Posts made by Apos

@Sparks said in Separating UX from Functionality (Design Patterns!):

Yeah, the one linked above is the Evennia prototype that I talked about on IRC. I probably want to add a few things (like the ability to flag a spammy board as not shown on web, etc.), And I'm still not sure about monospace font for the post content. But it demonstrates nicely what I mean about doing something on both interfaces.

I really like it. Generally speaking, the more things shared between web and in game, the happier I am. I think beyond convenience for players, it really does go a great way to making a MU more accessible.

@hedgehog said in Date Thenomain:

@Ganymede

I knew that. I figure every Ohioan has passed it at some point in their lives and has an opinion on it. I have seen it but twice (going to and from Jungle Jim's from Dayton) and the impression it left on me is undeniable. Mostly because of the hubris of the assholes that made not one, but two Giant Butter Jesuses.

I lived in Columbus for almost my entire life and have never heard of Giant Butter Jesus. Or Jesuses. Jesusi.

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I don't really understand the hostility towards wanting to simplify something. To me it suggests at least a baseline level of defensive elitism that embraces the barrier to entry for new people into the hobby.

I'll be the first to say that "paying your dues" and learning how to deal with stuff that shouldn't be dealt with in the first place is bullshit. I've said repeatedly that not every game needs to be made with people new to the hobby in mind, because that's not really the intent of every single game.

Yeah, MUs have a terrible interface and format. A lot of people have been working for years to address it, so the only hostility I think you're seeing is by you totally ignoring that and speaking from a position of ignorance by calling people lazy without acknowledging their work, particularly when you just haven't done that work yet at all. Making a board post talking about a problem everyone knows exists is fun as an intellectual exercise, but I immediately think, 'sure, and?' since like... where's your new GUI that you've made and put on github for everyone to use. If you wanna dump in thousands of hours to give a shot at it, everyone will appreciate it, but if you aren't doing that work, then you aren't saying or doing anything new.

And I don't mean this unkindly, but if you put the work into it, you will always get more players than you can possibly want, as long as you invest the effort into making something fun and accessible. My playerbase is like, ten times what I wanted. I did not set out to make a big game at all, because it's a lot more fun to hands on GM for people than be an administrator for other GMs. Of course I want to make the game more accessible, but there's a damned good reason I haven't put out ads for the game in RP places that aren't MUs- there's simply no way I could ever support the amount of players that come in with the same experience I want players to have. I mean, maybe you'd enjoy being the head director to 10 senior GMs that each then oversee 10 other GMs and never, ever have any personal interaction with players if you are running a metaplot game for 2000 people, but I sure wouldn't. UX streamlining is a great goal but I'd much rather focus on providing the best experience to the people I have than inflating a count, and that's coming from someone with like 300 active players in a game with a very active metaplot.

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Apos

Tools that add depth and complexity don't have to be insanely difficult to use.

We don't, for example, make hammers with handles covered in glass. What does the glass add to the functionality of the hammer to do complex things?

You're absolutely correct.

You should write them.

@Ganymede said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I'm a bit confused about your point, because my entire argument is "make shit simpler" and "things could be simpler". What is there to disagree with? I'm not saying don't add new features, don't innovate or try new things. I'm saying that if you're gonna do it, don't make it a complete mess that needs 5 help files to explain how to use something.

You're presuming that people want it simpler. This is not always the case. People may want to simplify how things are done, but this doesn't necessarily mean keeping "things simple." As an example, people on Arx seem to want to add complexity to it.

I think it might be fairest to say people want tools to effect meaningful change on the game world, and are willing to tolerate the added complexity to get the coded tools to do that.

@Pandora said in Good Political Game Design:

Maybe it's a perspective thing. I play code-heavy games, so I'm very used to seeing 'Might makes right' & the idea of a game with an emphasis on politics and relationships going the way of 'Idiot with a big militaristic force and no political support, leadership platform, or allies steamrolling to the top via brute strength' would just be disappointing to me, personally. Everyone has their own vision for these games, I'm just stating my opinion that I am against that particular vision and can only hope it doesn't come to pass.

I am for changes in the effective strength of domains, and the system is designed for the wax and wane of domains and ultimately potentially the military conquest of other domains. I think there needs to be a careful balance between making societal change possible, so you don't have permanent stasis, and making change so easy that you have nothing that feels like a real institution. So the advantages of the status quo can't be so crushing that it is impossible, and the advantages of new people coming in can't upend the social order with a trivial investment in time. Even for a hierarchical structure, I felt the baseline for that would be to make any liege slightly weaker than any 2 immediate vassals combined, or in rough parity to a vassal that is combined with their vassals' military forces.

That said, the social systems are imo far more important than the military ones, in so much the social systems will be the single largest determining factor for wealth and a healthy economy ultimately, and it will not be possible to support significant military forces that pose a realistic threat without gaining widespread support, or a significant economic expansion. And no players are creating new domains out of thin air- they are replacing existing NPC placeholders that codedly exist, and if a war happens, those NPCs are going to take sides, and those are going to be entirely social checks. And in macro army combat itself, I think morale will be way more important than most other factors, in that battles will be over if one side routs, and that would be extremely likely if a commander isn't well liked or respected. I prefer to make significant military advantages be the logical conclusion of social victories, pretty much.

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

If people can just buy a bunch of retainers to help with investigations if they can't/won't purchase their own investigate higher, doesn't that render obsolete the niche for high investigate pcs?

I definitely appreciate the concern. Now I think the thing that counteracts it most there is that there's no limit on the number of people helping in an investigation, and they all make a significant difference in the rate something is finished. Right now, most investigations are really done by teams of people- some people do slowly gain things on their own, especially if they are stated for it, but it's difficult enough where most people aren't really like, 'oh I'll just do this alone with my retainer bob' since the threshold is so high, I usually see it like 4 PCs and 2 retainers helping out in one big thing as a team, rather than a bunch of smaller ones.

We are really nudging people towards the 'work as a team thing' not just because of the whole wanting to encourage collaborating aspect, but because it's really, really, really difficult to keep up with the rate people investigate otherwise if there's like 40 separate ones in per week. (I was spending 15+ hours a week just writing them at one point, before we dramatically raised difficulty)

Yeah dinosaurs are always a significant issue, though I'm not sure it'll be as big a danger long term as it might seem, since I am intending to add in a lot of small cost sinks, and I don't think it'll be overwhelming by the time other sinks come into play. I could be wrong, but offhand rough math with the anti-dinosaur cost scaling means it would take 56,250 xp to raise each available skill to 5, which at 30 xp a week would take 1875 weeks or 36 years of play. And then the character would die of old age and the xp would be gone.

Funny numbers aside, I always will be concerned about dinosaurs and making newer characters feel overshadowed but I think it might not be as big a danger as it seems at first glance. I still intend to address it to make certain it doesn't scale in a way that's too disruptive, and I don't think it's gonna be nuts before those systems come in.

@Jaded The siege stories were almost all PRPs though, and I'm not giving player GMs carte blanche to kill off characters until the GMing systems come in that'll make that more systematic and easier to review. Have to be careful with that, but yeah at the same time can't have players going nuts and handwaving all danger and making it meaningless.

So right now clear non-consent deaths have been extremely rare, only 5 PCs have died in contested ways that I can think of. I imagine the number will increase in the future, though I don't think we need piles o' bodies to have a feeling of risk, just more than what was there. I think 4 people at the siege battles would have died if we were using current code, so be a little careful there.

Take all advice with a grain of salt, even this. Maybe especially this, but I hope it helps.

One of the defining factors of the medium we roleplay in is how hidden most activity will be. I'd say even on games with a culture of publicly logging everything, that still holds true, in so much that other people won't have the time to get the context from that activity. So in general, only a small sliver of the work you do will be visible and noticed, and I think a staffer is kidding themselves if they believe they know the full extent of anyone else's contributions, or if they are involved in problematic behavior, how far that goes. This makes it very, very, very easy for an awful lot of people who are receiving basically equal staff attention, to think the distribution is extremely unfair. It also makes it very, very, very easy to -give- an unfair distribution. It is likely for people not even remotely involved in the game, with not even the smallest bit of context, to shit talk you on your efforts and your choices there. They are doing so because they have spent years and years in the hobby, and desperately need to believe that gives them the experience to speak from a lofty perch and validate that time, even if they have been doing things hilariously wrong for that entire time period. Some people give good advice, but also bear in mind that it is very unlikely anyone giving you advice has kept a game running for more than a year or so. So yeah.

Second, the largest criteria you should judge anyone, player or staff, is by how well they handle situations that go wrong. How they deal with frustration, how well they deal with RP shut down, how well they handle a conflict with a player they don't click with, how well they handle someone else losing their temper at them, how short their own temper is, and so on. It doesn't matter a damn how nice and positive someone is when everything is going their way- most people are. All that matters is how positive a member of the community they can be when they aren't. Know that everyone will also judge you by how you deal with them based on how that person is when everything is positive and great, except if they have had personally bad experiences for it. This means staff are loathe to punish anyone that they have not -personally- had bad experiences with, and you will pretty much never, ever be lauded for protecting anyone from abuse unless other people have personally experienced that abuse. Since this is a creative hobby, and most people aren't exactly super creative and driven to create things when a ton of people who have no idea what is going on are calling them worse than Hitler, it isn't exactly a surprise that most games collapse as soon as the initial honeymoon period is done. I'd say depending on how things go, you'll have maybe 2-3 months. I lucked out imo by getting a longer period since I think original theme and interest in something much different gave me some more time- I thought I'd have the kind of rants like a month or two before I did. But I mean, someone is kidding themselves if they think it won't happen unless you keep the game tiny and with a super small circle of people you all know. Like, I also don't think there's anything -wrong- with a game only lasting during the honeymoon period when everyone is super hyped about it. As long as people have fun, it was a success. But if you wanna make something longer than that, I'd be prepared for how people will act when they start to lose interest, begin to feel bored, get frustrated with their stories and need someone else to blame for that- that'll be you.

And it really is you. Whether the game succeeds by your own metrics will just be how passionate you are and how much time and energy you are willing to invest, how long you can sustain it, and how many like minded players and staff will share that vision, but also be willing to be reasonable when things go in a way they dislike. Building a game is not that hard and honestly a lot of fun, everyone is hyped to be working together to create things, and it is easy for disagreements to be brushed over when everyone is having fun. You just either have to be prepared for when that easy part ends, or make your peace with not going past that point- if you stop there, no shame in that. Long as you and everyone else had fun.

I'm sometimes really taken off guard by how popular some small roleplaying tools can be. A couple weeks ago @Tehom coded in a small command called +firstimpressions, to let a characters make a one-time-only record of the first time they interacted with another character, with a small xp incentive to nudge it along to encourage meetings and creating new relationships between characters. Two weeks later, there have been nearly 3000 unique records created of characters meeting for the first time.

People really like to RP.

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

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.

Except isn't this exactly how the interrogation social combat worked on Firan? Not that anyone is holding Firan up as some paragon of coded system excellence by any means, but you can't quite claim that any social combat system will punish people for that kind of fuckery, because it was pretty much the status quo on the last L&L game we all knew and loved(to bitch about).

There's two distinctly different kind of social systems that people are really talking about, that have very different goals. The macro ones we took very light nudges towards (reputation, renown, prestige) and those will all be massively revamped- basically anything dealing with any NPCs at all have to come through a social lens, and how well someone will rule will largely depend either on their social skills, or the political and social characters helping them with that. That kind of, 'I want to sell the nameless NPCs on something' is something not many people have problems with, since even if characters are both trying to convince NPCs to do different things so it's effectively PvP, it still is at one divide.

The really fucked up, 'tell me a secret that is suicidal' is the kind of social combat that a lot of people justifiably have huge gut rejections of, because they've seen the gigantic abuse cases there which just completely remove autonomy. Simply put, no social combat system should ever allow any kind of absurd situations that is wildly out of character and self-destructive for them- it just doesn't make sense. I vastly prefer buy in and carrot approaches to things like that, and though yeah I need to make sure social characters have teeth and have plenty of ideas about that, no charming stranger at a bar is going to talk a calm, rational person into cutting their own throat because it seemed like a good idea at the time. One reason so many people had such a problem with Custodius oocly is because he tended to try to sell other players oocly into a direction for their own characters that was wantonly self-destructive by taking advantage of ooc thematic ignorance combined with staff indifference or active collaboration in other games. That's actually a design flaw that isn't really addressed so much- characters should always be representative of actual people, they shouldn't really be permitted to take actions that are so self-destructive they make absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and are a result of ooc collusion or ignorance. And I carry that same philosophy on social combat or anything else in the game- if some rational, calm character has no good reason their happy guy wants to self-destruct, and it is purely ooc motivated, it can't be permitted.

Virtually every game will let player characters walk off that bridge, because they don't want to impede player agency over their characters, -even if- it makes no sense whatsoever. I say that's bullshit, and bad for collaborative games. It makes a shared story worse when you allow the absurd, even if it is purely self-destruction that can't be explained or rationalized.

There's multiple kinds of social systems, and social combat. My principle interest is designing systems that will effect how characters deal with NPCs, and the value of their standing with them, and frankly nearly everything that's handwaved in the game deals with NPCs- social/economic/military resources are an abstraction of being able to utilize pull with npcs, for example. Ultimately, every interaction with faceless npcs from the income of domains to military actions to gaining or spending resources will be influenced by social mechanics.

About social combat, there's a philosophical difference in MUD style arbitration and others, in just how system reliant something is. For example, some dude that rolls a combat beast standing outside the place new players connect and spam killing them. In a MUD, that's arbitrated by mechanics that shut that down. In MUSHes, that's arbitrated by knowing that's unacceptable socially and having GMs or players that prevent it, with likely some softer mechanics that make the most egregious violations improbable to avoid annoying retcons. Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.

@Thenomain @Arkandel I'd prefer if you didn't.

Pure command line only is too high a bar for the vast majority of current generation gamers. I'm in a spot where I have more people than I can really handle comfortable at the moment anyways but like, I haven't even bothered trying to talk non-MU rp buddies into trying out the game. I absolutely would have if we had context sensitive menus, right click functionality, etc. On the veeeeeeeeery long term to-do.

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

(That said, I object on general design principle to having command, +command, and @command do different things.)

Evennia itself is guilty of this in a few cases in its default command set (@desc/desc is the one that comes to mind), but our convention is that the @ is then the more capable builder-only version. This duplicity (in the default command set at least) is going away in Evennia 0.7 when we start allowing the developer to specify which prefixes (@, +, &, ...) Evennia will simply ignore (making @desc and desc effectively the same command even without an alias).
.

I really, really hate having same named commands do different things and greatly look forward to that change. I just dislike all the different prefix conventions and would be delighted to see them go away, while being effectively backwardly compatible by letting whoever throw in their random prefixes that they are used to.

But yeah @desc/desc, time/@time, help/@help, home/+home/@home are all headaches.

Yeah man I decided early on that I didn't need to design like mustache twirling assholes on the roster because if I make multiple goals that are mutually exclusive shit is gonna hit the fan regardless. Originally I made a few red herrings and then quickly found out it was TOTALLY unnecessary. I'd create something ambiguous and it would go in wild directions I never fucking dreamed of with how it was interpreted.

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

There are many characters around who literally know all the things

The highest amount of clue discoveries for any character when I last checked a couple days ago was between a quarter and third of this season's clues. Average is a few percent. Second tier (revelations) is more extreme, I think the most anyone has is 3, and I would be surprised if anyone gets a third tier for a long time. Some outliers do know a lot but even the most extreme cases aren't anywhere close to knowing all the things for even immediately relevant plot. Which I know doesn't make it any less frustrating when someone already knows whatever you wanna tell 'em.

@Ganymede But we get cheaper candy tomorrow so I think it balances out.

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

My interruptions have always been more ... severe.

People come in, and have a gun fight. Never try to engage the players there. Just interrupt.

The vast majority of people making really elaborate sets just want to be very evocative storytellers, and I'm really okay with that. But then there's guys who just want to dominate a scene, and it's because of them that I'm instinctively wary of anyone taking tremendous liberties in describing the environment in a set, and trying to force everyone to conform to it, which just doesn't work so great in non-sandboxes. Like I personally prefer people to avoid describing any of the context of the world around them except things that are completely unobjectionable and would fit the context of anyone just wandering in, if they are in a public space. It makes the organic rp a million times easier, and I think rp that's highly referential off of the environment changing is better off done in private when context is easily understood throughout the scene.