Optional Realities & Project Redshift
-
@WTFE said:
A point of order, @Jaunt claims to be posting for his own amusement. Which is why I've been posting all that stuff about booze. We need something to drink for The Game
.Yes, but I tend to take @Thenomain's approach to it. Whether they think they are or not, they are here in an official capacity simply by dint of having thrown out those credentials in the first place, coupled with the current discussion.
-
L is a loss...it's football season.
-
@Jaunt said:
Ad hominem doesn't need to be fallacious to be ad hominem.
Ad hominem is, by definition, a particular kind of logical fallacy. If Bob is arguing that all people collecting for charity should be shot on sight because they're wasting his time, and I say that's ridiculous because he's a complete asshole, that's an ad hominem attack even if he IS, in fact, a complete asshole, since his assholishness has nothing to do with why the argument is ridiculous. However, if Bob makes that argument and I say he's a complete asshole, but don't suggest that his complete-assholeness itself means his argument is ridiculous (invalid), that's not ad hominem. It's just abuse. In both cases, whether it's an accurate label or not is irrelevant to whether or not the argument is ad hominem.
But, we're not going to change our target audience to include all MUSHes, just because of some chest thumping. What about H+S MUDs? What about PK MUDs? What about "RPEs" with a very low standard for roleplay? No. We're not trying to be a community for every text-based game out there. Those communities already exist, and we're not attempting to compete with them.
You keep saying this, and as far as I saw no one has asked you to change your target audience. As I see it:
- Verbiage on your site implies it is for/about text-based RPGs.
- The actual requirements for 'counting' as a text-based RPG and not merely an 'other game', as later laid out, are not fulfilled by the majority of our kind of MU*.
- Your site appears to speak of wanting to bridge the divide between various sorts of text-based RPGs.
Y'all are basically saying our games aren't "text-based RPGs".
- Roleplay is our games' SOLE reason for existing -- the only kind of "play" there IS on our games.
- In over 20 years I've been on exactly one game where death wasn't permanent (because of the story-world itself, and it didn't harm the RP), and only a handful where there was no risk of dying unless you agreed you would. Even then, many characters died -- permanently -- because the story or another character made that the most logical or beautiful option.
- Now, particularly given that in OUR culture, entirely automated systems are frequently felt to be things that replace RP, not count as it, using that to exclude us from the category of "text-based RPGs" is pretty damn offensive, and not exactly conducive to bridging any divides there might already have been.
As has been said more than once: You can claim to represent text-based RPGs. You can actually represent one particular branch of them. If you claim the former and do the latter, you will annoy people, particularly the people who belong to the former group and not the latter one. If I started a site "about text-based RPGs" and made "players in a scene are logged in at the same time" a criterion for what that means, forum RPers would be well within reason to be annoyed, whether they actually wanted me to talk about them or not. Why not simply claim to represent/focus on highly-automated MU* RPGs and then continue to do so? I don't think any of us object to the actual focus of your site. We object to the representation of said focus, and the way it's been discussed here.
I don't give three-sevenths of a damn whether you guys talk about or list our kind of games; I don't need another place to go. But don't claim you represent our overarching genre and then define us out of it, and if you insist on doing so, don't come do it in our house and get upset when we tell you where to stick it.
@Thenomain said:
This community has been around for, what, 10 years? The earliest Mush in, I believe, 1998.
Depending when we want to say this community started... well, I've found evidence of SWOFA back to January 2003, and there are references to WORA in my logs going back to September 2001; I don't remember when exactly it got spun off from the bad mush page, but I'm fairly certain it was before then. Tasteless Descs got killed mid-2002. Man, I should have been documenting the WORA/Snark/SWOFA/etc. history as we went... Anyway, I'd give this community at least 14 years of being around, probably getting into 15.
According to the ol' MUSH Manual, "The [original Tiny]MUSH code dates back to spring of 1990, or so." and "In January of 1991, PernMUSH [which as a codebase rather than game became PennMUSH] was started."
We could probably use a good, updated history somewhere. It's a lot harder to find things out than it ought to be.
-
Thank you for picking up on that. I didn't have time to do the research at lunch. I don't think the family tree of code bases is important in this case, but the distraction of history is interesting.
Incidentally, PernMush was the code test base of TinyMush 2, tho it is the game that Shadow came from. The game developers and Amberyl & Ambar inspired him to try his own hand at it, tho I believe Penn was mostly Amberyl's project after the start of it. It's been a few decades.
Likewise, thank you for your own attempt at making the points I've been trying to make since about page one. It's refreshing when you can find concordance in a sea of vitriol.
-
@Ninjakitten said:
Why not simply claim to represent/focus on highly-automated MU* RPGs and then continue to do so?
It's all the more offensive that they're not actually representing highly-automated MUs -- as I understand it, any MUSH using Faraday's FS3 qualifies, because of the semi-automated +combat system and the automated +heal.
Yes. I understand what @Jeshin means when he is talking about RPing around automated systems, and the idea of RP-enhancing automation. But this is the opposite of what FS3 is trying to do. FS3 +combat isn't there so you can have fun whacking at things/one another without a GM, and that is not, largely, what people use it for. It's there so that when the story calls for combat, you can get through it faster and things are tonnes less likely to go pear-shaped when somebody falls asleep at the keys. It's there so you spend less time interacting with coded systems than you do if you do the combat with +roll. It's not there to enforce rolled outcomes, either, really, which is why you can take endless damage but it will never say you're dead.
It is hilariously stupid that Game of Bones would qualify for this MU-list but few, if any, WoD games would, when GoB is much more fuzzy about combat than most MUs.
Basically, almost every RP MUSH/MUX that ever there was passes the first two criteria with flying colours, while almost all of them fail the third, and those that pass probably pass by the letter of the law but not the spirit. Even if it wasn't an annoying criterion (especially to hold onto here) the 'arbitrary' spot where it's placed is stoopid.
-
At the least, lets give them credit for creating a site that states it wants to talk about all text based RPGs equally and finds an ingenious way to make it so that only muds end up really being talked about. Let's be honest, automated systems was a great decision as far as criteria. It's vague enough to be subjective and just clear enough to disqualify most of our systems since they don't decide rp.
-
First off, thanks for your post and for being relatively civil with it, @Ninjakitten, because I think it gets to the root of some of the issues here, namely in perception (at least in the case of criticisms from people who have actually looked at our site). I would definitely say that the recurring theme of this thread has been that the perception of our intent is different from our actual intent. I'd really like to get to the root cause of that perception, and not get mired in people continuing to try to equate the perception of intent to actual intent.
@Ninjakitten said:
Verbiage on your site implies it is for/about text-based RPGs.
Verbiage on our site implies that it is for/about "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". It then goes on to make specific mention of 'RPIs' and note that our site is dedicated to games of this type. That's right on the tin. People keep saying that's somehow unclear, or completely ignoring everything past the first fifteen or so words. Maybe after that the language used is blurry for people not familiar with the genre themselves? And you know, if that's unclear, I'd love to hear HOW it's unclear. Obviously it's been unclear to you and that's concerning. But except where a few likely have malicious intent, I'm sure that the error in peoples' perception of our site's focus is our fault and not theirs; the issue is that in order to understand what led to that misunderstanding, we have to understand what led to it, specifically, and to really have productive discussion leading in that direction we have to acknowledge that 'perceptions' are not facts which hasn't gone so well so far, on both parties' ends. In many ways, I see our criteria for community partners as being a reinforcement of our site's focus.
@Ninjakitten said:
The actual requirements for 'counting' as a text-based RPG and not merely an 'other game', as later laid out, are not fulfilled by the majority of our kind of MU*.
Most of the requirements are right there on the first page. We don't argue that they're not fulfilled by most of your MU*. They're not fulfilled by most of the games we've played or that are out there, either. We're not trying to say that only these games are text-based RPGs. It's a very narrow niche, but it's still reasonably broad enough to apply to a pretty decent number and a very dedicated fanbase -- a fanbase that doesn't really have a site dedicated specifically to that niche, which is why @Jaunt mentions the longevity of that niche.
@Ninjakitten said:
Your site appears to speak of wanting to bridge the divide between various sorts of text-based RPGs.
I think in this particular case whenever 'bridge the divide' gets brought up, nobody's actually referring to anything in our mission statements. Unless I'm mistaken, they're quoting something @Jeshin said a good while ago? Basically the statement's been taken out of context over and over and over again throughout the duration of this thread. The site doesn't speak of bridging the divide, @Jeshin does, and @Jeshin's definitely the bridge-building type and I think he's been incredibly patient with things on this thread, really. There are a few very specific divides that our site endeavors to bridge (for example, between MUD, MUSH, etc. games that match our particular definition of what has historically been called 'RPI', which have historically argued over definitions to try and exclude each other for decades).
@Ninjakitten said:
Y'all are basically saying our games aren't "text-based RPGs".
We never said this. Ever. I don't think it's really implied by our site's clearly-stated focus group, at least from my perspective and understanding of the niche/genre. But if people are getting this implication, that's concerning, and I'd like to get to the root of why they get this impression of our site. That way we can fix it
@Ninjakitten said:
Roleplay is our games' SOLE reason for existing -- the only kind of "play" there IS on our games.
And that's fantastic, and many of 'your' games (and in many cases these are MY games, too) qualify for our criteria. Others don't. It doesn't mean they're not text-based RPGs. It means that they're not part of the narrow niche that's typically referred to as 'RPI'. I avoid calling it RPI, because my use of that title is restricted to a specific codebase. Moreover, I generally think that calling a codebase 'Roleplay Intensive' when there are hundreds of other games out there that may very well be MORE roleplay intensive with different features is pretentious and stupid. Really, I think the whole 'RPI' distinction and need for definition thing's rooted in a large number of MUDs out there that call themselves RPEs but aren't really roleplay enforced which is a whole 'nother problem and thing to debate, really. I think that one's uniquely a MUD problem, but if it isn't, I'd be kind of tangentially curious about how other codebases and approaches to the medium have handled their definitions regarding roleplay stringency and if they've seen similar blurring.
@Ninjakitten said:
In over 20 years I've been on exactly one game where death wasn't permanent (because of the story-world itself, and it didn't harm the RP), and only a handful where there was no risk of dying unless you agreed you would. Even then, many characters died -- permanently -- because the story or another character made that the most logical or beautiful option.
Permanent death is probably MORE common on roleplaying MUSHes in my experience than it is on MUDs, independently of automated systems, sure. I'm not sure if non-consent permanent death is all that common outside of games with automated systems, but if it is I'd tangentially like to hear how that works in terms of arbitration of conflict or disputes -- it's not something I've seen, personally. I think, maybe, what I'm gathering from this is that you didn't feel the automated systems requirement was made clear in that first line? It's sort of made implicit in the mention of RPIs in particular and the 'of this nature' qualification when 'text-based Roleplaying Games' are mentioned, but I could definitely see how that might be confusing or not very well conveyed to somebody not familiar with the genre. That's useful information and something we're happy to discuss. The problem is that a lot of the 'discussion' has been more along the lines of 'I feel x about y', 'I don't see that from my perspective', 'FUCK YOU, GET CANCER, ETC.'. Which is really frustrating.
@Ninjakitten said:
Now, particularly given that in OUR culture, entirely automated systems are frequently felt to be things that replace RP, not count as it, using that to exclude us from the category of "text-based RPGs" is pretty damn offensive, and not exactly conducive to bridging any divides there might already have been.
We're not interested in excluding you from the category of 'text-based RPGs' and if we were we'd kind of be fucking morons. We refer specifically to 'text-based RPGs of this nature', not to all text-based RPGs, and the 'of this nature' is referring to RPI or RPI-like games. We can definitely talk about ways to make that more clear though.
@Ninjakitten said:
We object to the representation of said focus, and the way it's been discussed here.
I don't know how many more times we could reiterate, here, that we have a focus group and do not purport to represent all text-based roleplaying games. If you perceive that our site is doing it, I'd be happy to get to the root of what causes those perceptions so we can fix it, but I'm not interested in continuing to debate it with people who have taken their initial perceptions and now hold them to be fact rather than just that, perceptions. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think @Jeshin's been remarkably patient and reasonable, and honestly, I've tried.
@il-volpe said:
It's all the more offensive that they're not actually representing highly-automated MUs -- as I understand it, any MUSH using Faraday's FS3 qualifies, because of the semi-automated +combat system and the automated +heal.
It's likely that most of these MUSHes would meet our criteria, too, which is why we've found the MUSH-exclusion argument to be odd, to say the least. There really haven't been many games that have applied for community partnership and been turned down, so if you want me to understand this perspective it would help if you offered some sort of evidence that leads to this conclusion that we exclude highly-automated RP-centric MUs, so that we could directly remedy the cause of that misunderstanding.
-
@crayon said:
do not purport to represent all text-based roleplaying games. If you perceive that our site is doing it, I'd be happy to get to the root of what causes those perceptions so we can fix it
I think the cause of that perception would be @Jeshin saying it.
The rest, well. You have come to this community to advertise a game and an online community. This is allowed. Your upcoming Project Redshift is advertised here as equal to all other games advertised here, even though it's not the sort of game that this community is about.*
However, your community does not reciprocate. Very few of the games that we here enjoy qualify to be advertised on your community in a manner equal to those that are your favoured type. Why is it hard to understand that this is annoying?
Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.
*Actually, since you persist in bumping this thread by posting about the new content on Optional Realities, you're really sort of grabbing more than your fair share of metaphorical airtime and thus creeping into the field of bad manners by local community standards.
-
@crayon said:
It's likely that most of these MUSHes would meet our criteria, too, which is why we've found the MUSH-exclusion argument to be odd, to say the least. There really haven't been many games that have applied for community partnership and been turned down, so if you want me to understand this perspective it would help if you offered some sort of evidence that leads to this conclusion that we exclude highly-automated RP-centric MUs, so that we could directly remedy the cause of that misunderstanding.
I think you're misunderstanding.
In FS3, one gets a bit of code where players can set themselves to be wielding X weapon and wearing Y armour and fighting with Z person or team, in a gung-ho, or cautious, or just-defensive fashion. The combat coordinator, who can be anyone, then triggers combat rounds, and the code rolls, determines who hit whom, and how much damage was taken, and counts up said damage, etc. There is also a +heal command, which rolls ones healing skill and heals the target appropriately. This, evidently, is enough automation that MUSHes using FS3 will qualify for your game list.
However, I, the administrator of an FS3 MUSH, and probably many other people here, do not see a fundamental difference between doing this and doing it the way one does it on most WoD MUs, where you +roll, and it generates a series of random numbers between one and ten, and displays the result, but does not necessarily even tell you if that's a success, and certainly doesn't adjust your opponent's sheet to reflect the damage done.
FS3's combat is a time-saver, saving the players from having to enter in their rolls for every round of combat, and the GM from having to set damage on sheets. It allows us to use the dice system but fuck around with it less. It is not like the automated systems on MUDs, which control the outcome regardless of player/GM input (apart from triggering one's attack or attempt to pick a lock or whatever).
So allowing FS3 MUSHes but disallowing most WoD ones on the basis of FS3's +combat and +heal systems seems stupid, because it's not really what you're getting at in requiring automated systems.
-
@il-volpe said:
Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.
I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.
This particular thread of debate just gets really odd to me, because while MUSoapbox's userbase is pretty clearly overwhelmingly of a particular genre with a lot of history, there's really not a whole lot of information that I've seen really defining what MUSoapbox is about, except insofar as it's a MU* Soapbox, in which case while the community might be overwhelmingly of a particular genre the board's intent seems broader. That could be user error or unfamiliarity with previous iterations, but it's a bit odd to me. If, for example, this site was explicitly defined as being dedicated exclusively to MUSHes, we probably wouldn't be advertising Redshift at all, and OR only insofar as many MUSHes meet the criteria.
Some of the criticism levied towards us has been based in our lack of willingness to really become participants in this community, but part of the obstacle to that has been the general 'outsider' treatment and a lack of explicit focus coupled with a community userbase that is definitely focused.
@il-volpe said:
In FS3, one gets a bit of code where players can set themselves to be wielding X weapon and wearing Y armour and fighting with Z person or team, in a gung-ho, or cautious, or just-defensive fashion. The combat coordinator, who can be anyone, then triggers combat rounds, and the code rolls, determines who hit whom, and how much damage was taken, and counts up said damage, etc. There is also a +heal command, which rolls ones healing skill and heals the target appropriately. This, evidently, is enough automation that MUSHes using FS3 will qualify for your game list.
Oh! Thanks for the explanation. The automated systems requirement is definitely a blurry and tricky thing to really hammer down and determine a firm line on. I would actually not include FS3, in this particular case, though if an FS3 game applied @Jeshin might reconsider our requirements on automated systems. Because the damage etc. is manually applied rather than applied by the automated system itself in this case, I wouldn't see it as being all that different from having a dice-roller in-game, really. If a player could, in theory, not follow the dictation/arbitration of the system I wouldn't really call it fully automated. Maybe binding automated systems or something to that effect would be a better definition. Specific verbiage here is something we're definitely happy to discuss, because it's obviously hard to really define and ensure the letters match the spirit. That said, the +heal function as you describe it might qualify on its own.
-
The first hard liquor I ever drank was as a child (yes, a child) in Germany. I was about 15 and had my eyes opened to a whole new world of flavour and pain in the form of this bad boy:
This is Kirschwasser (lit. "cherry water") and it's one of many German fruit brandies. Unlike most fruit brandies, however, and indeed unlike most cherry-based ones, Kirschwasser is made from the whole cherry (morello, to be precise) including the pit. This gives it an entirely different aroma and flavour from other fruit brandies: it is not sweet, it contains within it the essence of (sour) cherries and a hint of bitter almond (from the pits).
It's wonderful stuff. Drinking the best stuff is like drinking a hint of cherry mixed with liquid flame.
The stuff I grew up on was typically around 50%/100 proof, but the most common commercial brands are, like this one (Lörch is … competently crafted, but nothing special) are typically 40%/80 proof. Even that relatively weak stuff, I should note, packs quite a gasp-inducing wallop if you're not used to it.
This is, incidentally, a typical German Schnaps (sic). It is not that filthy "peppermint schnapps (sic)" that Americans think is the real deal. American schnapps is made from neutrally-flavoured distilled alcohols that have flavours (often fruit, but sometimes crap like peppermint) dissolved into them, sugar added, then some kind of thickening surfactant like glycerin added to make it seem smoother. A proper fruit Schnaps (Obstler) is usually made from fermenting the fruit's juice itself (with the exception of raspberries which don't produce enough sugar to ferment) before distilling. The other kind of Schnaps would be Kräuterschnaps, stuff made from a neutral grain alcohol then infused with herbs and spices like some of the better gins. The most famous of these (but not the best, IMO) is Jägermeister. (I've always preferred Underberg of this set.)
The bottle in this picture was my pride and joy; it was the first time I'd noticed that you could find affordable import spirits, wines, and beers in China. When I first came here that bottle would have represented a month's salary. Now it represents under 5% of a month's salary (if you count only my official salary). My salary has not gone up that much in 15 years…
-
@crayon said:
@il-volpe said:
Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.
I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.
I don't think this is accurate, actually; the ad may not get a lot of bites if it's for something other than a MUSH/MUX, but I haven't seen any mention of that being prohibited. Another forum isn't even a game, and that's been permitted -- along with a kickstarter for a tabletop game that's being run by a member of the community. There are threads for things that are not yet, and may never be, games posted in this area, that are just feelers or brainstorming threads for game concepts. It's quite broad, really.
I haven't seen any ads deleted or taken down or deemed 'forbidden'. That isn't to say it hasn't happened, but I haven't seen any indication of the kind of limitation you believe exists.
-
@surreality said:
I don't think this is accurate, actually; the ad may not get a lot of bites if it's for something other than a MUSH/MUX, but I haven't seen any mention of that being prohibited. Another forum isn't even a game, and that's been permitted -- along with a kickstarter for a tabletop game that's being run by a member of the community. There are threads for things that are not yet, and may never be, games posted in this area, that are just feelers or brainstorming threads for game concepts. It's quite broad, really.
I haven't seen any ads deleted or taken down or deemed 'forbidden'. That isn't to say it hasn't happened, but I haven't seen any indication of the kind of limitation you believe exists.
What I mean by this extrapolation of the analogy is that dedicated forums for community partners, eg. the games from the focus group, like OR does isn't something that MU Soapbox does at all. I don't think it'd really work with this site, really, so that's not a qualitative statement about this place in particular. We only do it on OR because we have, again, a focus group, and our community partners make significant contributions in the form of articles, etc. While MU Soapbox's majority certainly seem to be of a focus group, MU Soapbox as a site doesn't seem to be specifically or explicitly targeted towards a focus group, which is why the complaints about our advertising to a community where the majority aren't interested in our focus are weird to me.
Our 'Other Games' forum is an umbrella in much the way the Advertising forum here is. I don't think that our having dedicated forums in our organizational structure for community partners inherently makes the advertising opportunity in that Other Games forum any the lesser in strictly qualitative terms. I think looking at the whole thing as relative is probably not the best approach. If we didn't have our community partnerships at all, our site and discussion on it would probably suffer from it, though I think one could make a reasonable argument against having them at all. If we allowed them to exist for all text-based roleplaying games we'd be inherently changing what we're about. While we're certainly open to discussion of all text-based roleplaying games and all things in general, our focus has always been on "RPI"s and "RPI-like"s.
-
@crayon said:
I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.
Not really -- this board is our space for advertising. It's as big as it gets here, and you get equal space with everybody else. Your site has your 'listed game' advertising space, and then each of those games gets a subforum, and then there's this one 'other games' area on your forum. So you've come along here and used our advertising space to its fullest extent, while denying us the same privilege. If I post an advert for my game on your forum, it's not only more clicks away from the front page for your community, it's in a subforum area that's down at the bottom and named the equivalent of 'miscellaneous afterthoughts' and there's no link to it from the part of the site that people who are looking for new games are most likely going to be looking at. Your poster is up on the wall here, but on OR, most MUSHes are indeed hidden in the bin by the door. The fact that you have a special big-poster-wall doesn't change that; in fact it makes the effect worse by calling attention away from the advertising space we are allowed, and by implying, in no uncertain terms, that our shit is second-best.
it's a MU* Soapbox, in which case while the community might be overwhelmingly of a particular genre the board's intent seems broader.
Since I don't play WoD, a hell of a lot of the content here doesn't relate to me, either. I believe you are correct that the intent is broader than MUSHes/MUXen alone, and it's certainly broader than WoD, but most of the content is about WoD anyway. Nobody minded that you wanted to advertise a MUD here. They minded that you want to use our clubhouse to advertise a site which was put forth as being about text-based RPGs in general, yet enforce policies that class the favoured format of most of the users here as clearly second-best. Possibly if we had a board, hidden down at the bottom, called 'Advertisements for Games That Suck' and the mods moved your ad down there, people would see it as fair and ignore you instead of having all the snarky fun.
Some of the criticism levied towards us has been based in our lack of willingness to really become participants in this community, but part of the obstacle to that has been the general 'outsider' treatment and a lack of explicit focus coupled with a community userbase that is definitely focused.
Heh. As far as I can see, you've not posted anything that isn't advertising your own shit or defending your position. This is indeed bad form; it appears that you're trying to get something out of us (users for your site, players for your game) and not give anything back. I do this on 'Game of Thrones' fansites, but I've got the courtesy not to get into arguments about it if people complain, and in fact sometimes even apologize for treating their communities in a slightly predatory fashion.
If you want to become a participant in the community, well. Participate in the community. It is a rough-and-tumble community, and people will laugh at you and call you names and you'll have to take your licks, have a sense of humour about it, and figure out the culture. If you don't like that, stick to some other place. I think the phrase is, "There's no crying in baseball."
Oh! Thanks for the explanation. The automated systems requirement is definitely a blurry and tricky thing to really hammer down and determine a firm line on.
No; FS3 +combat does apply the damage, it is not set by hand.
It's different from a MUD in that you can more or less ignore it. Okay, you get damaged in +combat, you have minuses on your rolls and if you get hurt bad enough you can't hit shit, but it will never kill you.
More important is just. The culture of how it's used. My first RPG MU* was that Ghostwheel MOO, which was very MUD-like. Actually, that fuckin' thing was like the golden dream of heavily automated. All the exits had sizes, if you were in a mecha or riding a dragon you couldn't fit through small exits. All of your clothes were objects, and would add a line to your desc when you put them on, replacing the line of your desc that reflected that part of your body naked. You could find new clothes or armour and drop the old ones and people would find them and pick them up. You had a lockpicking skill and could find picks and open locks, and maybe find /better/ picks that would make it easier. If you swam under water for too long without a scuba-tank, you would drown and die. Code prevented you from doing anything you ICly could not do, there were McGuffins all over the place, and collecting and interacting with coded shit was a major part of the game. This, to some degree or another, is what I believe @Jeshin wants when talking about wanting automated systems.
On GoB, and the other FS3 games that I have experienced, the +combat system and +heal command are just convenient resolution-generators, no different from the +roll system (FS3 has both), except requiring one to enter fewer commands (and wait for other people to enter fewer). Interacting with it is less part of game play and more just a way to easily decide how game play shall proceed. The relationship between this code and RP is the same as the relationship between dice commands and RP on WoD MUs, but WoD MUs don't meet your criterion, and that is dumb.
-
My own first forays into the consumption of hard liquor were more pain than flavor. Miserable experiences with dirt-cheap tequila and other unsavory selections in a culture that is so repressed where it comes to teenagers drinking had unfavorably colored my perceptions. Forced to drink surreptitiously and at significant legal risk the flavor half of the intertwined flavor and pain promised by drinks like your fruit brandy was denied to me until many years later, unfortunately, by a combination of fiscal and legal concerns.
Stubborn and persistent, however, I was very committed to making the most out of very little, which is how I came to discover one gem, in particular. Topping out at an idyllic 8.0% ABV, Olde English High Gravity 800 offered a cost-to-alcohol efficiency I wasn't likely to find anywhere else. A 'malt liquor' by definition, and at that a silly definition I suspect exists mostly for legal reasons, OE was effectively beer. And not beer beer, but the worst of the cheap piss-flavored swill that is so abundantly common in this particular country. In 2010, in fact, the 3.2% ABV version of this particular brew was decried as "the Worst Beer in the World" by a major beer rating website.
This beverage was a travesty in a big glass bottle. Forty ounces of carbonated piss to swig through, with high enough alcohol content that the combination of condensation and glass would usually ensure that you dropped it long before you finished it. Thankfully, I discovered that wrapping the big ugly bastard in a paper bag would not only conceal the shameful contents, but provide a surface with significantly more friction for the owner to grip onto. Still, though, the taste was unpleasant at best, and the malt liquor had a particular knack for inducing especially nasty hangovers.
Enter the Sunny D. Though glorified by the Beastie Boys' 1986 hit "Brass Monkey" that peaked at 48 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for 1987, hardly anybody is familiar with what comprises an actual 'brass monkey', and in fact many cocktails lay claim to the name, with the only shared thread being the inclusion of orange juice to give the beverage its iconic 'brass' coloring, a coloring that I found to be particularly beautiful with my tasteless friend Olde English, once one-third of him had been drank and replaced with an equally classless orange "juice": Sunny Delight.
The addition of the orange "juice", or more aptly orange "drink", significantly altered the flavor of the beverage. Combined with the crisp and carbonated feel of the piss-flavored malt liquor, it created a silky texture while masking the worst of the metallic and musky taste. The fruity addition added a certain zestiness to the beverage, which helped with staying alert, but also compensated for the deleterious effects of the low-quality alcohol by offering a good amount of hydration and vitamin C.
The combined cost of both beverages came out to roughly $3, and I found that I could drink one to four of the forty ounce drinks in an evening and range from a jovial buzz to stumbling and stuttering. With the large number of cocktails competing over claim to the title of true 'brass monkey', and in light of its taste, concept, and cost, I eventually came to accept a more preferred name for the drink: the hobo mimosa.
-
@crayon Because I am evil, whenever teenagers would bribe my college-age arse into buying them liquor, but didn't know what they wanted besides "cheap" I would torture the poor critters with Olde E. Ahh, kids. Fuck 'em.
-
@crayon: Nice.
See, this is engaging. Well done.
-
@crayon said:
What I mean by this extrapolation of the analogy is that dedicated forums for community partners, eg. the games from the focus group, like OR does isn't something that MU Soapbox does at all. I don't think it'd really work with this site, really, so that's not a qualitative statement about this place in particular. We only do it on OR because we have, again, a focus group, and our community partners make significant contributions in the form of articles, etc. While MU Soapbox's majority certainly seem to be of a focus group, MU Soapbox as a site doesn't seem to be specifically or explicitly targeted towards a focus group, which is why the complaints about our advertising to a community where the majority aren't interested in our focus are weird to me.
OK, I see what you're saying. I think the confusion is more that we have... this forum for ads. More or less what @il-volpe said; for us, this is pretty much it. If you (or someone else) started a thread about a particular RPI in one of the other forums, it might be quiet, but it wouldn't be forbidden. Basically, we don't have the same resources available, but there's none that I can see that would be forbidden at all. It's more a factor of 'different resources' than it is 'not permitted'. If it was here, there's no reason it would not be allowed. It's not something that's here for anyone, either way.
I don't think people are necessarily getting their knickers in a twist about what resources are permitted -- I suppose some might be? But I don't think that's the crux of it. I think what @Ninjakitten mentioned in regard to the definitions, and the impression of an implied value judgment (whether one exists or not in reality) is probably more the issue.
Also, I started on the same place @il-volpe is describing, GhostwheelMOO.
You could, arguably, putter around on that place for days and still have stuff to do, without ever running into another character or interacting with them. It was pretty neat. At times, though, I'd say the level of code there interfered with the roleplay to some extent. I half-remember an axe that would invisibly teleport around from player to player, then force them to attack whoever was nearest them, without them ever realizing what was going on (and it was such a powerful weapon it almost always killed them in a single shot or two at the most). So much for anything else going on in the scene, purely because someone felt like making a weird bit of code, pretty much. Ghostwheel had people respawn after a timeout period, though, so it might not be what folks are looking for, either.Complete tangent: I suspect people have some slightly different ideas of immersive, too. For instance, it isn't a lack of OOC means of communication that makes something immersive to me; for me, the detail of the game world and how much it has going on, how much it gives me to work with, is what I'd consider immersive. There's essentially two approaches here -- one does so by removing something (the OOC element), the other provides something (more focus on developing interactive story tools). I suspect a lot of the places being discussed likely do both, but I wouldn't know.
For example, I am driving people insane with how long it takes for me to put a single grid room together, as I set up their descriptions to interact with time of day, season, weather, and so on. It's a SIMPLE code trick, but it's one that creates a directly interactive environment that people can reference as needed to enhance immersion and provide story-making tools. Similarly, we're looking at OOC-specific tools to foster roleplay, and more specifically, find the kinds of roleplay people want to find and niches to fill, which is something that would be trickier if OOC interaction was limited. The focus, I find, on a lot of MUX/MUSH games, is more in that direction. It tends to rely on how compelling the story is unto itself, and the tools provided IC and OOC within the game, to facilitate immersion, rather than relying on code to enforce it or limit communication. Both are effective, it's just a considerably different approach.
-
@surreality said:
At times, though, I'd say the level of code there interfered with the roleplay to some extent.
It rendered GMing quite effort intensive. On a MUSH, I can just invent story and roll with it. GMing on Ghostwheel, I couldn't just make up a story with some NPCs to interact with and emit them. I had to create them, as puppets (the elaborate AHaB type) with complete stat sets, completely equipped with all the weapons and everything else that NPC person would have. The time investment was much more significant, and the majority of the time was spent doing something relatively unfun. I consider heavy automation to be a hinderance to being story-centered; to meld both, anybody creating story must be at the very least, a builder, if not a coder.
-
