I have a friend I've been hanging out with lately who just doesn't explain herself, and I envy her so much. It's just ridiculous. Like, hanging out has made me realize more and more that any time I'm asked something or obligated to give an opinion, I have this deeply ingrained ritual of apologizing for having thoughts on the matter, and then laying them out really thoroughly so they aren't just immediately discarded, and then leaving caveats for how I probably don't know what I'm talking about anyway just in case the other people around want to disagree, and then I apologize for taking up time talking about it.

If I ask her if she wants to do something and she doesn't it's just "No", and like, she feels no compulsion to provide any detail whatsoever as to why. I wish that were me =|

@groth said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

I haven't tried it in Ares but I know in Evennia it's non-trivial to make something like a ball you can throw at people or a magic 8 ball or whatever.

I don't think doing that would be too difficult in Evennia either. I kinda structured this off some furniture code I wrote a long time ago on a pet project, but I'm really rusty with both Evennia and python at the moment so it's just a broad-strokes sketch and not meant to work out of the box and probably not the best way to do it!

from evennia import DefaultObject, CmdSet, default_cmds
import random

class EightBall(DefaultObject):
    "A simple 8-ball"
    
    def at_init(self):
        self.ndb.fortunes = self.ndb.fortunes or ["1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8"]
    
    def at_object_creation(self):
        # add the commands associated with the 8-ball to each instance
        self.cmdset.add("typeclasses.eightball.BallCmdSet", permanent=True)

    def fortune(self):
        # return a random selection from our fortunes. I don't think this return is an
        # issue but if it were you might need to change how this is done.
        selection = random.choice(self.ndb.fortunes)
        return selection

class CmdShake(default_cmds.MuxCommand):
    """
    Usage:
        shake <object>
    
    This command allows a character to read their fortune in an 8-ball.
    """
    
    key = "shake"
    arg_regex = r"\s.+" # require a space-separated argument, i.e. 'ball'
    locks = "cmd:all()"
        
    def parse(self):
        self.target = self.args.strip()
    
    def func(self):
        caller = self.caller
        target = caller.search(self.target)
        
        if not target:
            #yield an error if the target cannot be found
            caller.msg(f"Can't find {self.target}.")
            return
        elif not isinstance(target, EightBall):
            # ensure the command is being used on a valid target
            caller.msg("Shaking that would be rude!")
            return
        else:
            # provide a fortune to the caller
            caller.location.msg_contents(f"{caller.key} shakes {target.key} and studies it closely.")
            fortune = target.fortune()
            caller.msg(f"Through {target.key}'s murky glass, you can read: {fortune}.")
            return

class BallCmdSet(CmdSet):
    """
    Base command set for 8-ball objects.
    """
    
    key = "BallCmdSet"
    
    def at_cmdset_creation(self):
        self.add(CmdShake())

You could modify and complicate that in a host of ways, like having the main class have hundreds of fortunes and just pack a selection of 8 into each object (and be saved instead of being nbd), and so on, but it's a scaffold.

A huge challenge with an engine like Evennia, and from what faraday has been saying with Ares, is that a lot of its power comes from the fact that it has all kinds of hooks and tools distinct from the language it uses packed in everywhere. So even a simple idea ends up involving a lot of wrestling to learn how to get it to fit into the pattern of the engine, and that's really hard at first.

On the head subject of the thread, I think Ruby is pretty straightforward and no more difficult than Python or another alternative. My only experience with it was a mandatory semester of programming-for-non-programmers in college and I had no head for code but I suffered through it kinda well, and that's a point in the language's favor in a big way. The biggest hurdle to making any project a reality, imo, is bridging the gap from understanding the basics of a language (if you're approaching from a new-coder perspective) to understanding how to leverage whatever tools the engine you're using has to offer, and that's going to happen regardless of the language and regardless of the engine.

The treatment of thralls and the whole Thrax dynamic has always seemed to come across awfully flat to me.They seem like points intentionally added to the game in order to provide more contrast between the characters but my impression is that mostly they've been used for people to show just how downright good their characters are instead. Before I say anything more I'll really heavily qualify that impression with the fact that I more or less only track the news of the game as it goes along, since actually playing MUSHes is scary, so it easily could be the case that I'm not getting an accurate feel for things.

I think every or almost every bit of news/announcement I've seen involving thralls has either been someone from another house denouncing the practice or Thraxian characters liberating swaths of the near-slave workers they use to stay... afloat, lore-wise. The whole rules of the Compact that Arx has been built upon for generations makes it really weird for people to take exception to how Thrax does things, too:

1. Almost everyone should believe that there's a 'divine right' for a lord to run things his way in his kingdom. If you're a commoner suffering under that you might be a little less enthusiastic about it, but the game's religion (sans Redrain) and the quasi-Constitution tell everyone that people are in their place for a reason and it's not your business to tell other people how to run their shows. I think it'd be fairly taboo for most people, nobles especially, to go past muttering to their companions in private about stuff like that.

2. The other houses aren't peaches & sunshine. House Valardin might be the group of extreme chivalry/etc, but a lesser lord could fabricate a reason to execute one of his serfs and no one (except the grieving family and other potential victims) is going to bat an eye. There's room for a few nobles concerned for their vassals and wanting to improve things for people, definitely, but I think every house is principally founded on the labor and poverty of their commoners and serfs. It's a feudal-ish society.

3. Thralls are almost always in the Saffron Chain. There's a strong chance that any brought to Arx aren't going home with their owners due to the same rules about domain above, so they're only brought rarely. When people make a stir about the issue, they're more or less forcing their attention on something that's realistically a pretty distant concern for them at best.

There are other issues too, like there probably being bigger fish to fry than social reform when however many dozen thousands of enemies are marching to your city while supernatural forces try to rip your society to pieces, or the fact that every time Thrax liberates thralls they should probably lose a portion of whatever their big noble income is. But it's a game, and not everything is going to be accounted for, and you can't always be focused on that threat looming on the horizon.

I know this is tangential to the administration/banning stuff but it's kinda relevant, probably. A bit.

@icanbeyourmuse said in GMs and Players:

Should staff be able to TS players, NPC or PC?

NPCs: In my experience with games, NPCs generally exist and are about to further a plot or setting. Staff accounts generally have expanded access to the game and to characters than regular players do, although the extent of that will vary from game to game. So you have a charbit dusted with the allure of somethingmorethanplayers, on an account with the ability to check characters/histories/plots/details out, using all that oomph to mudsex someone instead of further any of those general purposes. I find that creepy.

PCs: Sure, do what you want. Some of the same concerns from the above can seep into this territory as well if they're a known staff PC, but I think it's an area where staff's general reputation overall will inform the perception of what happens, and there's enough of a divide created from their identity as staff to allow for that engagement, even if it does invite rumormills about favoritism or whatever.

So if I hear some staffer is bedding down with someone on a regular character, I don't care (provided I don't get the overall sense that their intent in running the game is primarily to seek out TS targets, unless it's a game where that's a pretty on-the-label expectation, I guess). If I hear a staffer is using some fancy NPC on their staff handle to bed down a character, I'm ditching immediately.

@arkandel Audiobooks are lovely!

Pros:

• You can listen while you're doing other stuff that uses your hands or eyes, yay!
• It locks you into a pace so you don't accidentally skip over details/good writing because you're anxiously waiting to find out about that thing that's definitely going to happen!
• A good narrator can bring prose to life in ways that reading doesn't necessarily accomplish! This is extra subjective but I'm of the opinion that humans are storytellers and hearing a good story just scratches an itch that text on pages doesn't.
• You might probably cry (even more than usual) if you get emotionally involved in characters because you hear about what's happening to the people you love as they die or face awful circumstances!

Cons:

• A bad narrator is terrible and will make you dislike what might be a good book!
• It's way more difficult to rewind to a particular point than it is to leaf back if you want to check details. If you're reading something like Cryptonomicon or stuff by Dostoevsky or something it can be a nuisance and a half to keep everything straight in your head.
• It has a larger time investment! Just about everyone reads faster than they listen (see the positive above for the flipside of that). But I find there's far less incentive to listen to ten minutes of a story than there is to sneak in five to ten pages when you don't have long to read. If I'm listening I'd like to stay immersed for a while, so I usually just hold off until I know I'll have longer windows.

I think aspects of whether you'll enjoy listening or reading boil down to personality and vary from person to person, I think allllmost everyone can find some books they'd like to listen to. I fall pretty heavily toward the audio side.

I also find it easier to dissect an author's style when I'm listening to a book rather than reading it, if you're into that. Maybe it's hundreds of hours of staring at MU-quality writing, but I can gloss over strings of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs on a page, while hearing them aloud will catch my attention and have me thinking about how else a statement/narrative could have been structured.

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Lithium said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

But +code? I don't see what's the big deal honestly.

You've obviously been playing for awhile so I'm sure it's no big deal to you. But put yourself in the shoes of a new player who's never MUSHed before. Imagine you're trying to learn this command set for the very first time.

I want to stress this point. I can understand people being comfortable/okay with the really weird command structure/code setup that seems frequent on MUSHes if they've been in it for a long time or they've actually had it develop over the time they've been playing, but from an outside perspective it's pretty daunting. The amount of disagreement on the rationale for different prefix symbols makes that kind of evident, but to illustrate:

If you want to move around in-character you use normal commands - n, s, e, w, or specific commands. You can look around with look. But if you want to see different joinable areas in the room you have to use +places. If you want to do a typical emote you can just pose or say, but if you want to write an emote that has your character's name in the middle you're breaking out a new prefix with @emit. You can look up other people's information with +finger but if you want to set your own you're editing attributes with &something = something IIRC. In a number of MUSHes you're going to have an inventory command that's probably not going to be used in favor of some other command with a +. You can use a channel name to chat to it, and comlist to see what you've set up, but @clist to view the public options. I think.

The helpfiles being pretty selective in how you access them doesn't help, either. You might get a helpfile for command before realizing you needed the +help for that command, since it's prefixed. I was looking at Fear and Loathing recently, and they have a damage +help that encompasses the +hurt and +heal commands (or equivalents, I don't remember if that's exactly what they're called). That file should, IMO, come up if you try to look up either of those commands, but doesn't. I don't know if that's a system limitation or just the game specifically, though. Then you have commands like +travel and +temproom mentioned by people without easily-accessible helpfiles, because maybe they were initially encountered on a different game or something.

All of that makes for a total hodgepodge if you're trying to learn it - you're basically trying to put three jigsaw puzzles together, plus one more if you're learning the system the game is based on as well instead of just how it integrates to the MUSH. I'd understand if a game went the way of, "@ is used for every OOC command", or something like that, but that seems uncommon. If you're using a jumble of different prefixes for any specific task - interacting with the grid/a room, interacting with another character IC, interacting with another player OOC - I think the drawbacks of that standard outweigh the supposed benefits.

I know, at least, there've been plenty of people that I've seen turn away from MUSHes that they'd probably enjoy and bring a lot to solely on account of the disjointed command structure to look for a more consistent alternative. Someone could definitely settle on the "just tough it out and memorize it" side of the fence, but I appreciate the intent of the thread in promoting some kind of streamlining.

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

Like to be brutally honest, theme almost doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of us have probably RP'd in a wide range of settings. The initial experience of, 'Did I have fun RP when I logged in', that's pretty much all that matters whether something catches on, and theme is just a subset of that. A game runner that's super active and tells fun stories will probably make anything work all right.

Yeah. I think it's safe to say that theme is a pretty big factor for getting people to give a game a shot and actually log in, but does almost nothing to keep them playing. Once you're on the smoothness of the mechanics, activity on the game, and RP style all matter way more.

Sci-fi is my one true love and I would be head over heels for a well-polished game that someone (else) slaved over to make happen. IMO I think the smaller in scope you make a game like that the more successful you'll be. If you spin up a game about a group (or groups) trapped on a space station going into lockdown, or a specific city/embassy/outpost on the frontier, or something similar, you both cut back on the need to explain every detail about how things work for handfuls of planets and wide ranges of technology and allow yourself to shunt some of those explanations into plot elements to encourage the mystery/exploration aspects of plots, which I think any science fiction game worth its salt ought to have.

@ganymede said in Good TV:

@greenflashlight

I like The Mandalorian, but it seems to lack the driving storyline that made me binge A:TLA, TLOK, and She-Ra. I'm not sure if that's a flaw, but I have more of a drive to watch B:TAS than The Mandalorian.

Have you looked into Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts? I can't like authoritatively say you'll like it, but I was a massive fan of the Avatars and She-Ra and it served as my recovery binge when I got through She-Ra's last season. The music especially is fantastic IMO.

1. In theory I think it's largely the player's responsibility to scout out what setting/etc is likely to cause them emotional issues and avoid them, but in my experience people really don't do that even when it seems kind of plain so in practice I'd say any plot- or game-runner that isn't doing everything they can to forewarn people about the type of content and danger they might experience is just asking for a headache. For example, while I've never played a World of Darkness game, what I've read from the setting would make me thing just about anything goes in various situations but explicitly stating, "Hey, you might run into things like x/y/z" gives people the tools they need to decide, and might wake them up a bit.

2. If you've gone ahead and made sure that people are (or at least don't have an excuse for not being) aware of what they're potentially getting themselves into, all that's really left to do is be sympathetic, help facilitate a smooth exit if you can, and wish them well. IMO it's not really your job to assume responsibility for their reaction or to talk them down. Just help them separate and be kind about it: especially if things have already progressed to the point that something awful has gone down or will go down with their character.

3. I like environments that have plain guidelines about warning people, because then the staff can easily defend or support the storyrunner. Personally speaking, I want controversial themes and potentially jarring things in a game I'm going to be playing, so I want people who are spinning that stuff up to feel like they're not going to be lambasted for an errant step or someone else's issues. Dangerous content is a fantastic catalyst for character and story growth on a game, so I think by completely restricting it you end up stifling the potential depth of your cast.

Emotional separation is challenging in a roleplaying game because you're constantly walking a line between investing in your character enough to give them an authentic feel and have the nearness to understand their motivations while trying to stay separate enough whatever Bad Things happen to them don't feel like they're happening to you -- at least, not enough so that it's overwhelming.

I'd say a storyteller's responsibility is properly signposting the game and/or the specific plots involved in it. I don't think the setting should ever obviate this need. A player's responsibility is doing their best to understand their own emotional wellbeing, what they can handle, and what they need to do when they've misjudged or a storyteller hasn't accurately communicated the risks. Staff's responsibilities are curtailing any verbal fistfights that kick up and maintaining a culture or standard of respecting others. There's no call for denigrating someone else, whether it's for running a plot with a controversial subject or for someone realizing they need to get away from a topic or subject.

@icanbeyourmuse said in GMs and Players:

Should staff be able to TS players, NPC or PC?

NPCs: In my experience with games, NPCs generally exist and are about to further a plot or setting. Staff accounts generally have expanded access to the game and to characters than regular players do, although the extent of that will vary from game to game. So you have a charbit dusted with the allure of somethingmorethanplayers, on an account with the ability to check characters/histories/plots/details out, using all that oomph to mudsex someone instead of further any of those general purposes. I find that creepy.

PCs: Sure, do what you want. Some of the same concerns from the above can seep into this territory as well if they're a known staff PC, but I think it's an area where staff's general reputation overall will inform the perception of what happens, and there's enough of a divide created from their identity as staff to allow for that engagement, even if it does invite rumormills about favoritism or whatever.

So if I hear some staffer is bedding down with someone on a regular character, I don't care (provided I don't get the overall sense that their intent in running the game is primarily to seek out TS targets, unless it's a game where that's a pretty on-the-label expectation, I guess). If I hear a staffer is using some fancy NPC on their staff handle to bed down a character, I'm ditching immediately.

I have a friend I've been hanging out with lately who just doesn't explain herself, and I envy her so much. It's just ridiculous. Like, hanging out has made me realize more and more that any time I'm asked something or obligated to give an opinion, I have this deeply ingrained ritual of apologizing for having thoughts on the matter, and then laying them out really thoroughly so they aren't just immediately discarded, and then leaving caveats for how I probably don't know what I'm talking about anyway just in case the other people around want to disagree, and then I apologize for taking up time talking about it.

If I ask her if she wants to do something and she doesn't it's just "No", and like, she feels no compulsion to provide any detail whatsoever as to why. I wish that were me =|

@groth said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

I haven't tried it in Ares but I know in Evennia it's non-trivial to make something like a ball you can throw at people or a magic 8 ball or whatever.

I don't think doing that would be too difficult in Evennia either. I kinda structured this off some furniture code I wrote a long time ago on a pet project, but I'm really rusty with both Evennia and python at the moment so it's just a broad-strokes sketch and not meant to work out of the box and probably not the best way to do it!

from evennia import DefaultObject, CmdSet, default_cmds
import random

class EightBall(DefaultObject):
    "A simple 8-ball"
    
    def at_init(self):
        self.ndb.fortunes = self.ndb.fortunes or ["1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8"]
    
    def at_object_creation(self):
        # add the commands associated with the 8-ball to each instance
        self.cmdset.add("typeclasses.eightball.BallCmdSet", permanent=True)

    def fortune(self):
        # return a random selection from our fortunes. I don't think this return is an
        # issue but if it were you might need to change how this is done.
        selection = random.choice(self.ndb.fortunes)
        return selection

class CmdShake(default_cmds.MuxCommand):
    """
    Usage:
        shake <object>
    
    This command allows a character to read their fortune in an 8-ball.
    """
    
    key = "shake"
    arg_regex = r"\s.+" # require a space-separated argument, i.e. 'ball'
    locks = "cmd:all()"
        
    def parse(self):
        self.target = self.args.strip()
    
    def func(self):
        caller = self.caller
        target = caller.search(self.target)
        
        if not target:
            #yield an error if the target cannot be found
            caller.msg(f"Can't find {self.target}.")
            return
        elif not isinstance(target, EightBall):
            # ensure the command is being used on a valid target
            caller.msg("Shaking that would be rude!")
            return
        else:
            # provide a fortune to the caller
            caller.location.msg_contents(f"{caller.key} shakes {target.key} and studies it closely.")
            fortune = target.fortune()
            caller.msg(f"Through {target.key}'s murky glass, you can read: {fortune}.")
            return

class BallCmdSet(CmdSet):
    """
    Base command set for 8-ball objects.
    """
    
    key = "BallCmdSet"
    
    def at_cmdset_creation(self):
        self.add(CmdShake())

You could modify and complicate that in a host of ways, like having the main class have hundreds of fortunes and just pack a selection of 8 into each object (and be saved instead of being nbd), and so on, but it's a scaffold.

A huge challenge with an engine like Evennia, and from what faraday has been saying with Ares, is that a lot of its power comes from the fact that it has all kinds of hooks and tools distinct from the language it uses packed in everywhere. So even a simple idea ends up involving a lot of wrestling to learn how to get it to fit into the pattern of the engine, and that's really hard at first.

On the head subject of the thread, I think Ruby is pretty straightforward and no more difficult than Python or another alternative. My only experience with it was a mandatory semester of programming-for-non-programmers in college and I had no head for code but I suffered through it kinda well, and that's a point in the language's favor in a big way. The biggest hurdle to making any project a reality, imo, is bridging the gap from understanding the basics of a language (if you're approaching from a new-coder perspective) to understanding how to leverage whatever tools the engine you're using has to offer, and that's going to happen regardless of the language and regardless of the engine.

A Memory Called Empire is a science fiction book about Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador sent from her home (a space station, Lsel) to the neighboring empire when the station's previous ambassador was found dead. The position is important because Lsel is an easy target for the empire's expansion, and it's the ambassador's job to try and keep that from becoming a reality. The book itself is mostly about political intrigue, as Mahit is racing to figure out why her predecessor died and whether she's in danger, all while the situation at the empire's capital continues to destabilize.

I ADORE the Imago machines and their influence on the story. Because Lsel is such a small station they developed a form of technology that permits taking an 'imprint' of a person's psyche and memory. As people mature in the station's society, they take aptitudes to slot into a role and then acquire (one of) that role's imago lines, so an ambassador isn't just an ambassador, she's an ambassador carrying some of the traits and memories from each of her predecessors. It allows for a lot of exploration into the concept of identity in the book, and I think the author does marvelously.

Gideon the Ninth has been mentioned in other threads recently, but I'll just quickly say that the audiobook's narrator is divine.

Only the first few of the Culture series books are available in the US for audiobooks for whatever reason, but I thought they were pretty good.

Seveneves and The Diamond Age are both narrated well, although that's probably true for all of Neal Stephenson's books since he's a pretty big name.

Phoenix Extravagant is a fantasy book rather than sci-fi and I'd recommend its narration as well. I loved the book too! It follows a third-gendered painter in a kingdom that has been recently occupied by a neighboring empire (it's very much modeled after Korea being occupied by China). Jebi, the artist, is reluctantly drawn into a conflict between the occupying forces and the revolutionaries.

All of Ann Leckie's books are worth listening to. I particularly enjoyed Provenance, which stands on its own although it shares a universe with her Ancillary books.

I could go on for ages but those all come to mind right away.

It's fine I'll just go through the emotional wringer again thanks.

@ganymede said in Good TV:

@greenflashlight

I like The Mandalorian, but it seems to lack the driving storyline that made me binge A:TLA, TLOK, and She-Ra. I'm not sure if that's a flaw, but I have more of a drive to watch B:TAS than The Mandalorian.

Have you looked into Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts? I can't like authoritatively say you'll like it, but I was a massive fan of the Avatars and She-Ra and it served as my recovery binge when I got through She-Ra's last season. The music especially is fantastic IMO.

This does seem like a neat idea. I hope some people come up with universes that play well together.

I'm pretty leery of encouragements for people to just stay connected, but I get the purpose. You mention the 150 lucidity per hour thing. How much does that amount to in relation to lucidity costs for expanding your dreamworld and how much you might make in a scene? How large of a starting dreamscape can a character make off the bat?

Is there any interaction between the universes characters come from, given the emphasis on it being interesting, or would other players mainly come to know about your waking world through whatever elements are pulled into your dreamscape?

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

Like to be brutally honest, theme almost doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of us have probably RP'd in a wide range of settings. The initial experience of, 'Did I have fun RP when I logged in', that's pretty much all that matters whether something catches on, and theme is just a subset of that. A game runner that's super active and tells fun stories will probably make anything work all right.

Yeah. I think it's safe to say that theme is a pretty big factor for getting people to give a game a shot and actually log in, but does almost nothing to keep them playing. Once you're on the smoothness of the mechanics, activity on the game, and RP style all matter way more.

Sci-fi is my one true love and I would be head over heels for a well-polished game that someone (else) slaved over to make happen. IMO I think the smaller in scope you make a game like that the more successful you'll be. If you spin up a game about a group (or groups) trapped on a space station going into lockdown, or a specific city/embassy/outpost on the frontier, or something similar, you both cut back on the need to explain every detail about how things work for handfuls of planets and wide ranges of technology and allow yourself to shunt some of those explanations into plot elements to encourage the mystery/exploration aspects of plots, which I think any science fiction game worth its salt ought to have.

@lithium I never thought to test it while I was playing Arx, but Evennia supports a command that's just 'idle' which is a null keepalive. I'd assume it works on Arx too unless they disabled it for some reason.