@ominous said in Happy Mother's Day MU Mommies!:
@arkandel The way society makes children such a burden in modern society, I expect us to go the route of Japan and experience a massive population downturn.
I think that depends on where one lives, but either way... celebrating motherhood is still an awesome thing to do. 
@ganymede said in Encouraging Proactive Players:
@kanye-qwest said in Encouraging Proactive Players:
I definitely don't agree. If you want to 'vent', whine, and complain, do it to your friends.
To be fair, there may be a handful of people out there who do not have any friends, like Arkandel.
What I lack in friends I make up in uh, er, other stuff.
<cries into his work mug>
@tempest said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):
The reaction to the "pre-app process" here seems odd, when meanwhile over in the Gotham game thread literally every interesting female FC in the setting has already been claimed. Like a month+ before the game opens (for the record, that actually kind of bugged me). And that didn't draw a reaction at all.
Are people just more interested in mutants?
Don't forget though there are a lot more mutants than there are Gotham feature characters canonically.
@deadempire said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
... Did you not just hear a human voice coming from in here?
Maybe it was Google Assistant!
I dislike non-scaling costs because they don't follow the real life paradigm.
It's easy enough in real life to learn some basic first aid (Medicine 1). It's not too hard to become a little more capable at it by learning CPR or how to clean and dress a wound (Medicine 2). However learning how to perform surgery takes way longer ((Medicine 3), and becoming a renown or world-class doctor (Medicine 4-5) is hard as fuck.
That's not reflected in spending the same amount of XP per dot.
@bobotron Not to derail your thread but the problem I've seen has to do with staff politics and diluting the vision.
If you have ten people staffing someone will not be getting along with someone else as well as you'd hope, and you'll need to mediate; that's more work generated from something you hoped would take work away from you.
And in a game like yours where there's no pre-written material the hard part to find the creative balance where you still end up running what's locked in your head right now but also allow creative input to add finishing touches that enrich it. If you have ten voices in your ear it's easy to end up running TR before you realize it, with people rolling werewolf PCs and PrPs of UFOs landing in your town square at noon.
@bobotron We're going to a drive-in soon with friends and we had to pick between Deadpool 2 and Solo. It's not even a real choice.
Damn, it's the first Star Wars movie coming out in the theatres in my lifetime that I won't go see. The trailer just looked... meh. I mean, sure, I'll eventually watch it at home, but...
@tinuviel said in Charging for MU* Code?:
The only thing I'd worry about with charging for MU* code is the problem of scope creep. If people are paying money, they're going to start thinking they're in charge of what you do.
Well, to be fair, with good reason. That's what hiring someone for money means.
The issue is imposing reasonable limits to where that work begins and where it ends.
@bobotron said in [Original Supernatural/Vampire MUSH] Houses of the Blood MUSH:
And you're so right; I haven't put down to paper everything that's in my head, and there are things that, when I put them down I'm like 'Ugh, why did I write that?' But I'm hoping to have a good layout.
Yep, writing it down also helps you remember what the vision was a few weeks/months down the line. Basically we all have our own ideas of what a game should be like, and especially on MSB even in the most well meaning of ways we'll bombard the fuck out of you telling you what we would want to see; give us enough time and we'll dilute your ideas . Having them all in a document helps you keep things a bit more pure.
I remember arguing with @Coin when Eldritch launched about everything having to be his way or the highway because I was - and still am, naturally - sure what I was suggesting was better. But here's a funny thing - even if it was he was still right (and it hurts me to type it) because that's what makes a game stand out more than anything else; a creator excited to be doing their own thing.
Too many games, IMHO, are missing that spark and just settle for the generic brand name instead.
@lemon-fox Youtube is streaming! Sure, valid choice.
If you're in the States also being a Google Play subscriber removes the ads from Youtube.
@lithium said in Creative Outlets:
@arkandel said in Creative Outlets:
@lithium said in Creative Outlets:
@arkandel You're making my point for me. You can RP the small things without forcing people to read the same thing over and over and over.
Well, I never advocated spamming.
Yes you did, if you don't even have a description, and you are trying to point something out to multiple people about mood, or habits, or the situation, and you have to include your clothes /every single time/ you are, advocating, spamming.
Hey, you're putting words into my mouth now. Well, into my fingertips.
I never said you had to keep including your clothes every time you pose, or whenever someone new joins the scene. I never said anything about not having a description - all my characters do because... why wouldn't they?
Spamming is pointless repetition. If I tell you my character is wearing a black hat with a feather in it three times in the same scene then yes, that's spam since it doesn't add anything usable that wasn't there before. If I do so in the entry pose - especially if I promptly use it in a future pose to indicate my character treasures it - then it's not pointless.
Maybe you (specifically, as an individual) don't like to read about clothing, or moods, or you prefer a certain style of RP over others... that's perfectly fine. But it sounds like you're dismissing other perfectly legitimate ways to play some players enjoy - although I could be wrong about that.
@tempest I am ignoring you, because I don't care. If you think it looks dumb, well, it's the Hog Pit and you can say it.
Away for the weekend, and I'm watching daytime TV which I almost never do.
At first I was only mildly facepalming about the royal wedding's coverage but... whatever. Sure, let's hear about the cake and who did the brows.
But then they turned things up several notches when I got hit with the goddamn trailer for their goddamn straight-to-TV-movie with actors and everything playing Meghan and Harry to tell the story of their incredible storybook romance.
... Sorry, this is a 'good TV' thread but I can't even plz send help.
I just remembered another thing I figured out helps me a lot, and it came from an unexpected direction at the time... spend justifications.
So on Haunted Memories and then partially on The Reach you had to justify (some of) your +xp spends. It was of course typical red tape bullshit passed down from one generation of staff to the next without really thinking it through, but as I was going through the paces I found out both that I liked it, but also that it helped me; there are stuff - usually solitary activities - my characters were up to I never thought about since they never saw the light of day. Stuff that was just a bit too boring or irrelevant in an interactive fashion came out as did details about their downtime and passive interests... and that made them more real in my head.
Actually later on when I played on a Kushiel MUSH and on Arx I found journals worked mostly for the same reason. I didn't use them to summarize stuff I already knew as much as to try and come up with stuff my characters knew and I didn't... which was always more than I had figured, once I started typing them out.
Dunno. Maybe I just like writing about RP.
@FiranSurvivor AFAIK non-full Supernatural templates aren't capped in any way. You could always even make a Wolfblooded character (for example) and have an in-game First Change when the sphere has room.
@hedgehog Both Spotify and Google Play let you save songs locally for future playback (and, for example, to only download songs on wifi to preserve data).
What @faraday says it's true. I'm in the field and I have friends who've freelanced on projects before, and figuring out the difficulty and timeline of non-trivial projects is an incredibly complicated task on its own.
Trivial doesn't need to mean 'simple' although it usually does, it can be something we've done before in a very similar fashion. For example setting up an existing CMS platform with a custom template and some configuration tweaks is trivial enough that someone who's done it before can do so again and fall within the ballpark of an initial estimate.
The fun part? Even then it's tricky. The customer might come back days or even weeks later with additions or things they just noticed weren't working right, a necessary security update could break critical parts of a site, etc. Non-technical employers (the vast majority of them especially for 'trivial' things since if they were technically inclined they'd have probably done them themselves) don't understand the issue but they do understand they paid for something that, in their eyes, isn't working right.
Work for hire has its rewards, and sometimes they make it all worth it, but care needs to be taken. As for the legal repercussions, add to them the nature of the job - you work for people in various geographical areas where different laws can be applied, and it doesn't get any simpler.
@aphrodite To get this out of the way, how are you deciding who's going to play the 'big guns' of the DC Universe?
Or to slightly rephrase this, what's the chance those roster spots will be taken by the time/before the game opens?
@auspice Isn't the guy like 21 by now? At this rate it'll be called Kung Fu Young Adult.
@ganymede It's a legitimate way to do it. In programming terms if the contractor is asked to provide a fixed estimate then they should fudge the number to comfortably err on the side of caution, and if an itemized list is involved then that can complicates things - such lists are often nitpicked to death.
But yeah, an hourly wage works best if feature creep is a reasonable expectation, which for MU* projects it definitely would be. Maybe have a pre-agreed threshold amount (in $$ or hours, whichever) past which the coder reaches out since few people will want to shell out unexpectedly big amounts for a free game.
As a side note, it'd be interested to see if such an idea would catch on, and how it'd affect other technical 'jobs' required to run a MUSH. If the coder is paid $200 to set it up for their 10 hours of work how does the wiki designer feel about putting their own 10 hours in for free?