Frankly I wish more coders were properly compensated. I've seen a bounty system used by some MUD developers, that is pretty neat. I wonder what it might look like with mainstream development support and people making a paycheck on the hobby in, say, three or five years.

@magee101 It was super important to me that people new to the hobby and even just new to the game were helped and made to feel welcome. ❤ I'm glad that fond memories were made there.

@coin said in Constructing a FAQ (and what ground to cover):

@auspice said in Constructing a FAQ (and what ground to cover):

@fortydeuce said in Constructing a FAQ (and what ground to cover):

Never tried that, @Bobotron. I just know Duck installs on a Chromebook as a discrete app, so you have a window that feels like a full program, even though it isn't -- I'd find it weird to MUSH from even a standalone browser window with a tab and what have you, but Duck doesn't have that feeling.

Duck does install on Chrome itself, FYI. I've done this to help people troubleshoot Duck on various MU*s.

So you can use Duck on whatever OS you want. 🙂

Duck has issues with some ports and not others, or maybe my job is weird with it, I have no idea. Sometimes DuckClient works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it works with one game and not another. It's really confusing, lol.

Yeah, it's a finicky beast. I've encountered times when it will be doing something on a game (I think one time someone couldn't send semi-colons of all things) and I can't even reproduce the issue to try to help the person in question, even after duplicating all their settings.

@kay It was an enchanting little game, and very unique. In a weird way, I wish it had been around later--I think Present-Me would appreciate it more than Past-Me. I was a teenager then and it was only my second game.

Sadly, I remember it having typical Small Game problems. A lot of initial enthusiasm followed by just not enough players, and I have the vague memory there were a lot of time zone issues with the ones that remained. I remember having a really difficult time finding RP there a lot of the time. Ultimately, I think there were more people who loved the idea of it more than could commit to M* style play, which is why they tried other forms of RP after closing the game.

I was very sad when it closed. I thought there were a lot of stories left to be told and the mysteries had barely been scratched. I can't remember the specifics but seem to remember there were a bunch of mysterious little things scattered around the grid that I really wanted to know about! When the closure was announced, a friend of mine there excitedly told me about the Greco-Roman fantasy game with the neat code she'd found, I told her it didn't sound like my thing but let her drag there because I didn't have any other games at the time and somehow she drifted off and I ended up playing Firan for nearly a decade, much to my dismay now.

It would have closed (or the closure announced, rather; I remember the game itself stayed up, empty, for nearly a year after) in December 1999, because that was when I started on Firan. It ran for a couple of years, so it was definitely a late 90s game.

(On the off chance there are any other Pod players lurking about, I was Emilia Penrose.)

Most games have always handwaved that stuff. And done things like 'women can fly gold, brown, blue, or green,' 'men can fly bronze, brown, blue, or green' and 'you can be whatever sexuality you want' (well, up until the 2010's, some did still press that metallics had to be straight....).

It just made sense really. Dragons have their own broad, wide range of personality. There's no reason to force sexuality alongside 'em ffs.

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I agree, and disagree, with the amount of work. I think you're front loading your work with something like this.

Costs: Additional up front work of writing the scenarios, designing the flows, tracking the results of the scenarios and communicating

Pros: Instead of needing to 'run things' 3 times a week, you may have one day a week of 'work' in doing the above.

For myself, I think the trade-off isn't the worst ever.

We might need to come to MSB's infamous agree-to-disagree state here. 🙂

Generally speaking it's far harder and more labor-intensive to communicate with and coordinate STs than to run scenes yourself. It simply is - there are all kinds of efficiencies which as staff you can develop over time when you're experienced at running plot, starting with:

simply knowing the rules (in many cases being the one who made them in the first place) understanding the combat system (many perspective STs I've spoken to have mentioned this as the reason they want to but don't) having the players' respect (fewer people try to go over your head to 'make sure you're right about this ruling') finding out exactly what happened (the log might not show incorrect rolls or use of mechanics, misleading pages, etc), and of course dealing with actually malevolent players which on their own can send you spinning your wheels for a long time.

I think the key to all of this is getting that early momentum going. Once you have it things become so much simpler; engaged players whose characters are already interested and have a stake in things will ask you questions, point out ways to enrich your plots, can easily run something on the spot for you if you ask them since OOC they already know a lot about the situation, etc. When you don't need to chase them down but they are coming to you then you got'em - but the first few weeks, sometimes months, require a lot of constant vigilance and grooming to the point of micromanagement.

Most games don't have the staff who can do that. It's easy to spot, too, when there's a surge of activity early and then the momentum dies down as people sit on their thumbs. In my opinion the first month after opening is critical for a MUSH; it's too easy to get the kiss of death from a surge of characters getting created followed by nothing at all; once the surge is spent if there's nothing else going on... well, things get tougher from then on.

@skew said in Welcome to Chontio! A Star Wars MUSH:

Web-portal is down this morning. Being worked on!

If anyone is in a dire need of their Tuesday morning RP, you can connect to the game via ip: 209.97.149.128 port 3268.

Oh, we're back. That was fast.

I spent some time tonight both asking for information and asking for where the information is.

Sometimes it’s about the information, sometimes it’s about the context, and sometimes it’s about being able to jump off the information to find more.

@arkandel I think this idea is neat, but it takes a lot of thought/time/mental energy to participate in,and right now I don't have it to spare. (But I hate when I have a neat idea and it doesn't get traction, so I'm sorry about that!)

@arkandel said in Ideal Scene Length?:

But every time you log in I unload a shitload of stuff that I've been doing, PrPs I took part in, NPCs my character encountered so that building a foundation is genuinely complicated. Every scene can feel like it's catching up to something instead of building up toward something.

If every time I RP with you, you are just dumping a lot of things that you are doing into the scene. Well, I am going to quickly stop RPing with you, because that sounds boring. There's some amount of 'catching up' that should be done in a scene, for sure. People share their lives. But you don't sit down with a friend or acquaintance and just start listing everything that has happened to you in the last two weeks when you meet up with them. It's an ebb and flow. I might go 'hey, did you know I started going to the gym? Yeah, I'm really enjoying the rowing machine. I am thinking about actually getting into kayaking.' and then my friend might be like, 'Shit, I love kayaking! I own my own. Do you wanna make a plan to go out on the river with me next week?'

Etc etc. You get the picture. So I get where you are coming from, but I also just-- have never had that problem. #MoreMoneyNoProblems

@arkandel You might consider setting up a wikidot wiki for it. Free, less resource requirements, you can allow membership easy for gamerunners to add their own games, and you can transfer ownership more easily if MSB ever needs to switch hosts or something.

@stabeest Yeah that has to be one of the hardest parts of the WoW RP-scene, getting into it without feeling like you are missing out on most of what is going on as it isn't so well documented like MU RP is. I got lucky when I first started and was able to get into a newly formed guild with a fresh storyline. It still had its challenges but from there I was able to sort of work my way into things. Horde-side RP has been my favorite, though.

Have to agree here. To folks of a certain age who grew up with text 'choose your own adventure' style games and similar, sure, even if it's still probably a bit of a stretch.

For younger folks, who have always had non-text graphics as an available part of the experience? It's going to feel like a bait and switch, most likely. Whatever the technical definition, this is pretty key. What we do is not what the majority is going to be thinking of when they think of video games. Would they consider it one? Maybe. But it's not what they're going to picture, and it's going to be as much of a stretch for them as envisioning something like the Wii as a real, actual thing you'd have in your house was for us in the days we feared the grue.

@wizz said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

Arx aside, we've had some great discussions here......... ere these many years gone

Discussion here would be great if it weren't for everyone involved.

@tat

I have no idea.

That's not helpful, I know, but page after page I skimmed while at work said you could.

@pandora Ohhh, that one is shiny.

@arkandel said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

Take this somewhat harmless example. I'm in a scene with you and Gany. My character says something confrontational IC and yours comes with a great snappy comeback... then Gany says, OOC, "hahah, she put you in your place Arkandel!". The moment that happens it ruins a lot of that scene for me, as it's reframed from an IC encounter we can all enjoy into an OOC zero-sum game where one person can emerge as the winner as long as the other loses.

I usually don't take that kind of commentary badly if I know the player's just excitable, or it's someone I know who just thinks that stuff is funny, which is usually the case that I personally have found. Especially if they bag on themselves when you get them good, too. Same with variations of, 'Zing!' 'Oh snap!' 'Wreckd!' 'RIP' etc. As they just come off as someone LOLing at the scene, not at me personally.

If it's some rando with passive-aggressive issues, though, that's annoying.

Sort of in the same vein, metaposed insults in a non-verbal pose are annoying, too.

@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

To the original-ish point though, boundary setting is not so much about what you do TO or FOR other people. It's more deciding in advance how YOU will react, when someone's behavior starts to feel violating to you, before it gets to the point of being an actual violation..
[...]
Boundaries just are not magical things. I think they're most valuable for keeping your choices and your own behavior on the up and up.

I think this is really key. Boundaries are there so you know how much bullshit you are willing to tolerate before you step back (and then decide on what course of action you will take).

Rarely will an abuser go 'Oh right right sorry!' As they are used to pushing too far. They're an adult, they already know better.

@kumakun said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

Reviving this thread again! Mwa!
For my JS powered codebase, I think I'm pretty decided that I want to use FATE as my first 'example' plug and play system. I'm curious what about FATE works well on a MU* and what causes hangups. I've heard that FATE tends to be very staff heavy. What makes it that way?

I can see the FP economy in a scene suffering some without someone being assigned to dole out compels, etc - or having to come up with a system to allow characters to offer each other a compelling from the scene pool.

Finding another small thread for FATE, I see that the Fate Point economy is a hangup in a persistent world setting - and some of the suggestions were to either lessen their impact or customize the refresh rules. I could see a time-based refresh, but the ability to trade back and forth with compels during scenes, which could lead to interesting RP.