Posts made by Apos

@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.

@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.

@saosmash said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I love the idea of both random organic RP springing up AND being able to RP more than one scene at a time on the same character. Is there a way that these perspectives can actually be combined? Like, what if I have a PC object that I can ghost around on crashing into randos AND somehow can spring off a scene in a different window on the same character and RP it out while that is still happening?

Actually yes. By specifically denoting any previous RP as having a previous continuity, with preset consequences that would already be reflected on anything current. So you could have a core continuity, where unexpected events can happen (like character deaths), and previous ones for fleshing out scenes but knowing that nothing could happen in it that would yield unexpected impact on current scenes.

In other words- one main scene, and any other scenes would either have to be fluff, or unable for other reasons to impact current RP except in terms of information.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

• Grid/movement would be gone. Choosing/changing location is just an integral part of conducting a scene.

That's what I meant when I talked about a paradigm shift instead of just slapping a web UI onto the current MUSH commands.

As for the UX? You’ll probably want a chat window at the bottom/side of your screen at all times because that's so important. Forum and Scene are things you would use separate tabs for depending on what you felt like dealing with.

And oh-by-the-way nothing stops you from having several tabs for different scenes just as you’d have different windows open in your web client. Difference is - you can do multiple scenes with the same character. No more spoofing or silly OOC puppet nonsense. So many clunky things that we're required to do because of the telnet client restrictions just fall away.

I think in possible next gen approaches there would be splits here due to philosophical differences in approach and implementation of the kind of game. I really admire the approach you have for Ares and particularly scenes, but I think I would have to branch in a slightly different direction to capture the feel I'd want.

There's a strong coded emphasis on continuity and a lack of handwaving or abstraction inside more RPI like games that I find extremely flawed but I do think it creates a more immersive, organic environment, and I lean closer to capturing what I see as positives for that while trying to avoid its pitfalls.

For me I'd have to design it in a way where I can answer questions like, "What are players doing on their characters in between the scenes they want to have happen?" and, "Can a scene spontaneously start around them without really intending to while they are doing that thing?" And I think those possibilities would be eliminated without me taking a different tack. Obviously this is a personal taste thing, and not saying what you're doing is in any way wrong, just how implementation might differ wildly based on feel we'd want to see.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

A list of people presently online on the game, where you can click on one and have it open a private messaging conversation to them, is arguably a lot more intuitive to everyone who uses the internet than knowing you need to 'page <blah>=<foo>'. Everyone's used to being able to do that on Discord servers already, or Battle.net, or Steam, or Skype, or IRC, or whatever.

I am 99% sure that that feature alone would make these games immediately accessible to a wider audience. Clickable tool bar to bring up a collapsible who list/friends (watch) list, clickable conversations, and so on.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@Roz
I would wager to say that, of those players that you describe, there are very few of them that are expecting or settling for a text-only medium, to begin with.

"What? No pictures? I'm out!"

There's something important here that I think anything next gen should really think about when thinking of alternate formats to MUs and going back to the original point of the thread. I think very, very few MU players are purists where they -wouldn't- use pictures or graphical representations in their RP if it was a) very easy to do so, and b) not jarring or offputting.

I am not someone that pays attention to PBs generally, and don't have much of an interest in making wikis. I know I am in a distinct minority with that outlook. People really, really want visual mediums of expression to go with their RP, and that is heavily represented in people using imo worse formats like tumblr specifically because it also gives them easy means to do so, in attaching some gif or image to their rp posts that captures a mood or theme.

While it is natural to think, 'oh god people would obnoxiously spam memes in RP and I would run screaming from that', I do not think there is any reason things have to develop in that way, and I also think that the hobby would be immeasurably more popular with smoothly accessible, tasteful ways of visual expression going hand in hand with the RP.

@rnmissionrun I dunno man, there's nothing intuitive about '+bb/post #_of_board/Re:Archaic MU syntax=I think this is awkward syntax'.

Like there's a good reason we're all posting on this website rather than using +bb on a community sandbox we connect to.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In some ways I feel the barrier to entry was what sort of what got us at least near in terms of preference of play as MU'ers with each other somehow? I don't know though. Literally, that one barrier: read the text on the screen. From 'create guest' and 'type 'help' for help', one can learn everything right there by just taking a couple minutes to read. Does everyone but us have short attention spans and won't read the text or skim it or tl;dr tell me how to play now please? Are we trying to take out a lot of the reading part to learn to play to draw in better writers?

I'm of two minds.

First, let's be elitist for a second. Numbers, in and of themselves, are not helpful to a MU at all. If a MU is a collaborative game, where everyone involved is essentially a writer creating content, then there are going to be people who even if aren't malicious, are not net positives for a game. I've had a number of apps from people that clearly couldn't speak English at all or were completely unable to understand theme. It sounds mean to say that we shouldn't help them, but if I approved them and let them play, and well meaning players spent hours and hours out of their day trying to help those guys instead of having fun themselves, it could potentially drive off the most proactive, positive people on a game for very little return. So I haven't exactly been in a huge rush to smooth out some of the barriers for entry because we don't have the support structure available to handle people that would need that kind of help in order to be a net positive for the game environment.

Now let's not be elitist. It would be a mistake to think of those other formats whether it's google docs, discord, any of a million chat programs and the like all being strictly inferior to MUs. It's telling that they are all more popular, and there's strong reasons why. We can capture the features that make things vastly more convenient and easier to use without necessarily compromising the game environments that could be easily disrupted by opening floodgates.

Really small differences in game environment make dramatic differences in the RP pacing. If a game enforces a sequential order and runs at the pace of its slowest contributor in a scene, that game is going to develop glacial RP unless a game takes means to counter that.

Edited to add: Think of how different MU rp in a scene would be if we saw a typing indicator for someone that was posing.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And let's say you're someone like @Ganymede who lacks the time and/or inclination to learn how to code. That's fine. So you need a coder.

How many MUSHcode experts are out there? A dozen? There are tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of Python/Ruby experts. You're FAR more likely to be able to find a programmer pal who knows one of these languages, or someone who's willing to learn.

This reminded me of something that I hadn't really thought about until now. So in running Arx for about two years, I've had maybe a dozen offers to come on board as a coder, due to someone being familiar with python. It comes up enough that Tehom's staple response is to ask them to do a pull request for Evennia first to show they are serious.

It strikes me as unlikely that any mush would have a dozen people with softcode familiarity offer to come on board to throw in a system for fun. I think even in as small a hobby as this, there's significantly more people with python experience than there is with softcode experience... even on games -made- with soft code.

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yeah, I don't mean this as a slam on WoD at all, but it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it. It's significantly easier to set up a sandbox and get going there than anywhere else, along with a great many people familiar with it that are willing to pitch in.

Yeah, I'm reading this 'good games differ' line and am just baffled, given the world we all exist in. We've been getting by on plug-and-play code in large part for decades. I cannot fathom how better plug-and-play systems will be anything but a positive and open up the market for people who wouldn't have otherwise to run a good game.

Now in fairness to the quote where that came from, I am pretty sure they just meant every good owner will want to add their own things and systems if they don't want a sandbox clone. But even from that perspective, I think it's just easier to do so in a modern language, and having a baseline, out of box game that can then be modded easily is a huge help. And as systems are created, they become very portable.

Edit: @Ganymede was hitting the same point while I was posting, so I will edit to add for clarity- I believe it would be significantly easier to port systems made in ruby or python to new games, if people are willing to share code, so in theory even for someone wanting extremely complicated systems but without having the time/ability to code, there could eventually be a whole hell of a lot they could do out of the box with a bazillion potential modules/add ons.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

All of this may be true, but good games differ from one another. Your package may have all of the great features we've come to know and love, but I don't think, for example, that the developers are interested in coding up special, unique features for each game.

Of course if you want special, unique features you'll need a coder. That will always be true. But right now you need a coder even if you don't want special unique features, and that's silly.

Systemless games + Games willing to run FS3 + Games willing to run a simple "descriptive stat" system (like many comic games) ... all of these will be enabled out of the box with zero code in Ares. And that's not even counting games that can be enabled it somebody does a drop-in plugin for a new system.

And if somebody does want custom code? Unless they're already a kung-fu MUSHcode master, it's going to be way way way easier to learn the new systems than the old.

Yeah, I don't mean this as a slam on WoD at all, but it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it. It's significantly easier to set up a sandbox and get going there than anywhere else, along with a great many people familiar with it that are willing to pitch in.

I'm sympathetic to people that are extremely proficient in softcode and prefer it, but I just don't see any advantages to it outside of that familiarity.

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

And what I find kind of amazing about this, is how ill-suited and often semi-broken for real-time, text-based RP a lot of these formats are (I've read Facebook RP, man. I have read it and shall never forget). But people muddle through because life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. I think part of the reason Arx is so - comparatively - explosively popular is because it's found a way to hook some of this audience into a MU-like format, which is MUCH better for this kind of RP in so many ways. Once you get players into this format, its positives for what we do become clear. It's an indication of what's possible, to me, not an anomaly (and it displays the problems of scale when you manage to tap this audience, but that's another conversation).

Yes yes yes. A lot of these formats are actually not great for RP, and that's another thing I've discovered from players who try out MU* and manage to hook in: they find it a much better platform for RP than others they were using before. Like, guys, we actually have a lot of potential to bring in a lot of new players, we just need to lower the bar a little where we can.

Yeah, I should point out I'm not like some lifelong hobbyist. Relatively speaking, I am new to MUing - at this point I've invested almost as much time into Arx as other MUs total. I come from those other formats, and I intentionally created Arx because I just think the format is better for telling really big, interconnected stories that let people weave their personal RP into a much bigger tapestry. Other formats just don't do it nearly as well.

But I think there's three really major issues, that come up time and again, even with it being imo a way better RP format than docs, forums, freeform in MMOs, messenger services, etc.

1. Technical barriers for entry. Specifically downloading clients, and then figuring out extremely complicated commands in an archaic command line that's not at all intuitive. I think Ares/Evennia and a client that's much closer to what people would expect from other games would be a world of difference. Right click, drag and drop, and the typing is pretty much all for creative writing, not archaic commands.
2. Social barriers for entry. Particularly being intimidated, with a lack of organic RP. For every really outgoing roleplayer that's a-okay with grabbing a dozen strangers and creating storylines for everyone involved, there's scores of people that are exceedingly uncomfortable with making the first move. And this is more true the more it feels like an ooc requirement. If people can just show up and RP, or have tools to do this, it is way more accessible to a new person. If we put the onus on a new player in a strange environment to reach out to strangers in order to RP, that's vastly more intimidating and difficult. Mentoring, and just a friendly, welcoming environment is really vital, and rewarding inclusive behavior.
3. Lack of satisfying alternatives. This is the one I think a lot of people would disagree with me on, but I think minigames and giving players the ability to engage in fun side projects is nearly vital. When you look at games like Firan or RPIs that have a significant amount of coded time sinks people could optionally mess with, it adds a great deal of sustainability in creating an environment where roleplayers are accessible and filling in their time between scenes. With the nature of MU being a game environment with constant up time, I really think that if players are given tools to fill in the dead time between RP scenes, the environment becomes far healthier for it, as players are more consistently available, organic RP happens way more often, and scheduling becomes a much smaller concern. There's significant drawbacks (like to the extreme of people consciously avoiding/shutting down RP because they enjoy a tool way more than RP itself), and risks there, but I think it makes games way more accessible when someone that is having a more difficult time integrating has fallbacks aside from sitting silently in a room or listening to the loudest voices in ooc chats.

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.

That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.

So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.

Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.

I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.

@faraday My perspective might be biased since I'm missing out on the hardline dinosaurs already by running evennia, as those folks wouldn't play on a new codebase anyways. But I personally feel that the amount of dinosaurs like that is pretty tiny compared to the people that would get introduced into MUs with a web only format. Downloading a client is a big bar for entry for some people, let alone archaic command line interfaces in telnet.

@sg said in How do you construct your characters?:

@arkandel said in How do you construct your characters?:

"oh, no, that plot twist wouldn't work for a MUSH"

But really, what twists do work for a MUSH? I'm trying to think of one that I've encountered that turned out well or was interesting for the players rather than the staff running it having just a laugh. More often than not, it has months of planning and RP being thrown down the drain.

I feel I've had some cases that worked well. I don't think it is something I could do except for a game in running, but what I've tried to do is make a few main, visible overarching plots that everyone has access to, and then dozens of secret subplots. It has been extremely gratifying seeing player reactions to things I planned out a couple years ago as surprises. I think one of the keys is to just make the plots as internally consistent as possible. Sure, some will never go anywhere or be rendered irrelevant, but more than enough will work to be really worthwhile.

I can roll with about anything, so I dunno if I would call them dealbreakers, but there's two cases that are popular and common that I find intensely annoying and would pretty much always avoid if I had the choice to do so- one example from low code mushes, one from high code RPI type games.

1. Absolutely no means to organically find rp and having to reach out and page people to arrange RP scenes. Look, I just want to jump in and RP. I don't wanna talk to someone and create a weird, pseudo friendly acquaintanceship with every single person that has relevance to a potential story. That's just weird, man. No wonder WoD games feel like a meat market. If the way to find RP on a game is to talk to strangers OOC first, it's not really my thing.

2. Simulation games that have coded features that create absurd, immersion breaking situations. Someone is playing Tywin Lannister, some grave, dignified badass. He is now walking around naked. Why is he walking around naked in the street? Because the player oocly forgot to put on coded clothes. Oh look, he starved to death, because he forgot to codedly eat. Meanwhile all the players are trying to roll with it IC and it is as dumb as a scene as anyone can possibly imagine. Of all the things I can do in RP, trying desperately to justify some unbelievably stupid code results is on the bottom of my list.

@three-eyed-crow said in How much Code is too much Code?:

@mietze
I tend to look at coded toys (especially many of the ones on Arx) as Features Not Bugs That Aren't For Me. There's a type of player they are for that clearly really loves engaging with them, but I'm not in that demographic. I do play with some of the stuff on Arx now, but that was only after resolutely ignoring it for like 3 months until it stopped feeling overwhelming/like homework.

My own preferences run pretty lean, code-wise, but I come from a free-form background.

Yeah, ideally that's how I hope it comes across, as an option of, 'here if you wanna check it out, don't worry if you don't', but I know that just doesn't work for some people too. I have a lot of sympathy for that, but not sure about the best ways to address it, really.

@faraday Yeah, that. Twice I've quietly changed storylines because I just had someone give me a polite heads up that someone lost a loved one in the way that a story was moving towards depicting. It wasn't hard to write around it, and no one made a big deal about it.

Every player in a MU is effectively creating content whenever they rp, so they just generate stories under general guidelines with staff maybe deciding, 'these stories are just too big headaches and we aren't going to do those here'. That's never going to be exhaustive for what will bother the hell out of people, but frankly I've had way more experiences with people being reasonable and politely opting out of something with others then trying to accommodate them than I have people royally freaking out.

@louis-manigault Nah that's being hypocritical cause you don't wanna use the word 'offended', since you associate that with snowflakes. Being irritated or annoyed or angry -is- being offended, it counts. It's not all clutching pearls while a monocle drops into a tea cup in horror, man.