Best posts made by Arkandel

@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

They are not being used. Most players don't roll in social encounters unless there's some kind of pivotal moment, usually around conflict. That's pretty rare. They do get used in PrPs when prompted by a GM but of course that, too, is biased toward those with access to such scenes.

Totally agree, but I don't see that as a problem. My games always contain this guidance:

Well it is a problem if the game runners assume their players are +rolling on a regular basis, and distribute XP based on that assumption.

Similarly when it comes to incentivizing failure, a lot of the scenarios leading to it cannot be summed down to a single roll of the dice. If the Council votes against your IC interests (which they do based on individual scenes leading up to it, the voters' private IC motivations, political maneuvering etc) what is the roll going to be?

@kay said in Darkwater: The Return:

@burgerslave Mr. Harris! Some of us are eyeing this place to have our characters travel to http://www.musoapbox.net/topic/2283/san-francisco-paris-of-the-west - if we don't hit up the upcoming Miami game. Perhaps an idea?

That's so cool. For some reason I always loved characters moving between games, despite the impracticalities involved.

@krmbm Something is wonky. I am looking into it.

BeipMU

Spawn windows and correct-as-you-type spell checking. That's where it's at.

@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I think an even more arching issue is whether failure is really a goal to strive for in the first place. What is the problem that we're trying to solve here?

The way I see it the problem we are really trying to solve here is that, unlike table-top or video games, on a MU* there islimited access to desired venues, achievements or outcomes.

Some examples:

• In table-top you are never out of the group. But in a MU* access to structured plots varies.
• In a video game your character is special by default - in Skyrim you are the Dragonborn. On a MU* you're not special by default (or rather 'everyone is special').
• In table-top and video games you get to participate in all meaningful encounters. You want to face Arthas, the Lich King? You got it, baby! On a MU* you may never be in the same room as the Big Bad.
• In table-top access to your friends isn't compromised by failure. Even if your character dies in a campaign the DM will let you roll another and find a way to incorporate them fully into the group and current narrative. On a MU* that might not be possible at all. Even your name loss might have a social impact after a reroll.
• In table-top there is more social transparency. You are (presumably) playing with friends, people you know. The GM (probably) likes you enough to invite you to their campaign. The party likes your company. On a MU* especially for someone more socially awkward that can appear to be otherwise, while true or not, so when you 'lose' it can seem... personal.

And so on.

@shincashay said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

@arkandel I've never played Mage before. I've tried so often and it never 'clicked' for me. mortal+ I get. I need MtA for dummies.

I'm now really excited to give mage another try.

What I always liked about Mage is that although Awakening could be traumatic it didn't need to be.

Every other splat is full of trauma and angst by necessity. You are a bloodthirsty monster or a raging death machine or a dead man walking with voices in your head... but Mages can be happy. Like, naturally. They can afford to worry about their grades. And they get to reshape reality but how does that get them a date?

I think this might be under control now. I'll continue to monitor it, but the symptom seems to have been a rogue nodebb process was fired up which led to EADDRINUSE errors as the service kept dying then firing itself up again.

I still need to look into what caused this mess. Meh, redis.

@skew I spawn windows, set them so they don't flash but I still have the option of going over later. And if for any reason I decide to chat while doing other things - such as during a scene - I can do so without contaminating its backscroll with channel spam.

@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

The way I see it the problem we are really trying to solve here is that, unlike table-top or video games, on a MU* there is limited access to desired venues, achievements or outcomes.

There can be, sure, but there doesn't need to be. Even if your game has that setup, I would argue that the way you'd solve a problem like "when you die your OOC name changes and you lose social connections" is very different to how you might solve "access to structured plots varied".

I agree, but if this problem had a straight-forward solution - or even if there was a single approach that 'solves' it, no matter how complex it was to implement - I suspect it'd have been a non-issue already.

Getting players to accept or even welcome negative IC outcomes as part of the narrative is difficult.

Again just from reading this thread if I would insist on one approach to not take, though, is to not accept 'hopes and prayers' as a valid strategy. Any of the following for example:

• Staff should be trustworthy/competent
• Players should be mature/communicative

are not really helpful. Of course that's what we want, but there's no real way to design a game around it.

However swiss cheese model approaches can absolutely apply. For example while still building a game ask some questions:

• Which in-game rewards (positions, XP, etc) will the game offer? How are they going to be distributed and why?
• How do we engage players in structured plot (PrPs, staff-ran scenes)?
• How do we match reward to risk?
• How do we handle character death?

And so on.

@autumn said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:

@arkandel @Ganymede @Cobaltasaurus So, single-Order? Multi-Order?

From a gameplay perspective I'd say multi-Order just for flexibility.

From an IC point of view... millennial do like their echo chambers.

I think I finally fixed our recent technical woes here. The logs so far have been completely silent for the last 3-4 hours, so that's a good sign.

We also upgraded our hardware specs since at peak times we had a couple of instances the server wasn't keeping up.

Please let me know if you experience any more of those 'pink letter' boxes telling you your connection to MSB is lost.

@Catsmeow said in Dealing with Staff:

However, I would like to remind people that sometimes staffers are DICKS. We've run into them. We know they exist. So maybe this person is dealing with one of those.

People can be dicks, and staff are people, so that's a truism.

Is there a possibility this person is dealing with a dick? Of course. Can the situation be salvaged? It depends on what a satisfactory condition is that works for them; if it's to 'win' - i.e. get their way - it's quite possible the answer is 'no'. Their best bet, that someone else further up the chain of command would give in seems to not have worked.

So what remains is either coming up with a different condition for the outcome to be satisfactory (for example avoiding that staffer, giving up on this particular issue, keeping a low profile, etc) or to keep being pissed off with a game that's supposed to be fun.

But this?

So what do you do? You log any and all conversation. You deal in jobs and @mail. You tell them that you aren't really comfortable dealing with them without time to process what is being said and time to process your response.

This sounds extremely unpleasant to me. In fact if I wanted to come up with a way to make MU*ing unfun 24/7 that'd be it - having to log every conversation, making a point of stating terse comments expressing my dissatisfaction, prolonging an interpersonal grudge.

@faraday said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

I'm a fan of cooperative games, but cooperation != consent. I think it's fine to encourage players to work out a mutually agreeable solution, but there has to be some kind of fallback for the cases where they don't agree.

I think this is an unfortunate side-effect of accounting for assholes.

Consent is basically cooperation with asshole-insurance built in.

Which of course has side-effects of his own.

@ixokai can we please move the 1E versus 2E discussion elsewhere as @Auspice requested? Feel free to start a new thread if needed.

<scratches head> Well, I just read some Linode emergency e-mails about the physical drive the VM MSB is running on is hosted on failing, so they had to migrate and restart the machine last night.

I guess systemd took care of everything since obviously we're here, and I'm happy to not have had to do anything about this.

Apologies if any of you tried to access the forum around 05:00-07:00 EST since you wouldn't have had much luck, apparently.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

They RP in Discord. On Tumblr. On forums. In Google Docs. And if I want to RP with them, I need to go there. It's eye-opening how many people are RP'ing that way; the number of people doing Tumblr RP probably dwarfs the userbase of this board. The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

Speaking for myself and my own experiences which will obviously vary, I don't care about the amount of RP that's taking place or the number of people participating in it when the quality is as low (or at least dramatically inconsistent) as I have seen.

I've tried roleplaying on WoW and it was disheartening. The tools simply aren't there (255-character limits, reduced ability to backscroll, text being hard to read while stuff's happening in the background, etc) but also the people themselves... well, I wasn't impressed.

Similarly experiments with Google Docs didn't pan out very well. I remember when ES put something up a long time ago - maybe offline/turn-based play isn't for me, but I just found I wasn't looking forward to participating, and without the familiar momentum of RP carrying scenes forward I didn't care enough to try.

For me RP needs to be real time. Again, it doesn't mean this is the only 'valid' way to do it, but that's what would work for me.

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

One of the most, paranoid things that I worried about openning my own place is the sheer amount of drama that floats around the community. I think since our community tends to be great story tellers we are also capable of being dramatic... it's the double edged sword. People take things wrong, or too serious, or various other things. Instead of just playing a game. Maybe because it is all text based we miss on those subtilty that are expressed in tone of voice.

You can fix systems, mechanics, rules, policies and processes.

You can't fix people.

The problem isn't in the medium itself. Sure, anonymity and the lack of personal accountability doesn't help.

@taika said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

From what I saw, it wasn't just the new game, but it was kind of a snowball effect. They cut ST xp, then overall xp, and announced the new game all within a couple of weeks. Seems silly to take away incentive to Do Things then tell players if they're going to Do Things, it's not going to matter in a little bit. Then be confused or upset when people Stop Doing Things.

This should be a lesson about the order of operations, I think.

What I found worked pretty well back in the day is when a MUD we were running was planning its next major version (well, it felt 'major' back then ). We knew there'd be a time in between while stuff was still under development, but there was no way to keep the cat in the bag for that period either.

Basically what we did instead was diverge the timeline immediately using the old code, and created a massive game-wide 'what if?' world. Players got to redo their same characters but in this alternate 'present time' based on that what-if - and it created a surge of activity instead since retired PCs were even brought back since their players were curious how it'd work out.

Then, since this had a finite duration which we announced ahead of time, once the code was ready we rebooted the game without the what-if but (if I remember correctly) allowed people to choose which version of their characters to bring back.

It was fun. Fun usually works.

Moonman was banned, and yes he was probably Lain but not conclusively. Either way he went too far (as they do).

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it. It's significantly easier to set up a sandbox and get going there than anywhere else, along with a great many people familiar with it that are willing to pitch in.

It's part of the appeal. Maybe half of it. I think the other half though is definitely that the existing playerbase is easier to set up for it; there are a lot of people who already know the rules, the setting, are familiar with concepts and themes, so staff only needs to do the same thing everyone is used to (including themselves) to get going, instead of having to explain how everything works.

This is reflected in some wikis which are basically minor rewrites of old wikis, down to CGen syntax and policy documents.