Picking the community's brain...

GamerNGeek

So, time to consult the collective wisdom, as it were. I'm looking for a game. Said hypothetical game would have to fit a few criteria, so, here we go...

1: Game has to be some flavor of Mush or Mush. I've looked at the Ares stuff, and I'm sure it has strengths. But it is too different for me, and when I can't do little things I'm used to, it stresses me out.

2: Game has to be something that works for a "casual" player. By which I mean someone who has to hold down an RL job and an RL life, and so no, can't necessarily commit to scheduling multiple scenes a week to coordinate with tons of other people. Something that someone can log into 2-4 times a week for 3-4 hours and still be able to get roleplay.

3: Something that someone whose main hours are "prime time" PST can get said roleplay, logging in from, say, 8-11 or 8-12 PST.

4: Something with a reasonably low entry-bar. If I have to submit an app and wait a week for approval, I'm not interested. If I have to create a novella of a background which will then never be touched, I'm not interested. I want something I can go to, put in an evening of work (at most), get my character, and go play.

5: Beyond this, I'm pretty open. Genre, setting, etc. I can adapt. Just looking to see what people might recommend, that might fit into this.

surreality

@GamerNGeek Check out HorrorMU. I evangelize a lot, but there's reason for that.

The amount of time you're talking about is safe, though much less than that could start getting hard to keep up, if that makes any difference. Things move at a decent pace, but a lot of folks (including the headwiz/plotmistress) try to keep people updated and in the loop IC and OOC, since that's about the amount of time a lot of folks have these days.

ETA link: http://horrormu.com/index.php/Main_Page

GamerNGeek

@surreality Are you sure? I popped by HorrorMU in the early days, and that "keep up" seemed like a really viable problem. At least then, HM seemed all about the "big scheduled scenes" that I'm worried about, since more of my RP is "drop-in".

surreality

@GamerNGeek It has chilled a bit on that. People tend to group up IC and schedule a thing now more than most else, which has definitely helped. Smaller groups, too, rather than the huge piles.

faraday

@GamerNGeek said in Picking the community's brain...:

1: Game has to be some flavor of Mush or Mush. I've looked at the Ares stuff, and I'm sure it has strengths. But it is too different for me, and when I can't do little things I'm used to, it stresses me out.

Only tangentially related to your query, but I'm curious what about Ares you found stressful. The web portal is something new, for sure, but it's wholly optional. When you connect to the game via a MU client pretty much all of the player-side commands (posing, channels, pages, bbs, etc.) should work the same as what you're used to from MUSH/MUX. In fact I've had people who've logged on and thought that it was just PennMUSH with some extra softcode. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to get into it on this thread.

ETA: Keeping things familiar and approachable for veteran MUSHers is an important design goal for Ares, so if there's something missing I'd love to make it better. (there's an article summarizing some of the differences from Penn/Tiny btw)

GamerNGeek

@faraday Because I'm one of those weird edge cases you can't plan for. I'm enough of a coder that over the years I've gotten used to throwing functions into normal things that it's not always the player-side commands that I'm directly doing, whether it's logging into a new game and doing a think [version()], or an "ex me", or a @dol Jack Jill Spot=l ##.

Every time I run into one of those things and can't do it, it's just nails on a chalkboard for me. It's like a good veggie burger or a good diet soda. Sure, it can be good, it can be tasty...but it's not the real thing, and my subconscious knows it, and the little details grate at me.

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx (aka Firan: The Second Coming), which puts enough simulation game into my roleplay MU* to ruin it. This is guilt by association, and totally no fault of Ares, but I never claimed any of this was anything but emotional bias.

Tinuviel

@GamerNGeek said in Picking the community's brain...:

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx

Arx uses Evennia, not Ares.

TNP

If you're interested in a superhero game that uses traits, check out http://empirestateheroes.wikidot.com/

We have a number of west coast players including on plot staff.

Three-Eyed Crow

@Tinuviel said in Picking the community's brain...:

@GamerNGeek said in Picking the community's brain...:

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx

Arx uses Evennia, not Ares.

Yeah, Ares and Evennia are totally different/done by different programmers. They seemingly share similar goals of 'a codebase that MUs only more modern' but have different approaches to it. I've played on a fair few of the Ares games and Arx and the experiences were pretty different in terms of the RP experience the games were trying to offer. I enjoyed both Arx and the Ares games, but I don't find them comparable (in large part due to the more simulationist Arx experience you describe).

krmbm

Other than the Ares thing... There's a place opening next week that would probably tic most of your boxes.

I do feel your resistance to Ares. As someone that can MUSH-code my way through pretty much anything, it's frustrating to feel hamstrung. But - ultimately - I got over it, because Ares is goddamn spectacular for players, and @faraday is really awesome about adding quality-of-life improvements and answering questions. The only time I really use my client any more is to chat and pose - and both of those can be done through the portal; I just tend to use it more for "non-real-time" things.

Anyway. I wish you luck with your search~!

faraday

@GamerNGeek said in Picking the community's brain...:

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx (aka Firan: The Second Coming), which puts enough simulation game into my roleplay MU* to ruin it. This is guilt by association, and totally no fault of Ares, but I never claimed any of this was anything but emotional bias.

As Tinuviel pointed out, Arx uses Evennia, not Ares. Ares is far closer to Penn than Evennia, if for no other reason than my own sanity

Some things are just not possible in the architecture, but I'm always open to quality of life suggestions that are. For instance, it never occurred to me that you'd want to look at multiple characters at once, but it would be easy for me to add look Jack Jill Spot to the look command. Ares doesn't have 'ex me' (examine is only for coders) but you can get all your data via the backup command for logging to an offline backup. And so on.

But sure, if not having the ability to throw functions into think commands or making your own custom commands is a deal-breaker, then it's a deal-breaker. I can respect that!

Anyway, good luck finding a game.