Posts made by Arkandel

Some of us use VPNs and proxies. If so this link might interest you, since instead of paying a low price (typically $5-$10 per year) recurringly there are deals to pay a lump sum under $50 for a lifetime subscription.

Are you guys having issues on mobile or desktop versions (and do they persist on both, if you've tried)?

These might be template related... I suppose we can upgrade nodebb again. Meh.

The kind of restart that interests me is when a game is launched around an idea that should have worked but failed due to reasons unrelated to its own merit.

So for example if you start a Wheel of Time what-if MU* but something happened to make it failure-to-launch - maybe RL hit staff hard right at the start, or your coder disappeared early on, or it was during the summer when things were quiet and not enough people noticed it... whatever it was, it could be fun to see it come back to life in order to attempt to fulfill its promise.

If it's nostalgia it interests me less because chances are big it'll try to imitate something oldbies are into for its own sake, which tends to be an I guess you had to be there proposition. It could still work but... eh.

Now if it's a straight up clone of a game including the playerbase, catering to oldbies who're in position with their full old sheets while newbies are by necessity their sidekicks that's basically of no interest to me.

... What's with all the GIFs?

@thenomain Can you define 'restart' in this context? Are we talking bringing back an old game from no longer running? Same or different staff or theme... or is any of this negotiable?

At some point, given enough changes, 'restarting' could mean a new game with an old name, for example.

SAGA is a game within a game. It's so vast, with so many books - nearly all of which seem to be out of print - and the information for builds and traits is scattered all over them.

It was pretty discouraging when I dipped my toe in an otherwise pretty good Star Wars MUSH in the past.

@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

"Hey I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm... it's going to ICly require you to spend the prior 8 hours getting there, so don't RP anything that happens during the IC hours of 12-8pm."

I guess the alternative to that is what I've been doing my whole MU* career. Basically timewarp the downtime into its own pocket instead of letting it bottleneck anything else.

If IC my PC is supposed to be on the road for a day and there'll be a PrP about it tomorrow at 8 then I just continue to RP on the grid until then if an opportunity comes, and simply place all those scenes in the timeline before the trip takes place.

I dunno, maybe I've never ran into someone who tried to enforce it on me? Or if someone did I mentally chuckled and just didn't pay attention to them.

@ganymede said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

As far as I'm concerned, the travel time is the time for social RP. So, if I can't RP while I'm in transition, that's a strike against the game.

If it's done right it could also be a good hook for side-quests or extra thematic stuff PCs don't need to be proactive about.

I do like that option since it's a little less on the nose (sometimes my NPCs feel like they well have a yellow exclamation mark over their heads) and there's a small chance the players won't see it coming.

But even then I guess I wouldn't even call it an 'enforced travel time'. There's basically zero difference between "hey, I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm" and "hey, since you guys will be on the road let's have a scene about the trip tomorrow at 8pm".

@lotherio said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

@firepuff said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall.

The key here is freedom of choice. You should be able to roleplay being en route, but when it's enforced by any outside force then there is no way for it to fit any narrative of absolutely essential gameplay elements such as timezone compatibility, story narrative.

If I, as staff, force you to stay out of general scenes for 3 RL days 'so you can RP going from Waterdeep to wherever' then I better be on the ball about providing you with stuff to do during those days.

If I don't then I'm bad and I should feel bad.

@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

But OOC inconvenience is definitely a thing. @RnMissionRun brought up folks who wouldn't tolerate a 40 minute travel time. I would assuredly be in that group myself. I have a limited amount of time to play, and I'm simply not going to burn 40 minutes of it twiddling my thumbs waiting to play.

Any OOC delay is absurd, IMHO. Either you are IC able to be present for an event, in which case you should just take your PC to the room it's taking place in and that's it, or you are not. It's one of the issues I'll both agree with you on and bring up a point you've raised an objection to in the past in my WoW-to-MUSH analogy, as Blizzard made the deliberate decision to not have their world shrink down by making travel instantaneous; sure, you could get from A to B conveniently, but you still had to sit on a mount and wait while you flew through all the lands in between.

We can do the same thing on a MUSH but we don't need to use the same mechanism (delays). There are better ways to do so @Coin raised a good point by presenting resources, including time, which you can invest - any 'interesting decisions' offered to players are great, as far as I'm concerned.

Similarly I don't have high demands before something is handwaved. If an +event is supposed to be, say, a day's horse ride away from a character then dammit, be there. But if it'd have taken a month... that's different. And it's an essential difference, too; a borderland can't be lawless if every PC with a zip code in the well policed capital goes back and forth constantly unless there's a damn good IC explanation for why they get to do it, but the police/army can't do the same thing.

How come PCs get to fight White Walkers with Jon Snow then show up for dinner at King's Landing but the Watch is always undermanned? As much as I'd love to have my cake and eat it, at some point theme begins to break down because everything feels like it's next door to everything else.

@apos said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

In my experience, I think the hardcore purists who really want a very narrow scope of something are the minority. Most people even if they have an appeal of 'Oh I like more realism for my immersion' or 'I like more handwaving so it doesn't get in the way of RP' are okay as long as there's a general nod in their direction and are willing to compromise a little, so compromise systems I think do pretty well.

I don't know. I mean it's a game and I'm typically very accommodating when it comes to handwaving all kinds of stuff... but sometimes geography is part of the setting, too.

Take a Game of Thrones MUSH. The fact the Wall is out there on the edge of the map is just a major thematic element; characters bouncing between it and King's Landing on the regular wouldn't just break immersion for me, it would have a ripple effect. One occasional report via raven about some kinda weird-ass zombies could be construed as a ploy trying to get more troops or a Stark thing or whatever, but how long can you plausibly deal with people who've taken the Black walking around telling you their personal horror stories from the day before without everyone's characters going 'okay, uh, maybe there's a grain of truth here?'.

In other words geographical separation - or even isolation - in fantasy settings is often too big a factor to just discard... at least for me, others' mileage may vary. Without that regional fragmentation it's arguable events would (should) simply play out differently.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, dunno.

@nemesis said in Zero to Mux (with wiki):

But learning your way around Linux is really the hardest part.

Even though you are right, I don't see a real way out of having someone involved in running a MUSH to know more than the basics in all of Linux, some system administration and at least a little bit of coding.

You can follow a guide only for that long until something changes enough to break... something, or the guide itself isn't explicit enough for that one part, or you start out with anything different without even realizing (the FAQ is assuming Ubuntu but you're on CentOS and apt-get won't work), etc.

These threads absolutely help though.

@zombiegenesis said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

I don't wanna be rude but could we please take the copyright questions to another thread?

Guys, please respect the OP's request. Make a different thread for the copyright stuff.

Thank you.

@sockmonkey said in RL Anger:

At that point, he came over to my desk and talked to me in person. Which was better. He apologized for being rude and I told him that what he did made me really upset, that he shouldn't do it again and that he should be more aware of how he treats his coworkers. Him coming over did make me feel better but we will see if it was sincere or if this behavior happens again. he did thank me for bringing up my feelings and I was glad that I did it since my tendency is to keep things bottled up. But god dammit, did that day suck.

I'm sorry this happened. I think in certain work cultures - sometimes ones contained within a single team - is people get used to how they relate to each other in them, and carry the same attitude over to the rest of their professional interactions.

This is more prevalent among IT (or maybe that's my experience with it). People rarely say 'please' and even fewer say 'thank you' at the end of requests; they just need stuff done, and they treat others as simply the means to get those things done. In most cases it's not even done intentionally, they just don't think about it any more.

For example it would be easy to mistake some of the people at my job as abrupt or even rude. They are not, I've found, but they're so used to treating each other abruptly - say, interrupting one another, not listening at all, communicating poorly, etc - that they can easily come off as jerks. Yet if you get to know them they are not, and in fact they'll bend over backwards to help if you ask for it.

Maybe it's exposure to gaming culture but... being thick skinned helps, I guess. I'm not saying it's a solution, or that times it can't get to me, but there's something about being screamed in all caps at by angry rogues who think they deserved more healing when they stood in the fire that makes me less impressed by a grown-ass neckbeard being abrupt with me on a Monday morning.

@zombiegenesis said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

1. Custom houses. I think this would be one of the biggest draws to a game, getting a few people together and creating your own house. The RPG has fantastic rules for this. Would people actually use such a system?

I think only having custom Houses would be counterproductive. People coming to a GoT game probably want to play a Stark or a Lannister - the characters may be different (and it's probably a good idea) but the rest of the setup is what makes Westeros tick. It's what makes Game of Thrones different than a generic L&L game, IMHO.

If you wanted to add some as well to the mix, well, I don't think anyone will mind.

2. Setting. The game needs to be political, sure, but it could be Big Political or Little Political. By Big Political I mean setting it in some place like King's Landing and allowing all types of characters from all over Westeros and beyond. By Little Political I mean setting it in one specific location (Casterly Rock, say) and focus on the politics of that region. This would obviously have an impact on what custom houses were available.

I absolutely, 100% urge you to base it on a central location. You do not want your playerbase split up between a bunch of places it takes days/weeks to travel between; barring PrPs your players should never have to see a scene taking place somewhere on your grid and be unable to join because their characters are in King's Landing while it's taking place at the Wall.

Does that mean you might lose out on some opportunities for cool settings (outside of plots)? It absolutely does.

3. Ready-made characters. Would having a +roster filled with characters that players could just do a small app for be worth investing time in? It seems to work on other places but I don't play on those places so I'm unsure.

Rosters seem to have worked well in other games, I don't see why they wouldn't here.

4. Sticking to canon. This is something I don't really care much about. I figure we start the game and not worry about if what we do would prevent the game from eventually leading into the books or whatever. Do what we want and have fun telling our story, not worry about the story that GRR Martin will eventually tell. Would this be a deal breaker for fans of the theme?

I don't think it's a deal breaker as long as you document it well and simply. Westeros has had several upheavals, but as long as you offer fan favorite options their current circumstances shouldn't be too relevant; placing it a couple of hundred years in the past compared to the books/show is probably a good idea though.

I was just curious what, if anything, people might be looking for that may be missing from current games in the L&L/GoT niche. Thanks.

The trick here is doing something better than other games. If you rely on GoT to be that difference it won't be a great game, IMHO; if you use the setting to enhance and draw players - you'll need more than a few to make a political environment work - then it could be great.

What this absolutely depends on is your answer to this question - how ambitious are you with this project?

@apos said in Favorite Minigames:

I don't think it's too off topic if we redirect it very slightly. How about from a perspective of someone that really dislikes minigames and sees them undermining the narrative focus of storytelling on MUs, what would be games that aren't a big deal and aren't disruptive even if they aren't something someone is into? In other words, what would be ones that are tolerable for people that dislike them, and what are ones that would send them running to the door?

I wanted to make a quick disclaimer here - sometimes all kinds of systems - and definitely ones not designed as minigames - can influence or even disrupt RP to an extraordinary degree just because their designer didn't think of everything in advance (which ties into @faraday's clause about us all being amateur designers). Carrots in general absolutely work that way.

For example Haunted Memories implemented a +vote system with diminishing returns at some point to provide a source of XP. This almost immediately made large scenes the best way in the game to farm XP - and as anyone could guess, it turned nearly every scene overnight into a gargantuan 12+ player affair, many of whom were completely silent but present to benefit from +vote/here. This absolutely influenced the kind of RP people did, and those who couldn't handle those were left behind.

There's always risk when we introduce new things. They could work as intended or they might lead into unforeseen directions, but you don't know what you'll get beforehand... whether you're a amateur or a professional. Diablo 3 launched with a real money auction house thinking it'd be amazing for players to generate an income through play (from which they'd get a cut) and it was an epic disaster that almost sank the whole franchise before they got rid of it. It happens!

Ultimately we pick the games that reflect what we want from them. And I want my damn carrots.

@lotherio said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

Just want to further this, most likely not in a direction @Arkandel intended.

I mean I didn't want to make an one-size-fits-all attribution of blame so I picked the most generic model (one person gets jealous about their IC S.O.'s actions and disrupts them). But yes, there can be all kinds of scenarios and some are much more reasonable than others.

For instance if I played a half of a relationship which depended on the other party to make sense - a ghoul to a Vampire, a tight political alliance requiring both people to work as intended, etc - and my partner wasn't around 'enough' it'd be reasonable to have a conversation; maybe RL has been the issue, or they aren't enjoying the RP, or they are enjoying their alt more.

Whatever it is you can have a conversation, there's nothing wrong with that. But sending code puppets to knock on bedroom doors, fuck off with that.

@lithium said in Favorite Minigames:

I think part of the problem is considering them mini games.

If they are part of the system as a whole, and a part of the focus of the game, then they are not mini-games, they are /part of the game/.

Yeah, agreed.

For example my long-standing gripe about resource management in games is derived, at least in part, from the fact if MU* have implemented it at all it's been in a sloppy layer on top as an afterthought without tying it into any other existing systems or stats in a way that promotes them or generates interesting choices for players to make.

Such systems can not simply coexist with storytelling and roleplaying, they can enhance and even drive these things - if done right. But we judge them by those sloppy implementations ("Vampires can type +hunt 3=I ate a homeless person!") and project their overall uselessness. Well, yeah, +hunt if done that way is worse than useless, but that doesn't need the case.

@faraday said in Favorite Minigames:

I don't think most MUs can handle that dilution of focus.

I'm concerned about getting out of topic here (the OP can decide that) but it's a good topic.

I don't think the focus is diluted, that's all. If WoW is too different then surely D&D isn't, and it's been incorporating both story and loot for thirty some years; sure, different campaigns (which I can argue is a similar concept to 'different MUSHes') can definitely focus on one over the other, but the default case is to have both.

@faraday said in Favorite Minigames:

But this attitude is why I'm kind of burnt out on running games. I view MUSHing as a collective storytelling game. You're there to tell stories.

There's nothing wrong with adding gameplay. WoW isn't made poorer because there's raiding and a separate pet 'minigame', and transmogs for people to pick up cosmetic items through the raids, and a professions system... all of which tie into raiding in different ways (which could be argued is the game's main focus) and which can motivate people to participate in it.

Furthermore there's nothing wrong with letting people have extra gameplay that (generic) you don't care about. On Arx I noticed folks were going through a lot of trouble to pick up and customize some kinda special courier messengers that made me scratch my head, but it entertained them.

Our hobby has its roots in RPGs and no one here needs to be told both stories and loot hunting are part of that. If anything I'd say what I enjoy is part of our tradition than not; the two are not at odds, mutually exclusive or antagonistic with each other so why not?