Alternative Formats to MU

[Apos]

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel If we're talking about travel specifically, My personal opinion is that no game needs a grid. It's an expected feature of a game, but the reality is that nobody actually RPs in 90% of the rooms most games have. The reality is that you could open a game with a clear theme and maybe 10 important, constantly used locations alongside a coded RP Room creation wing and it would work just as well.

The problem is that if you do this, people will stare at you like you're fucking nuts.

Sure but design a game like that in a way that requires no ooc communication whatsoever to find RP. I mean, you can. It just fundamentally alters the base gameplay.

[faraday]

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Sure but design a game like that in a way that requires no ooc communication whatsoever to find RP.

Faraday does:
scene/start Joe's Pub=public
scene/set It's a pub. It could have a better desc but Fara sucks at descs. If Joe's Pub was an actual defined location, the desc would be imported automatically.

@Seraphim73 sees an open public scene in the scenes list or on where. Does:
scene/join 713

I'm not trying to be difficult, I just honestly don't see how the gameplay is fundamentally different than Seraphim chilling in an actual @dug room on the grid hoping somebody wanders in (or more likely does a meetme to hop straight there).

Now I get that the grid can offer some immersion for some folks. I'm not saying it can't be a feature. Just don't think it's necessary or dramatically game-altering.

[Apos]

@faraday Naw, I was hoping that my tone wasn't coming across as confrontational or dismissive either, because what I more was trying to get at is I think those kinds of automatic tools that are the rough analogue of wandering into a grid space are super important. I think that it dramatically lowers the barrier for entry socially for a lot of newer or shy players, and that stuff doesn't exist on a lot of MUSHes which edges people out.

I think that implementation would be fine, though I would probably go further and probably have a tutorial type equivalent that nudges people towards its usage and make sure there are incentives for doing so. Probably with a wander command for randomization, minigames for spending time in different scenes that are publicly accessible, etc. Could probably change how people enter a scene to accompany a set, to formalize the culture for whether someone is 'in' or not, compared to the whole, 'I'm here but I'm not here because I haven't made a set' thing that I find vaguely ridiculous and awkward.

[faraday]

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Could probably change how people enter a scene to accompany a set, to formalize the culture for whether someone is 'in' or not, compared to the whole, 'I'm here but I'm not here because I haven't made a set' thing that I find vaguely ridiculous and awkward.

That's again one of those things that I think becomes much easier in a web-only game. The scene is a web page. You can access it if it's public, or if you've been invited to. You join a scene when you pose into it, and you can do so from any of your alts. The lurking state is still there - it's what you do when you're reading the existing poses on the page to see what's going on. But it's invisible to the other participants.

But alas, telnet.