bonus post, here’s Vorpal trying to intimidate me during all the original UH stuff using my RL name, but using the wrong name

alt text

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

One of my many unpopular opinions is that MUs can and should be very like tabletop, but this is one area where that doesn’t fit – if everybody in my gaming group participates one session except Phil, who stares at his phone for five hours instead, and I give everybody but Phil XP, good. Everybody on the MU can’t participate, though, only a limited number can join the event, and then I give those lucky ones extra XP? Meh.

I have always liked the catchup xp of TR, in theory at least. Maybe not an automatic gain, but if a dinosaur and a newbie both RP the same amount, the newbie gets bonus to catch up.

It is always annoying on games with universal xp tick. Like, if Im not there in the first couple of months, it feels like I am forever behind.

@Ominous said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb I am also anti-XP as is probably well-known or know-ish at this point. If we have to go with advancement of that sort, I’d prefer a system where you set a skill or two that’s being worked on by the character, and, after some time, maybe with some random elements, it increases.

I’d also like maybe Milestones blended with catchup? Like ‘the plot has progressed so far, anyone with X major milestones gains a minor one (basically a skill swap, rather than a flat +1 or something), anyone with more gain a bigger bonus’

But I haven’t even done napkin math on it, let alone proper thinks.

@Raistlin Writing code for an even moderately complex RPG system really hammers home the lesson that not having a robust data structure design before starting on anything else is a recipe for pain.

@Coin said in Freeform or Systems?:

That’s why any game I run promotes joint narrative storytelling; Batman doesn’t become a joke because everyone works to make Batman be Batman. I also typically do not allow villains and any PvP is strictly plot-dependent.

100%. And that’s why my personal feeling is to rely on filtering rather than stats. A player who barges through a scene flexing will usually reign it in after a quiet conversation with them explaining the issue. The ones that don’t rapidly find that nobody wants to play with them.

@Tez said in Wikibara’s allegations:

@voiceinthevoid said in Wikibara’s allegations:

@Kestrel

Just – to be clear. You’re fine. Just want everyone to know who I am, which is Tez, with a z.

a woman is holding a cup of coffee and saying crisis averted .

@Trashcan said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

@Babs said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Just reuse the same description. Chances are no one will notice.

Chances are no one will say anything to you.

THIS IS WHY. I KNOW I WILL BE SILENTLY JUDGED BY ALL YOU ASSHOLES*.

(*I say affectionately.)

@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:

To be fair, Jenn, I feel like the act of asking about unplayable/disallowed character types is kind of your version of MUSHing.

In the Otaku-specific instance, at the time I entered chargen they were legal. There was some fuckery that occurred that I went over elsewhere and can go over again, sure why not. But later.

Edit: Nagah are very much the unplayable thing I ask about, because sexy sneks. Mummies are more a meme at this point.

@Ashkuri
There is no war in Ba Sing Se and there are no sex pests on AoA.
Any belief to the contrary is against the way of things.
Self-report, then self-deport.
/s

a man in a suit is making a funny face and saying oh no !

@hellfrog I think I tried to do a rewatch like ten years ago and couldn’t or wouldn’t. Mean middle school girl go live in computer. What a timestamp, though. Internet trolls from the 1900s.

@Warma-Sheen said in Warma-Sheen:

As Hollywood on TR, I was banned because I kept pestering Troy about trying to get other staffers to quit talking crap about my character on staff channels. She told me to stop bothering her and I didn’t. It wasn’t until after I was banned did some accusations about cheating get thrown out after the fact from which I never got a chance to address/defend and only heard about 3rd hand, which I think were about looking at my own jobs as a staffer, to which, if that was a thing, wasn’t more than occasional typos of the many, many, many jobs that I handled there.

Troy: is that the dude who used the Shemar Moore pb?
Coin: yes.
Troy: that dude was straight up cheating.

Troy: i’m glad he remembers all those details, cuz i sure as fuck don’t. but he was a fucking menace.

Troy: ask yourself why the staffers were talking shit about his character.

Troy: the game was better for it when he left. and by left we mean got kicked out. sorry not sorry.

also, as Coin, I will say, i remember Kelvin being the most metagame-y, minmax-y, Pledge-abusing, power-gaming dude in the Changeling sphere, and this was CONCURRENT (to a degree) with VASpider’s tenure there, so keep that in mind.

cheers.

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism.

Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else.

Baytor yelling "I AM BAYTOR!!: in someone's face

This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.

@Tez said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@Jennkryst That explains a lot about my household, including the faking coughing and ‘boo, you whore’ earlier today.

aheh aheh i’m sick 😞

@Jennkryst a man in a brown jacket is pointing in front of a sign that says that 's true

@somasatori said in Multisphere pressure:

@Warma-Sheen said in Multisphere pressure:

I suspect… that some of them are looking for a “specific” type of RP.

The other meaning of the acronym “CBT”

a man with a mustache and a sweater that says i mean that 's nuts

Also contractually obligated to make that joke.

@catzilla

91fa71ba-f07c-4ad8-a602-5cd4b92a4cf4-image.png

But in all seriousness, I could elaborate on it. I just vastly prefer the theme of nWoD changeling to oWoD changeling and think it fits the mould of a pet project of mine… which is kind of a small-town Americana murder/mystery thing. I could actually read nWoD werewolf, but I don’t wanna and I like Apocalypse more!

@Jumpscare

Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414

Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497

Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836

Pigeon Too Fat To Fly

There was nothing special or secret about the pigeon. This just reminded me of it.