@Warma-Sheen I find saying, 'I wish I had handled that better, and I regret how it went down' is unobjectionable and usually helps mend fences. It's, 'but here's why I thought you were in the wrong and your part in why it went bad' is the part that just pisses people off, and just comes across as someone trying to justify the dumb shit they did.
@Arkandel Yeah, I had the same reaction to @emit when I first saw it, and even though it's constantly reinforced about what is acceptable or not by the community, there's still some problematic cases. Some people do unclaimed emits to be funny- some people think it's funny, some thing it is incredibly annoying, and you have people walking away with two very different feelings from the same scenes.
What I think are a problem are ones that aren't easily caught and corrected. Some new player does an unclaimed emit in a scene of literally 50 people, you have a half dozen people ask to please not do that. It's not repeated, everything is fine. It's big, it's noticeable, there's no need for a rule since it's immediately responded to. But on the other hand, what about something mostly invisible? A game has a social system that two people in a private scene use, one things it gives authority over another character, the other person is super creeped out but still feels that they would be the bad guy if they don't play along, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth, they log off and never come back, and staff never knows what happens, and the person that even did it probably doesn't even know. Those are the very problematic systems.
@Arkandel I generally agree but I think everyone judges the relative merits versus what's possible from abuse cases. I don't think anyone would argue that giving everyone full admin privs on every game would be a great idea, even though it would definitely cut down on overhead. I think most players are honest, non-dicks. I also think most people get extremely involved in their stories, and the time they are least likely to be reasonable is when they get emotionally invested in a conflict against another player or feel slighted by something, and it's not that paranoid to try to avoid cases that get people worked up. For me, the cases that worry me the most are ones where it would be largely invisible to staff and extremely difficult to correct, resulting in a corrosive atmosphere for the game. Pretty much any system players feel justified in policing one another will result in players hating the fuck out of one another, imo.
@Lotherio I personally think the most important ones to outline are ones that there's disagreement on, or can vary significantly from game to game, which can describe the atmosphere and culture you wanna foster. If you don't want a PvP game or you find it fun, it's a good idea to decide which and point it out. If you are okay with underage characters or it makes you uncomfortable, same thing. Do you want carefully moderated talks and civility, or free wheeling arguments and complete transparency. And so on.
If something can be argued either way and it is not defined, then people will act towards whatever way on an issue they fall upon, and just naturally expect most people will be on the same page.
Even though I pretty much never use formal pose order, I could see how that would be useful- I use the 'here' command frequently myself, since it lists the idle times of everyone in room to give me a benchmark.
@Cupcake said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Is there any way at all that paging can be adjusted so that you don't have to type the person's entire name? It makes it especially difficult when you're maintaining multiple conversations and/or are on a phone or tablet. I'm not sure about the reason for it, but it's terribly inconvenient.
There's a nick command that lets players do customized string replacement but I'm preeeeeetty sure that broke in the most recent version of evennia with how it does aliasing now, so assuming that gets fixed lemme talk about making it more universal and automatic, for what you are asking for.
The short answer is yes we could but not quickly. There's a method to just compare partial string matching that we could use but I don't think it would work well by default due to how many naming conflicts would exist. There would be a lot of checks to make that works how someone would expect it to work, and how to resolve name conflicts in a way that's logical, like 'page bob' going to bobby rather than Talbobis, which means probably having to check the most recent people they've paged with a library for that, and failing a match there, build from start of strings for partial matches filling from the left. So yeah but non trivial.
Ideally will just have a new client with a UI with right click functionality for pages on names sometime in the far future and try to give options to move past the more annoying aspects of MU command line stuff.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
- A GMing system for players creating PRPs, that would temporarily grant GM, staff like powers and code support.
- Full social combat systems.
Could you give some more details on those two items please? No need to go into the coded parts if they're just not fully fleshed out or designed yet, but I'm curious about your policies regarding them - i.e. how they'll be handled once the systems are in place.
If you can include an example that'd be great.
Lemme talk a bit about #4, since PRPs in code heavy games are kind of tricky, in that you run into issues with concrete elements that need GM support that would normally be handwaved in MUSHes, and really needs to have PRP runners have code to keep things immersive and exactly what you'd expect.
Like a PRP in a normal MUSH, while it varies a lot we know the general idea- a player gives staff a heads up for approval or not, depending on the game, it's checked for consistency, then everything falls upon the player running the plot and depending on how it resolves, sheets are updated and so on. There's not really hard code in so much, since everyone ultimately has the tools to do what they need.
But for a game like Arx, when there's automated combat, NPCs are attackable objects, currency and items are in game objects, there's three issues at play I think.
First, there's total handwaving, where players are able to @emit and do whatever they want, but they don't have the ability to create objects that would be consistent with the story- finding a dragon's horde can't happen unless they'd get staff to swing by and create the actual money, items, whatever to actually demonstrate that, which leaves players in this unfortunate position of @emiting and getting people to play along, but unable to create any kind of consequences that aren't handwaved unless they have the code support to go along with that and enforce consequences. That's just a big part of the whole MUSH/RPI type divide of consequences (good or bad) being kept by code rather than by hand. So until there's code support, or staff wanting to sit in and create objects/update things accordingly for a plot, it is stuck in this handwave-y state. That's where it currently would be until I get code support.
So then there's full coded support for players, that would in effect temporarily turn them into staff, and give them access to the coded abilities they'd need to make the RP consequential in the sense of demonstrable, lasting change at a glance to outsiders that aren't involved in the plot. The tricky part there is doing it in a way that doesn't have abuse cases, where if you are trusting players to act as staff even for just a single plot, what kind of oversight is involved. My feeling there is just an increasing degree of leeway granted to GMs based on feedback from players. For example, unless staff wants to risk messy retcons and constant oversight, probably shouldn't give a new guy the ability to shatter the grid and get carried away on his first try. Or similarly, the ability to bankrupt a great house or give something worth millions or arbitrarily kill players or so on. So this would be inherent limitations on the commands a player acting as a GM would have access to, and then just gradually removing the limitations as a GM goes.
And then there's the whole, 'well, how do we keep stories consistent and accessible and avoid a sandbox feel where everything happens in isolation and has no impact on other people?' My feeling there is something very akin to version control as a tool to help GMs figure out what plot elements are currently in play and being changed, to prevent any GMs contradicting one another and making those weird continuity breaks that happen in some games, particularly larger ones. For example, a player in house Grayson wants to run a tinyplot about Iron Guard elements that have gone rogue and are working with Abandoned to raid pilgrims traveling to Arx, and have been murdering Knights of Solace trying to escort the pilgrims. This would highlight different plot elements as a searchable index so anyone making a plot would know story is happening there- Grayson, Iron Guard, Abandoned, Pilgrims, Knights of Solace. Probably with a synopsis of each plot searchable in a database, then automatic sorting of different plot elements, so later if some dude is doing a story about Iron Guards purging disloyal elements, they'd see that previous plot highlighted and pop up and let them know what happened there, so they wouldn't trip over their feet and make anything contradictory. This also would let staff very quickly review proposed PRPs and see, 'this isn't possible because X happened' or 'This fits neatly along with Y, and will create potential story crossovers'. That kinda thing. While this sounds complicated, I think this would actually be much much easier to implement than the previous thing of giving players carefully controlled code, and probably would not be so bad, and it would come down to implementation being clear and easy to use, and not something that felt like an administrative pain in the ass.
Social combat I'll post more about later, there's a lot of debate about that, but the one thing I can say I'd never ever do is put in a system that made someone feel like they were obligated to RP with a creeper. That way leads to horror.
@ThatGuyThere In the very very long term, ideally we can make a build of evennia that's available that would feel more like off the shelf TinyMUSH and then let people add in coded features we've created like that if they want, so that someone wouldn't need to know much python in order to get the kind of game they'd like. Because I totally get wanting to have a very code-light MUSH feel game, but then the possibility of, 'well, except maybe for this one thing' or whatever.
Starting beta tomorrow, November 1st. This means in practical terms the start of GMing for the game, and beta should run for the length of the first major story arc of the game (season 1), which will hopefully coincide with us finishing most of the major systems that we'll use to have long term sustainability. Things not yet fully implemented but planned for beta are:
And then ideally we'll be ready for full release. Mostly during beta we'll be watching for things that break and then trying to fix them, and handling everything by hand as we need to.
@Arkandel I'd rather still hear the criticism for anything I have, even if it's not near being officially open. Even if it's problems I already know about and are on the to do list to fix and clarify, I'd rather have it emphasized than risk me forgetting about it down the line, so I think it's very helpful.
@ThatGuyThere That was kind of my thinking about it, and I'm not married to it/violently opposed to tweaking it, but I thought it fit and I wanted to give an extra bonus to people with the investigation skill (where each level discounts it, and someone with maxed does it for free).
@Tempest Yeah before it was definitely disproportionate, and it was more like a popularity contest, and I wanted something that felt a little more immersive in the sense that it represented player actions. I still don't think it's quite there though, and Tehom and I were working on something else that's a lot closer to what @Pyrephox was talking about that'll be an extension of the system. Since right now it shows a way people can generate resources, but we'll have something parallel to show how players can work together, invest on something together, and utilize their skills/stats as leaders to produce a game effect as projects. Which frankly isn't that much different that what really would be happening in requests in most games but a little bit more streamlined and easier, hopefully.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
This game looks really interesting to me, especially as it approaches beta, but I have been curious about the tasks.
Are there ones you have to complete daily? I'm fine with weekly, but leery of anything that's going to need maintenance on a daily basis. I just dunno if I'm going to be in the mood to log in that often, even if I'm able to (and I won't be sometimes).
Naw, everything is on a weekly system, and most aren't intended to be completed in a single week. How they work right now is an abstraction for Leader of Group A asking People with influence over Group B for help with any random task off screen. For example, a noble of a house concerned that the recent chaos has made merchant shipping by sea more dangerous asks some of the coastal houses with large navies for to help guard the waters, that'd be a military task, they agree to support it, and once it passes a threshold it completes, different rumors are generated automatically so everyone in the city can see what's going on (even if the individuals involved are obscured), and resources are generated. I think it's misleading from the posts to see it as a heart of the game or anything like that, since it's more of a minigame for players to make offscreen actions from bargaining RP meaningful, and I haven't heard about anyone being pressured about them and none of the tasks have innate time crunches on them and just persist until someone finally gets enough support for it.
While I do want to be pretty careful about the resources generated giving some groups a larger edge, I don't think it's too much of a realistic concern since while the resources are meaningful, it's still very minor compared to the bulk of the economic strength of the noble houses from their domains. For example. Someone trying to do a Littlefinger-I-Know-Everyone-And-Can-Get-Dozens-To-Help-Me type guy can do it, and probably knock out a couple tasks, maybe getting like 30-50 resources or something if they worked like mad at it. That would be under 2% of the income of the wealthiest great house at the moment, and like a tenth of a percent of some of the Scary Big Bad Organizations. So there's definitely a sense of, 'Bob the Fast Talker is getting rich' from an individual perspective, but from a macro perspective compared to what the powerful organizations are doing, it's pretty mild.
@Karmageddon Yeah, agreed, I'll have to do a wave for the other houses, the amount of OCs created by players in velenosa dwarfs everyone else by a good margin, and to give an idea by how much, the amount of PCs generated by staff was close to the same for each fealty. It definitely is an issue I'll have to tackle, though I don't think it's as bad as it seems at a glance, since the much of the values are independent of player pop and are essentially divided up amongst members (that's why some of the small houses seem more wealthy than the bigger ones). But still something for me to very carefully keep an eye on and trying to spread out the population more.
Finally leaving alpha and heading into beta on November 1st. For purposes of my gross misuse of those terms, that pretty much means the same thing that we have been doing but now we'll also be GMing and moving the story forward. If any system we add in spectacularly explodes in a horrifying display of imbalance and regret, we'll try limit the damage as much as we can to keep a consistent play environment, but hopefully we can avoid many retcons. Systems remaining to be added in will be primarily dealing with automated coded systems for controlling domains/armies, dynamically generated exploration rooms and GM commands for players running plots in them, social combat, and agents (npc minions). And a lot more website/game integration. We'll be adding/testing most of those during beta, and aim for full release once the systems are done and the first major season/storyarc of the metaplot ties up.
@Cupcake Nah I just permanently freeze 'em unless the creator comes back, unless they specifically told me they wanna see them rostered. I think most people would feel weird about someone else playing their own creation so unless I hear otherwise that's what I go with.
@Kanye-Qwest Someone needs to be Dickwolf Exposition Guy.
@lordbelh We've disagreed philosophically on a number of points and I always felt you were extremely respectful and easy to talk to, and I never felt discouraged by it even when I disagreed, just from my own perspective. I personally see things as a trade-off between a more powerful narrative and storytelling tools versus a comfort level for players in being reassured that abuse they have experienced in the past wouldn't be possible in a new location, and I think it's a tricky balance. Which is why I say no dark mode, but yes on alts, since I think the types of abuse in the former is much harder to police and be aware of than in the latter, and the narrative advantages in the latter are greater than the former too.
I'm sure people could correct me on my use of terms, but here's how I'm defining them for my own purposes:
Alpha: Putting in core systems and testing them and seeing base functionality. No GMing pretty much at all or story movement, so it's effectively a sandbox, with just some light seeding of story elements as a prologue. I was not expecting us to be this busy at this point in the game, and I absolutely do not blame anyone if they are like, 'I can't find things to do or feel it's difficult to get involved or code is too hard to use and offputting'. Those are all extremely fair criticisms and a lot of those things just aren't ones I'm focusing on right now, since there's too many core aspects I'm working on that I think would help long term sustainability. Also a fair criticism to say I should expedite things to help people have easier access now when they are hyped, but I see it as a trade off. It is very reasonable for a lot of people to not be interested in the game in this state, which is where we are right now.
Beta: When it's no longer a sandbox, and we're actively GMing and moving the story forward, and see how a lot of the macro systems work in progress. I view it as entirely possible I could have made a catastrophic mistake or two that will make revamps necessary as I see how things come together, which is why I'd prefer to call it a beta in the full knowledge I might have to wildly tweak systems, and this is where we hope to really put in most of the systems that would help players create their own story long term. Dynamic rooms, storytelling support for PRPs, and similar systems.
Release: Probably will aim for when the first major chapter of the opening story is done, to coincide with me being satisfied that no major system will need to be completely overturned or there will be a need for mass retcons and things like that. Where I picture a reasonably consistent continuity and if I dropped dead of a heart attack the game wouldn't immediately lapse into stasis even if the metaplot stalled.
