Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?)

[Seraphim73]

@Bobotron and @Arkandel
I think this is why you need a Dramatis Personae/wiki page for them. Describe their personality, outlooks on various people/places/things (like the dreaded "Relationships" section, but describe their outlook on Technology, young people, and "whitey" instead), and a link to all of their logs. It has to be kept updated, and curated by Staff to make sure that no one adds in "Likes: fiesty young Brujah who spit in his face" unless it fits, but it should help with consistency. Because I agree with the concern that if one player is playing the "Feature," then what happens if they go idle, or get busy on their PC, or... whatever.

[surreality]

@Seraphim73 Even though it'd require the dreaded 'lots of reading', it wouldn't be too tough to make 'must post a log after use' a requirement for checking out an NPC (like a library book, you gotta sign the card so people can keep track of where the NPC's been), which would also keep a record of what they've been up to.

[Seraphim73]

@surreality Right. You don't have to use the NPC, but if you want to use the NPC, you have to make any updates to the wiki page and post the log.

[Arkandel]

Look, I know it's not in the works. And I don't want to derail the thread.

But a web-based game instead of relying on telnet has got to be the largest innovation to the form we can have here.

[Ganymede]

@tragedyjones

I'm going to do this punchy-style, as I'm at work.

And I know a constant question people ask, is: What is GAME X going to do differently. What CAN be done differently? What SHOULD be done differently?

The way RP is generated. RP is generated from things happening. "Things happening" does not have to start and end with staff -- or even players. "Things happening" can occur in an automatic, coded fashion, or through how the system operates.

• Grid Design - Part of me feels that a pre-made, pre-described grid is... a waste. Many players eschew the room descriptions, and many prefer to use +temprooms, RP rooms or private builds. How much is a minimum necessary grid design for a city? The sprawling layouts of DM or even HM are, imo, dead.

You should have a relatively small grid to represent areas, with exits into buildings or structures for public RP, and then into private or small areas for private RP. This is a classic, useful, time-honored system that encourages bump-into-you RP.

• An End to Bar-P - I have long ranted against random social banter RP, slice of life stuff, when that is all I can find. It is something I personally feel should be used as a downtime thing between active story

"Story" is what you make it to be. It can be as simple as a scene to barter for a point of Resources X from another PC to a important information-sharing session between "allies" looking to enact a plan to change the city/territory/landscape. If the players have things they can do, the innovative ones will figure a way to get ahead by interacting with others. Not a novel concept.

• Homework.

What's homework, and what's the objective for it?

If it is applying for a PC, make it simple, short, and sweet. If it is changing the landscape of the setting and game, it may need to be more complicated than that.

• Making things matter.

This is a system issue. And I have some ideas on it, but it requires some planning and thought. Ultimately, though, this is comes down to staff letting control go.

[Arkandel]

Oh, another thing.

Anything that keeps a PC from the grid - be it CGen or unthawing (obviously excluding restricted concepts or banned characters) - might as well be removed if it's not 100% necessary.

Soft approval, if you need it, is a better alternative than making someone wait for 1-2 days before they can show up on the grid - and even if you catch some problem after the fact so what? Fix it, but let people RP in the mean time.

[surreality]

@Arkandel This is what temprooms are for. Seriously. And if the game may be potentially set up to be mostly temproom-based anyway, it's not a huge difference.

I dunno how long it's been since you've appstaffed, basically, but, er. There are some winners. It's been a while since I've been appstaff anywhere, and while I'm 100% down with temproom soft RP, there's too much crazy out there to not give things a passing look-over before they are approved for play.

For one thing, this trusts implicitly that no one will make one of those banned concepts anyway and drop it onto the grid, thinking they have the best reasoning ever and they're sure to be an exception. See the 4chan troll and his insistence on that in a variety of ways -- this is sadly not at all uncommon; there are people who app as elders and just assume they'll be handed a giant extra pile of XP for nothing because they're old and would be playing accordingly; I've had people come to me asking 'hey, can I play a Strix?' and stuff there aren't even PC templates for. Someone asked if they could play a cat. Not a werecat, not someone with a spirit cat, just a cat. Meow. Some of this stuff is harmless, but some of it is pretty breaky, and even things that'd pass with minor tweaks could end up requiring some major retcons (which are a pain for all involved). People are accustomed to that with the kind of off-grid softRP that almost every game I know of permits, but if something is on grid, generally it's assumed it's approved, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to lose that delineation entirely.

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

Look, I know it's not in the works. And I don't want to derail the thread.

But a web-based game instead of relying on telnet has got to be the largest innovation to the form we can have here.

You mean like this? Just a prototype, btw. It doesn't do anything for real.

But really, it's hard to motivate yourself to build something new when hardly anybody seems interested in changing the way things have always been done.

[Arkandel]

@faraday Perhaps? I'm at work now so I can't quite look at this, but what is it based on? Or is it home-grown? What are the features?

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@faraday Perhaps? I'm at work now so I can't quite look at this, but what is it based on? Or is it home-grown? What are the features?

Home-grown, but based on AresMUSH. Basically it's my imagining what a MU* would look like if it were entirely web-based with no telnet connection. It's basically a game wiki and the game itself bundled into one. Chargen is online. You don't need to create wiki pages for your char because it's done automatically. RP is centered around scenes (which can be public or private). You don't need to post logs because RP is done on the site in the first place, although you can keep a scene private and then publish it when finished. It takes a lot of the friction out of MUSHing.

Aaaand the reaction from almost everyone has been: "Eeeh, yeah, it's neat but I'd never want to play that way."

Here's the blog post with some more detail if anyone cares.

[Arkandel]

@faraday That sounds pretty interesting actually. No 'eeeh' from me, it sounds like you already put a lot of work in it, and if it was ever working (including live chat - Discord is a good idea but if everything else functions it'd be great to be able to communicate in-tab as it were) I'd be definitely interested.

[faraday]

@Arkandel Thanks. And yeah, I think I've changed my position on chat too since I wrote that. I looked into actually bundling Discord into the game for one stop shopping but it would be ugly since there's no easy way to 'share' users between the game and Discord.

Edit... drat, hit enter too quick. But still, when more than half of the people polled are not just disinterested but a hard 'no never', it's hard to imagine the already-fractured MU* community getting on board. I mean, people routinely boycott either MUSH or MUX just because the channel commands are different

[Arkandel]

@faraday I started a web MU-from-scratch project back in the day for my own amusement but I got distracted. It was based on a php websockets server and I had it working with a grid stored in MySQL with rudimentary 'pages' for chat ... but then I realized how much work it'd be to write a forum and ticket system from scratch, too.

Plus, as you noticed, there's not that much interest at those stages. I figure someone will eventually bite the bullet and produce a base platform others can build on, but until then it's hard to recruit help.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@Arkandel said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

Look, I know it's not in the works. And I don't want to derail the thread.

But a web-based game instead of relying on telnet has got to be the largest innovation to the form we can have here.

You mean like this? Just a prototype, btw.

I missed the comment the first time around, so I'm commenting now:

What the hell does "web-based game" mean?

Faraday has an idea, because she's in the coding industry and can think further than the buzzwords. I've seen "web-based" mean everything from "just have a telnet window in a web site" to ... I can't find it now, but there's a scene-based subscription RP setup that was kickstarted fairly successfully, had some RPG authors involved, and would not fit what we normally expect in this hobby.

Right now, "web-based" is as meaningless as "online game". Even comparing a MUD to a MUSH as "telnet-based" has only to do with the service, not any notable information the game itself.

Rant ended.

Faraday: That looks super-cool, an updated play-by-post service. One of my first dial-ups was a board called "The RPG BBS". We took our role-play totes serious.

[Bobotron]

@Thenomain

Storium.

[faraday]

@Thenomain said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

What the hell does "web-based game" mean?

Doesn't the "... instead of relying on telnet" part give you a pretty good idea though? I mean, what would you call it? Web-centric? Web-only?

I agree that the terminology is imperfect but I lack anything better without diving into specific technical details: "A game that provides a MUSH-like playing experience(*) but with only an integrated web client/wiki and no telnet connection to support existing MU* client software."

(*) And even that gets into philosophical territory of the fundamental differences between a MUSH, a PBP game, and something like Storium. What makes a "MUSH-like playing experience"? Is it the grid? Posing in real time? The fact that IC time passes in constant progression with RL time? You can see where I ended up on that question, but I think everyone is going to have a different answer.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@Thenomain said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

What the hell does "web-based game" mean?

Doesn't the "... instead of relying on telnet" part give you a pretty good idea though? I mean, what would you call it? Web-centric? Web-only?

Web-centric and web-only are two entirely different concepts, tho. Slack, for instance, relies on some dated technologies and puts them together for pure amazement. I would hate to return to play-by-post.

"A game that provides a MUSH-like playing experience(*) but with only an integrated web client/wiki and no telnet connection to support existing MU* client software."

So someone will create another client for real-time communications with the server, one that might not be web-based. I actually think "web based" right now to be still pretty limiting; look at the number of people who use Skype as their game-enhancing system of choice.

So either I think "web-based" is a terrible way to view innovation in the hobby, or I think people are mis-using the term.

[Bobotron]

@Thenomain
I think the closest 'web based' analog we have to MUs are digichats. At least, the way lots of places set them up (essentially as a grid without the 'walking back and forth' stuff). Nothing on the level of the code you've done for MUs, but integrated die rollers, sheets and such.

[Thenomain]

@Bobotron

Dial-ups, multi-line dial-ups, role-play forums, play by post, play by email, play by snailmail, IRC, Skype, Roll20, Tabletop Simulator, not one of these are "web-based".

I'm complaining not that I would never play on something that's not telnet-based, but that many of these technologies can be folded into web or even telnet. I'm complaining that "web-based" is poorly defined and a poor metric.

We can do better.

[faraday]

@Thenomain said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

So someone will create another client for real-time communications with the server, one that might not be web-based. I actually think "web based" right now to be still pretty limiting; look at the number of people who use Skype as their game-enhancing system of choice.

I don't understand why you're equating "web based" with "not real time". I just responded to your forum post 16 minutes later. Is that not "real time"? Is Slack or Skype somehow more real-time even though responses could come back hours later? It's eminently possible to have real-time chat on a web-only MUSH - just look at the Slack web client or some of the Rails 5 cable examples.

But yes, someone could conceivably make a separate client to talk to the game, if there were a public API. Again, to use Slack as an example - there's the web client, the Mac/Win desktop clients, the various mobile clients, etc. If the perceived value was there, it could be done. But I think it would be onerous to implement.