Posts made by Thenomain

@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.

@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.

Perhaps. This is a pretty heavy experiment right now, and if planning or execution fail then it's insanely easy to turn this all back off. At the moment, it's not possible to see the connection or idle time of dark staff, and it's possible to list 'there are xx dark staff on right now'.

I believe it's important for staff to be able to remove themselves from the general who list (yes, there's a @power for that), and not be visible in deeper scenes.

We'll see.

I am trying something new.

I am going to have the 'staff' command list staffers who are connected, but dark.

I don't want to be disappointed. The purpose of this is to discourage staffers from being dark for very long (i.e., their entire staffing careers), and to see if players can be asked to be responsible toward them.

This may be a short-lived experiment, but it's one that I would like to see if fits with the game's staff philosophy, and if that philosophy will survive new staff that may be needed if popularity rises.

I find @HelloRaptor tends to hyperbolize, then step his statements backwards into something better for even-keeled discussion, if pressed.

Then again, I find Ganymede as someone you have to make defend her thesis before she will find the words to compromise.

And me? Both of them have criticized (in a constructive manner) my conversational style, so I don't mind saying so.

I mean, seriously HR, "it's happened" is not the sole reason to accept anyone doing it, just as "it's a fantasy world" is not the reason to deviate from that world's internal consistency.

I don't personally care as long as the person playing the character is engaging. I'll bend all sorts of rules on theme if they know what that rule is to begin with.

To get away with breaking any rule, you first have to understand it.

Who the hell carries around a double-headed coin before they become a villain?

What? A lawyer?

Oh, carry on, then.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Thenomain said:

I'm awaiting the hot debate whether or not "human" is a minor template.

If you mean template as in the general design/outline used to format something in a specific way, then technically every race would be a template.

In terms of RPGs a template generally refers to taking a base set of stats and then adding to/altering it based on a template, in which case 'human' is the base other templates are applied to.

Unless you're making some kind of existentialist joke, in which case .

I said minor template, dork.

And yes, I was also making some kind of existentialist joke, both about "races" in WoD and about nerds being nerds.

I watched the whole run of Tweeny Witches and the consistency and quality of animation was all over the damn map. As long as the story is pretty good, I don't care a whole lot. The better the story, the less I care.

I ended up not caring much at all.

Quick Update:

All four minor templates (human, ghoul, stigmatic, wolf-blooded) are in and their chargen tested. Next is to get the xp gain system working.

I'm awaiting the hot debate whether or not "human" is a minor template.

@Huzuruth said:

@tragedyjones You should try Beyond Earth at some point. It's fun as hell, but I will say it misses some of the flair of Civ 5.

That's what I want; a game missing the flair of oatmeal.

Not to mention Star Trek. I am only cautiously optimistic about Star Wars.

As much as I like Apocalypse World (and its many spin-offs like Dungeon World), it is still a Game About Stats. It is one of the most focused Games About Stats that I have seen in a long time; it doesn't matter what the other person's skill is, if you succeed lives on your stats alone. This keeps the game rules part more understandable and accessible. Mind you, all the AW games are pretty damn dark.

One of the best Games About Not Having Stats is Polaris, but it's only for three players. Its system is really nice in that only certain people are allowed to tell certain aspect in the story.

If you like that idea, then Microscope may be your game, as a structured world-building exercise. It's the game I want to play to set up a Mu*'s background.

I like character generation in Fate Core, you're tricked into playing an RPG system because it looks like a cooperative story-writing exercise, but after that it becomes a Game About Stats.

The classic and venerated Prime Time Adventures is another game that tricks you into playing an RPG and can be presented as pretty much a party game. I feel that it can be simplified even more than the manual. It's been Kickstarted for an update, and I hope that comes out soon.

I'll echo RDC's Don't Rest Your Head as being a stats-light game, but it's also very damn dark, and it has a lot of (die) resource management to it. It has a very board-game feel to it.

Vaguely: Another week or two for minor templates. Another month after that for major templates, assuming nobody mistakes my code crunch for sociopathy.

I code better while minorly ill with the flu, so we will see what these weather changed bring.

The people logging in to check things out are pretty excited people, so that helps.

@Chime said:

[...] code should be clean, concise, and move like poetry

So, code is a cat.

Consider Donjon, a system of improv where the players dictate what happens. Players dictate some, and the storyteller dictates others. You can simplify it further and re-skin it. Your character sheet can be not unlike the "mystery dinner" stuff. Motivations, a little light rules, and numerical counters so they can't get too far afield.

An idea.

@Insomnia said:

Origin is still giving Syndicate away for free too!

"Pllleaaaase loooooove ussssssssss!"

I really don't want to be singled out for helping code things. I code WoD, which is one of the most convoluted, intricate, and annoying system I've ever coded. 7th Sea was a hundred times easier to code, and I imagine D&D is likewise. I want people to rely more on simple systems and creativity than this kind of thing, but here we are.

I rather hate that people rely this heavily on code to make a game. It makes the barrier of entry so damn high, and I promised @Chime that if she made her Modernized Moo, I would code all over it. I think she's calling it Squidcat. Or Squishy. I don't know, but I want it.

I also want a hot librarian nerd girlfriend. One of these things may happen before the other.

The point there is we've been leaning heavily on WoD, when we don't really need to. It's where our friends are, though, and so it's where we're going to find one another.

My baseline for code legibility is @Cobaltasaurus. For everyone who says, "I don't understand code," I point to her. She was still saying it when she coded +events. When I was coding WoD stuff, I would point her to things and say, "Does this make sense?" If it did, I was on the right track.

I don't think I'm part of any such Rennaisance, tho. I think it's everyone. Either people are frustrated enough at one thing to branch out, and bring their friends with them. Their friends excite other friends. We're getting excited about ideas, interested, and that's what makes this work. Believe me, if you had nothing but a room and some exits people can use, you'd end up with as big of a game as your extended social network. Roanoke drew people to The Reach because people really like Roanoke. Sure, Haunted Memories had run its course, but if I had opened a new WoD game, I wouldn't have had anything near the response.

I'm a cheerleader of new ideas, though. Coming up with good ideas isn't easy, and that's where I try to support them in the way that is good for them; occasionally tweaking bugs, offering what code I have, helping its installation, and so forth. It's what I can do, and that means it's what I will do.

Other people write theme, run plots, keep us even-keeled. They should get as much thanks. They're almost as rare as coders.

I am not a gunsmith nor a metallurgist, yet I have come to accept that if I want rules on an elephant gun or want to make a sword out of Toledo Steel and the multi folding technique, it is not unreasonable that I be asked to pitch the rules I want with some kind of reference as to why I think this is reasonable.

This allows staff to delegate and not have to do everything for all the things, and it means I am starting with the pitch that I already think is reasonable and staff and I can negotiate from there.

I resisted this at first as so unfair (back in general early days of Paris), but I admit that having me do it is an all around advantage.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Arkandel

Even if in 2.0 Mages receive no buffs whatsoever, they're still so far on top of the food chain it's not funny.

It's a little bit funny. ^_^

I'm not sure which reply I want, so I'll give both:

1. Do I get to laugh at the Mage players when they continue to complain when people want them to stay far away? I don't think it happens that much anymore, but oh the white man's burden humanity,

2. Constrain XP for once and Mages aren't that hard to kill, and easier to avoid.

Maybe you want to know how long someone has spent approved, so I created a function to pull that information from the middle of this code (but not, yet, via the isapproved() function). It hasn't been tested, yet, but I'm sure it will be.

Here's the commit.