Of course I was making wild claims, a large part of moderation is "is this bad for the site? I'll know when I see it".

Basically, I felt in the lose-lose situation of either hardening our rules, possibly creating inconveniences to other users, or lose to random guy #19456983 on the Internet.

Neither option was good.

Letting random guy who is a troll win the argument / have the last say is the good option.

@Zachiel well, I can see the cost of the first option, but what cost, other than hurt pride, for second point?

Trolls win when you engage, and win even harder when you stoop to or below their level.

The phrase "don't feed the troll" is relevant here. If you don't give them what they want, they starve.

That's their point, yeah.

@RollingFeles hurt pride is hurt pride, and I don't really care much about what he feels. What I feel counts more.

How's that work out?

Is your pride hurt even more for engaging like that?

@Zachiel I understand that. But fighting further with this will cost you even more. Like you can end this with few scratches on your palm or you can delve deeper and got a broken arm. Arm here is your pride.

I think the tension of "don't do the wrong thing. Conform to expectations. Keep your rage in" is just harder to stand than the "don't give him what he wants". If I can't beat him at his game, at least I will metaphorically give him a beating.

Sometimes not giving what he wants is a hardest beating you can give him.

The winning move is to not play.

You don't beat a troll by trolling or aggressing back. You doing that is exactly what they want.

They are trying to piss you off, because they want the reaction it gets them. So instead of taking it personally, take it as them being an immature brat throwing out whatever words they think will sucker you into giving them that.

They want to be beaten harder? So be it. As long as I'm not seeing their smirking smug, I'm quite fine. Until I become an unwelcome element in the community, of course, but that's bound to happen anyway sooner or later. It has always been so.

@Zachiel Yeah, don't do that. :/

Hey @nitsua60! Guess what! First DW PCs blood are spilled by me :) No Last Breath yet, but that was fun.

You make things worse that way. For yourself and everybody. I will flag you, and you will become a problem if you want to flip out at every troll.

@doppelgreener the best way to not make this happen is to keep them out of my radar

@Zachiel Mate, that's on you.

That's way easier when you identify someone as troll at first.

@doppelgreener [ghost of trolls past] "I'm not your mate.... OoooOooOooOOoOhhhhhh.

=D

When you still think they're just not understanding how you're trying to help...

@nitsua60 hey there

@Shalvenay Hiya. Ice-bound?

@nitsua60 not yet.

in a bit of a state of limbo atm.

@RollingFeles Glad to hear it! Is this still the first session you're talking about, or have you run a second?

@Zachiel wanna feel better and oursmart them? Play their game then. But think in their terms. No arguments and no agro. Think meta. Trolls aim at default behaviour. They show you your imperfections. Accept that. No one is perfect. Play that style. You won't look like a cool guy, who scares them, but you will spoil their fun and they will lose. But this way demands to ignore what is said. You must view this conversation as tactical battle. Like chess.

@Zachiel I'm working on a meta on the topic right now. I hope you'll give some feedback/a different perspective.

But it must be done very carefully.

I'm both hands with "Not to play with them" option.

@nitsua60 best if I keep away from it

@nitsua60 only the first one.

@RollingFeles That's what I was doing last night. I had a duty shift where I literally just had to sit in my office in case a call came in. I thought I might organize some papers, but then thought "hmm... a troll in the stack. I bet myself a cookie I can out-patient/-nice him."

@RollingFeles urgh. I'm the worst at chess. XD

@Zachiel In that scenario, one needs to have a confident view of their own behaviour. Are you acting constructively within the rules of the site? Good, then some newbie telling you otherwise can be soundly ignored as either (benevolently) misguided and misunderstanding, or (malevolently) a troll who wants a rise out of you. Either scenario benefits from continuing to behave as if they're the benevolent case, or disengaging and letting other people take care of it.

I felt like I was walking a tough line, because part of the challenge is not to use comments/meta/chat for anything other than their proper purpose. =)

We understand your behaviour will be positive if you're acting positively.

@nitsua60 yeah! I love the reactions of the inexperienced troll when I say something: "Okay. I guess you're right and I'm wrong. What now?"

Relevant is the thing SSD describes: if we all behave constructively, those who are clearly not trying to be constructive either out themselves in the act, or end up being constructive because it's the only way forward:

But experienced ones will play a troll chess for a long time and you may be force to leave them or lose to them.

Talking about something different: can anyone see if there's any discussion on how darkness works in D&D 4e?

@RollingFeles For me an important bit-flip was to keep reminding myself "it's not a 'respond' button, it's a 'comment' button. And 'comment' has a very specific meaning around here."

@Zachiel there's 13 D&D 4e questions that mention "darkness"

@nitsua60 well, you played like a pro! :) It's all about controlling yourself.

@RollingFeles Aw, shucks. =)

@doppelgreener oooh, is:question

@RollingFeles I get lots of RL practice. It's been, like, months since I yelled at a 4 year-old for doing perfectly-normal four year-old things. (In other news: nitsua60's a horrible dad.)

@Zachiel click that little "Advanced Search Tips" link at the top of the right hand sidebar if you haven't done so before.

(fyi, only diamond moderators can use the deleted:yes filter)

@nitsua60 I'm reading parenting.se sometimes. I love parent's stories :)

@doppelgreener Is it that only they can use it, or that only they will see deleted posts other than their own when using it?

Speaking of practice, I need more DW GM experience. My session wasn't dangerous enough, was too long for single encounter and wasn't intense. I was a bit lost when we came up with PCs goal and their current situation and couldn't came up with something really fun.

@RollingFeles That may be the next stack I take a stab at. I think WB.SE and I have to acknowledge that our long-term separation redounds to everyone's benefit =)

But I feel I can and will do better. Even with this issues all players said that they enjoyed it and want to continue.

@nitsua60 I'm just a lurker and upvoter there. What was a reason for your separation?

@nitsua60 oh hey, you can use it for your own stuff. didn't actually know that. but yeah only they can see other peoples' posts with it, because there can be super sensitive stuff in there.

I really love 100 rep bonus at stacks. I can join other stacks and upvote awesome answers and questions.

@RollingFeles I get very frustrated at the (community) moderation around there.

Thirty-comment chains/discussions/short-answer lists seem to be the norm around there, rather than the eyesore I find them to be.

@RollingFeles Here's the full scoop.

@RollingFeles That's because we feed the trolls with love =)

@nitsua60 I see. Still looks like diamonds acknowledge the problem and ready to work with this. Sounds good to me.

@nitsua60 which is like feeding chocolate to dogs; they can't handle it and enough love is lethally toxic.

@doppelgreener Care Bears FTW =)

(disclaimer: goku is probably not actually a troll, but most appropriate image i could find)

@RollingFeles You may find it helpful to review the rules, particularly around what kinds of moves the DM can make, and what triggers them

@nitsua60 Would you, by any chance, have played Undertale?

hey there @ObliviousSage @CTWind and @JoelHarmon

howdy

what's up?

Morning!

hey @Shalvenay

any interesting ice structures yet?

A storm I was once in had a cool effect on an evergreen tree; each individual needle had a thick coating of ice (1-2 cm)

@JoelHarmon not yet. it looks like the brunt of the storm is coming in tonight. so far, I'm actually leaning towards turning up for session one.

@JoelHarmon Nope. Sorry. Though I was thinking about you a while ago. Running now, but I'll ping you later.

uh, sure?

also, that reminds me that I need to hit the gym today

Ice? As in, water outdoors getting cold enough to freeze solid? That's a thing that can happen?

sure is

@ObliviousSage ...are you from the tropics?

Houston

It was 80 degrees on Christmas day.

you guys occasionally get snow there, don't you?

Last time I recall getting snow was about 10 years ago. We got about half an inch. Everyone freaked out.

Last year we got freezing rain from the worst of those lake effect cold fronts. The city basically shut down.

I recall hearing that Eskimos have 50+ words for different types of snow, then hearing that number was over inflated because they use a constructed language where they append adjectives to nouns to create new 'words', the same way German does

@ObliviousSage yeah. be glad you aren't in Dodge City -- they're slated to get 3/4" of ice

Anything below 50F is unacceptably cold. Thankfully our winter temperature stays in the 60s and 70s except when cold fronts come through.

Meanwhile, when I was in college in Vermont, I adapted to the point of wearing shorts and a tshirt while it was snowing. :-P

I will never undestand this whole Fahrenheit business

Fahrenheit corresponds very well to "we'll call the warmest weather in Europe 100, and the coldest 0"

so, on a scale of 0 to 100, how warm is it outside?

0

technically -2

@nitsua60 Great metapost!

@JoelHarmon -18℃? So that's kind of all of Europe including quite a bit North and East, but that may be helpful when I wonder again in the future.

@Baskakov_Dmitriy You do know that you're asking three questions in one, right?

Also: Mostof the teacher's were just plain old vampires that spend yeas in thinking of & craeting a power

And in all my reading of vampire books & fluff, I think I can think of two combination disciplines, where some detail was mentionned about the origins

ANd in one of those cases, the originalcreator was lost to the ages

For me, the question is very opinionbased

evening chps/chapettes

@Ahriman What you said here doesn't look like opinion-based.

There's very little description about the "teacher" part

you have combo disciplines

and someahve hints towards there origins

WHy not just share what you said as an answer?

the closestyou will cometoa "teacher", is a character described in a clanbook/guide to... that has a combo discipline

at least, I can't remember any teacher form the mdoern era clan novels

compiling evidence from my books

Why is one supposed to get them anyway?

If I allow PCs to recreate the Disciplines, it would break the logic of the world a bit.

If I don't, it's unlikely that they will ever encounter anyone who has such a knowledge.

@Ahriman Anyway, what you have described might make a good answer.

please note that combination disciplines, in third edition, rarely make sense

in the sense that, from a powerplay point a view, having a higher generation (and thus a higher discipline level) has more advantages then creating a combination discipline

The vast majority of the combination disciplines require disciplines below level 5

Requiem gives more reasons to have combination disciplines, becaseu you might forget sstuff that's at level 6 or 7 due to torpor

which is, generally not a problem for combination disciplines

Requiem has, compared to Masquerade, a buttload of combos

@Anaphory Games which are not what you describe include Awaiting the End, Drifting Through Space, Atop a Lonely Tower, and A Penny For My Thoughts.

@Ahriman *lower Generation, higher Discipline level

By the way

I spent some time reading other Stacks recently

Gee, nitsua, thumb-typo much? ( <-- @doppelgreener)

After the impression RPG.SE has made, with it's very high standards, with almost no opinion-based questions allowed now, in 2017, etc., other Stacks may seem so bad

The most upvoted questions are often those that would definitely be redirected to a forum if asked here

Russian Stack in English is OK and has a good community. Russian Stack in Russian is so bad that I my first impression was that it just made it from Area 51.

And I was thinking if it's even needed, since you may ask in Russian on the Russian Stack in English

@Baskakov_Dmitriy our group developed teh tendency to talk of higher generation as having a lwoer number

very confusing for newbs

That "lower-higher" thing is always confusing for VtM newbies the first moment they read rules

In Russia we have a problem of some players only reading the rules for LARP and never playing tabletop before

They really think that 14th Generation is better than 7th

Some understand that 7th is better, but call 7th higher then

Etc

And sometimes the one who writes rules for LARP forgets to mention the Generation mechanic

(WHich is better, which is lower)

And it leads to a lot of confusion and unwanted "cheating"

@doppelgreener the point I was (obliquely, I now recognize) trying to emphasize most was "it doesn't matter if you think it's a troll or not, just do your usual thing and it'll work no matter the intentions of OP."

@nitsua60 "Judge by results, not intentions"

@Baskakov_Dmitriy I psoted something

poke me if soemthing is unclear

@Ahriman ty

also @nitsua60 what is tgat?

@Ahriman "tgat" is what my "tgumb" says when I'm on mobile trying to say "that".

=)

Also, there's an s/ad/as in there, too.

hihi

TGAT is the official abbreviation of the Wizard of Oz's honorific.

I try to avoid lenghty aswersbecause of that

The Great ...

> I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you and why do you seek me?

(The "Great and Powerful" description is mentioned by others in the novel, but is not his proper title until the film.)

Read the book

liked Wicked more

I found Wicked didactic and tedious to the point that I put it down partway through, while Baum's novels are didactic and insane and just get moreso as the series goes forward.

series?

I'm deeply disappointed in Emerald City for being such a paint-by-numbers gritty reboot instead of actually embracing the horrific insanity of the source material. (I guess part of my problem with Wicked is that it's trying to punch up material that can't be punched any upper--Oz was always a cynical no-holds-barred social and political satire with a horribly dim opinion of... everyone.)

I thouth it was one book?

Baum wrote fourteen books in the Land of Oz.

Wicked was interesting primarily in how it managed to recast the "good" and "bad" guys from Baum's work with almost no changes to Baum's plotline. I don't think it would be good enough to stand on its own.

I've only read about half of them, but whoo are they warped. Even the first novel had to get an aggressive facelift for the film, and I wouldn't be surprised if the second one wasn't an inspiration for Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

[admits to having only read the first one]

The Land of Oz is a saccharine hellscape, saved only by the fact that hardly anyone who lives there notices.

(Which, again, biting satire.)

@nitsua60 I'm around now if you have a question; otherwise it'll probably end up having to wait until after Sherlock airs tonight (I promised my wife I'd watch with her)

@ObliviousSage Yeah, it's more a reaction to the cleaned-up film, I guess.

@BESW True, I don't think I've read any of the actual books.

The film is definitely the source of the pop culture gestalt understanding of the franchise.