Posts made by Apos

@surreality Yeah, and I also kind of figure that when the game comes up I'll be too busy GMing or dealing with players to go back and revise systems easily- particularly if anything I change while it's live impacts players, then they'd get all pissed off and potentially feel cheated if something they got accustomed to changed.

@Ganymede And that's very kind of you, and I honestly would not have held it against you if you did nay-say it. Most big ambitious MU projects never launch, or settle for much less or have catastrophic problems due to their ambitions. You don't know me at all to say why mine would be any different, and I'm expecting to deal with a lot of doubt and negativity- I'd read it all and make sure there's nothing I'm missing in terms of a reality check.

That said, a major project I ran for fun lasted twelve years or so and I was overseeing hundreds of gamers, and my shortest project I controlled went about three years, so I'm a long-haul kind of person and I think I can handle it. For this MU I'm working on I spent NaNoWriMo just writing lore/story for it in game, and I ran a python script at the end for a word count, was around a hundred thousand from November. Seemed kind of in the spirit of the project, anyways.

@Coin Original theme and setting medieval low-fantasy game kind of in the spirit of game of thrones style political intrigue. Probably be a month or two on launch, was hoping to have it out by new year's but don't think the economic systems and war game type systems for moving armies around will be done by then.

@Arkandel I believe you're correct, and because of that I think new games absolutely must be accessible to players that have never MU'd before. For me, and what I've been working on, that partially means that I don't think I can require players to have access to any materials outside of the game at all. I just don't think I can expect players to know a game system, no matter how popular, and attract anyone that's not already MU'ing unless they have hardcore MU friends that try to sell them on it. WoD is popular and great, but there's tens of thousands of younger roleplayers out there that have literally never heard of it, and for the majority of them there's no way on earth they will go through the trouble of buying a book or ripping off PDFs to play a retro text game that already feels like a throwback without graphics.

When one MU I was on closed and I went to the Reach, I had a surprisingly difficult time convincing other mush players not familiar with WoD to try it... and these were players that had been MUSHing for years, much longer than me. It's not a dislike of genre, it's the -work- involved that is a perceived barrier for entry.

So for the game I'm creating I'm going with fully automated coded systems for basically anything that would require someone to do the equivalent of consulting a rulebook. I frankly feel like I have no other choice.

The lack of organic development of RP on grid by happenstance is the primary reason I decided to start creating a MU myself and it was shaped by my experiences on the Reach. After immediately coming from a game that had an awful lot of random RP that significantly shaped plot and started those fun RP chain reactions constantly of one small thing leading to dozens of other things that ultimately would be pivotal in character development.

The Reach was the first game I played that I saw people mention how much they hated social RP, and that really surprised me when I started. Then I came to the disappointing conclusion that what they REALLY meant was, 'I hate RP that won't go anywhere', and that social RP was code for that. It was the first time I played where social RP was largely without consequence, and I just wasn't used to sandboxes doing that.

I firmly believe that insular sandboxes are largely a result of RP social interaction being mostly consequence free, which is incredibly stifling to meaningful spontaneity. Not everyone would think of that as a flaw, but I don't enjoy it, and I think it's actually not that hard to design in a way that counteracts it (after all, I came from a game that months before was exactly that style where the Reach was night and day different).

@Thenomain You have some really good points there, and while I could only speculate on how comic book writers try to balance out the continuity of their shared stories, you're right in that there are some really interesting parallels.

Like for them, they have to weigh what makes for the more interesting outcome and appealing story to their readers versus a more internally consistent outcome that might make a story impossible or a too predictable with a weaker narrative.

I think that definitely has some pretty close similarities between a GM on a MU (particularly a statless consent one) that is trying to keep the different storylines consistent and coherent versus individual players that want to take them in different directions and make the sandbox less and less plausible to have overlap.

@Ganymede Seconded about potato. I thought double input windows sounded dumb and now I can't imagine not having them.

Now if I could only disable the update reminders.

@Arkandel What the? Wiki code in poses? I don't think I've ever seen that, but now I'm honest to god curious what that looks like.

@Derp said:

@mietze said:

Yeah, I do think that a game staff that purposefully always will choose personal friends over new-to-them talent that meets the same qualifications for the position probably should be explicit about that.

But then we circle back around to "How do you know who meets the qualifications?" Through experience, of course. If it were as simple as ask-and-answer, then there would be no need to restrict the concepts in the first place. If you would trust anyone off the street to run them, they'd be open to everyone, which would negate needing qualifications in the first place.

I'm confused. Don't you do in depth applications where you have people explicitly write why they'd want such a concept, what they'd do with it, what kind of roleplay they'd create, how it would improve the game, etc? I mean, I thought that was standard. If you have that, then you just read the application, and if someone knocks it out of the park with their answers and understanding of it, then they are qualified. I mean, it IS as simple as ask-and-answer. I approved strangers and brand new players more often than not for extremely powerful/restricted things because they had wonderful apps and it worked fine because it was obvious they had a strong understanding of what the character/position/whatever demanded. I honestly can't recall a situation of it backfiring.

I see experience as helpful in knowing someone likely won't flake out but I really don't think it's all that important comparatively if you just ask the right questions.

@bored said:

I don't get what you're saying here, or rather, I don't understand how you think the part you quote as not solving things doesn't actually solve things. Why isn't leaving them to handicap themselves if they want a solution? Why do you need to pre-handicap a character? I just don't see the justification. Someone who doesn't want power won't grasp for it.

Sorry, my fault for not being clear.

Say you're eliminating a tier system of I, II, III characters (which I think was a flawed system too), but your emphasis about useless characters was to more not generate them to begin with to avoid characters from either a stand point of personal (statistical) power or social power that are inherently weaker. So as potential approaches you make all characters have the same potential (which sounds the fairest), and/or you avoid generating characters that are kind of locked on rails to never achieve either high stats or social influence because that's how the character is designed.

From my experience there was a few small problems with both of those. In the former, if you have players who just wanted to roleplay a low key, slice of life character and avoid personal or social power, you have an awful lot of people giving them shit for doing so. While that sounds ridiculous, look at the firan threads and see how many posts are about players ruining or wasting a character. Yes, a lot of those were players that wanted to be powerful and fucked up, but I guarantee that the purely social types would get the same grief and worse often be nudged into taking the character in a direction they aren't comfortable with and can't play. So you generate all characters that have that potential, and some players are actually unhappy because other players give them shit for wasting it.

Avoiding generating inherently weaker characters also sounds great until you run into players who feel you are completely disregarding their playstyle by ignoring them and not making characters that appeal to them, forcing them into a niche of making their own characters. So you either do appeal to them (and specifically mark those characters as less important, by a firan style tier system), or you tacitly admit that no, you aren't going to make those characters and they are correct, you do value them less as players. Basically in the same way Firan implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) said IVs were worse a lot of players would take you not bothering to make them characters as much the same deal.

In my experience those players aren't necessarily more easy going or less prone to complain or less dramatic. They are just as demanding, but have entirely different metrics for characters.

@bored said:

Serious question. If you were the one running Firan in an imaginary scenario where you somehow had the game and were in complete control, how would you have handled their roster system with its playerbase at peak?

The full answer to this is beyond the scope of this thread I think.

Relevant to this argument, not designed it with 3 tiers including characters that were purpose-built to be shitty nobodies who could accomplish nothing?

I get what you are saying there, but I think it's important to note how wildly different the goals of players could be. You're looking at it clearly from a comparison of characters power in how much stats they had compared to like their social influence. A significant portion of the player base couldn't have cared less about either of those and looked at characters from an roleplayer's perspective of whether the character personality and background interested them. So you get into a case where you say, 'Well if players want to make characters that are intrinsically worse, let them CG them themselves and handicap them' but then players complain about story aspects or slice-of-life characters being overlooked, and I'm not totally sure how to balance those demands from groups that want much different things out of CG. Firan's was very flawed imo, but can't overlook how popular some characters are that would have been seen as useless by others. Put another way, look at how popular mortals are in WoD games, and eliminating the IIIs would have been a blanket 'no mortals' rule.

If you talk about the whole casting bias thing, I remember on Firan some of the app approvals for characters were judgments on the personality of a player and how well they thought they could play the role from a story perspective, which is a way, way different set of standards than like, 'Is this person a fair choice for something powerful'. People making 'casting' decisions in something based on artistic merit where they'd be happy in a totally statless system vs something more like a wargame have really different metrics.

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Serious question. If you were the one running Firan in an imaginary scenario where you somehow had the game and were in complete control, how would you have handled their roster system with its playerbase at peak?

@mietze said:

I don't think this as an automation-solved issue (except for maybe the XP), so much as a documentation and staff /team/ diligence issue. What works for a smallish place, which tends to be a LOT more forgiving in that regard, does not translate once it goes large. IMO.

Thanks, that does help a good bit.

@Alzie

So hypothetical question. In a perfect world where you had infinite time to code anything you wanted for that game, was there any systems you would have had that would have made things significantly easier for staff?

@mietze said:

I agree it's not sustainable on a larger game, and I also agree with Gany that having the huge influx of people suddenly hurried along its demise.

That brings up a question I had that's been eating at me for a while and I hope you guys that played RfK can help me out with. I've been building a game with a really heavy emphasis on political systems to reduce the amount of GMing necessary to resolve things, and friends that have played RfK have told me about similarities they noticed, but none were staff and really saw the amount of work that was generated.

So my question is what kind of work did the players create for stuff that was overwhelming, what made the larger player base unsustainable, what type of jobs did you get flooded with that more automation could have potentially helped with?

I registered to reply to this thread after I noticed it because of how close it is to my experiences. About six months ago, I decided to start creating a new MUSH with my room mate. I've been MU*ing for a few years with a decent amount of soft code experience but no experience at all with Python while he had very little MU experience but a pretty heavy computer science background. We had a pretty big argument since he was horrified at softcode and didn't want to learn it, while I was extremely reluctant to try something I had no familiarity with at all, but we went with Evennia.

I'm SO glad we did. While definitely a few features would have been faster to add as we stumbled, there's a good amount of features we're adding that would have been flat out impossible with softcode. Particularly on the web framework side. One nice thing is that since django is bundled into it, you can do a lot of stuff for web support rather than just use an external wikia. We're still working on this ourselves, but there's a lot of potential there to have a far more rich web experience than just wiki character sheets. When you think of how critical wikis are to most games, there's a large potential for eliminating tedious tasks players often complain about, like cleaning logs or updating things about their characters sheets that would be reflected on the web. Ultimately the game might wind up being closer to a web browser game than a true MU, but with how niche MU gaming is I think if anything Evennia will lower the bar to entry rather than raise it.