Posts made by Apos

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

Hope your crossover project is successful, sounds like a lot of work melding two potentially drastic cultures in regards to what constitutes 'RPI' and what it means; assuming you're trying to draw in Mud folks towards the free form or mush versus reliance on full code to account for everything.

I don't think it's as hard as it sounds, since I think most people are pretty forgiving with adjusting a little to different environments just as long as the game is giving them fun things to do, the game's format isn't infuriatingly difficult to learn, and they don't feel like their own RP ideas and stories are being shut down. Don't think we can appeal to everyone, but I think most roleplayers are generally pretty okay with new formats as long as they are enjoying the RP.

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

From a taste perspective the heavily coded part does not appeal to me. But if that was a teaser line for a book or movie I would buy it in a second. Hope your game is a lot of fun and you and your players enjoy the telling of what promises to be an interesting story.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

I'm hoping a lot of die hard mush players won't find the code as off-putting as they fear it would be. For me, the greatest appeal for mushes is how free form it is, and how much opportunity someone has to really make their own story. And in direct contrast to that, a lot of RPI's try to code everything and limit characters just to that code only, and force characters into narrow decisions that don't really fit what a character would do, removing decisions from players. Some players really enjoy that MUD feel, but I fall way closer to the mush spectrum for storytelling.

So while I don't think I can please everyone (as you said, it's taste), my goal is definitely not to remove the storytelling strengths of mushes that I think most people on here really enjoy, but to try to provide a few more tools to players so they aren't as reliant on GMs to take actions that can be very consequential.

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

Everything devolves into wild sex romps, because sex sells. Sex and Violence.

You have a point there, but I'm still kind of an optimist about this. While sure, a lot of players will always have their sexy fun times, I still feel that a lot of people fall back on relationship RP and fooling around as just something to do because they don't have much else going on game wise, and I would feel that would be a failure on my part to provide meaningful story and an accessible metaplot. I kinda feel it's just on me and other GMs to make sure players have enough to do.

As for high vs low fantasy, there is magic in Game of Thrones, it's just very rare unless you take into account the corpses turning into zombies and babies being turned into white walkers and the dragons and the sorcerers and... well nevermind.

And you kind of hit it right there in what I was getting across by low fantasy. When someone describes the fantastic elements of Game of Thrones, "Well it's a medieval political drama but has dragons, undead zombie hordes, plant elves, giants, shadow demons, resurrection..." it wouldn't really sound low magic whatsoever, as you pointed out. But I think most fans would agree that Game of Thrones and similar settings followed the narrative approach of using fantastic elements sparingly early and gradually increasing the prevalence and significance of those elements to the story.

Which brings me back to @Glitch and the "baby with the bathwater" complaint, which I think is very valid and I definitely don't want to give the impression that Arx will be magic free. Oh god no it will not be magic free, it will be (and mostly is) coded, and it's intended to be used by players and not just NPC deus ex machina. But yeah, much like those same narratives, the metaplot is designed in a similar way to increase prevalence slowly over time, and cause a significant change in fundamental theme throughout the game's lifespan. From a game runner's perspective, I think it's a dangerous idea- we'll change theme slowly through the game, meaning some people that loved the start will hate it later, and vice versa, but I think in terms of actually telling a story and letting players go nuts with it, will be an awful lot of fun.

A better way to phrase a core thematic element of Arx would be: "What would it be like if a high fantasy world became a low fantasy one, forgot it ever was a high fantasy world, then started to change back?"

@secretfire I like high fantasy quite a bit, and I very much agree about endless sex romps not being the same thing as character-driven RP. But for me the difference between low fantasy and high fantasy is just pitch and degree, since it's about making characters and how they react to the world and their setting.

A character that lives in a world where magic acts as a constant deus ex machina and they have magical travel and can magically handwave hand wave all diseases/ailments/common problems immediately has a different tone in stories from ones where problems like that just can't be solved. This doesn't make high fantasy bad, and this doesn't necessarily even make low fantasy grimdark, it just changes the perspective of characters from ones where cure all panaceas might exist to ones where they very emphatically do not. I personally find high fantasy focus a lot more on describing the world and their possibilities, since they are so markedly different, while low fantasy take a perspective closer to the character and playing more the similarities.

@surreality This might be helpful for you, not sure if it's what you're going for. But one handy thing in evennia is automatically being attached to a web framework (django), in that the DB for the MU and web are shared so that as players update post like things in game it can automatically populate on the web. Like we have characters writing public notes about other characters, and then it populates on their page, and visible story dialogues going, and might move to a tumblr-like IC format. That might feel a little more intuitive to some people than editing a wiki, so might capture what you are shooting for, in having a Play-by-post type format existing alongside of a MU proper.

@Sandor said in Play-by-post analog to MUSoapbox:

RP Online, IIRC, is all play-by-post.

I don't think they do. I'm just surprised that such a common way of playing has gone under the radar so thoroughly. I mean, MUDConnector is a veritable encyclopedia of obscure-ass MU*'s that get practically no play at all, and here we are with a mode of play that I can't find an analogue to that for.

I was curious so I googled and looks like @coin is right, http://rpol.net/ has a few thousand play by post games going. Weird interface, had to click at bottom and search, but I think that's what you're looking for.

@Cobaltasaurus Ohhh yeah, I remember, you were pretty cool. I think towards the end of Firan it was hard to get involved and the environment was pretty stilted, not sure if you found that to be the case or not, but I vaguely remember it being that time period.

For the handful of people that know me and have fallen out of touch:

Last Ojitar @ Firan
Last Furen @ Firan
Judante @ Firan
Declan @ The Reach

and now since it's about to start beta:
Apostate @ Arx

@Lithium I think a lot of the other threads can give anyone a gut aversion to the words 'RPI' and that's understandable. It's also fair that I'll have different tastes than other people, and some of the things I've made people will hate, and some they'll love. But I'll definitely appreciate someone with a much different point of view trying out the game, since it'll help clue me into obvious blind spots of things that might appeal to them I have no idea about, or big turns off that I just wouldn't otherwise notice.

@ixokai Now that you mention it, double \ is an alias for emit from the evennia base code. I absolutely didn't even notice that till you asked. Whoops. Thanks!

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

I am loving this idea!
So tell me:

• Is it possible to raise and breed animals for better yield of materials or better horses? (like specifically breeding 'Far Strider' horses that can't carry a lot but could indeed go farther in a day that a 'normal' horse?

• Housing and home? I know on Firan if you didn't know the crafting system inside and out you couldn't really do your IC job, which meant no money which mean.. you'd loose your housing and no access to the baths.. which meant you smelled. (down down the drain). until some noble took pity on you.
  How do you prevent that from happen?

• Are we purely locked into having characters from a Roster who don't belong to players? Or are those just examples?

Good questions, I appreciate them.

1. For the first, yes eventually, but we're trying to avoid going super far deep down rabbit holes at the start since I don't want to create a system that's too complex for people to intuitively grasp and get into. For example, making components in crafting easily accessible rather than a mini-game collecting/harvesting type approach mandated that also means you store up mountains of random bits of a hundred different components for crafting. I think that style gets really overwhelming, so think of it closer to a gw2 style locker of having permanent access to all sub components without a very MUD orientated, 'trying to carry everything on you and mix and matching non-stop'. Similarly, while we'll eventually go down the, 'And you can refine this by doing Y', we're avoiding that initially to try to make sure it's not overwhelming in the, 'I want to raise horses' 'well what kind of horse, how were they bred, how were they...' of 10 thousand questions that someone doesn't want to deal with.

2. Similarly, I personally found firan's approach extremely newbie unfriendly and alienating, with no disrespect towards them. I generally am extremely strongly opposed to design in RPI type games that force players to handle a lot of upkeep. I think most players despise that, and really, really resent feeling forced to engage in tedious minigames instead of RPing. So our approach economically is to have a tremendous amount of voluntary sinks of things players would -like- to do, without a true upper end of it no longer being useful, but without a lot of things where you feel like you absolutely must have it. So a much stronger carrot rather than whip approach.

To elaborate on that slightly further, my design philosophy is to implement systems that encourage RP, but never, ever any that remove player agency, which is where I think most mush players nope the hell out from RPIs. 'If my character forgets to eat, I starve to death'. This is an absurd situation since no character is moronic enough to forget to eat and just die from it, if they have access to food. So any kind of maintenance type system that seems silly for characters to not be doing is right out.

3. No, player created is totally fine. And every character on the roster was generated using the exact same CG that all players will have access to. Generally speaking, I'd try to give hooks to each player-created CG to help them tie into the metaplot in small ways so player created ones aren't alienated from the game as a whole, which I think is a failing in a lot of roster vs new CG games.

Since it's a base framework and we wanted to be able to accommodate both RPI and mush players, we tried to heavily alias a lot of common commands in both formats to work. Like for example standard mush page syntax works, and standard 'tell' syntax in muds works also. Can't do it completely without rewriting the command line parser, but it probably won't feel that alien in terms of interface.

The common people of Arvum wouldn't really call the last thousand years a 'golden age'. Since the founding of the Compact of Arvum, the five great noble houses of the realm have schemed and warred against one another, locked in a millennium-old struggle for dominance kept only in check by the occasional powerful monarch. But even as the fragile peace frays with the latest dynastic crisis, creating courtly intrigues in the capital city of Arx, ancient foes that took mankind to the brink of extinction a thousand years ago stir once more.

Currently in closed alpha, Arx is a low-fantasy, original theme game, built from evennia to create a heavily coded mush/RPI hybrid that incorporates a lot of the ideas from both that we find to be the most fun. We like a lot of the stronger story-telling aspects of mushes, while we also like the heavily coded games ability for players to make their own fun and affect the game world without being as GM-reliant (a selling point of games like RfK, Firan, RPIs, etc). Arx will have a story driven, episodic style metaplot that changes the game world significantly over its span separated into different distinct 'Seasons' of the game's story, able to go in wildly different directions based off player actions.

Posting about this now since most of the systems are done with, and soon it'll be time to start breaking things in a spectacular fashion in a closed beta and seeing if I can drive our coders into a bleak depression with how many things need to be rewritten.

Features wise, our design philosophy has been to focus on implementing systems that promote consequential RP between characters developing organically, which ideally will in turn free up staff to focus on the metaplot and the overall story. This means there's a lot of design choices that some people will love, and a few will very sincerely tell me I'm a bad designer that should feel bad.

For example:

Fully coded and automated combat, without GM interaction. Both small scale tactical combat that can include character death, and large scale army combat as nobles can go to war with one another, conquer each others' lands, and create all sorts of problems without putting in a single request/job.

Player-controlled noble fealty system and land control with a civ-style minigame, along with organizational minigames that let players influence the political power of different groups.

Crafting system, all the player-controlled items that implies.

Gossip/Rumor system and Prestige system of player-controlled political influence.

A slew of different RP promoting systems that are similar to ones in other RP formats (play-by-post, MMOs, tumblr, etc) to encourage characters being interconnected. Character journals, changing timelines of character relationships, shared character milestones, rewards for RPing about character niches, things like that. As well as a number of minor system to encourage IC communication over ooc ones to give a more immersive, organic feel. I personally believe it's hard to overdo it on giving characters fun reasons to interact with another, while never making them feel forced or obligated to.

Alright, but what's the setting like?

Completely original world, because we wanted more freedom in storytelling. Well, 'completely' is a bit of a stretch, since there's going to be homages (shameless ripoffs) to any number of series that we love, and being low fantasy there's going to be parallels to Game of Thrones, and I'm a huge fan of Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy so there's many a homage there. But it'll be low fantasy in the sense that while magic and fantastic elements exist, they are rare/understated enough that thematically there is doubt they exist, and the emphasis of stories will fall on a more human, character-driven element.

Except aesthetically, which is an odd thing to talk about in pure-text games. Because while I respect gamers who adore historical costume pieces, I think most people would rather not be in a frock. The aesthetics for the game are closer to eastern style high fantasy ridiculousness found in games like Aion, Tera, Guild Wars 2, Archeage, Black Desert, etc. So low fantasy world, high fantasy aesthetics in the medieval stasis trope.

To the brave and extremely curious that want to glance at the lore, you can look at our painfully basic webpage that exists as awkward testimony that none of us are the least bit proficient in CSS here. That will be completely redone before we launch.

If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to ramble on endlessly about the up and coming game.

Someone else will step up to ask the questions that everyone else is too smart to ask. Carry on the mantle.

@Arkandel Yeah, one of my most popular characters was an utterly repulsive asshole with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Loud, smelly, crass, unpredictably violent, absolutely unrepentant thug who engaged non-stop in deplorable behavior. But like, I was privately shocked (and frankly a little unnerved) by how often he got propositioned, just because I tried to make him also funny. The game had coded social rolls like seduction, and I enjoyed trying them since they would never, ever do anything but spectacularly botch due to his absolute lack of any kind of social skills and was therefore hilarious.

But he was also a roster character, and I was told that basically every previous player of the same character was not well regarded, and that also reinforces your point, in that the same character can then also magically transform from being hated to everyone wanting to RP with them because of the player.

@Coin I agree and this is an approach I'm using, since I think no single style of xp system create incentives for every form of good, RP fostering behavior that helps a game grow. Relying on a single approach without any kind of bounds I think usually undermines the approach as a system for rewarding good behavior, since often players cut back on or stop doing the good things that aren't rewarded by the system while making them half-ass the single thing the game was focusing on.

@VulgarKitten said in Finding roleplay:

Does anyone ever feel like Carrie at the prom when asking for RP on the public channels?

I pretty much should play youtube clips of the, "THEY ARE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU" for how I feel when I ask, yeah.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

To take this thread in a slightly different direction... do you think incentivizing public scenes helps in practice?

What I mean specifically here is either +vote systems with diminishing returns for the same recipients so that players have an extra reason to seek out new partners, higher XP for larger scenes, etc.

Do you think these have a positive impact on whether you can find roleplay? Please forget any other effects of them for the purposes of this thread - power balance, etc - and focus on RP generation. Does it have that effect?

Yes. Night and day difference.

Hm, I don't think I fall so much into the 'are you drawn to a character, or are you drawn to a setting?' type question. It's whatever story happens to grab me for the game, really. Might be my own character, might be supporting the story of someone else's character, might be a transformative story about the setting itself. I think that alternating focus is just part of collaborative RP and what makes it fun.

@deadculture I even understand the kind of defense. "Well, I'm involved in a hobby and something that I've always considered net positive. Sure, there's bad spots, and I can picture these things happening, but I have never witnessed anything like it should it stands to reason that these are far less common than it sounds and it might be overstated." That's kind of the mental process that started from this stuff about sexism and assault in gaming, and it's the last part of that defense that's the problem.

Because no one here seems like a big enough asshole to actively be turning a blind eye to something as loathsome as assault or overt abuse, and they sure as fuck don't feel it's fair to be grouped in with it. Everyone here gets that. But when they say, 'Well, since I haven't seen any signs of it, I feel like it has to be overstated', that's where the shit hits the fan, because no, lord no, LORD NO it is not anywhere close to true. It is pervasive and constant and that's why so many posters here gets enraged when they see the, 'but there's two sides guys!' polite dismissal. Because that kind of the unconscious, 'well, benefit of a doubt time' that is a large reason why this kind of abuse stays as pervasive as it is. So right, it's probably better to let the topic change if you still have that, 'well, these assault victims probably are being too loud or I wanna withhold judgement'. It's really not the time or place, and confronting them is pretty damned cruel when they aren't exactly looking to debate about it.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

@Apos But are they jarred out of it? If I responded to your disagreement with insults for example it'd have been as likely to put you on the defensive and just dismiss everything I'm saying ('Arkandel is just a fucking idiot' - you might actually have been right about that ) as to actually take what I argued under consideration.

It's very difficult to look at someone calling you names and admit they have a point at the same time, you know?

While the last 20 pages have been kind of depressing, I think the whole, 'Wait I'm doing harm by my posts and people are getting upset at me because I am unconsciously belittling their life experiences' and people in turn getting insulting actually very clearly was getting through a lot faster and more clearly than the more reasoned and calm arguments that were posted earlier.

@deadculture Yeah we'll probably disagree on what makes harm. But look, a lot of the posts weren't trying to start a dialogue and win converts, and that's the problem. It was people reflecting on their life experiences and shitty things that happened to them, and it was a lot like some random asshole barging into a conversation of people that all had been mugged to chide them on not being safe when the dude lives in a safe neighborhood. The conversation should have just been, 'hey, that happens, keep an eye out, but it isn't about you', but guys were very desperately trying to make it about them. If you don't wanna say harmful, I definitely wouldn't say it was helpful either.