Mmm, at the risk of re-awakening this... I don't look at MSB very often, so I didn't see this thread before; but from the specific details given on here, especially in certain of the earliest posts, I'm 98% sure this is the person who afflicted us a few years ago on Game of Bones. Made ridiculous overblown male concepts that smashed together various extravagant and incompatible bits of theme, broke the spirit of that very laissez-faire MU*'s minimal rules, then the minute he was gently asked if he could maybe not do that so much, please, he vandalised the game wiki and ran away issuing a stream of personal threats based on his vaunted IT skills.

Apparently he just recurs every so often. Blah.

My preference in general is for competing factions within a larger war. I generally prefer the politics to be Character vs Character and the combat to be Character vs Environment. I think that this generally means that there are fewer CvC deaths, which tend to be the ones that cause the most disgruntlement and calls of favoritism (you’re going to get disgruntlement and calls of favoritism even if the characters are just competing over a seat on a bench).

I don't like to show my soft underbelly to you fucking fuckers, but thank you for this. 🙂

And thank you to all the players who hang out, play, chat, whatever. Your friends appreciate you!

@Chet said in Wolfenstein MUSH?:

Well, if we have horror, sci-fi, and diesel, that could be a troll heavy environment.

Perhaps, we will need to apply the logic of Eric Cartman, Fuck It Mountain, the son of a wrestling team member.

We must adapt the comedy to the game, but as a series of three measures in discussion.

First, simulacrum: approach as diminuitive, to force the problem to show itself as a display of its strength, truly its weakness.

Then, the subversion, the movement to achieve dominance over the display of strength, by approaching with the inverse, the opposite concept in the abstract.

Finally, the counter, the defeat of the problem and the learned solution, the disabling of the displayed weakness with the inversion's conclusion form, our policy.

So, what is the weakness to a troll in terms of an Axis player (and there are more than three) that wants to be offensive, in their comedy. What can we find, if we force them to display this as their primary trait (with the proper courtesy of doing the same as Allies, a separate discussion), then applying the inversion of the logic to their consequence, for the policy solution, the gameplay factor in the theme?

Almost everything you said here went right over my head. Game idea doesn't appeal to me at all, though.

@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@Roz said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

@Groth said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

That doesn't need to be the cost at all. Even if baronies no longer exist as organisations, you're still perfectly capable of playing a poor member of a noble family and you could still be appointed the Baron of three pig herders and a horse if you want to without that needing to be an org.

Wait, can you play a Baron without there being an actual baron-level org? Is that an actual thing? I don't know, I'm asking.

It's not an actual thing in the current structure. Groth is suggesting the structure could be changed.

Oh! That should reduce staff workload, at least. Since you're typically already in the higher-ranking orgs as well, I'm not sure what the overall effect would be besides that.

I dunno if it would reduce it. The problem with things like, "we'll just handwave it, we don't need to get the mechanical background for it" is the moment that stuff comes up, it's worse than as if we hadn't done it before and means I need to retroactively add it all or the player is just told they can't do what their character really should be able to do. It would be a lot like if someone is told they are a powerful merchant family, but we'll just handwave their income since no need to really do it. Then they want to spend money later for a plot, so we're trying to determine how much that is compared to other people, and invent a lot of numbers. It can just introduce a lot of problems of ambiguity that don't exist if it's already defined mechanically.

I haven't played any other genres in a while but, at least with supers, you have many of the same players playing on multiple supers games. Sometimes they play as different characters, sometimes the same exact one. Regardless, having a character on every supers game currently running is not unusual. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

I agree with most of that which has been said!

I often use breadcrumbs too. The plot takes as long as it does but breadcrumb scenes happen anywhere, anytime I need something to have happened that either was caused by the players' actions or was not prevented by them, or just happened. Those can involve random players and may never be picked up by them, or might.

The breadcrumbs draw new faces in, or bring the plot back to the attention of the player base, and make it clear that sometimes they have to act.

Fucking awesome.

I have not done this for a whole game, but I have done it very small scale when creating the history/background between PCs or the formation of a group, ect.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to try to decouple that from the players' personal PCs to create history/legends.

However I think that how well that would work would depend on the players and their interest in taking on a role other than their current PC and being willing to not tie it back totally to their PC (as you mention, hiding a stockpile of magic weapons, ect). It would be a neat way to give players investment in the background of a world other than JUST what their PC can do in it now.

You could always give it a shot, see how it works, if it becomes problematic you can just amend. I think it is worth a try.

@Misadventure It can be a root for how I see the PC and formed them, yes! Even if never seen. For me though that tends to NOT happen with photos/actual actors and more with art, which then I get frustrated trying to fine a photo to match the fact that everyone else uses photos (if they do). It doesn't always happen with art (there's always music involved too, and not always of the same time era/style of the MUSH too which sometimes means people make fun of it as well).

Maybe because I use other people's wikis they're created of their PC as a launching point OR just a supplement/insight into what their creator was thinking when they first got on the grid, and most of my experience with them is going to be formed by that personal interaction rather than anything static, I'm not super attached to someone else totally adopting my vision for how they should see my PC.

@Ghost What you did there? I see it.

@JinShei No, I don't think I ever made any house rules/adjustments when my group played it.

Hi all,
As promised, @browncoat and I have been discussing and working on our security setup and admin policies for FSF. We've just posted an improved policy on our wiki. There will be no DARK snooping on players. We will, if necessary, set people SUSPECT and whenever possible communicate with them as that happens rather than doing so silently. Thanks again to those of you who engaged us in discussion on all of this - our goal is to create a good, solid game where people can have fun playing together in the Firefly Verse.

Another improvement: we've just opened up guest access to the game (and to the +newbie channel, in-game) so that people can drop in and talk to us before creating a character. We hope to add player-spawning of characters soon. For now, that step still goes through an email, and we'll be glad to set people up.

Come say hi!

firefly.silvertree.org 2517

Osiris

I created a thread in the hog pit and will be moving the appropriate posts there. I think the real discussion actually is interesting and was at least for the most part constructive, and there are some interesting issues discussed that I can see why some folks might not want the whole thing moved to the hog pit.

If you want to rip into someone personally, please do it there. Further namecalling posts here after this post will just be moved to the locked circular file thread.

Topic drift is fine and expected. Personal attacks and just namecalling really aren't but if it is important to you to do so there's now an appropriate place to do so. Thanks.

@Kestrel hahahaha yeaaaaah pretty much what I thought, too

For me, the hardest part was finding a game where I felt welcome. I have a few challenges to deal with before I feel that there's room for me in a game.

One is a learning disability; due to chronic pain my capacity for taking in new information is limited -- I can swallow down only so many game commands, setting lore, and background information in one sitting. Games with miles and miles of old history that you are expected to read up on and know before daring to join a conversation -- not happening. If your setting deviates that much from the canon universe, whatever that is, it's not accessible to new people.

Games with complex custom settings and stories that require lots of lore learning before playing are out (looking at a lot of novel or movie setting games here), as are games that require you to learn a ttrpg system (looking at the various WoD games here for sure).

Social anxiety is another. Games where you have to pretty get on your knees and beg in order for older players to notice slash recognise you are out. MU*s are social games -- don't make newbies exist in their own vaccuum for days if you want them to stay. At the very least return IC greetings.

I don't expect roleplay to get handed to me on a platter when I enter a game, but I have had the same experience many times when deciding that I can do this, yes I can -- you get a character through the app process and finally get on the grid, and no one responds to you. You walk into rooms and try to join a conversation and get flat out ignored. You see people who are somehow marked 'helpers' or 'newbie friendly' and send them a whisper or a page -- and get no response. After a few hours of that, I'm out. I'm not going to stay where I am obviously not wanted.

And obviously, the community needs to be tolerable. I've seen some pretty horrific things out there, although the MMO games tend to be a lot worse than the MU*s.

In the end I gave up on MU*s and MMOs alike. I got dragged back in this fall by @JinShei whom I used to play with elsewhere when she was opening her new Discworld themed mush. I am grateful for that because it's a setting I know very well, Ares is ridiculously easy to learn and use, and since I was there from the start, I don't need to bang on doors to get the older players to acknowledge me (though I make a point out of trying to greet guests and newcomers the way I've often wished someone would greet me on a new game).

Amazingly, it looks like my tale of woe got a happy ending.

@Ganymede said in Trivia for Health:

@Kestrel

I feel all of that.

Season your food. Dammit.

^ This.

'Spicy' is not the only flavor out there. I am always delighted when I find things that are very seasoned but not spicy.

@faraday said in Learning Ruby for Ares:

I was reminded that I did a blog post awhile back on the Ares dev blog awhile back about learning Ares code by starting small and reinventing a few wheels before working up to tackle a major project. Might be of interest to some.

While I did indeed jump straight into the big projects, the coding tutorials were actually a huge help! I had tried getting into Ares several times before and each time I was quickly overwhelmed by the complexity (and I have 20 years of experience with MOO, MUSH, MUCK, LPMUD, etc so it wasn't like I was coming in completely "cold". It was still overwhelming).

This last time, I worked my way through the basic coding tutorials and they really helped me learn the system. Ruby was a different story. I was able to figure out the basics just by looking at the code, but ultimately I did have to invest in a Ruby book to learn some of the not-so-obvious things such as code blocks, modules, and how only nil and false are considered False (which actually caused me no small amount of frustration because I use short-circuit evaluation in my code quite a bit).

I highly recommend that anyone interested in learning to code for Ares, start with those tutorials. They'll definitely help ease you into what is a fairly complex game engine.

I'm so sorry to hear of a loss in our community. Condolences to everyone who knew her and enjoyed being a part of the Masquerade game.

once upon a time I did one for Magik

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1gLU3ILmMp7mEvKrlUYBhz

and one for Black Widow (the 40s version)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Xa8M5PRpyewYZxDveVGOL