Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Friday, 27 May 2011
Text-based RPGs were a passion of mine from 10th grade (2002) until very recently. Right now my life is too busy to commit to much gaming, but a break from the hobby can do wonders to renew passion.
Despite my distance I find myself ever-lurking, observing mistakes players make and acknowledging my own failures in the medium. With 8 years experience playing and 6 years modding, I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two. So, here I pass on some wisdom and welcome comments supplementing my knowledge.
"All I know is that I know nothing." -Socrates.
6 Fatal Mistakes Commonly Made in RP Plot
1. Blowing The Load
You heard me! So many great plots get rushed through. A story that could have beautifully, slowly developed over months takes two week and then it's over and done with. This happens most commonly with relationships. Two players get so excited by a ship that they fall in love, get married, and consummate (usually not in that order). Any tension from a forbidden romance, any secret love, gets rushed and done with so that plots have to loop or fizzle out because they were over too quickly.
Worst of all, none of the other players care about these fast-developed ships because they see them as too little development with too much enthusiasm.
2. Becoming Romantically Dependent
Too many players make their romantic plot their only plot. Then if their ship gets boring (because good relationships make bad TV) they end up in an endless loop of fluff/smut or fade away. Even worse, if their ship partner drops they have no friends or plot to fall back on while they NPC the ship and find a new player or adlib a breakup.
3. Isolating
Like becoming Romantically Dependent, if all your plot is with one other character, this spells doom. This is really specific to communities and not personal story lines, but it's a boundary that is dangerous if confused. Other players will come to dislike you if they see you as a pair playing out a personal story line in a community and it will be hard to get involved in the community should your storyline partner fade away.
It's easy to come up with an epic plot and barrel ahead, but it's always a good idea to find little ways for others to play with you. I'm not saying that everyone has to cater to your plotlines, but that you should give others opportunities to fill slots in yours. Offer up roles that an NPC might play to the community for grabs or find a way someone else can complicate it.
Further, don't just stick to plots you came up with. Volunteer to help others and even if you have an amazing plot running with plenty to do, tag open threads. Don't get stuck in your own world. You are part of a community.
4. Hitting an Emotional Dead End
Sometimes plot is so epic that it breaks a character. If you are going to horribly scar your character for life you have to decide if you will be willing to realistically deal with the emotional fallout of certain traumatic events.
Killing a spouse, for instance, makes a character very unpleasant to play for quite a few months.
This is not to say that you're a bad writer if you don't want to deal with it. Writers in prose fiction generally have the luxury of summing up a character's emotional breakdown in a literary montage or at least reflecting it off of a supporting cast of characters. You play one character in role-play and you really shouldn't play anyone who interacts with them. You don't have the luxury of summing it up because games are played in real time. You have to wallow in it.
Consider before you do it.
5. Ignoring Plotholes and Flaws
If there is a simple way your character could solve all of their problems, but they aren't, you'd better be ready to point out in your narrative what psychological reason your character has for ignoring that out or you will be seen as a Mary Sue player.
Too proud to apologize to win her back? Make it clear that this is a flaw in your character and not just you being too attached. It's admirable to make your character flawed, even stubborn. It's annoying when we can't tell if it's the character or the player who thinks they are right.
6. Failure to Recognize the End of an Arch
If a plot has nowhere to go without going in a circle, end it. Sometimes you need to do this with characters, too. If you have a character you've played for years and you love their plot and arch too much to upset it with drama, retire the character. Nobody will fault you for saying that you have no more stories to tell with that character.
Only write the book if you have a story to tell.
Despite my distance I find myself ever-lurking, observing mistakes players make and acknowledging my own failures in the medium. With 8 years experience playing and 6 years modding, I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two. So, here I pass on some wisdom and welcome comments supplementing my knowledge.
"All I know is that I know nothing." -Socrates.
6 Fatal Mistakes Commonly Made in RP Plot
1. Blowing The Load
You heard me! So many great plots get rushed through. A story that could have beautifully, slowly developed over months takes two week and then it's over and done with. This happens most commonly with relationships. Two players get so excited by a ship that they fall in love, get married, and consummate (usually not in that order). Any tension from a forbidden romance, any secret love, gets rushed and done with so that plots have to loop or fizzle out because they were over too quickly.
Worst of all, none of the other players care about these fast-developed ships because they see them as too little development with too much enthusiasm.
 |
| Credit Hannahtess on DeviantArt |
Too many players make their romantic plot their only plot. Then if their ship gets boring (because good relationships make bad TV) they end up in an endless loop of fluff/smut or fade away. Even worse, if their ship partner drops they have no friends or plot to fall back on while they NPC the ship and find a new player or adlib a breakup.
3. Isolating
Like becoming Romantically Dependent, if all your plot is with one other character, this spells doom. This is really specific to communities and not personal story lines, but it's a boundary that is dangerous if confused. Other players will come to dislike you if they see you as a pair playing out a personal story line in a community and it will be hard to get involved in the community should your storyline partner fade away.
It's easy to come up with an epic plot and barrel ahead, but it's always a good idea to find little ways for others to play with you. I'm not saying that everyone has to cater to your plotlines, but that you should give others opportunities to fill slots in yours. Offer up roles that an NPC might play to the community for grabs or find a way someone else can complicate it.
Further, don't just stick to plots you came up with. Volunteer to help others and even if you have an amazing plot running with plenty to do, tag open threads. Don't get stuck in your own world. You are part of a community.
4. Hitting an Emotional Dead End
Sometimes plot is so epic that it breaks a character. If you are going to horribly scar your character for life you have to decide if you will be willing to realistically deal with the emotional fallout of certain traumatic events.
Killing a spouse, for instance, makes a character very unpleasant to play for quite a few months.
This is not to say that you're a bad writer if you don't want to deal with it. Writers in prose fiction generally have the luxury of summing up a character's emotional breakdown in a literary montage or at least reflecting it off of a supporting cast of characters. You play one character in role-play and you really shouldn't play anyone who interacts with them. You don't have the luxury of summing it up because games are played in real time. You have to wallow in it.
Consider before you do it.
 |
| Credit altana on Deviant Art |
If there is a simple way your character could solve all of their problems, but they aren't, you'd better be ready to point out in your narrative what psychological reason your character has for ignoring that out or you will be seen as a Mary Sue player.
Too proud to apologize to win her back? Make it clear that this is a flaw in your character and not just you being too attached. It's admirable to make your character flawed, even stubborn. It's annoying when we can't tell if it's the character or the player who thinks they are right.
6. Failure to Recognize the End of an Arch
If a plot has nowhere to go without going in a circle, end it. Sometimes you need to do this with characters, too. If you have a character you've played for years and you love their plot and arch too much to upset it with drama, retire the character. Nobody will fault you for saying that you have no more stories to tell with that character.
Only write the book if you have a story to tell.
Monday, 23 May 2011
Sunday, 22 May 2011
I randomly stumbled across this comic through a cute fluffy kitty drawing on the front page of DeviantArt (I'm Nimbuschick there, btw, if you feel like giving me points and llamas).
The internet IS made up of a series of cats. The concept is brilliant, the execution is flawless.
ASOC | A Series of Cats
Updates twice a week. Check it out for cute/funny overload!
The internet IS made up of a series of cats. The concept is brilliant, the execution is flawless.
ASOC | A Series of Cats
Updates twice a week. Check it out for cute/funny overload!
Thursday, 19 May 2011
I saw a blog entry a couple of months back about the most expensive dice in the world, and as cool as it would be to have a meteorite as dice, it's just not worth it to me. Gaming is fun, but I can't imagine spending $200 for something that might roll under the table and end up traveling through my dog's intestines.
These dice, though, are cool and reasonably priced. Some of them, I'd say, are even cooler than the world's smallest dice or the world's oldest dice.
1.) We begin with handmade steel dice. These are D6 and are useful for most board games, but probably most desirable to Warhammer players. Steel dice are a subtle, classy, sleek statement. Unfortunately they were made for a gift and aren't available for purchase.
They are good-looking, though, aren't they?
2.) Okay, so maybe these aren't affordable, but these crystal dice sure look nicer than the clear plastic ones you find online. Neiman Marcus sells these dice for $600 which means that you could afford 3 meteorite dice for the price of the pair.
My recommendation is that you either keep these on a shelf or don't own a dog or a small child. I get the idea that these dice are made for the gambler who isn't blowing his money fast enough at the tables.
But they're just so pretty!
3.) I continue the theme with the expensive dice, moving down the price bracked to $98. These crystal-studded black dice are a bit gaudy for my taste, but if you want to show off, they're a lot more reasonable than all crystal.
Barneys New York sells the pair in a leather box and they are embellished with Swarovski crystals.
Once again, I suppose they're intended for the heavy gambler, but I figure anyone who can afford to spend $62 on a soul grinder has disposable income for some bling on their D6.
4.) We're back into the realm of sanity with this Chessex set. The set automatically generates dungeon paths. It's a great way to run a pick-up game or to sluff off on your planning duties as Dungeon/Game Master.
The D6 come in sets of 4 with room numbers on them so you can randomize your paths.
Alternatively it's useful for when you play with that guy who has read all of the core material and knows every canon dungeon in the game. These dice take away the pressure of having to make some random dungeon up from scratch.
5.) This one is called the "Weird yet Fair D6". It has the shape of a normal D6 with beveled corners and carved numbers. The coolest part is how this dice was made. The D6 was made using Shapeways, a company that specializes in converting 3D models into tangible objects.
It's a simple enough concept, but the fact that it was implemented with computer assisted design makes it really cool. The D6 goes for around $10.
6.) Finally a D20! For all of you D&D gamers (I only use D20 in my life for MTG as I play D10 systems) who want a big flashing beacon when you make a critical hit! This ThinkGeek dice does just that!
I'm not sure how you'd change the battery in a dice that runs $9.99, but it is an LED dice so it'll be a while before the power is gone.
The site suggests playing it behind a DM screen or in the dark for a dramatic effect.
7.) PC Diagnostic Dice have no gaming purposes. They're like sex dice for nerds and the ThinkGeek site suggests that it's likely as accurate as a real PC diagnostic test.
This set of 3 dice comes in a velvet bag. Roll the dice to see the problem, the culprit, and the suggested action.
Incidentally, as I type this, I am on a shiny new iMac because my PC had a melt down a few months ago and I was tired of rolling the dice.
8.) The final point on this list is pretty much all of DiceCreator.com. The webmaster boldly sent me a link to his blog a couple of weeks ago and I had fun browsing his gallery finding everything from Cthulu to Punisher to Firefly to Portal dice. He does some odd dice but most are D6. I'm not sure how the weighting works out, but the designs are really detailed and amazing.
Browse through the blog if you have an hour or so to kill. Some of these designs are even available from his eBay store.
These dice, though, are cool and reasonably priced. Some of them, I'd say, are even cooler than the world's smallest dice or the world's oldest dice.
They are good-looking, though, aren't they?
My recommendation is that you either keep these on a shelf or don't own a dog or a small child. I get the idea that these dice are made for the gambler who isn't blowing his money fast enough at the tables.
But they're just so pretty!
3.) I continue the theme with the expensive dice, moving down the price bracked to $98. These crystal-studded black dice are a bit gaudy for my taste, but if you want to show off, they're a lot more reasonable than all crystal.Barneys New York sells the pair in a leather box and they are embellished with Swarovski crystals.
Once again, I suppose they're intended for the heavy gambler, but I figure anyone who can afford to spend $62 on a soul grinder has disposable income for some bling on their D6.
The D6 come in sets of 4 with room numbers on them so you can randomize your paths.
Alternatively it's useful for when you play with that guy who has read all of the core material and knows every canon dungeon in the game. These dice take away the pressure of having to make some random dungeon up from scratch.
It's a simple enough concept, but the fact that it was implemented with computer assisted design makes it really cool. The D6 goes for around $10.
I'm not sure how you'd change the battery in a dice that runs $9.99, but it is an LED dice so it'll be a while before the power is gone.
The site suggests playing it behind a DM screen or in the dark for a dramatic effect.
7.) PC Diagnostic Dice have no gaming purposes. They're like sex dice for nerds and the ThinkGeek site suggests that it's likely as accurate as a real PC diagnostic test.
This set of 3 dice comes in a velvet bag. Roll the dice to see the problem, the culprit, and the suggested action.
Incidentally, as I type this, I am on a shiny new iMac because my PC had a melt down a few months ago and I was tired of rolling the dice.
Browse through the blog if you have an hour or so to kill. Some of these designs are even available from his eBay store.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
to skip the rest of the entry and get the latest update on the matter, click here
A few months ago I got a Mac. I discovered that bookmarks within directories in the Firefox bookmark toolbar cannot be right-clicked. The Mozilla feedback listserv admin directed me to a broken link and never got back to me when I said it was broken. It didn't even look like an html file.
I did my own hunting and found other Mozilla admins and moderators telling people that it was actually a Mac problem because nothing else in Mac lets you right click for options (which is crap because you can right click or command click for so many things). Command click, by the way, does nothing, either.
Here is why this excuse is bull. If you want to design an cross OS browser and right click/command click won't seem to work in an OS, you NEED to make some other way to get to that functionality. How do I edit the name or delete a bookmark in a directory within the toolbar? Apparently that function wasn't figured out.
Signing up for the feedback-mozilla list was the start of a nightmare. I receive at least 100 emails a day from the list, 99% of them complaining about firefox and the new upgrade. "Firefox 4 Sucks" and "I hate FF4" are common subject lines.
And I can't get off the list.
According to the CAN SPAM act, you have to let users opt out of mailing lists at any time and make the information accessible or they can report you for spam. There is no opt out link on the list and no way that I have found through countless Google searches over the last 36 hours to get off the list.
It seems like Mozilla set people up for this. A google search for firefox feedback got me this list before any mail in forms. So I signed up, thinking it would be an easy out because that's the law.
One user on the list says:
"On top of that, when I tried to submit this through the "SubmitFeedback" feature on the Help menu, the webpage wouldn't work. The "submit" button of the page was only active as long as nothing was typed in the "remarks" box. The minute anything was typed in, the button was "grayed out" and became inactive."
Are we being set up to sign up for this list? Probably not. If we are, this would be a stupid move as it's mostly hate for Firefox. What I can say is that their web marketers know nothing about search engine marketing and PR if this is how they manage their sites and meta tags.
I've contacted their support and tried various unsubscribe suggestions since coming back from a 6 hour shift to find 75 complaints in my inbox from the list. I got so mad after this went on for more than 24 hours that I downloaded Chrome last night.
The douchebaggery continues. Chrome has a button to import bookmarks from IE and Firefox without having to export as html and then import manually. It doesn't work since the Firefox 4 upgrade. Now, it may be a coincidence as half of the good plugins from Firefox 3.0 don't work in 4.0 and thus make the upgrade even more useless, but it does seem kind of sneaky that abandoning ship to Chrome was made harder by the latest update.
Firefox lured people in saying that FF4 is faster, but most complaints are that it is slow and freezes. This can be attributed to bugs in any new software, but one PC savvy user checked his system usage.
"I've been running FF4 for about 4 weeks now and not long after installing there was a dramatic reduction in performance of my PC (6GB RAM, iCore5 etc etc - good spec) so tested what the cause was today. The primary culprit, I'm sad to say, was FF4. It used considerable more memory than Chrome, IE9 and even VMWare making work very frustrating."
Any complaints about the design or the loss of intuitiveness or user friendly layout is met with direction to go download a customization. I wish I could do sloppy design work and tell users to fix it themselves. Judging by how much time Mozilla gave developers to fix their plugins, I wouldn't rely on yet another plugin to make my browser usable.
Some key browser functions are completely gone!
"I've just finally "up"graded to FF 4, after being nagged by your message every day. I'm still getting to grips with any benefits but I've noticed a very retrograde feature: There is no drop-down page navigation arrow any more. i.e. You can't select to, say, go back to a particular page from the list but must keep clicking on the back page arrow till you reach it.I find this omission baffling - a very useful feature for years now - and if I'd known it would be missing I'd not have upgraded. Why have you done this?"
This influx of hatred is because Firefox used to be loved; they were the only real alternative to IE (because Netscape explorer wasn't really an option) that was cross OS. Firefox started a revolution of independent browsers, but they haven't kept up. Their latest update was rushed to lock out competition and because of that is buggy and has left users who came to rely on plugins stuck without that functionality. When you strip away all of the little tricks that made your browser awesome and then replace it with slow or freezing browsing and awkward design, you give your users no excuse not to bail.
As of this morning I posted a threat to report them for CAN SPAM violations if the moderator of the list does not remove me. I'm so filled with venom for Mozilla now that I may start a hashtag #whyfirefox sucks.
If you know a way to unsubscribe, please throw me a line here. I'm going mad.
UPDATE: Someone finally got back to me with instructions on how to unsubscribe. Funny part is, they managed to do it while all-but telling me that I was an idiot.
You are the one who has to unsubscribe to the list. Sending email to list subscribers is what list servers do. This particular list is populated through "Hendrix" where people provide feedback without the expectation of getting a reply. To unsubscribe reply to any message such as this one and change the subject to only show one word: unsubscribe nothing else in the subject, and remove the content of the reply
If you looked in your message headers you would have seen the following information.
List-Unsubscribe: https://lists.mozilla.org/options/feedback-firefox,
mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=unsubscribe
List-Post: mailto:feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.org
List-Help: mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=help
List-Subscribe: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/feedback-firefox,
mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=subscribe
Newsgroups: mozilla.feedback.firefox
Message-ID: mailman.48.1305729071.9060.feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.org
Like that? Well here's the kicker... that info is not in a single of the 200 something emails I've received and one attempt to just send a blank "Unsubscribe" subject just got bounced after being held because it might contain "administrativia".
Here's a sample email:
Name:
Email: [REMOVED BY AMY TO PROTECT PRIVACY]
Product: Firefox
Summary: Miss old Back Button
Comments:
I really miss the old Back Button with the drop down box that let me
pick which recently viewed page I could go back to or am I overlooking
this feature? It's a bother having to click Back one page at a time.
Browser Details: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
From URL: http://hendrix.mozilla.org/Note to readers: Hendrix gives no expectation of a response to this feedback
but if you wish to provide one you must BCC (not CC) the sender for them to
see it.
_______________________________________________
feedback-firefox mailing list
feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.orghttps://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/feedback-firefox
Do you see info on how to get out there? Nope.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
