Best posts made by Apos

@Roz It's kind of like a Tier position, only the more you invest the lower you drop.

@dontpanda said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@apos Please don't make clothes a thing that affects anything else. I love the standard position that, "If someone's not wearing clothes, assume they're wearing clothes,"

That would still be unchanged. It would be for a specific opt in, that's one way of many to gain prestige.I don't really see many people who don't care about it changing what they are personally doing, so much as funding people that do care about it.

@saosmash said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos Ugh but fluff is terrible. What if I want plot relevancy in all of my RP? Why can't I have all the things?

I dunno if fluff is quite right though. Maybe we shouldn't look at it from a technical implementation perspective but a story perspective. Right now most MUs that allow proxies/puppets/whatever in multiple scenes have the strong understanding that it's not like someone is going to randomly drop dead in them and have them have to explain that to every other scene that character is in. The scenes can be exciting and fun but they cut away that organic element slightly, even if it's not really emphasized. The problem is making it explicit kind of starts to destroy the illusion that anything can happen, even if it might not have really been the case.

@silentsophia said:

4. Holy fuck, bilingual labeling and non-white co-workers and customers really bring out the racists.

Man, that sinking feeling whenever someone starts a sentence with, "I'm not a racist, but..." Please stop right there, bro.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@lavit2099 said:

@Ganymede

People enjoy political RP too much to say no.

Do they really?

I've seen maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe five players, in my life, who are actually, truly interested in feudal politics. The rest want to be knights and lords and princesses without actually doing anything. Which I honestly think is fine, but it's not political RP, and I honestly do think it should be minimized in my ideal D&D game. My ideal game is not others' ideal game, though.

I definitely have met a number of players extremely interested in the dynamics of political groups interacting and the RP that comes from it, and I've seen it done well. But I think they are a small minority compared to individuals who enjoy the trappings of power/control but have no interest whatsoever in ever RPing the responsibility that would come with it, particularly when it comes to generating RP for people below them.

Strong, established characters are always going to be an issue, and one I'll never be fully satisfied with, because again it's a balance. You can't only approach it from the angle of new characters feeling edged out, or at risk by being bullied. Those are two terrible possibilities that have to be counteracted. You also have to ask how capable should new characters fresh to the grid be of disrupting all the existing power structures or destroying an established character, and what degree of effort it should require and how feasible it should be. On one hand you have extreme outcomes that can feel unwelcoming, and on the other hand no meaningful stability or structure to play off of.

From a game design perspective, I think it's significantly easier to punish established characters that would use abuse cases that would be hostile/unwelcoming to new players, than it is to have a much flatter entry point and then try to ensure that new players all avoid abuse cases due to that flatter scale. I think the level of investment necessitates opting for the former.

@saosmash said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos I mean, sometimes I'll randomly take damage in the middle of a scene from a storyrequest and I usually just wait until the scene is over to RP a new one about the fact that I'm vomiting blood. There's usually room to be at least a LITTLE flexible.

Yeah, like I definitely am not a fan of going the full on simulation approach of some RPIs, which while immersive I often find miserable. It's just tricky getting just the right amount of handwaving that won't bite you, especially if you allow PVP in games and someone can feel another person is basically cheating by doing way more than they could possibly do. I don't have that kind of environment but on like a half dozen occasions I've still gotten mighty salty complaints from people mad that other characters have had their names up in lights so often and felt it wouldn't be physically possible for them to be in multiple places, despite repeatedly saying I'm not interested in enforcing that kind of strict timeline for travel yet.

It depresses me and I do not see any reason to doubt its accuracy, even if I hope that it was not recent. Not sure it isn't though. Tabletop is still one of the most niche gaming there is, and I would be surprised if any of us on this forum could NOT name at least one genuinely fucked up personality they had met in MUs or tabletop type gaming (HI REX). Which isn't even counting the wildly inappropriate behavior of terrible dumbasses in this hobby who do not know they are being painfully offensive and basically lack fundamental social skills in general.

That doesn't excuse their behavior or make it in any way okay, but I think you have to draw a distinction between the kids (and man-children, which is more common) who do not know any better and really could benefit from a talk, and the really vile ones.

@tragedyjones said in Bump In The Night: A Chronicles of Darkness MUX:

I don't know what everyone else's definition of sandbox is, but, to me, from a design standpoint (and I was there for at least, like, 20% of the design process), BITN was designed to be a venue for telling horror stories. I've worked on games that aimed to provided a simple sandbox (RenoMUSH being a prime example). BITN was not that.

It might make an interesting topic since I suspect that a lot of us use the term in different ways. For me, I think of a sandbox as when stories can exist in complete isolation, and things that could reasonably effect other characters on the grid don't even if their characters would know/react to it. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, just a different style.

@lithium said in Internet Attacks? Why?:

But... does that really apply to MU*'s? Our anger and such tends to take a lot longer to build up to the point of ostracism. We are a lot more tolerant than most online gamers (see league of legends and dota for extreme examples) probably due to the media in which we use, text is slow, it's patient, it gives us time to think and respond.

Curious as to people's thoughts.

I don't think people are all that different, but MUs need a vastly different level of investment than someone playing LoL or Dota. I mean someone gets into a LoL game, they play with 4 strangers for maybe 20 minutes, they never see them again. For us, someone gets onto a new game, they could be interacting with some of those people for literally years, and even though it's anonymous, anonymity means a hell of a lot less when the reputation attached to a character basically effects how you can play for thousands of hours invested. So we have a lot of mini society pushback, where people though they are anonymous from a RL perspective for one another, care a whole lot about their 'anonymous' personas on here enough to practice a lot better behavior generally.

I know there's a temptation to be like, 'kids these days' about that but I just don't really think that's the case. I think it's just people generally know that even if it's a fake internet name of a character or board handle, they are attached to that, and their investment heavily helps reduce the really egregious examples we see in games with zero investment.

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel If we're talking about travel specifically, My personal opinion is that no game needs a grid. It's an expected feature of a game, but the reality is that nobody actually RPs in 90% of the rooms most games have. The reality is that you could open a game with a clear theme and maybe 10 important, constantly used locations alongside a coded RP Room creation wing and it would work just as well.

The problem is that if you do this, people will stare at you like you're fucking nuts.

Sure but design a game like that in a way that requires no ooc communication whatsoever to find RP. I mean, you can. It just fundamentally alters the base gameplay.

@Ganymede It is more than a little depressing to me that the redpill types aren't actually trolls trying to be absurd on purpose and it is actually a thing.

@Tinuviel Still not as bad as wink ones.;)

@insomnia said in Games that are active overnight?:

@cobaltasaurus I'm sorry I didn't get fired sooner!

I dunno, how fast do they do jobs on Arx? >.>

Hm, all things being relative. Apps usually overnight at most. Investigations we keep up with okay. Simple jobs usually as soon as I see them. Some of the complex things probably not as fast as I'd like, due to the sheer volume with like 350 active players and a thousand characters or so, but I think the oldest jobs are like a couple weeks old. I think we do okay, but we're always trying to add more automation and streamline things in places to improve turn around time.

@faraday Naw, I was hoping that my tone wasn't coming across as confrontational or dismissive either, because what I more was trying to get at is I think those kinds of automatic tools that are the rough analogue of wandering into a grid space are super important. I think that it dramatically lowers the barrier for entry socially for a lot of newer or shy players, and that stuff doesn't exist on a lot of MUSHes which edges people out.

I think that implementation would be fine, though I would probably go further and probably have a tutorial type equivalent that nudges people towards its usage and make sure there are incentives for doing so. Probably with a wander command for randomization, minigames for spending time in different scenes that are publicly accessible, etc. Could probably change how people enter a scene to accompany a set, to formalize the culture for whether someone is 'in' or not, compared to the whole, 'I'm here but I'm not here because I haven't made a set' thing that I find vaguely ridiculous and awkward.

@Thenomain said in RL things I love:

@Misadventure said in RL things I love:

@surreality said in RL things I love:

I am keeping the shit out of "you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max" forever.

I prefer Swiftian principles.

Straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked satire, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.

An immodest proposal.

@Misadventure said in The 100: The Mush:

Incorrect.

Example of describing a variety of possible actions as passive-aggressive. Perhaps you mean undermining, disregarding, disrespectful, not listening, etc.

It lacks the key element of accepting responsibility to do something, then not doing it as a form of resistance.

Would still be accurate and correct for Conflict Theory tho.

@golgoth said in nWoD2.0 Support Code?:

I know I'm invoking taboo when I say this, but have you guys checked out the MOO called Sindome? It relies on a strict adherence to IC communications only. ooc chatter is to be kept to a minimum, paging players is frowned upon, IC mail (I can't remember what they call it) and commlinks / phones are used extensively for RP purposes.

I like RPI type setups, and it does avoid some common headaches while introducing a lot of others, but that's been discussed so often I don't think I need to go into it. Now what I don't see mentioned much and what I do think is relevant is that I feel that organically encouraging RP and making things immersive is way, way more newbie friendly than the mush approach, or the very ooc centric approach you see in rp forums.

Theno made a comment about that if IC only approaches were popular, then MMOs would do it. That's very funny because RP communities in MMOs tend to fall way harder on the scale of something like RPI. There might be a few hundred roleplayers in a zone, most who have never met one another before, and they just randomly approach one another IC and leap right in with no ooc communication at all. OOC communication would just come after people get to know each other. There's no written code of etiquette or even really understood norms, it just develops because it's very intuitive- someone is there on a character, other people are talking IC and throwing out emotes, someone feels they can add something, they jump in.

The bar for entry is vastly lower. Someone is on a character, they see something being said or done IC, they respond. That's pretty much it. Now, take a MUSH- they have to log in, create characters (often using out of game references to do so), then once they have those characters, they either need to be extremely proactive in reaching out to other people, or make sure they sell their concept and hooks in a way other people feel compelled to reach out to them. That's a really high bar to ask of a community that has a whole hell of a lot of people with social anxiety.

That's why immersion tools are important- they can be one of the easiest ways to allow people to get hooked into the game, get initial roleplay, and build the kind of relationships with other characters that lead to compelling stories.

@surreality There's pacing though. Like take the first episode of any sci fi series or the first hundred pages of a sci fi novel. It doesn't have to all be there from the get go, and I think people want to answer every possible question before they get going and that cripples their ability to get going at all.

Sci fi differs because intrinsic to the setting people want to very clearly illustrate how it's different from the real world. You do that, but in measured strokes or else you will drown in it.

Edit to add: Imo people wanna say, 'Here's a setting I'm making, and I can tell stories in it', when they need to approach it from, 'Here's stories I wanna tell, and this is a setting I can set those in.'

There's not much saving individuals that are so self-absorbed that they cannot recognize the sacrifices of others that help them or refuse to face the hard truths about their own culpability for their poor circumstances. Never be responsible for them, since they will never appreciate it nor change.