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61

Roleplaying / Rant rant rant

« on: March 18, 2007, 10:11:22 pm »

This is an official rant thread.  If you are not ranting, then please don't respond.  Also, I am not posting this because I am upset about anything, I am posting this because I have been quietly brainstorming for about a  week now, and it's starting to rain.  My purpose is not to make people feel defensive, it is to encourage character development onto a new level of RP.  

First of all, I would like to thank Gary Gygax for making D&D in the first place.  Second of all I would like to quote my sister Tai, "An entire generation of roll players has suffered because roll playing was conceived by war gamers and not by cultural anthropologists."  You might be asking yourself what this means.  It means that the system we use to govern our characters personalities is a  stupid and archaic system that was made up by a war gamer.  I swear, the only reason Wizards did not make a better alignment system for D&D 3.0 is "If it aint broke, don't fix it."  It's not a bad system for beginners but it has way way too many limitations.  Good characters should have the flexibility to do things, on occasion, that are malicious, vengeful, greedy, and vindictive.  Evil characters should have certain weaknesses where they behave in a generous manner.  A good example of this is when Raistlin Majere demonstrated love and compassion to a gully dwarf. All you RP elitists talk about something not being realistic to a character's alignment, and you miss the point that alignments are incredibly unrealistic.  No one, and mean no one fits into any one alignment perfectly at all times.  In real life, we call actions and comments that are out side of our normal personalities, "mistakes"  or "moment of weakness" or "I was drunk" or "Christmas spirit"

When I make up a character, I do not chose an alignment and then make up an appropriate personality.  I make up a persona and then pick an alignment that best fits that persona.  When I RP my characters, I never think about alignment.  I always think of my characters personality.  I don't think, what would I do, I think what would my character do.  Some times it comes down to my characters experiances when deciding what they say, and how they would react.  Never once though, since high school, has anyone accused me of not playing my alignment.  Now is it that I don't care about alignment, and I never think about alignment, but my characters RP fits with in his alignment?  Answer, I made the personality first and chose the alignment that fits that personality, and I do stay true to that my  character's personality.  Hmph, we should just throw that old arcait alignment system out the window, and evolve to better roll playing.

My next rant, is Power gaming.  You know, it took me a long time to figure out why power gaming is a bad thing.  It is pretty ¤¤¤¤ natural for us to want to be the best at things.  We want the strongest, fastest, smartest, wisest what ever character in the world.  The hardest to kill, and deals a punch that legendary.  There is a problem with the power build.  It is called game balance.  The more uber your character, the harder it is for a DM to create encounters that are challenging.  Encounters that are too easy are boring, and encounters that are too hard are frustrating.  When all the stats significant to your class are maximized, every feat works perfectly to maximizing damage dealt and minimizing damage received, then you have just set yourself up for a bad time.  Either you are bored, or you are dead.  Never did you stop and think about what is most fun.  You ever notice that most encounters just seem to get harder.  I blame power gamers.  We have players soloing the rift, and what happens, the rift gets made so difficult, only power gamers have business being there.  In the time I have been playing here, I have seen this as a continuous trend.  The more players power game, the harder the DMs make the encounters, the more players feel like they have to power game in order to not get DTs.    The answer to this, is to take feats that do not work best for your character, but take some good RP feats.  Do not get the very best equipment you can possibly have, but allow your character to have some weakness.  Weaknesses and disadvantages generate good RP, and allow DMs to create fun and interesting encounters that challenge parties.  My gut feeling here is that if we the players make conscious efforts to not power game, then the DMs will balance our game world accordingly.

Where power gaming is most painful, is how it effects new players.  In the Amber roll playing game, Erick Wugic writes, "If I put a 200 point character in the hands of a  novice player, and a 100 point character in the hands of an expert player, the 100 point character will kill the 200 point character every time."  Notice that if you power build build your character, you are relying less on your own skill as a player, and more on the brute strength of your character.  By this you not only handicap your skill progression as a player, you handicap your personal enjoyment that you get from playing.

Now, what happens on Layo is that new players start playing.  They do not have enough playing experience to create a power build, and they lack technical skill.  They enter into a game world that is balanced for highly skilled players with well built characters.  Bad time.  We as players need to turn this around.  We need to be patient.  Not rush to get as many kills as possible.  We need to embrace new players, and coach good RP and technical skills.  We need to build characters that are well balanced, and then avoid areas that are too dangerous for a non power built character.  Only then will our changes be recognized and certain areas re balanced to be more fun for everyone.

AeonBlues

62

Introduce Yourself / Greetings from the Machine...

« on: March 18, 2007, 02:39:15 pm »

Hello folks!

For those of you who don't know me, I figured I may as well follow the nifty trend of introductions.

My real name is Kevin C. Krinke and my nickname is OneST8 (which is read as "One State" and is not OneSTB, not that I really care that people have a tendancy to misspell my nickname; just stating it here for clarification purposes).

So what do I do here at Layonara and why aren't I publicly active within this community? Well... there's a lot that I cannot talk about for whatever reasons but there's a bunch I can talk about so lets focus on those goodies.

Firstly, I'm the one footing the bill for the server which is hosting the new forums as well as the aging LORE site. I'm also responsible for starting up the official Layonara IRC services as well as maintaining the Layonara email services. While Layonara does not compensate me for these services; I am more than happy to provide them to this wonderful community of zany people who are enjoying the world I've helped to foster. A HUGE thanks must go out to our webhosting partner Netelligent located in Montreal Canada who has graciously set us up with a bandwidth package catered to our community needs.

Secondly, I'm the creator and general mastermind behind the LORE site itself, so let's talk a bit about what LORE really is "under the hood". LORE is a wiki engine that I wrote almost from scratch using Perl, Apache, and a slew of Perl libraries. The actual wiki engine is a fork and virtually a complete re-write of the CGI::Wiki Perl library that I've named it YAWT which stands for Yet Another Wiki Thing. One of the major features of YAWT is it's insane plugin capabilities. This plugin system has enabled me to write all of the nifty parts of LORE that everyone seems to be totally hooked on. For instance, the Bird Messaging, Character Pages, Deity Relations, Parchement Folders and so forth. Most of those features were written 100% by me with help from the venerable orth when it came to the NwN integration and database optimizations.

One major shortcomming of LORE is it's speed and performance. LORE itself was never really intended to run as a straight CGI application like it is, but rather it was designed for a mod_perl environment however I've never gotten around to implementing the actual support for mod_perl. You could say that greater priorities have taken over since LORE was made and sadly I'm in maintenance mode with it. For the curious, LORE will at some point in the next few weeks be fully functional again but with the added load of these wonderful new forums it's been a little trying to get all the different services to play nice with eachother.

One thing to note is that this server is still considered "unstable" until we get all these bugs and quirks ironed out. At which point we should see the months and months of uptime that LORE previously exhibited even though it's more sluggish than a slug at times.

Ok, so a lot of what I do here is all about programming for Layonara Studios... which seems kinda strange to some... "why does he not play anymore???" some may ask... well... let's look into my history with Layonara and what's brought me to where I'm at right now.

I started playing the character Elrond Anwamane with my friend and resident room-mate orth back when he started the absurdly popular cleric Plenarius Ashaley (yes, I'm allowed to poke fun at him while everyone else should show some respect hehe). Now, "Elrond" was created prior to the copyright rules being put in place and the name Elrond Anwamane is actually my middle and last name put through an elvish name generator so it's not like I'd just grabbed the Tolkien character's name out of uber-fanboy-ness. I'm really just lazy and so when pressed for a name, I used a program to give me one.

So, I played Elrond for a while, was part of the Red Caps when they first started up and at the time I coaxed my now ex-wife into playing in Layonara with orth and I. This proved to be a heartwrenchingly bad idea as hindsight shows me because only a few short months later my life fell apart with separation resulting in a full divorce. I won't go into the nasty details but suffice it to say; the in-game world of Layonara became polluted for me and I no longer had the mental strength to endure the memories made within the world. At this point I knew I would return someday as Layonara is just that incredible of a world but I also knew I needed time to heal and so believe it or not; I stipulated a part of my separation and divorce agreement that my ex-wife voluntarily leave the world of Layonara permenantly of her own free will and to her credit that's what she did. She made a nice post thanking everyone for the fun times and left the world.

During this time off I began to rediscover myself while rebuilding my life and my sanity. In this process I figured out something very important about myself. I don't like playing video games. I like programming them more than playing them. Yep. I'm crazy. I absolutely LOVE programming more than playing. With this renewed steam under my wings I eventually returned to Leanthar and basically flat out stated that I'll probably not play or GM within Layonara but instead wanted to code for the world exclusively. Now, I'm not certain that Leanthar had taken me seriously at the time and so that's when I dove right into developing LORE and within a month an a half I had the core engine created and fully functional and within the next five weeks LORE as we know it was implemented. At this point I believe Leanthar actually got the picture regarding my talents and my obsession with programming. This then brought me fully into the Layonara fold and the position I now hold within this organization. For this, I am grateful as Layonara has been a major driving factor for the happiness within my life.

If happiness is knowing what you want and wanting what you have, my role in Layonara has made me absolutely happy regardless of the ups and downs.

Ok, so you now know more of my history and background with respect to Layonara... what about me as a person? Well, some things worth mentioning are ...

I love to write poetry. For me, English is just as fun to program as Perl, Python, PHP, C, C++ etc etc and so by extension, Poetry has become a major outlet for my creativity and emotion. I've even been published in a few vanity-press type poetry books that were the direct result of wining a contest or two. I've always wanted to do some stand-up poetry recitals but have not found the time nor and interesting enough venue to do so. In time I'm sure I'll cross that of my "list of things to do before I perm-a-die" but for now I'm content to just write my poems and publish them on my personal wiki site which you can find here:

OneST8: Poetry By Kevin C Krinke

I'd like to draw everyone's attention to three poems I've written and while you can find them on my wiki, you won't find the background leading up to my writing those poems in there. Rather, I'm going to make this long post that much longer by elaborating a little about each of them.

The first, and most sacred to me is "Perceptions of Life". I'm not a religious person by any means though I have done my fair share of reading up on various religions from the Christian and Catholic to Taoism and Hinduism, from Islam to Bhuddism and other psuedo religions like the twisted Scientology. Each of the religions of Earth are interesting in their own right but I'm forced to take them all with a grain of salt as each has it's own pros and cons. While struggling to bridge the gap in my mind between science and faith I became inspired one night and under a full moon while meditating in my backyard I wrote the following poem in hopes of making sense of it all.

Perceptions of Life

Life is a state of energetic vibration.
Vibration is the resonance of being.
Being is the basis for thought.
Thought is a pattern of energy.
Energy is the ability to effect change.
Change is the nature of growth.
Growth is the essence of experience.
Experience is a memory of existence.
Existence is the perception of life.

While that poem does not touch upon the concept of a higher being who's sometimes referred to as "the creator" or what not, my answer to that is a simple acronym for the word GOD.

GOD

Grand
Omnipotent
Design

Now, jumping away from the ever-so-hotly-debated topic of religion and science... let's look at the other two poems I mentioned above.

The first I will bring up is one that I wrote because of someone else who inspired me to look for my soulmate. While her and I no longer communicate, I am truly grateful for all the time we shared together and it was on one of our camping trips that this poem was written.

Happiness

Happiness is the silent breaking of dawn,
When the moon recedes and darkness is gone.
Happiness is a flowing wisp of her hair,
When it catches a ray of the golden sun's glare.

Happiness is a long conversation with depth,
When the coffee is warm and words steal your breath.
Happiness is a sweet moment that's drawn,
When it takes some time yet does not feel long.

Happiness is that connection of eyes,
When the clouds break and open the skies.
Happiness is the smooth voice on your ear,
When the words spoken ring true and clear.

Happiness is sharing the depths of the mind,
When the emotion is strong yet pleasantly kind.
Happiness is excitement enthralled,
When the world seems to have slowly stalled.

Happiness is found in every glorious day,
When nothing can take nature's beauty away.
Happiness is the silent breaking of dawn,
When the moon recedes and darkness is gone.

Now, the structure and general format of that poem is rather strict and stems from a previous poem I wrote called Sadness. In fact, Happiness is my answer to the heart-wrentching emotion I poured into Sadness.

Shortly after separating from my ex-wife, there were a few deaths in the family starting with my Godfather's. He was a good man, a "man's man" if you will. Such a rock solid and invariably honest fellow. I truly cherish every memory I have with him. He had passed away suddenly one night from a heart attack. All I can say is that he led a long life, was able to know his grand children and his passing was a quick and relatively painless one. For that I am greatful.

The next death in the family was the one that inspired Sadness within me. It was my own Father's passing. I'd found out only a few months before that he had advanced limphoma cancer and that it had spread throughout his body. There was little hope but he started the treatements and so forth. Witnessing his slow and brutal decline while I myself was going through my own personal depression was intense to say the least. Two weeks before his passing, I had to let out all the pain somehow and so I poured my heart into some words and the following poem is the result. Literally, these are the words that came out of me on the first try... I didn't even know what I was doing until the poem had been written out and lay there in front of me. I ended up finding the courage to read that poem during his funeral service. Surprisingly, the congregation truly did appreciate the words even though I'd ripped a hole in everyone's heart that was listening.

For those with a weak heart, please stop reading. You have been fore-warned.

Sadness

Sadness is when you know someone dear will die,
When you can see it in their face and in their eye.
Sadness is when you can see their pride obstruct,
When you can see that they're about to self-destruct.

Sadness is when you can see the frailty of their day,
When you can see it in their actions; in every way.
Sadness is when you know their every step is in pain,
When you can see that there is no way they can remain.

Sadness is when too many emotions become dumbfounded,
When you yourself feel the weights of life compounded.
Sadness is when you have a defined lack of choice,
When you can hear death creeping though someone's voice.

Sadness is when you know in a few moments they'll fail,
When you know this person's soul will soon set sail.
Sadness is when they deny their own mortality,
When you know there will be one more fatality.

Sadness is when you see their remaining time cut short,
When you know the treatments are of the horrible sort.
Sadness is when you know someone dear will die,
When you can see it in their face and in their eye.

For those that have made it this far in my introduction turned mini auto-biography. I appreciate it and sincerely thank you for your time.

I hope all this helps you to somehow understand me better.

Sincerely,
One State of my mind,
One State of mankind.

PS: If people think this is too depressing of a posting, I'll remove the Sadness section. Just let me know and I'll edit it out.

63

Introduce Yourself / wuts happenin?

« on: March 12, 2007, 09:18:42 am »

ey, my name is Skyy (19) and i go to Central Washington University. I lvoe doing pretty much jsut about everything, been on Layo for a little of three months now i think? ya pretty sure, three months and little. i got a main char named Tath Zo'layum, as well as a couple alts, Jearick R H'gar and Caim Zyvorn.

um... i have a Myspace, feel free to add me if you want www.myspace.com/ryno2112 i love making new friends and getting along with mostly everyone. some big passions i have are creativity, snow boarding, and Music.

I love creativity in a raw and prue form, not what it has been concieved to be in mondern times as just randomness. Things should be classy in one way or another, it should all fit in even an obscure way, or it should all cllide in a way that makes sence. ep catchign myself before i ramble heh. but ya go Creativity!

Snow boarding has been in my life for ten years now, though the amount of time doesn't really matter to me. one thign i lvoe about Snow boarding is how it requries you to be in the now, cuz if your not you'll reck yourself =P. i also liek it cuz it's one thing that i actually excell in, cuz i put alot of time and effort (not to mention money =P) into it.

Though the other two are important Nothing to me is mroe important than Music. I alsoways got music around me, WHen i'm playing Layo i'm listening to music, when i have a test in a class i listen to music while i take the test, shor twlaks long walks got my music. doesn't matter. silence sux, and Music is the thing to fill the void it creates =D

and ya that's me pretty much wanna learn mroe feel free to sne dme a Tell ig, hit me up on MSN platinum_sky@hotmail.com (ya i know lame but i was like 12 lol), aim Rynosnoborder  or ad me on Myspace =D.

ciao for now!