Best posts made by WTFE

There is not a photographic cliché that I won't use:

@Pyrephox And that is not a stance I will judge you negatively for. The point of my little story is that while yes, you can, often for even a long time, have both mechanics and good story-telling, there will come a point where they clash and you have to pick one or the other.

In the case of that 2300AD campaign I happen to think the GM picked the wrong one, but that's an issue of taste. You obviously fall in the "let the story fall where the dice do" camp and that's fine too. But it doesn't change that the game mechanics can and often do clash with good stories.

@surreality said:

Naw, that was her floozy cousin, Corona•, described as 'a little stout, but the cure for what ales you' and always wandered around in a too-tight tee that said, 'Tap This!

I'm way overthinking this, but ...

• Her anus should release various dark beers on demand: dunkler bock, various stouts, etc.
• Her urethra is exclusively for the dispensing of Pabst products.
• Her breasts should dispense weißbier. (There's a little joke there. A terrible little joke.)

Any other suggestions?

@Lisse24 said in RL Anger:

@Aria Man, I hate to start something, but ...

I'm Christian.

I grew up in the Evangelical community, though in a very small, independent tradition, and not among the Baptist wave.

Although, I left my tradition for a mainline denomination, I'm currently attending a church of that same tradition again, because family.

I disagree a ton with what many Evangelicals preach and believe. I do not believe there is a war on Christians. I do not believe Christians should be able to legislate morality, BUT ...

The argument isn't that they're oppressed because they're no longer able to force their beliefs on people. The argument is that they're oppressed because they feel like they can no longer voice their beliefs outside of their own small circle without having half the country jump down their throat for their backwardness and hate. They feel like their not even given the chance to truly explain what they believe or how it differs from more extreme fundamentalists like Westboro Baptist.

And given the amount of conditionals I felt necessary to put at the beginning of this post to keep people from jumping down my throat, they maybe have a bit of a point ...

You seem like a nice person, so I'll be gentle on you and keep the really bad words I want to use out of the equation. For now.

You're talking to someone who met a girl in university who was in every way the person who would "complete" me. She was smart, funny, and intensely, creatively artistic. (She was in a special degree program that was tailor made for SIX STUDENTS in the faculty of music.)

She was also a Christian.

And one day the inevitable happened: she asked me which church I went to. (Note: not if I went to church, not even what religion was I, which church I went to.) When I explained to her that I was an atheist she went STARK WHITE with fear. She was absolutely convinced that the person she'd been dating with for over a year was a soulless, evil automaton. Because if you weren't Christian, and especially if you didn't believe in God, you must be evil. She dumped me then and there. (Had I said I was a Buddhist or a Muslim I suspect she'd have instead tried to convert me because I was merely "mistaken" instead of "evil".)

You're talking to someone whose hobby (RPGs) was on the receiving end of hate campaigns you had to see to believe. They hunted us out in the school basement in my high school. (Luckily the principal had a backbone and told them to fuck off so they were left with only harassing us with pamphlets.) They (in this case the Campus Crusade for Christ) followed us from room to room in university until we found a place they couldn't reach us (a private attached college's meeting room) trying to get our club shut down.

Throughout the '80s and early '90s they embarked on multiple campaigns of lies and deceit to convince everybody that we gamers were drug addicts, Satanists, murderers, or, worse, ATHEISTS! (See a theme here?)

You're talking to someone who was fired from a job upon the boss finding out that I didn't go to church. (That wasn't the reason cited, of course, but it was the real reason.)

Given all of this, you'll have to excuse me if I'm a bit gunshy whenever I meet someone who self-identifies as a Christian. Especially of the evangelical camp. (The tormentors in high school were Adventists.) And if you think you're oppressed because of people like us being gunshy and suspicious, perhaps it's time for you to reflect on how you (the collective, not you individually) have been treating people for centuries. Perhaps, then, you'll feel a bit of sympathy instead of whining about your oppression.

@Lotherio said in Eliminating social stats:

To incentivize, I've been pondering Pace, a 24 game (written in 24 hours). Pips are gained and used to supplement skills (descriptors). To gain pips for use later, a primary way is by accepting a loss. Their example has a dashing character takes a fail at flirting, the loss ends with them wearing a red mark on the cheek for a 2 pip loss in that situation. They can now use those two points for a success later.

Fate and Spark both use mechanisms similar to this. Probably loads more, too. This is thinking that dates back to Champions' first edition with their ham-fisted "get points for weaknesses" attempts.

Man, it took all of what, an hour, before @crayon came in here to remind me why I'm staying WAY the fuck away from Optional Realities and affiliated projects.

Dude, sometimes the best PR recourse is to just SHUT THE FUCKING FUCK UP. (In before "we don't care if you don't like us" with "then why the fucking fuck are you here you imbecile!?")

@Jeshin, perhaps, once you've dealt with the (obviously more important) personal issues, it may be time to fit @crayon with a muzzle. You may have come across as a used car salesman to me, but @crayon comes across as a mix between a drill sergeant and the shit I have to scrape off my boots after crossing a cow field.

@WildBaboons said in RL Anger:

It's like being Canadian but without the waiting.

You know, all this verbiage and I've never had to wait for a necessary procedure. Ever. Even semi-voluntary procedures like my knee surgery my "wait" was a grand total of two weeks from seeing the sports injury specialist and being wheeled in on the gurney--and five days of that was my schedule causing problems!

It's almost as if there's political forces at work that want to spread that "yeah, but you have to WAIT" meme while carefully pointing you away from just how much your systems are costing you for how little benefit...

@WildBaboons said in How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?:

Any time you put paganism into a Mu you get trouble I've found. There is a not insubstational number of actual pagans that MU and they want things done right as opposed to pretendy fun times.

Except that "pagans" (neopagans) are doing pretendy fun times for all practical purposes. (And there's nothing wrong with that, I hasten to add.) At issue is their insistence that their practices are the same as historical ones, a claim that rarely passes even a giggle test.

@Jaunt said:

There is a constant internal discussion amongst its staff about where we are succeeding, where we are failing, and how we should move forward.

You're succeeding at turning off your very target market. You're failing at PR. You should move forward by learning small things like "telling a discussion board you're not interested in discussion is a Bad Idea".

I'll second the Dream Pod 9 Silhouette system and will also point to CORPS and EABA (from BTRC) as possibilities.

@Tempest said in The Metaplot:

Makes me wonder, did this Castle Marrach staff hide behind anonymity? IE no record of who they played and they generally wouldn't even say which staffer was making decisions or doing things in-game that affected players?

They tried. They failed because they were incredibly bad at it. It typically took about four days, tops, for it to be really clear which player had just been elevated into a new staff bit.

@Arkandel said in The Metaplot:

I think a big problem is we often make here is that we mistake a general concept with its worst implementations .In other words, that we look at the way staff at a specific game we played did a thing and extrapolate from that that the thing is always bad.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

I don't think metaplot is always bad, just for the record. I was specifically addressing a case where it's pretty obvious that it's perfectly legitimate to say that you don't want to play something but are being forced into it.

In terms of the metaplot in particular it shouldn't be something you want to escape. It ought to be the reason you are there in the first place!

Yeah, "should" is a tricky word that way. The problem is that a lot of metaplots are designed by people who can't plot worth shit and who don't play well with others (as in, their plots don't change if people impact them).

Then I come in and I want to do my thing; I want to bring back civilisation in a year or less. I toss +jobs at you with wikipedia links about making solar panels and try to build mech suits and use drones strikes to defeat my enemies; I mean that's definitely great, and it could be awesome for a game, but as long as you make it clear what game you are trying to play then what am I doing in it? Is it fair that I complain your metaplot sucks? It doesn't suck... it's just not what I like, and it's not your fault I tried to turn your MU* into following my vision.

That would be the opposing extreme, yes. Both extremes suck. But staffers who don't recognize that people like this exist are heading for burn-out if they don't prepare for this. Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

@Lisse24 said in The Metaplot:

This is actually my problem with metaplot, in how they're most often used to describe happenings on a game - they're inaccessible.

That would be the example of "people who can't plot worth shit" I mentioned above.

@Jaunt said:

You're succeeding at turning off your very target market. You're failing at PR. You should move forward by learning small things like "telling a discussion board you're not interested in discussion is a Bad Idea.

Please, quote me where they said that they weren't interested in discussion.

…

OK, @Jeshin is Used Car Salesman-in-Chief. @crayon is Yappy the Wonder Pooch. You are just plain old Dick Nixon with your deranged "deny everything" approach.

I'm not so certain that you are the greatest spoke person for "good PR", but then again, I'm not here for PR. If I were, I wouldn't be able to write so candidly.

Here's a hint, Dick Nixon: there's a difference between "candid" and "disingenuously stupid".

Our community is a specific genre of MUD that is over 20 years old. If the style of MUSH played by "most" people on this board is not represented on OR, then those people don't really need to worry about OR. It's that simple.

And, conversely, this is not the board for you to advertise on then. Jesus Fucking Christ! Merciful Fucking Allah! Compassionate Fucking Buddha! Are you really that fucking thick, or is this some Laurie Anderson scale of performance art? Let me guess. You're wearing skates that have been frozen into a large block of ice and are posting on MU Soapbox continually while the ice melts, right?

However, as we've received numerous great users from this site at OR, I would venture to say that your perception is critically flawed.

Name three. (Hint: if you come back with "I won't tell you" you have failed to substantiate your claim and your claim can safely be ignored.)

Oh, this? Another example of misunderstanding intention and ideas.

Note, too, the classic Dick Nixon approach of blaming people for "misunderstanding intention" instead of the original writer for "miscommunicating intention". This is a classic reversal manoeuvre.

Free clue×four here, Dick: it is the job of OR's people to communicate their intent clearly, not our job to read every conceivable intent. If you can't communicate your intent clearly in your advertisements, learn to do so or...

Chorus

Get lost. 滚开. Berambus. Biến đi. चले जाओ।. Хол яв. Hau ab. Vas t'en. Уходи.

Statements of intent, especially when they fly in the face of a trivial search on posting history, don't mean shit. At this point you're a hairsbreadth away from being Bane Mk. II not because of that one joke but because of a motherfucking HUGE HISTORY of posts that make you come across as, well, Bane Mk. II.

Statement of intent is nice. But the only thing that's going to edge you away from Banehood is action. Which means you're going to have to exercise something you've shown little desire or aptitude for in the past: self-control.

Make no mistake: I honestly don't know fuck all about you. I don't know who you are, who you played, where you played. (I avoid that section of the board as being largely irrelevant and slightly distasteful.) My impression of you as B-b-b-b-b-b-b-oote Man comes strictly from seeing you, over multiple threads, come across as quite possibly the most poorly-socialized person I've seen in MSB this side of the 4chan crowd that periodically tries to infest the place.

Enjoy the process of growth. Or indulge in the reputation of being Bane II. I personally don't care either way. You might.

The problem with prefix codes (or paired identical tokens) is one of scoping. I'll pull an example of this (specifically paired identical tokens) out of the realm of Unix-alike shell scripts.

The traditional way of getting the output of a command in a shell into another command is the use of the "backtick" (`). You wrap the command in backticks to get the string that the command would otherwise print to your screen. So, for example, `date -I` would put the current date in the "international" format into your command. So if I wanted to scan a file for any instances of today's date in it, I'd use a command line like this: grep -i `date -I` my_file.txt

There are several problems with this (for an example of these, check the actual text I had to type above to get it looking the way it does…), but chief among them is that you can't nest. I can't take the output of a command and put it into another command whose output I want to use. foo `bar`baz`` doesn't work, for example. This unnecessarily limits your abilities to compose higher-order constructs in your text.

The solution to this in the Unix-alike shell world was to deprecate the use of backticks and instead use the $(...) construct. Because there's a clear opening token and a clear closing token, it's easy to build nested structures. The original scanning one would now be grep -i $(date -I) my_file.txt, for example. And the one that doesn't work would become foo $(bar$(baz)). It's clearer to the eye where the replacement is going to be in the first example, and the second example is actually possible. (Incidentally, this also makes it easier to write the parser, so a developer who opposes balanced tokens is of dubious competence in my books.)

Of course this still leaves us with the problem of how to identify replacements. The MUSHcode solution is, as is typical for that family of half-baked software, utterly idiotic. Using % as the introductory token doesn't work because % is a character people use a lot. As in saying "75% off!", a problem I face after well over a decade of playing MUSHes still. (It doesn't help that various bits of softcode deal with this inconsistently so sometimes I have to use %% and sometimes I don't in an incoherent mess.) Too, using square brackets is also pretty idiotic. We may not use square brackets as often in English as we'd use, say, the percentage sign, but we still do use them.

What a good system really needs is something that's consistent and different from English.

So here's the outline of what I propose:

First, use a compound, balanced-pair approach for EVERYTHING. Period. Yes it means you type a bit more when you're accessing, say, a variable name. Suck it up. For substitution codes, open with, say "$(" and close with ")". So what in MUSH would be "%n" becomes "$(n)". (Let's not quibble over whether it should be $(...) or %{...} here. This is illustrating a concept, not detailed specifics.) For function invocation and substitution I'd suggest a different pairing be used, just to make it visually clear to the reader that different behaviour is intended. So "[random_select(this|that|the other)]" in a hypothetical MUSHing substitution could be instead "${random_select(this|that|the other)}".

Now my reasoning for these:

1. First, $( and ${ (or whatever opening tokens are chosen) are not exactly commonly used tokens in English expressions. This means you reduce ambiguity and the resulting disambiguation (like MUSHcode's irritating, and inconsistent, requirement for %% when you want to talk about sales promotions). About the only time you're going to have to escape these is if you're directly talking about the code itself.
2. To my eyes $(n) stands out a lot more from the text than %n does. It calls out that a substitution is being made and this makes it perfectly clear precisely what is being substituted and where it fits.
3. The parser is easier to write when you have a clear and consistent single character that begins a substitution.
4. It's easy to mix and match at need, as well as nesting at need. Consider a piece of code that can randomly affect the invoker or the target: ${name(${select_from([$(n), $(1)]})} is bonked on the head!
5. It is also, by virtue of being properly tokenized, parsed, and executed code instead of simple-minded string substitutions all the way down, code that's able to be formatted. In situ, not passed through external formatting/deformatting tools.

@surreality said:

I think @Jeshin may need a little time, y'all. … So maybe let's not expect a speedy response there, is all.

Yes he now needs a little time and we should give it to him. Losing a long-standing family pet is a horrible experience and way the fuck more important than people squabbling over two boards dedicated to discussing pretendy fun time games of slightly different flavours.

But…

That being said, @crayon has been on here grating cheese with his personality for at least a month. The time to step up would have been, say, a month ago when it was becoming clear that whatever was being done wasn't working.

@Derp said:

@Ganymede said:

@Derp

I used to think that way until I got kids on my own. It's not always that simple.

Ah. Yes. I do happen to be childless (to my knowledge), so I suppose that I can't directly relate to these circumstances.

I'm not childless. I still maintain that it is that simple. If you need to get away from the kid, get away from the kid. Don't drag the kid with you in the name of getting away from it and thus inflict it on everybody else around you. If your child is such a problem to you that you "need to get away", what the everloving fuck makes you think inflicting that kid on others without pay is right!?

@HorrorHound said:

I am terrified to ask...what is Second Life? I refuse to google it.

Second Life is the online game for people who lack a first.

@crayon : No sarcasm, you're doing well now. This is what we've been looking for since the beginning of this whole thread: a willingness to listen to other people and engage them with a clear understanding of both your position and theirs.

In the spirit of your newfound ability to engage in actual conversation, I take back the nasty things I said about you.

Meanwhile, in Second Life (the game for people who lack a first):

Of course Nymeria plays Second Life. This should not have surprised me.