Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

I wait like 15 minutes then page again once before moving on with my life. If they're busy we can touch base later or I can mail if it's important.

What I want. Demonstration of a very basic grasp of theme and where their character fits into it. Minimally basic. If you’re trying to app a Lord of the Rings-style wizard on a Game of Thrones MUSH, you want to have a conversation about why that won’t work upfront. If you’re trying to app a space smuggler on a game where all of the RP is centered on the starship Enterprise around Federation officer PCs, same deal, people will try to do it and it’s easier to hash out those issues before stuff is happening on the grid. I don’t think this requires more than a couple paragraphs, though I generally write more for myself as I play the character. Also, if you’re apping a person who fit a pre-existing role in a military hierarchy/noble house/pack or survival group, you want to think about how they got there and what they do in it, though you can hash that out through conversation with your faction head as well as you can in bg.

I’ve staffed on games that used backgrounds as a weeding process for handing out feature character roles, and required fairly detailed write-ups (a couple pages in a Word doc is my view of detailed, I never went in for the novella-length games). I’ve staffed on games with no background requirements. The quality of RP, on average, was not terribly different. CG definitely isn't an effective gate for quality or how well or poorly a player will do with a role.

I have more difficulties with +sheet skill and stat mechanics than I do with backgrounds, because it’s very easy to do stuff ‘wrong’ in a way that’ll impact your play long-term simply due to unfamiliarity (I can bang out a BG in a theme I’m not ultra-versed in in a weekend, but sheets are where I tend to bail on a new game). Though ideally staff is liberal about re-speccs for newbs.

@apos
That sounds really cool. Currently, I personally run into situations where I feel like 'Ugh I don't want to dogpile on this guy but this actually is a huge IC deal, I guess I'll just RP my character internalizing a loss of respect for society being tralala about it.' Which is appropriate in a lot of cases, there's no shortage of hypocrisy in the world, but I love the idea of non-mob IC impacts that are subject to staff review.

@crysta said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

Yeah I think Arx Twitter does enough shaming for silly things.

Condemn doesn't work for the same reason no one likes downvoting on forum threads.

It definitely doesn't work and I don't want it back.

What I dislike currently, though, is that serious thematic issues don't receive a blink a lot of the time (murder a dude with an heirloom weapon? Go about your life, nobody really cares) while people freak the fuck out over ultra-minor shit. It makes a lot of thematic things in an honor-bound society feel like they don't have any actual weight, while being paranoid about saying something 'wrong' in journals.

IDK, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more stuff that impacted IC reputation (like, I REALLY appreciated the Vox posts on divorce and rep adjustments, because that's a huge thing IC, while also appreciating that it didn't call out any names) but I'd like there to be an OOC gate on it, which is probably too much work for staff, so whatevs I guess.

I do kinda wish you got like 1 or 2 free shares a week. Maybe based on your Mental stats and investigation skill. I know with training it helps a great deal, and clue sharing isn't even something you can burn on retainers, so it'd be purely RP/sharing oriented.

Same. Bourdain was still so out there and prolific and producing awesome, often challenging and thoughtful, content. He was wonderfully human and humanist. This hit me harder than I've been hit by a celebrity death since Prince, probably. There was just so much more he could've done and so many people who loved his work (and clearly loved him personally).

Most of the criticisms I've read of Ocean's 8 have centered on the direction. The 00s movies were triumphs of how to make a movie FEEL fun. Really wish Soderbergh had come back for this but, alas. It'll still get my money. I'll forgive much in a fun heist caper.

I'll confess a lack of interest in @theories as well. While I've read some good, comprehensive ones, I've also read some wild extrapolations that I know are wrong, and it seems like codifying what's essentially a PC's opinion in a way that seems more from-on-high approved than it actually is. I generally take what's shared and make my own conclusions and talk about them, right or wrong. Idk exactly how I'll feel about more clue weight being placed on them (especially for orgs that only have one or two clues that, while not at all confusing, aren't connected) but I'd roll with it.

Given that part of the theme is rediscovering lost knowledge, I don't know how thematic clue deterioration would be. I feel like, once it's uncovered, it's back in the wider world. I do wish you got a certain number of 'free' clue shares a week (kind of like your Teaching stat gives you free trains a week) but if I were to isolate the systems on Arx I think are semi-broken, clues would be fairly low on the list.

My hate-on for orgs that just bank a bunch of clues for people to brief themselves on with no context is vast and I think it leads to problems in terms of people RPing some real whack-a-doo things, but making clues harder to share individually and without scenes would just make this worse.

@sg
I might pick it up this weekend. I've been on the fence because other bsg-bases games have been...not so much with the good, but this looks like my jam.

I get a decent amount of random RP on Arx. I seek it out because I have free time. The public grid and randomscenes (XP if you tag certain random RP partners in a given week) help drive it, as does the large population.

I'm not singing the unqualified praises of these scenes. Some of them are tedious and if I'm not enjoying them I have '5 poses and out' rule. It's less about wasting my time then not engaging in RP I don't find fun. Then again, some of them are entirely fun and interesting and sometimes I make new IC friends. It ebbs and flows. I still have to cultivate the scenes that are meaty by seeking them out, which I feel like I have to be pretty aggressive about. I'm probably better classified as a player who prefers a certain amount of control over one who prizes verisimilitude of environment, though I think I actually like a mix ideally. Plentiful bar RP is not a magical utopia or a cure-all for hobby malaise, at least not for me, though I do enjoy it enough to keep at it. I do think getting it regularly is more a factor of having a big game than anything else, though. Like, I plant myself in public on a game with 100 people logged on, there's at least a better-than-average chance one of them will maybe RP with me. I do this on a game with 30 people logged on? The chances of crickets increases, until it no longer becomes a useful way to get a scene when you want one.

I mean I'm personally of the opinion that 'Other players being special detracts from me' is one of the most toxic impulses in this hobby but that's maybe another conversation.

Sometimes I'm genuinely unclear ooc if something is impossible or not. I don't care so much about failing at stuff it makes sense for my character to try. That can be really interesting. But it's a waste of my time and staff's time to go down a dead end and I really and truly would be fine with an ooc clarification of 'this isn't feasible at this time and due to future plots I can't tell you exactly why.' A GM being coy with me when i think I'm asking a straightforward question makes me actively disengage. I know this isn't every player but it me.

@carex
I would be absolutely fascinated to know which games you've staffed on and what that experience has been like for your players.

@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:

This is slightly off topic but unilaterally banning someone for being a creeper seems like a bad idea. I would go with something more insidious.

You are incorrect on the face of it, to put it mildly. I keep typing other responses as to why but really you should understand this and if you don't that is the thing that warrants examination.

@shelbeast said in Let's talk about TS.:

I've had the whole "Wants nothing but TS thing" happen to me a number of times, too. It... definitely causes a burn out. For sure. I've also stopped logging in to characters because of it. I've full on freezered a character about it, too.

This happened to me when I was younger. I'm old and mean and actually dump the motherfuckers IC now.

@carex
I certainly get 'will only play sex' or 'will only play relationship RP with little outside it' burn-out, and it's usually a sign for me that this isn't a person I should be shipping with.

@wildbaboons said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

Another issue with environmental emits is the timing. You might start a scene where +time and weather says it's dawn and sunny, but four hours later at 4x time it's sunset and pouring.. meanwhile only about 30 minutes has actually passed in the scene.

Yeah, a lot of my antipathy for environmental emits comes from ones that run every 30 minutes (or less), or even once an hour. At that point it's spamming even a relatively normal-paced scene quite a lot, and can be jarring in ways that actively break immersion if there are changes to what you're playing (like, even if you were playing by the first emit you got, now it's something else). I'd probably not really mind them if they were less frequent.

Having to remember to turn off something that annoyed me every time I started a scene would send me from passive hostility to active hostility personally.

This is a matter of preference but ideally I'd find opt out to be a one-time thing that I had a way to toggle or check but that wouldn't neg me.

I like coded weather as a thing I can optionally reference. Same with time of day. I'm an emit hater (the immersion they give to some they break for me) but if I could opt out or even just lessen frequency I wouldn't freak about them as a great evil or anything.

ETA: where they particularly ugh me is when they become 5+ lines of not quite right randomness I have to scrub out of a log, particularly a GM'd scene that a lot of people may want to refer back to.