saying why people find value in it.

@faraday

But that describes exactly the WoD Mu*er's current use of time & temp systems: A default, not a requirement. It provides a framework from which you can easier write that set, a writer's tool. If you decide to ignore it for reasons of etc. etc., then it's a tool that you don't need. Me? I love the tool, and I know quite a few people who use it. (c.f., WoD)

I'm not sure how useful a population calculator would be, or if it would be as useful as, say, a weather system that tries to accurately calculate not only rainfall but accumulation based on regional drainage and ground absorption rates. Or if a builder could just say: It's between 4 and 6 so let's describe the place as 'crowded'. I can see the benefits and drawbacks in both.

@faraday said in Population Code:

Like weather code, it seems like something that would easily be forgotten and/or ignored, and just cause people RPing inconsistently.

This term has entered my RP vocabulary: "Are we RPing time/weather?" Almost every game I've RP'd on since the banishment of the dreaded "Nightzone" flag has had people either RPing game time or clarifying the conditions in their initial pose.

@acceleration: Do it if you think it'd be fun to do. I've long ago learned that doing something expecting it to only have value if it's used is not going to leave a good taste in your mouth, as what Mushers value is not consistent and doesn't always make sense. I have about half-finished a weather system that is independent from the real world, mostly because it was a challenge. What I got out of it was a single function, 'ictime()', that can give the builders all the information they want for day/night/moon phase/weather/season @descs.

This in turn gave me the grounding to make a function-based 'places()' code which far surpasses the traditional places code. I've written a lot of code that was never really used, but I knew that going into it.

Your question makes more sense when you're coding for any particular game. This is the occasion where you're being asked to code something, and you need to find out: Does this add usable code to the game? If the answer is "no" then see above; you're coding for fun. If the answer is "yes", then don't worry if other games will use it.

This is why my answer was convoluted. Before I can say if I'd use it, I'd want to know what it's useful for or, at least, an overview of how it works. I can see the footer for a room not only having a location's security ("Poor"), but its current population ("~7 NPCs here").

@acceleration

Only from the main post.

Would this work for street-level traffic, to? I think that would be cool, and I'd install it and react to it in the same way that I do weather, et al.

@Ide said in Do you RP to play a character, or get a character so you can RP?:

Question is simpler than it sounds: when you play on a mush, are you there primarily to create and play a character, or would you happily RP as anything (minor characters, one-shot characters, talking trashcans, whatever) just to have some pretendy funtimes in that chosen theme/setting?

Both. Sometimes at the same time. I have made some people mildly upset because I would pose the ongoing life around them when they were trying to, say, talk about magic in the middle of a Starbucks, or have someone call the cops when they wanted a consequence-free bar fight. (On that occasion, they ignored a mere player posing cops nearing and I had to call staff.)

While playing as just a character is interesting, someone has to play the environment or it becomes nothing more than My Dinner With Andre (a fantastic film, but not sustainable), so I mix the environment to my RP if no one else is. I don't consider that part of playing my character, but playing the scene, playing the game. My character is but one piece in it.

I would use it to set scenes, and to remind people that having an open conversations about magic in the Starbucks isn't a great idea.

I would not use it for environmental emits. I would use it to name specific NPCs and stat them. I would use it as a way to complain that it's not accurate or varied enough, which is what I do with my own weather code. If my NPC barista has a Charisma of 1, would the crowd be smaller when he's on duty?

I would want to know what the point of it was before I looked into installing it, and I would answer the question: does this goal fit my game or enhance role play? Alternatively, can I use it to enhance other code? How fast will the police be called based on the crowd and mood and location? How likely would a missed gunshot hit an observer? How fast can they clear the scene? How many are walking, how many in cars?

Ok, can I use it to pre-fill Places code? Man, the cafe would be impossible to scene in because of all the college students taking up the tables. Sure, group of 2, take a table for 6 because you need to spread out 5 books and a computer and still steal an outlet across the room to charge your phone.

Way back in the dawn of time just as NorCon PernMush (the original) was starting up, I helped code for a simple ElfQuest game called TwoMoonsMush. We only had elven magic as skills and the time scale was long enough that we created a learning system where regardless of anything else, given enough time your, say, Fire Magic would increase. The curve was diminishing returns, so the older you were the slower that would go. I can see this working with a system that got you more starting points for later age to simulate the learning you missed before creating the player.

Anyhow, it worked remarkably well, and could be enhanced by occasional RP points. This being based on a Chaosium system, we would give people a random very low amount if they showed that they learned something about their magic by failing, or something like that. It was also a percentile system, so people would see the small point increase over time, whether it was RL months or years.

This is the only time I have ever applied calculus to my real life.

@The_Supremes said in XP systems:

@Thenomain said in XP systems:

Roughly around 60-80 players for pulling 10, 40+ for pulling 5. This really only works if the people who help are fairly random; if the same five or ten people are seeing the nominations then half of the system isn't working; the half where people get to see how awesome their peers think this other person is.

Do you not anonymize the recipient of the +recc as well as the author?

No. Everyone gets to see the things said about a specific character. I'm trying to imagine how it would look if the recipient were also anonymous, but things like "an amazing plot about two penguins and the police car" would probably out them pretty quick.

I have no idea what this report has been about. I rather assumed at first it was a sarcastic response to a spam post that got deleted. I even went there and it looked like a parked address at first glance.

@The_Supremes said in XP systems:

@Thenomain said in XP systems:

@Ide said in XP systems:

I liked the vote review system with a panel of players on Aether as well. I don't remember the specifics -- I think votes were anonymous but with no explanation? @Thenomain I summon thee.

Reccs were a small paragraph of text that were anonymous to players so a blind group of 10 players would vote if the reccs for that character that month were worth 0-3, with 3 meant to be pretty rare.

Getting a rotating group of 10 players together once a month (so about 20 players, different sets each month if possible) became stressful. It was reduced to 5 later on, which would be my bare minimum to make this system work.

After the process, the players got to see the nominations for themselves, including the name of the person who submitted the good vibes.

Nowadays it's the occasional bonus kudos, one at a time.

I kinda like the peer-review process there, but it seems like you'd need a fairly large player base to consistently get the panel. Any estimate of how large a group of regulars you feel like you'd need to implement such a thing?

Roughly around 60-80 players for pulling 10, 40+ for pulling 5. This really only works if the people who help are fairly random; if the same five or ten people are seeing the nominations then half of the system isn't working; the half where people get to see how awesome their peers think this other person is.

It occurs to me that this system would work pretty well pulling five people from a group of 20, as this might make it even easier to see what your peers are doing, but you're not going to get a "community" feeling for 20 people, as they're a pretty light community.

@Ide said in XP systems:

I liked the vote review system with a panel of players on Aether as well. I don't remember the specifics -- I think votes were anonymous but with no explanation? @Thenomain I summon thee.

Reccs were a small paragraph of text that were anonymous to players so a blind group of 10 players would vote if the reccs for that character that month were worth 0-3, with 3 meant to be pretty rare.

Getting a rotating group of 10 players together once a month (so about 20 players, different sets each month if possible) became stressful. It was reduced to 5 later on, which would be my bare minimum to make this system work.

After the process, the players got to see the nominations for themselves, including the name of the person who submitted the good vibes.

Nowadays it's the occasional bonus kudos, one at a time.

@EmmahSue

I need a tutorial on how to split topics, yeah.

@Chime

Nerd.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

STed PrP

Oxymoron. If it's run by an ST, it's not a PrP.

@faraday

Coin got it. Where I play, a PrP has become systemized. There is an expectation that it have a point, an ending, or at the very least a risk/reward setup. Some people are good at winging it, but the last five years in the realms of WoD that's been discouraged.

I think we're seeing a reversal of that, but I still see the letters "PrP" and cringe.