litphoria

It's a confusing mess of overlapping categories. Almost every character I personally make will easily fit into multiple and it doesn't actually tell anyone anything.

I know some people want it to be able to find angels and demons, but that has to have a better solution than the current state of supernatural nature.

I'm not okay with the idea of deleting Supernatural Nature before we find viable replacements for what it expresses.

Angelic/demonic could probably go with alignment

Angelic/demonic nature has no correlation to alignment. See: good demons, warlocks (demonic power), Lucifer (literally an angel).

I don't know why we need technological; there's robotic for skin that's supposed to cover making cat-bots and stuff, and an option for cyborg implants under the body mod group.

Mass effect. Borderlands's Technomancer. One can have technological powers without necessarily being a robot or having cyborg implants. Samus is a high tech supersoldier but canonically (I think) has no implants at all.

Magic doesn't tell me anything, neither does superhuman, neither will the new proposed category of psionic.

It tells you they're magical, which is a great thing to indicate acceptance of or dislike of. It's in my Dislike list for Samus because I have no interest in exploring magical scenarios with her. I could dig Psionic on the other hand, since it jives OK with scifi.

Alien is already a species, but it's repeated here, probably for alien dogs? There's got to be a better way to deal with something like that, it was only finaggled into supernatural nature with the reasoning that "it's as supernatural as technology."

To both points: probably. I've been increasingly thinking that the only-one-option-ever thing is hampering us in a lot of expressiveness. Heck, free tagging like on -booru sites has a lot of desirable features we could apply to profiles but don't.

Magic, superhuman, and psionic may as well be traits of their own; they cover a lot, none of which I can search and quite a bit of which would be useful to search. Like if I wanted to find a super strong berserker warrior, or a healer. Right now I can't do either of those because the categories they fall under are so general.

There was a discussion on a Magic trait. Apparently it's gone. The general direction was it wouldn't work very well because you can chop and divide magic in an enormous and arbitrary number of ways, with lots of overlap or competing generality vs specificity between the different ways. That's not conducive to making same categories for it.

There's no way that multiselcting this trait would solve those problems, so while it might be nice, there are still problems with the categories themselves, like that they were never updated to match the new trait anyway.

I dunno, it'd be helpful for some problems (techno-wizards can now be technological and magical and maybe psionic if they so need).

Why can't magic be split up? People keep saying that there are too many, but are there really too many useful search parameters in there? Damaging, debuffing, buffing, healing, and transportation covers almost everything I can think of that someone might legitimately want to search for use in RP scenarios that aren't better covered by interests. Or, potentially more atomic things could be interests and it'd do away with a too-vague category altogether. Or all of the above. But as it is, it's too vague to be useful unless you specifically want to avoid any type of possibility of magic ever, anywhere. So yay for you and people like you, I suppose. People like me still can't tell a good wizard from a good healer, or an evil mage from an evil healer.

There's loads of other ways to dice it up as well: Elementalism (and then more specifically Pyromancer and so on for specific elements), Bending (as in Avatar, and its specific elements, depicted far differently to regular fantasy elemental magic), Necromancy, Divining / Seeing, Illusionism or Mesmerism, Summoning, Conjuring, Potion-making, Alchemy, Dark/Light/Red/Blue/Green Wizardry (from Final Fantasy), Druidism or Shamanism, Divine/Cleric/Paladin/whatever, Lovecraftian magic, Witch Doctor stuff. Then you get the less explicit general magical hoohah that Gandalf, Saruman, and the Elves do, and that the wizards and witches of Ghibli get up to.

The slices you chose seem to be pretty sensible in a game context where you pick one of those roles, but these fit narrative contexts. These have overlap because different lore is slicing things up differently, and some of these names mean different things in different lores — Necromancy has all the healing and resurrection spells in AD&D and D&D 5e, that's the healing magic!

We also need multiselect to make sense of this. A prototypical Cleric or White Mage would have to pick between buffing and healing in your paradigm. If we go with the stuff above, the Lovecraftian alchemist & illusionist misses out on people looking out for the one of those three things they didn't pick.

People mentioned things like illusions and teleportation and transmutation and blah blah blah, niche niche niche, but most of those things should be interests, not traits or categories. That's where things that specifically actionable go, after all. Maybe all of that particular category is better off under interests and shouldn't be a trait or category at all?

(...) I am really not familiar with borderlands, but afaik, a technomancer was someone with magical control over technology. Or the use of technology so advanced that it seems like magic. So I guess it depends on which one any particular character falls under. Still, the former is the use of magic to control tech. The latter is the use of technology. Both are interests, both are actionable things.

Sure! Maybe we should express brands of magic in interests.

It's the same with technological. Someone interested in gun battles or hacking isn't necessarily interested in mechs and powersuits, but all those are thrown together in a category when they're specific items or actions that fit the bill for belonging in the interest list. Being a cyborg or robot is a far cry different from using an exo-skeleton.

That's pretty fair.

What you need to understand is that not everything will be searchable. Some things will be broad, others more specific. Too broad means it's not useful, too specific means it clutters the UI (and potentially isn't useful to many people either).

Currently this field as I view it is basically a "spirit" or "archetype" in the supernatural world. So if it's a magical character, you put magic into it. If it's a superhero, superhuman. Etc. It doesn't need to be specific, that's all in the detail box. What it also allows is to define settings, like Samus said. If magic shouldn't be a thing - put magic in dislike. If there's no technology, do the same with that. Opposite also works. Yeah, exosuits are not the same as cyborgs and magic wands are not the same as D&D wizards. But it's okay. The traits do the job of limiting the number of profiles you need to look through to find a particular one, and that's exactly why we should not delete them. They do their job just fine.

And I can't stress enough that yeah, adding multiple things into one category would really help things be a lot more flexible.

Basically, I'd like to hear good alternatives to this system before we remove it. "Damaging, debuffing, buffing, healing, and transportation" is may be good for something like D&D magicians, but for Harry Potter kind of magicians, Avatar bending, probably lots of other things, it's not really a good way of representing it, ESPECIALLY if it's only one thing per trait.

Though I already picture a bus driver with "transportation" set in it :p

So if this is deleted, what is proposed it is replaced with? There's a lot this trait covers that we would need to be covered still.

Hm. I'm not sure we can replace these traits with a buttload of interests. On the other hand, a lot of interests seems like the most scalable? solution to having tons and tons and tons of kind of magic. It could all just be shuffled under a magic interest category for lay people, and allow you to drill into specifics as you see fit. Also, having any of them set to giving would indicate that character is capable of performing that magic.

A thought also occurs that it being more granular could be helpful for people looking for players outside of a fetish-y context. I imagine someone somewhere would want to be able to find, e.g, an evil necromancer as separate from e.g a resolute priest without having to refer to obtuse traits like morality.

But, this is definitely not an area I have much expertise in.

The problem is that supernatural nature has two purposes. It can express the inner nature of a character or the supernatural ability. That's why it's confusing. The combination of human and demon could be a humanoid demon or a human with demonic power.

Okay, warning, I'm really tired and sleepy, so I didn't take my time to fully read the giant wall of text. I shall do so later, for now I'll post what immediate thoughts that I have. Sorry if I make a mistake due to not reading the post fully, feel free to correct it.

So why can’t this trait be useful only to specific groups?

It can be, just not at the cost of omitting things that might be useful for others. Examples that you've provided are only additional content that's potentially hidden, in this case you want to drop a whole bunch of things without decent replacement.

The traits do the job of limiting the number of profiles you need to look through to find a particular one

I disagree. <..>

It's... really not a matter of opinion. A >= (A and B). So if you search for male characters and male demonic characters (insert any category you say is useless), the latter will always be the same size or less, therefore limiting the search.

Now. Traits are not meant to identify the character exactly. It's just not possible, we'd need infinite amounts of traits and categories to allow for that functionality. Traits are exactly for limiting the search, and practically any trait will do that, at least the ones we're discussing here. And that means they do the job. It doesn't matter if multiple different things end up under one trait as long as it makes sense to search them under that trait. Of course, traits could get too crowded, be too broad, so we could split them up, create additional interests or traits, etc. However, you needn't lose anything in the process.

I mean, really, do you think vampire category is useless because it doesn't allow you to search for what exactly, in what quantities and under what circumstances exactly it is that that particular kind of vampire drinks? It's way too specific to search for, and the place for it is in the description box.

(there’s no helping that guy that chose “unguligrade” for a normal human with normal feet without reading, he’ll never read the descriptions, we can’t make him).

There is. We could use a fourth foot type "human" for all chars with human feet or use self-explanatory names which work without reading the descriptions. Both was discussed, it's another topic though.

The trait supernatural-nature is used to contain species which have no specific physical shape. Demons, gods, vampires, shape-shifters, extra-terrestials, robots, monsters. While species which have a specific shape are under "species". The idea is, that you can combine them. Cat-robot or wolf-demon. Or in my case: demihuman-demon. The Angel is probably wrong at supernatural-nature and would fit better at species like the dragon.

The attributes of a vampire are therefor probably not physical attributes but things like immortality, thirst for blood, being a creepy creature of the night.

It's... really not a matter of opinion. A >= (A and B). So if you search for male characters and male demonic characters (insert any category you say is useless), the latter will always be the same size or less, therefore limiting the search.

Its the category though which is always useful not the trait. I could delete supernatual-nature and move "demon" to "species". Then I could define a succubus by species:demon and body-type:human and find it by searching for this. Now I need species:demi-human and supernatural-nature:demonic and searching for these could show chars which are not demons and some demons have maybe chosen "magical" or "shape-shifter" and don't show up.

We decline deleting this trait given its usefulness.

If anyone has further issues to bring up - such as what we can do with this trait instead of deleting it outright, if anything needs to be done - please do bring it up as new feedback.