@Seraphim73 said in What MU*s do right:

@faraday said in What MU*s do right:

TGG's combat system, designed by @EUBanana, was amazing.

Yeah, I've always been intensely curious as to how things worked behind the scenes (only having read a couple of logs). Looked like there was a whole lot going on (and maybe like FS3 was a 'simpler' version of this system?).

I tried to code pretty much everything I could think of that might be relevant. By the end it was onto silly obscure stuff, like making damaged, flooded batteries on U-boats hit everybody inside the boat with chlorine damage. Most of the later stuff like that only got used once, if at all.

The joys of having too much spare time. Those were the days.

But the main bread and butter stuff was that you could shoot into adjacent rooms, so people would be looking in a given direction normally and shooting people in that direction. And the equivalent of places code like you see everywhere else was used as a system for taking cover, plus places could be connected to other places, even in adjacent rooms (like you could be in place 1, a trench, in one room, move south, and be in place 1, a trench, in that room as well, because the trench ICly is long and stretches across those two rooms). And it also tracked who you could see, so you could sneak around sometimes, though firing revealed your position. And there was a combat stress mechanic which simulated suppressing fire and the like, the accuracies were usually really low after the first couple of shots as a result, plus artillery barrages and the like would stress people even before the fight proper had started.

Dystopia takes place in the year 2085, a world in which the conspiracy theories of the 20th and early 21st centuries proved to be all to real, inspired by sources such as Deus Ex, Blade Runner, the works of Gibson and Neal Stephenson. From the ashes of the collapse of the West a New World Order has arisen, displacing the bankrupt and corrupt nation states that ruled the world for centuries - now megacorporations under the leadership of the World Trade Organization are the great powers of the world. It's a world of conspiracies, secret societies, business, greed, politics, power, freedom, crime, dark suited agents, technology and humanity.

It's a fairly generic cyberpunk genre that we're going for - probably the closest setting to it would be Deus Ex, with an emphasis on conspiracies, secret societies, Bavarian Illuminati and all the rest. As for the system, well, it's a heavily coded game with a custom system - if anybody remembers Drums in the Dark from long long ago, it's actually the same code, with some stuff thrown on top. To run down the main features...

• Lots of code - combat, crafting, augmented reality Matrix, corporations, all sorts. And more to come, this is very much a work in progress
• Chargen is roster based. There's no application per se, log on, have a chat, get the password. Hopefully there is enough breadth to have wide appeal.
• Characters run the gamut, there are corpers, cops, journalists, gangbangers, etcetera.
• The theme is fairly low key. No miniguns.. at least not yet. More Neuromancer than Shadowrun, though there's plenty of cybernetics and stuff to get. Technology is pretty standard cyberpunky stuff.
• XP is essentially age based, characters get a certain amount of points based on age. As time goes by, they get more points. There's XP for RP on top of that with a pretty standard +nom aka vote system, but the majority of XP will probably accrue by the passage of time. This happens even if they are on the roster, so nobody will rot.
• Skills are trained as you use them. You are what you repeatedly do, as Aristotle said.
• I've been sitting on this game for freakin years. It's still not as finished as I'd like it to be, but it probably never will be so what the hell, we're going in. This is essentially a beta opening. Though as it has a lot of old Drums in the Dark code, a fair bit of the code at least is actually already fairly robust and tested in the wild which makes me feel a bit more confident.

Do check it out, at kuramori.mechanipus.net port 2500.

@three-eyed-crow said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

@apu
I remember Bhagyamma

I have a lot of nostalgia for Gallipoli. WW1 is still my favorite, and it hit at the time I could be most involved OOCly in helping it along. Always been happy about how it came off (and how history gives you a natural end point to something).

The Battle of the Nek was as awesome as I hoped it would be.

I've got a cyberpunk/politicksy game in the works, it's sorta ready. Will probably open it, at least beta, fairly soon.

I'm a fossil now? Man that's sad.

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Yo. Have a server of it running myself, don't have MUSH itch enough just yet to actually like, do anything with it, though.

...yet.

The corporate characters were harder to write than the cyberpunk staples, but I think they are all fun as well. They tend to have the best secrets. Probably veering a bit more towards sci fi L&L style RP than cyberpunk with the managers though.

There's a whole bunch of secret societies which will hopefully serve to draw people together from right across the IC social spectrum and give people some common purpose too.

Even so, when you got inspirations like Dick Jones out of Robocop I think you don't really need cool secrets to have a good character.

Too lazy for super hipster tea, so only from shops near me.

Twinings Assam is my usual brew. Assam is just generally lush, Twinings is easy to get hold of.

If we're talking flavoured teas, Whittards vanilla tea is very good, ditto their Russian caravan though thats a smoky tea like lapsang souchong so not for everybody. I could drink vanilla tea all day I think.

Never liked green tea. Tastes like grass.

I can feel MUSH itch slowly developing again, so my thoughts turn to Normandy...

@three-eyed-crow said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

@eubanana
War without end...

"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums."

@jim-nanban said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

Well I got the Linode set up, with a $20 credit (there was a code, PodcastInIT2018) and giving @ixokai a $20 credit for his referral code too. Quite nice!

It's currently just a blank Fedora 27 box.

I'm enjoying it already, pretty easy to set up. Makes AWS look like the Byzantine empire.

AWS is just super bare, so if you want something, anything (like, g++ compilers) then you need to install it. Which makes it a PITA.

@three-eyed-crow said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

@apu
I remember Bhagyamma

I have a lot of nostalgia for Gallipoli. WW1 is still my favorite, and it hit at the time I could be most involved OOCly in helping it along. Always been happy about how it came off (and how history gives you a natural end point to something).

The Battle of the Nek was as awesome as I hoped it would be.

Bhagyamma maybe?

@apu said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

I wish I could remember the name of the character I played. All I remember was that he was a Punjabi soldier of some flavor or another.

Can you remember which campaign he was in? Was that Gallipoli? I seem to remember a few Indian soldiers there.

@three-eyed-crow said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

@eubanana
War without end...

"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums."

I can feel MUSH itch slowly developing again, so my thoughts turn to Normandy...

@chet I'm not sure I've ever played a game with a system quite so rigid in its outcome as the one MotM has - exacerbated by the fact that there are tournaments where the ranks pretty quickly became clear. With the possible exception of D&D, but then D&D isn't generally about tournaments. And D&D would be pretty boring if the game was always 'A level 3 guy, a level 7 guy and a level 15 guy did a set of ranked arena matches...'.

It's easy to make systems that have a bit more randomness to them, or where the players decisions cause a greater impact on the outcome.

Is the combat still utterly zero-surprises predictable with a super strict hierarchy of who beats whom? Where your decisions, as a player, are merely a bit of cosmetic window dressing but are ultimately entirely irrelevant?

Or will Ryu beat Guile 10 times out of 10, while Guile beats Cody 10 times out of 10, while Cody beats Hakan 10 times out of 10?

I recall it played out like a game of Top Trumps. And when the novelty wore off it was very, very dull.

@WTFE Oh I know they are out there.

Just saying. My experience could not be more different to the chap up above.

@WTFE said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

@EUBanana said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

@Rook Jeez. I don't think I know any man who isn't a gamer, at least in some degree!

Define "gamer" here? If you mean video games, I'm emphatically not a gamer. We could get together over a beer and then you'd know a man who isn't a gamer.

If you mean the broader sense of RPGs/wargames/board games/card games/etc. then I'm definitely a gamer.

Video games really, though to varying degrees, I know quite a few who play them quite rarely and probably wouldn't self describe as "gamers".

If you included wargames and the like, games of any sort, then that's basically everyone I know. But then. I know people, through gaming, mostly.

...Oh I lie. The other half is emphatically not a gamer.