Burning Post II

[BetterJudgment]

I'm sure that Thenomain (who is, after all, a smart, skilled, and experienced game coder) was joking about not recognizing a prompt and not joking about having the character's HP etc. shoved in his face in a RP-centric environment. It should be possible to eliminate the prompt, but from my memory of similar situations on MUDs, people have really not understood why I would not want to see it when I've asked about doing it.

The last time I had a problem with most commands not working was on TrekMUSH: ATS, and the only way I could get things to work was raw telnet. Oddly enough, that was the most MUD-like MUSH (in terms of both game and attitude) I've been on in a long time.

[Orpheus]

Not that it particularly matters, but is the other iteration of which you speak The Inquisition or is there actually another 'Burning Post'?

[Shard]

Ahhh...

Well I know nothing of coding (and give all credit to those wise enough who know how to) but again as I've grown use to seeing it.. the prompt is practically invisible to me.

But.. hey.. I just learned by testing!
Just type prompt and a space and the prompt will vanish completely for you. So.. we can accommodate to either taste. (However it looks to foreign to me so... I shall now run and regrab my prompt) However when walking a long distance that movement is rather handy to know as you can get exhausted if you walk too farr (and if your carrying someone or sneaking or moving at a faster pace you will tire out even faster) so.. I'd say its good to at least have movement bar in sight if you plan to be traveling... but certainly not a requirement

(I like the atmosphere of this community as a random comment.. you guys all seem quite friendly and open. No insults meant if I give out too much basic info you already know.. I got no idea who knows what)

[Ide]

@Thenomain said:

At what level does introducing OOC elements make game-play not RP?

Nail, meet head.

From my experience (and I've played muds and mushes equally since the beginning of time) RP muds measure their RPiness on this weird IC <---> OOC scale because most RP mudders have both feet stuck firmly in actor stance. Mushers are much more various in their RP approach so they rightly understand this is quixotic at best.

[Orpheus]

I"m not going to disagree. In fact, I recently (today) read a post about a long-running TV show. The showrunner is not popular with the fans, but he is with the actors, and the reason could be best summed up as: the showrunner often ignores narrative and continuity for the sake of drama, which gives the actors a chance to stretch their 'acting muscles', but those that watch it are constantly saying 'this or that character wouldn't do that!'

[Thenomain]

@BetterJudgment said:

I'm sure that Thenomain (who is, after all, a smart, skilled, and experienced game coder) was joking about not recognizing a prompt and not joking about having the character's HP etc. shoved in his face in a RP-centric environment.

Close to this.

Part of my argument with a Build Wiz/Imm/Whatnot (P-something) was this: How things are presented is informative, and by nature the consistency of those non-obvious prompts such as ANSI is educational.

I would expect a MUD to know this far more than a MUSH, as Muds are still using the Ansi-Hilite Standard. Instead what I found was a game where the coder(?) threw things at the wall and went, "Eh, good enough." This is in part how I could, in 30 minutes, get a pretty good idea that Mudders and Mushers have a lot more in common than I expected. We all be lazy, yo.

---

@Ide,

Of my untested theories about RP-Mudders, I want to theorize that the severe stance on What RP Is comes from how these games grew out of the Mud culture. I mean, last I knew, a Mud was about running around killing things and having fun coding your own Mud macros, speed-walking, auto-mappers, so forth. The part of Adventure/Zork that became MMOs. I would bet small amounts of money that in there somewhere there were a few very bad years of us-vs-them mentality to those who wanted to "role play" on such a game, or that the RP fork of Muds had to combat people who were from the pew-pew fork of Muds.

This is a theory, mind you, as the Mush version of forks didn't create terminology or strict definitions about what "role-play" was. (That Muds categorize themselves as Role-Play Intensive, for instance, is kind of fun to think about on the heels of @Jeshin's "role-play is role-play" statement in his own advertising thread.)

Well, I might be blowing smoke here in my purple-skied world. Except for the existence of the "I" in the "RPI Mud" moniker. That always makes me grin a bit.

[Alzie]

@Thenomain You mean turning numbers into random names isn't informative? You don't say.

[Arkandel]

@Thenomain said:

Of my untested theories about RP-Mudders, I want to theorize that the severe stance on What RP Is comes from how these games grew out of the Mud culture. I mean, last I knew, a Mud was about running around killing things and having fun coding your own Mud macros, speed-walking, auto-mappers, so forth. The part of Adventure/Zork that became MMOs.

Let me give another anecdotal take on it, perhaps you'll find it useful or at least mildly entertaining.

When I first played A Moment in Tyme back in the mid-90s it was a MUD's MUD. Everyone was a 'channeler' (which in the Wheel of Time theme is an anathema, especially for males) since that's what the coders had made for the setting. People walked around throwing fireballs at mobs or used teleport to go places. RP was pretty thin (think aliases which emoted "Die, evildoer!" before casting said fireball) and so on.

However more people started liking the idea of emoting more and throwing fireballs less. It was small things at first, such as justifying the constant casting somehow ('cast refresh self' was perhaps aliased to 'emote eats a cookie') but it grew, and eventually a new version of the code came out which actually allowed people to make non-channelers. It was pretty organic; the culture started to shift to where better roleplayers were valued - and gained positions of IC influence - more than people who simply had a more powerful characters, knew where the best mobs to farm were, etc.

I mean this wasn't a quick process - it literally took years. By the time I took over coding there we put out more versions of the code where your sheet-power was dependent on how much respect you had as a roleplayer from the community. It was a pretty convoluted system in retrospect but it worked unlike anything I've seen since - each person participating in the system would submit a log of a spar or lesson with someone else, which was anonimized then distributed randomly to other participants who graded the logs and sent them back. So at that point the most powerful characters ended up being the best roleplayers - at least in theory.

But I mean if you look at this from where it started, with the priorities we had given the tools handed to us and where we took things in a natural way - this was never the original plan of the administration who originally owned the game in any way - it's pretty cool. I'd say the quality of posing (we called it emoting) at its peak on Tyme was pretty damn good on average, easily on par with what we consider the same today.

And it started with folks aliasing stuff to say to mobs as they killed them.

[Thenomain]

@Arkandel

That is an awesome story, especially the part where staff and players fell into mutual love with the theme regardless of the platform.

AetherMux did something very similar with their vote system. You wouldn't submit logs, but people would explain why so and so was awesome, it was made anonymous, and other players would vote meh, good, or wow, and that would award a ranked amount of XP. After the vote period was over, everyone could see the comments made about them that period.

I had one or two passive aggressive comments made at me through this system, but people were otherwise very well behaved and well handled by staff who wanted to see this work. Except for the lack of player density to make this work, I'd love to see it again,

[Arkandel]

@Thenomain I think I like having more than one parallel system of measuring character growth.

For instance in an implementation such as the one described above (or AetherMux, which does seem quite similar) we had 'RP XP', which were awarded automatically as you roleplayed with other people and quality criteria which defined your PC's raw potential based on your quality as a player overall. That meant if you wanted to play someone powerful you had to be active and good at the same time - a fair requirement. Various systems I've seen in nWoD utilize different ways of assuring the same thing although some are better and some are worse for achieving what they set out in the first place (+vote and +recc for quality, time delays for buying up more dots of things, staggered XP awards, catch-up XP to help level the field between old and new PCs, justification requirements to ensure IC viability, etc).

My preferred rule of thumb is allowing your community to guide the approach to such things. A system which is either routinely exploited or routinely ignored is most likely a bad system no matter how good it looks on paper; on HM +vote was bastardized to the point people joined gigantic scenes to farm them, for example, so the original intention became irrelevant. Sure, staff can go after players in such cases to try and punish them for doing unintended things with their toys, but when the underlying problem is systemic solutions should be found in the design itself.

An additional difficulty here is that, once you adopt a system to facilitate power growth, it's difficult to make adjustments over time without upsetting some of your players by either making oldbies inherently better off (the dino problem) or by invalidating their challenges after the fact by removing hurdles.

[Ide]

I really liked that Aether vote system. Has anyone done it since? I've never seen it elsemu*..