Optional Realities & Project Redshift
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Is there an eclipse phase game I'm missing? When I read the website it looks like an RPG tabletop book series or do you mean staff on Project Redshift?
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Eclipse Phase is a tabletop RPG that I have been wanting to turn into a mush for a good while. For realistic space stuff, I'd suggest looking at HSpace 5, and tinker with it from where it's been left. I thought it was awesomely promising, but might not be the best of things for Eclipse Phase. Most of the physics are accurate, as I understand it.
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It appears Hspace 5 closed in 2010 and I can't find Tinker MUSH. Can you provide links to any existing examples as I've been looking at pretty much every text-based space game I can get my hands on.
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I just spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to track down Revian and the HSpace 5 code, with probably no success (but there's a chance. An email has been sent, and we shall see)
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Well I appreciate it!
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If you're looking for space mu*'s have you seen this?
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I had not, taking a look at it now. Project Redshift already has its core systems like movement, combat, space flight, and crafting all documented or in development. But since I think there are smarter people than me who have toyed with space text-based games in the last 20 years. I try and check out any scifi oriented ones I can see. Find out if they came up with an elegant solution to something we might be struggling with.
That and it's just fun to see what's out there already and what features haven't been supported prior to Project Redshift's development.
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Results for the Game Pitch contest are in! Find out who the top 3 were. Think we fucked up? Let us known who your favorite was. Don't care but want to see the submissions, they'll be posted this evening (soon).
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Are you to cool to check out Optional Realities? Don't think anyone submitted a game proposal worth looking at? Well aha we've converted our 1st place winner (Usurper by Griatch of the Evennia codebase) into an article to remove all obstacles of viewing it.
Check out the article right here!
Look at it and be hopeful of the future of text-based gaming.
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I'm interested in hearing the reaction to Usurper from people here. The design would make a damn fun game IMO.
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@Ide said:
I'm interested in hearing the reaction to Usurper from people here.
Okay.
I'm not sure what one is meant to do on this game. I have a sense of "things will be coded that will do all this stuff", but not what those systems are expected to look like. I can see that there is some plan to link the island to the science-fiction aspect of "The Light" and that's kind of neat, especially as the population of the world are apparently misunderstanding it. It also ties in how Favor can be gained or lost without witnesses, so bonus points for making the game mechanic thematic.
The mechanic of changing fashions is being described as "give Commoner characters something to do" which I'd be afraid would undermine the diversity of the support network that Commoners do. Akin to the first sentence, why would someone play a Commoner?
It's an interesting proposal, and I'd be interested to see how it develops. I am not excited by High Nobility, so I can't see if it's a gripping theme or not.
I liked the presentation.
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At the risk of over-plugging...
This is the Judge feedback for all submissions
This is the discussion thread where the game contestants expand a little about their game
In my opinion Usurper would be a very dynamic setting with a system geared towards social/political RP. In my opinion it's a fairly innovative approach to automating some aspects of social/political RP that are difficult to quantify. The fashion thing is as much to give people something to do as to incentivize the appropriate attention to fashion that is a staple of high society. The favor mechanic is (in my opinion) a clear battleground in the social sense. Those with higher favor are better than you and you need to undermine them and earn more favor. As for what commoners would do well if you wanted to engage in crafting or hunting or something like that which would be inappropriate for your noble. Off to a commoner you go to explore the lowlands, get lost in the labyrinth of the palace maze, or perhaps compete in arenas for entertainment on honor.
To be fair to the proposals they had a 600 word minimum. I'll leave a note for Griatch and perhaps he'll pop on over and answer himself or someone can ask clarifying questions in the OR Thread discussing the submissions.
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Additional Note: The source of a strong overarching story and defined minor storyarcs would be required for such a game. He didn't really provide us with anything in the proposal due to the word limitation but I agree that the game as proposed seems like spinning of wheels. We presumed there would be adequate plot support to give context and meaning to all these actions.
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@Jeshin said:
The fashion thing is as much to give people something to do as to incentivize the appropriate attention to fashion that is a staple of high society.
This exemplifies my biggest gripe of "what would the characters do?" So far, only tailors are the only Commoners important to the game mechanics. I imagine that guards and others close to the Noble characters will also provide important roles, but to be taken on the whims of the players and not encouraged by the system.
My feedback isn't meant to challenge anyone's notions or attack the concept, but @Ide enjoys watching differing paradigms interacting, and why not. From this new ideas might be born.
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Of course! I'm only trying to provide some expansion that wasn't included in the proposal. I actually picked out Griatch's specific post expanding on it and will copy it to here so no one has to go over to OR to read it.
@Griatch / OptionalRealities said:
Jeshin's Question for Usurper by Griatch - You're kind of a MUSH guy and we commented on the Usurper concept (for the most part) as if it would be developed as a MUD. What systems would you automate in your proposal and which would you leave more collaborative/staff controlled?
Griatch's Response
Just so you know - I've never played a MUSH in my life.
The commands are way too archaic for my taste. 
It's just that I see so many interesting stuff from the other MU* worlds when talking to Evennia developers (which are really from all over) that I often try to bridge the gap.I visualize The Usurper as primarily a "MUD" in the code department. It is designed to be run with a minimal staff, which is why all the systems you are reading about in the pitch are actually intended to be automated. This is also in order to help make over-aching social effects somewhat predictable. Predictability is important to some extent if you want players to be able to establish forward-looking strategies. For example, the Empress as an NPC may be puppetable for flavor and RP but her main role is that of the face of the automatic systems that I envision drives the social metagame.
On the Favor system and the drive to intrigue:
The main drive for intrigue on Morat is an important aspect not properly covered in the pitch. As rightly mentioned in the judge feedback, leaving intrigue only up to the players may lead to complacency. For this reason, the Favor system is something I envision being a double-edged sword. As alluded to in the pitch, losing all favor (which represents both having no friends (or leverage on "friends") in the society and, most importantly, not being appreciated by the Empress) is a poor life's choice. Losing your Favor (or maybe having very low favor) may first mean social RP stigma (since all Nobles can always sense your current Favor). So far it is all RP-based. But eventually your loss of status will start to rub off on your family, causing them to lose Favor by association. This slowly spreads to affect your previous allies, and finally the other members of the clan your family belongs to. People will know who is bringing them down in a very real way. I imagine this will be quite the push for you to improve your standing or for your peers to take action to help you or make sure that you are no longer a problem ... So why don't you want to be down to 0 Favor? Having 0 Favor for too long eventually means the Empress herself will eventually decide (again this is an automated system) that she doesn't want you around anymore. Which means work for assassin Servants (or even official soldier servants since the Empress does not need to hide from anyone).
On the role of Combat
Whereas combat exists and players may scratch their combat itches by playing Servant soldiers, guards, assassins, hired thieves etc, this style of gameplay is something which is not the main focus of this particular game (it is covered excellently in so many others). As guessed by the judges, the lowlands of Morat is a wink at the more traditional explore/combat game styles. Just how fleshed out this would be I'm not certain about but the point here is that the Servants are throw-away characters as far as meta-plot goes. They do the actual practical work on Morat but they do so at the whim of their masters and the meat of The Usurper as a game is really intended to be with the Noble play. I'd probably skip other base necessities for the Nobles too, like food for the sake of survival, and have these things be automated or giving some sort of temporary boost (or even a Favor boost if you are known as a gourmet eating only high-quality food from a master chef).
The island of Morat is meant as a depraved and decadent pit of scheming, intrigue and on-the-surface smiles rather than a base-survival simulator, battlefield, martial arts tournament or a cutthroat place of deadly dark alleys.
On the Empress mechanic
As for further mechanics, The Empress makes decisions based on Favor, adding up Favor for those voting aye/nay in a petition. There is a random element in there, representing the Empress' own fickle will (the vote is just a "recommendation", she's the one who actually makes the decision), but it's un-random enough for it to be relevant to seek support for whatever you are proposing. I think such a petition should not be free-form but rather be built from a coded "petition recipe" by combining elements similar to how you'd create a crafted item. The components building the petition could be snippets of information, accepted bribes or power influences of various kinds.
On the Fashion system
The Fashion aspect is something I didn't see much comment on from the judges, but I haven't seen this particular take on it before. The fashion represents the Empress' current liking and also the overall fashion of the island. The Fashion for, say, clothes, is a multi-dimensional matrix where each axis is slowly changing. You could have one axis with styles of hats, another with colors of hats, another axis with pants etc. These axes shift along slowly moving trends at semi-random speeds and when you are showing yourself in public, how "fashionable" you are is represented by the distance from the current "fashion average". This will affect your favor.
The Fashion system can be applied to all sorts of things. Another example is food. A Noble is a pampered person physically. They can have very specific likes/dislikes for food and drink (this is a mini-version of the Empress' fashion matrix, based on food ingredients. Most likely this is automatically set at Character creation to make chargen easier, with only optional customization for those that want to). So if you organize a social event (usually a Favor boost) but have your chef serve that high-favor person the wrong meal could lead to disaster.
All aspects of the Fashion system are aimed at forcing change and diversity. It also filters down and means Servants will need to produce new items for the nobles as a steady rate (and depending on the depth of crafting, you would have e.g. cooks very good at pleasing some nobles and not others for example). This is also the reason for the extra Favor boon by publicly burning items which are no longer favored by the Empress, it's a somewhat contrived item sink.
These are all primarily automated systems. I have no doubt one would have to be careful to limit minmaxing here, but I don't think a social mechanic would be any more or less twinkable than a combat mechanic per se.
At this point it's all hypothetical anyway.
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Griatch -
@Jeshin said:
It's just that I see so many interesting stuff from the other MU* worlds when talking to Evennia developers (which are really from all over) that I often try to bridge the gap.
What gap is it that you're trying to bridge? I've become lost between your talking about MUSH and a system I have, myself, absolutely zero experience with or knowledge of.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
Hey, I didn't say that. That is the quote from Griatch that I copy pasted from Optional Realities where he was expanding on the proposal.
So the top is me and everything after @Griatch is his response to a question I asked which was
---* Usurper by Griatch - You're kind of a MUSH guy and we commented on the Usurper concept (for the most part) as if it would be developed as a MUD. What systems would you automate in your proposal and which would you leave more collaborative/staff controlled?* ---
Due to my question implying he was a MUSH guy he corrected me. He then referred to the Evennia codebase which he is the developer of so he tries to bridge the gap between designing an engine for a MUD and designing an engine for a MUSH since Evennia is meant to be a foundational engine that could be used for any top of MU*
EDIT - I'm unfamiliar with this forum interface so sorry for the messy posts.
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Do you enjoy writing? Do you enjoy contests with cash prizes? Do you like challenging yourself? Well that's great because Optional Realities has a June 2015 contest for you. 600 to 2500 word short stories that are based within the setting of any game we list on our site! 50 USD for 1st, 35 USD for 2nd, and 15 USD for 3rd.
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One of the things I noted from the example winner is that a lot of it read like "stuff happens". I don't mind "stuff happens", but it must be a Mud thing that this is the design work methodology. Perhaps it's the mentality that "let's do this and see if it works, and if it doesn't then oh well". We Mushers could have more of that, but we seem to be more used to the RPG aspect of things, where the game is more or less complete before we log in, and that we understand that changes will be made with some commentary from the consensus.
Mind you, I would like to live in a world where if I change how, e.g., Favor is generated I won't get an angry mob of players with pitchforks and torches trying to beat down my door. Engagement will inform changes in procedure and therefore code. So will unexpected system loopholes.
Understanding is key to bridging groups, so here I am, trying to understand.
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@Thenomain
Hey,So I re-read the portion from the linking of Usurper down to the bottom a few times and I'm afraid I'll need to ask some clarification questions since I do believe we're discussing the topic from 2 very different paradigms. Which, frankly, is really interesting and I have a few people reading this thread now because of that potential "genre gap" going on. (exciting)
This was a contest with a fairly strict 600 word limitation. We didn't want everything fleshed out and explained to the degree that someone could then produce a game from. We wanted to encourage people to think about game concepts and put those ideas to paper because we felt that a lot of people in the text-based rpg community have games in their heads that they might never make but would like to share the idea at least. That kind of accounts for the very simple "it will be like this and function this way" approach in the statements about the submission.
Questions for clarification purposes
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When you state that you are used to the game being more or less complete. Can you give me an example of what you mean? Do you mean most MUSH use RPG systems as their game systems and thus all the rules are quantified and known to everyone after they login to the game?
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The favor generation wouldn't actually be "changed" per se. It would be designed on a matrix to shift. These shifts would be a game feature and an intended function so players would be aware of that when they started playing. So would that still cause players to become upset as per your example?
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Can you elaborate on your "stuff happens" comment so I can better understand it? Do you mean that the game features are not properly quantified and just generally say this is how it will work with no system explaining why? Do you mean it in the sense that we brainstorm and implement features without a source material to guide us and "that stuff happens" kind of way?
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