Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing

[Groth]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

They are exceptionally useful for a game designer though. Evennia has dynamic systems for making building command question/answer pairs (the EvMenu for example). But for ease of coding, this function:

I think it's bad game design. If you ask someone to yield and they disconnect, did they yield or not? Maintaining REST forces you to do things properly and ensure that the character is always in some sort of meaningful state.

If our prospective game designer wants to code anything meaningful ever, they're going to have to learn REST principles either way and I don't think you're doing them any actual favors by trying to give them a dodge.

[tek]

As one of the newer MUers I've encountered (I'm about three years into the hobby), these are some of the unwritten conventions I had to learn the hard way:

1. Pose order and how people like to handle that
2. It was hard for me to learn that most people aren't into lots of OOC chatting
3. Pose length and what to put in my poses -- I didn't realize it was expected that I should not only write what my character does, but that everyone (or the majority of folks) in the scene with me generally expects to be acknowledged, usually by name.

[Griatch]

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

It's possible that one has to stay away from such convenience if wanting to be fully REST compliant, but I'd personally hardly say the functionality is not useful.

I would not say it's "not useful", but I would venture to say it's not essential.

Ares doesn't have a way to do that sort of direct query-response command, in part because PennMUSH never did. Maybe Penn does now, but it's not something I ever really encountered in MUSHing. And you see a shift away from interactive commands in regular command line interfaces, mostly for automation reasons. So generally I find it jarring.

It's pretty straightforward to store a variable so you can do chargen/next or store a prior state to do destroy/confirm after you tried to destroy something.

It's not essential, sure. Evennia even has a whole infrastructure for doing menus (and also questions/reply) with stateful commands. But for simpler, non-branching questions/replies, as a developer, once you have tasted the convenience of code-inline player interaction, it's really quite hard to go back, honestly. It allowed me to make my Evscaperoom so much faster, creating content in code almost as if writing paragraphs in a book.

[Griatch]

@Groth said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

They are exceptionally useful for a game designer though. Evennia has dynamic systems for making building command question/answer pairs (the EvMenu for example). But for ease of coding, this function:

I think it's bad game design. If you ask someone to yield and they disconnect, did they yield or not? Maintaining REST forces you to do things properly and ensure that the character is always in some sort of meaningful state.

If our prospective game designer wants to code anything meaningful ever, they're going to have to learn REST principles either way and I don't think you're doing them any actual favors by trying to give them a dodge.

These are good points. I'd say it's up to the situation though. One use of an interactive structure can for example be to step through a 'cinematic' sequence of texts. Restarting that sequence on a reload may be perfectly ok. Another common case is when asking for a confirmation to perform an action - disconnecting at that point is ok, it just means you declined to answer (so nothing happened).

While the points about REST principles are fine, saying categorically that something like this is "useless" or making people not able to "code anything meaningful ever" is a bit too inflexible in my view. There are many different game styles and -types out there.

[Thenomain]

@Lotherio

So you're saying that you prefer systemless to systemed, and a more open setting to a deeply established one?

[Groth]

@Griatch
If you have a deep abiding love for interactive functions and you want to achieve REST compatibility, what you can do is split the function into two parts. The prompt part and the answer handler.

If you want people to step through a 'cinematic' sequence of texts. Why not just use rooms? Rooms do that amazingly. It's why basically every MU * chargen ever is done through rooms. Especially since in MUSH you can attach commands directly to rooms and make them fully interactive.

For confirmation dialogs, the easiest way without prompts is to just have the user enter the command twice.

[Lotherio]

@Thenomain said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Lotherio

So you're saying that you prefer systemless to systemed, and a more open setting to a deeply established one?

My preference certainly, simple universal system is better than complex combat that requires reading 40 pages of a tome (handbook) and less established setting for me versus knowing the nuisances of decades old established theme.

My perspective, I see more systemless/settingless RP on Forums and other video games than on a Mu*. Or if it is an established setting, other RP outside of a Mu is pretty good about letting folks claim high end FCs and retelling stories versus a debate about how to play and who gets to play who.

[Auspice]

@tek said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Pose length and what to put in my poses -- I didn't realize it was expected that I should not only write what my character does, but that everyone (or the majority of folks) in the scene with me generally expects to be acknowledged, usually by name.

I'll be frank: this one has always vexed me.

There is not always a reason for my character to acknowledge yours every single round, but I have absolutely had people throw fits at me for 'ignoring' them...

And honestly? I don't remember it always being that way.

Does it suck if no one acknowledges you? Sure. But I also, personally, don't give a shit if a couple people don't. So long as I have someone/thing to respond to (and that people I specifically address react), I'm good.

But if my PC says to Bob, 'Hey Bob, that's a nice hat you're wearing today,' I don't expect Ken, Sally, and Jenny to also all react to my compliment.

[WildBaboons]

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Does it suck if no one acknowledges you? Sure. But I also, personally, don't give a shit if a couple people don't. So long as I have someone/thing to respond to (and that people I specifically address react), I'm good.

This. I've absolutely been in scenes where absolutely no one acknowledges my presence. Directed statements and actions just no responded to like they never happened. It sucks.... but really, I don't think the expectation is there to react to everyone if what they do doesn't involve you in any way. If someone hands you a soda, react to it.. but if they hand Sally a can of pop you really don't need to acknowledge it unless it was meant to be your can of coke.

[Thenomain]

@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Thenomain said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Lotherio

So you're saying that you prefer systemless to systemed, and a more open setting to a deeply established one?

My preference certainly, simple universal system is better than complex combat that requires reading 40 pages of a tome (handbook) and less established setting for me versus knowing the nuisances of decades old established theme.

But part of the draw of FS3 is that it hides the complex system in code. (Not that you can't read it if you want.)

My perspective, I see more systemless/settingless RP on Forums and other video games than on a Mu*. Or if it is an established setting, other RP outside of a Mu is pretty good about letting folks claim high end FCs and retelling stories versus a debate about how to play and who gets to play who.

So you see the the problem in how we have built up requirements over the years in certain circles (cough WoD cough) and if we want to be inviting, it will take more than a devoted recreation of, e.g., the Dresden Files world.

Encourage the light fandom over deep nerditry.

Yeah, I can get behind that.

[Sunny]

@WildBaboons said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Does it suck if no one acknowledges you? Sure. But I also, personally, don't give a shit if a couple people don't. So long as I have someone/thing to respond to (and that people I specifically address react), I'm good.

This. I've absolutely been in scenes where absolutely no one acknowledges my presence. Directed statements and actions just no responded to like they never happened. It sucks.... but really, I don't think the expectation is there to react to everyone if what they do doesn't involve you in any way. If someone hands you a soda, react to it.. but if they hand Sally a can of pop you really don't need to acknowledge it unless it was meant to be your can of coke.

While I agree this SHOULD be the way it is, it absolutely is not the case across cultures. There are some games @tek is probably playing on where it IS the case, culturally. I judge that culture harshly (JUDGEY EYES), but it IS something that they have likely encountered and are not just misunderstanding it.

[WildBaboons]

@Sunny Oh yeah, I deleted the line where I put that there may be that expectation somewhere by I'm not going to feel bad about ignoring it because it's terrible and the people that want it are bringing great shame to their family.

[Griatch]

@Groth said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Griatch
If you have a deep abiding love for interactive functions and you want to achieve REST compatibility, what you can do is split the function into two parts. The prompt part and the answer handler.

If you want people to step through a 'cinematic' sequence of texts. Why not just use rooms? Rooms do that amazingly. It's why basically every MU * chargen ever is done through rooms. Especially since in MUSH you can attach commands directly to rooms and make them fully interactive.

For confirmation dialogs, the easiest way without prompts is to just have the user enter the command twice.

Yes, I know well these techniques, and as said all of them are available as stateful commands or even as ready infrastructures like EvMenu in Evennia. These have no problem with REST, they are saved to the database. If necessarily wanting to go the room-based chargen route you can of course have commands on rooms in Evennia too (but personally I find it ugly to use rooms to mimic what can be handled by a proper multi-option menu ... but I digress).

My like for interactive commands has mostly to do with how easy they are for the developer to work with, understand and maintain (specifically in Evennia, not as the general case since I don't know about how they would work in other code bases). And ease of use means they will indeed be used - they allow for less code, and for very quick development (I know this from experience). That's all.

Technically, if REST compliance would be needed, it's not at all impossible to make the interactive state persistent; I was just pointing out (to @Tehom at the beginning of this exchange) that it was something that would need to be handled in that case.

[Ninjakitten]

@tek This itself, IMO, illustrates one of the issues with starting up: different game cultures. I haven't been on a game in years where there wasn't an expectation that a scene was strict-pose-order unless 3per had been declared (though some places it's assumed in whatever is there considered a 'really large' scene), but 2 and 3 have varied wildly, from games (and people) that loved running OOC commentary and jokes and out-of-scene chatting to ones where almost no one did OOC during scenes unless it was establishing something important to IC (or saying 'my kitchen is on fire, afk'), and from places and people where every individual is expected to get a nod all the time to ones where the prevailing unspoken (these things are so often unspoken) opinion is that that's silly and real people don't do that.

I wrote a few intro to MU*ing/rules for MU* RP essays in ye olden days when I was pretty sure I knew the Right Way, but I think the rules and expectations that are genuinely close to MU*-universal in not only existence but magnitude are not that many.

[Griatch]

My anecdotal input: Having played mainly on RP-heavy MUDs rather than Mushes, my emotes would generally only include people my character would be expected to notice/react to. I'd personally get a little annoyed if my character was walking into what is described as a large, super-busy tavern and the people around the table behind a curtain on the other side of the busy stage immediately emotes how they notice me entering (it has happened, many a time).

If wanting to make it clear the player was noticed without actually addressing them, I might include them with a simple X doesn't notice Y coming through the door, but keeps doing Z, but I never felt this was expected or dictated by convention on any of the games I've played.

[Groth]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Yes, I know well these techniques, and as said all of them are available as stateful commands or even as ready infrastructures like EvMenu in Evennia. These have no problem with REST, they are saved to the database. If necessarily wanting to go the room-based chargen route you can of course have commands on rooms in Evennia too (but personally I find it ugly to use rooms to mimic what can be handled by a proper multi-option menu ... but I digress).

The point about rooms is that they're the simple way to do things. I think it's unhelpful to someone who wants to develop a game to give them shortcuts that they'll regret later. I think Evennia Attributes are an example of this because they might look really tempting and easy to use when someone is starting out, but later when they come further trying to design their game systems and maybe want to migrate their database they'll come to the realization they need to rewrite everything because attributes are kind of awful when you actually try to do anything with them.

I think it's better in cases like that to simply give people an entirely non-code way to handle things. Already in the 1980's we made a distinction between coders and builders and I think that's the right way to go.

Instead of giving people shortcuts to code menus and text adventures, why not straight up give them tools to generate menus and text adventures? If you look at various game dev toolkits, they're usually some kind of simplified scripting interface available designed to make it easy for people who don't know how to code to make things happen. You could argue that the first 'code' I ever did was messing around with the Starcraft map editor.

It shouldn't be that hard to make a web interface for Evennia to allow people to make Zork style adventures without ever having to touch python.

[Auspice]

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

If wanting to make it clear the player was noticed without actually addressing them, I might include them with a simple X doesn't notice Y coming through the door, but keeps doing Z, but I never felt this was expected or dictated by convention on any of the games I've played.

I think it is a very small minority who expect to be acknowledged every round by every person.

...unfortunately, it is a very vocal minority. As I said, I've had people get angry at me for not acknowledging that thing they're doing over there away from my PC.

[Sunny]

We DON'T have a unified culture or set of expectations; they differ heavily from one game to another. OOC chat amounts, who to acknowledge in poses, pose order (or lack thereof), length of poses, public scenes, pose in or rely on the room message...I could go on, and on, and on, and on. Navigating these things is ROUGH for new people, especially if they come in to 'mushing' and not a specific game with specific people helping them with the culture of THAT GAME. Transitioning to a new game the first time has got to be awful, it really does.

Denying someone's shared experience because it 'shouldn't' be like that isn't helpful.

[Auspice]

@Sunny said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Denying someone's shared experience because it 'shouldn't' be like that isn't helpful.

No one denied anyone's experience: we shared ours. Please don't insert malicious intent where there isn't any.

[Sunny]

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

@Sunny said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Denying someone's shared experience because it 'shouldn't' be like that isn't helpful.

No one denied anyone's experience: we shared ours. Please don't insert malicious intent where there isn't any.

Er? Maybe take your own advice about inserting malicious intent? I wasn't making an accusation, it's all good. I was agreeing with you. o.o

ETA: Like, expounding on a point isn't an attack, I promise. I was elaborating on the sorts of issues that new folks have to deal with with differing cultures between games and how many, many things there are that change between games.