Verad

I think I might have misrepresented what I meant by 'clever'. I'm referring specifically to the player willing to be inventive, creative, and willing to compromise and acknowledge when they might be outmatched. If someone's fighting dirty against someone who's trying to fight smart, the person fighting dirty will likely have better tricks and get an upper edge, obviously because they're pressing the advantage, but also because they're not following traditional convention. That doesn't necessarily guarantee victory, but also doesn't guarantee a loss. . . . If a bad roll of the dice meant more than just a 'quick loss', people would be less eager to rely solely on dice. But how do you tell when you are outmatched? Because the character has been out-fought by another character, or because the player has been out-witted by another player? When does an emphasis on freeform suggest that character skill should be equivalent to player skill? It's an argument people make frequently for PvP-as-conflict-resolution; in freeform, I see it as well, but with a different type of skill in mind. I am eager to rely on dice because, in general, I find dice to be more unpredictable than freeform roleplayers in combat. They provide more interesting situations and when the results turn out in an unexpected way, I do not get cross that they violated my vision of how combat should go. Instead, they make me think about how to frame the fight in such a way that the results of the dice are sensible plausible. The notion that dice make it easier to mitigate losses have nothing to do with it. To be fair, I understand how simple /random high-roll-wins combats are unsatisfactory. It's why I have a roll-system linkshell with a more complicated set of rules and a sheet system. Even in /random, however, I would consider it the mark of a good player to acknowledge that the dice don't go the way they expected, and then craft the narrative around that unexpected result, than to try and deny the result entirely.

Exactly. They're not fair. That's why fighting smart doesn't fairly guarantee victory. To suggest it should consistently guarantee victory is to suggest a kind of fairness.

Cleverness triumphing over brute force is a subjective judgment, and speaks of the kind of mind that values freeform combat, which, reduced to its base components, is a game of duelling logic constructs. In general, I find it more immersion-breaking than dice because it presumes the clever fighter wins. Sometimes they just cleverly die.

The looping argument only exists within the context of your presuppositions, relying strictly on the set of definitions you've given for "rights" or "judge." That these are the correct definitions for these two statements is as much conjecture as anything prefaced by the use of the first-person. Remove or change the suppositions. The argument ceases to loop.

An attempt to use strictly formal logic with a set of presupposed axioms to resolve an apparent contradiction between two halves of a commonly-stated piece of roleplaying advice.

Linguistics are conjecture.

This. There is not a single human being on this earth that does not make judgements. Condemnation is an entirely different ballpark. As it was written in the definition options that I provided, there is nothing obtuse about it. 9. to decide or settle authoritatively; adjudge: The censor judged the book obscene and forbade its sale. You will note in the definition, and not in the example chosen, that "To decide or settle authoritatively" does not indicate the quality of the decision beyond its authoritativeness. It does not include positive or negative categories. You will also note the absurdity of presuming that when people say "You are free to roleplay what you want, but do not judge," that they are implying, "Do not positively judge the roleplay of others" or "Do not judge the roleplay of others regardless of whether the judgment is positive or negative." The statement is used to advocate avoiding condemnation in general practice. The notion that people would use it to advocate avoiding the condoning of roleplay concepts, or the avoidance of condemnation or condoning roleplay concepts, is so bizarre that you are clearly arguing in bad faith. If you wish to point out the linguistic contradiction between the two statements as written, congratulations. Give it 5-6 pages and some cites and your PHIL101 professor will give you a B.

You don't be deliberately obtuse and realize that when people say "judge," they are using it as a synonym for "condemn" in these threads. That's how.

I am also blue.

Your wiki's got the same challenges that mine does: It reads more like a Monster Manual entry than it does a description of the character. I don't think that it needs to be tweaked much aside from keeping the various bits and bobs up to date, I don't know how to "improve" upon it. If you were looking to spruce it up entirely, I'd suggest ripping the tab-based template some users have? It looks awfully fancy. The only thing stopping me from doing the same thing is that I don't have the drive to do it myself. ...Supposing I embraced the Monster Manual feel and gave him XP, Challenge Rating, and average treasure?

I don't think you're overplaying the paranoia here, because the overall purpose of the post is to move Gogonji to Revenant's Toll, and the paranoia is serving as more of a means to that end rather than the point of the post itself. I actually disagree with Aya that it's a stream-of-consciousness post, because it feels too structured for that. Stream of consciousness, to me anyway, represents a more scattered form of thinking, the mind moving back and forth between several tracks, represented by a falling apart of sentence and paragraph structure. The post avoids that - Gogonji's thought process is easy to track and comes to a simple conclusion - and it's better for it. It would be a much harder thing to read if it were written like some of the classics of that mode of writing, and I don't think your purpose here is to make Gogonji impenetrable to the reader. So the writing style and purpose is fine. My one comment comes from this: That one word threw me. Gogon reads like a very formal thinker throughout the piece. Maybe that's not true in the story at large, but for a piece that's largely about his thought process, this word does not seem like part of his process.

Edited: Let me scratch this and do something more complicated. I'm crap at physical description. Thought processes, dialogue, narrative asides, these I can do quite well. But the physicality of an object is often a tertiary consideration for me at best. Take the first post of Decades Ago, here, and help me figure out how I can make place evocative. I will get back to this story, I promise.

Not a remaster, exactly, but I'd like to see what Xenogears would have been if they hadn't run out of budget.

Could you provide a more concrete example of this as regards how old methods of finding roleplay don't work with a new population? This seems very abstract as it is.

Mrs. Spahro Mrs. Spahro I have a question: What do you do if you're a player with anxiety issues? How do you manage those problems on your quest to be popular?

I'll take one!

Then I need to know what you and the moderators consider an asshole. You will be setting the tone; better to provide concrete examples.

I would make it more difficult to give reputation so people cannot toss off a quick +1 when somebody gives something snarky, thereby making rep more valuable for both giver and receiver, or I would remove it. Another possibility is to make rep available only to posts on certain forums. Maybe Events and Town Square and a few other places where the goal would be rewarding IC writing rather than OOC snark. This isn't an RPC-specific problem, to be clear. It's just how the internet rewards discourse in general. But in general it leads to toxicity, trolling, and far more aggressive behavior. It can be moderated.

Here's why I'm hostile: It feels good. It's cathartic. If there's somebody I disagree with, then replying in a hostile tone is pleasurable. Unfortunately, catharsis is addictive, so I keep doing it. As part of that catharsis, I'm rewarded for it by the structure of the board. My reputation is very high given my post-count. If you were to click through that reputation and examine it, you would find that most of those boosts come directly in response to a hostile comment. That could be because it's witty, it says something that people agree with, or because they just like me and want me to post more in general, I don't know. But the hostility is what gets me points. Tiny little ego-boosts to surprise and brighten my day. Somebody likes it when I'm a shithead far more than when I'm constructive or writing IC fiction, and I don't think I'm the only person for which that's true. To be clear, I am not excusing my hostility as the fault of the reputation system, nor am I excusing anybody else's for the same. Reputation facilitates and rewards, but I would be hostile without it - though probably to a lesser extent. Carrying on, I find it to be something to post when I don't feel like there's anything very useful or interesting going on in the boards in general, and in the pre-expansion lull, that's been quite a lot. I prefer substantive discussion to fun threads or hype speculation. I don't hate fun threads, and I will post in some of them myself, but in some of the forums I prefer, like Character Development, they dominate the discourse. I don't consider them circlejerks as other posters have insinuated, but I don't want to see them be the primary mode of discourse. It's a useful way to shift conversations which are going down the same roads they always go. I recognize that there are new roleplayers every day, but there are not so many new roleplayers, not just to FF14, but to RP in general, that we need to have regular threads that end with the same non-conclusion of "It comes down to trust and communication" whenever there's any thread dealing with the possibility of character or player conflict. The conversations always stop there, at this uncertain point which is technically true but functionally useless as roleplaying advice, and it's no wonder they devolve into arguments. I admit my complicity in this, but at least hostility is interesting to read. I also don't like forced positivity. I would rather be honestly critical in my own voice than be falsely positive. This can lead to people ignoring me, as I believe one person mentioned in this thread, and I completely understand that. I don't take it as a slight, and I would rather be ignored for my voice than chastised into changing it. So that's some of the reasons.

Don't give up on this idea. You have enough players that you could make it work for individual players or players in pairs. It may not be as many as planned, but if you already have the notes for the plot, you can still make it work. And when it does, you will have a proof-of-concept to expand out to larger and more elaborate scenarios. I'm sorry I won't be able to sign up myself; work obligations and managing Scales prevent me from getting into other peoples' events quite often lately. But I'd hate to see work on something interesting like this go to waste.

I'm going to out myself on this point - you're probably talking about me. I had not been aware that a quirk of the RPC when blocking people is to notify them by telling them User X has added you to their buddy list. I added in response, and when the situation was explained to me, I never got around to removing the name. My apologies for that! I certainly didn't mean to disturb you with the action. You're removed, and may continue ignoring me.

To return to the topic, I note there's a general theme of mass combat being a DMed situation primarily involving NPCs against PCs, with Osric's experience working as an exception to the rule, the NPCs being from . Are there any instances where two FCs have had this kind of conflict?

Any time somebody gives me the opportunity to repost the following from Unknown Armies' section on combat is relevant: There's probably a much lengthier discussion to be had about when it is and isn't appropriate to have such an attitude towards combat, but that can be another thread.

A little while ago we had a thread about how to be better at combat roleplay, especially in freeform. There was a lot of good and useful advice in that thread. One thing that struck me, however, was the general assumption that combat is conducted one-on-one in duels with a single opponent - the advice was generally framed in terms of "your opponent" rather than "your opponents," etc. While we have a number of venues for one-on-one combat roleplay, it occurred to me that works well in the one-on-one might not work as well in the many and chaotic situations in which a fight breaks out between groups, rather than individuals. Sometimes these are planned, but sometimes these are the byproduct of spontaneous RP proceeding as it often does. Somebody finds themselves involved in a fight with someone else, and their friends happen to be nearby. Two groups with reason to dislike each other encounter each other in the street and things get heated. In the event that these scenarios occur with an equal number of parties on both sides, then there's no problem - people split off into duels and that takes care of that. But there are any number of situations where this gets complicated. One group outnumbers the other, or it's only one man against several; the environment is structured in such a way that only a few people can fight at a time, like a narrow street; some characters may not be trained in the kind of one-on-one combat that would allow for easy pairing, like conjurers; and, of course, it's possible for people to contribute back and forth to each other's attacks. In short, how we address freeform combat RP as individual duels doesn't often address the much-more chaotic version of mass combat RP and how that can be structured in an entertaining manner. And, knowing how often we see mass combat in the game iteslf through things like the MSQ, it seems like a subject worth at least a little consideration. I have the following questions: 1. How do you address posting order and initiative in freeform mass combat? Who goes first, and how often can they attack? 2. In situations where one group is outnumbered, does the other group allow them to have an edge in terms of how often they can attack and defend themselves for fairness' sake, or does the larger group press the weight of numbers? 3. How do you handle disparities in character strength? The Powerlevel thread shows that some characters consider themselves strong enough to take on much larger groups. Do you take these disparities into account when trying to resolve a mass combat? 4. Do you assign individuals to specific targets to the best of your ability, or do you prefer a more chaotic melee in which it's possible for everyone to strike everyone else? 5. Friendly fire: It happens, and it's unfortunate, but how do you involve accidental strikes on someone friendly when there are very few accidents in freeform? 6. Do you feel some of the difficulties in addressing the above have a cooling effect on this kind of combat RP? If so, how can they be corrected?

Certainly, but when it becomes a judgment on RP because players are supposed to "see sense" and go back to the more historically efficacious weapon, it becomes less of a fun thing to talk about and starts being an indictment on the people who chose it in spite of the historical use of the weapon. Then when there's the assumption that people made that choice because they're ignorant of the real use of the weapon, and not that they might be choosing based on different criteria, it becomes even less so.