Posts made by Arkandel

@Gingerlily HM. It was surprising because my character - Theodore, a Crone Storm Crow - wasn't political by nature and because the sphere itself was basically unmanned; we had a constantly rotating staff roster who joined and immediately went inactive or did very little while they were there. Rudderless like that, the sphere still flourished.

What made it work was the presence of several really, really good roleplayers spread across the Covenants. Laibah (played by @EmmahSue) joined the Carthians and turned them from a distracted irrelevance into a dominant force, Moritz played an excellent polarizing bad guy Bishop/Prince, Magnus was great in the Invictus, etc. We had a lot of very talented people who went on afterwards to make games of their own all pouring time into the volatile political environment, all player-driven and unplanned.

The main reason I still look back and appreciate it all this time later is that it proves - at least in my mind - that although systems and administrative support matter, it is doable for fluid politics to evolve if there's a strong drive of involved players behind it.

It also shows the importance of both having great people in a game, as sometimes a single really good proactive roleplayer was enough to incentivize and attract others to join their sphere of influence.

The previews for Iron Fist aren't so great.

I haven't GMed iRL for some time but when I did my problem wasn't cancellations, it was either enough people just not showing up without saying anything, or coming an hour late.

Cracked.com is touch and go, but some of their work such as Superman being a complete dick has been really funny.

And then the murders began.

@ZombieGenesis said in DC Rebirth:

We do have the occasional guest or player log on, issue a single command (I'm assuming it's WHO), and then log off. I'm guessing when they don't see 30 or 40 people on they assume we're "dead as fuck" and decide to leave.

Yeah, that catch-22 can be nasty.

If you want to break out of it you could try word of mouth... for example set up a big event, make sure your GMs are present, offer an incentive for new rolls over a weekend then try to get players to give you a try in order to hit critical mass.

@Lithium said in Web-based MU poll:

I remember at one point there was some code floating around on how to make a telnet window inside a webpage but I never managed to get it to work. Wonder if that code is laying around somewhere and one of our psycho-coders might be able to get it working. Would love to throw it up so I could MU* from work again.

That's not too hard to do, but it's also not very useful in this thread's context since we'd be doing away with none of telnet's limitations - we'd be replacing a specialized client for a more generic one and...that's about it.

@Gilette said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:

I do laugh at the people who are like "YOU MAY NOT CREATE FANWORKS OR GAMES BASED OFF MY IP" because, when you go diving, you tend to find that they wrote fanfiction in the beginning and, better yet, sometimes still do.

What they can't do is allow it. They just can't. It's sort of a wink-wink thing, but under no circumstances can they just say "sure, make a game out of my property" without it weakening their copyright.

It doesn't mean they'll sue free games based on their stuff, that's basically unheard of. They can't officially condone it but it's as it does help the property to have word of mouth constantly generated by players, and it brings their fanbases together, I've never really heard of an IP owner going after MU*.

@Glitch said in Web-based MU poll:

@Arkandel I think you're entirely underestimating the amount of work it would take to integrate those things in a mostly seamless manner.

Oh I'm not saying it's easy or fast. Just that it's a smaller project than duplicating anywhere near the featureset... for a certain range of mostly seamless.

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Arkandel Not all of them support that sort of integration, though. And as a player, do you really want to go hopping around to all these different websites to do things for the game, or do you want it all to be in one place?

You can hack the ones you don't, or pick them for it. It's not like there's a shortage of options.

For players... it depends. For example I'd rather boards opened in a new tab anyway because it won't be messing up my scene - I can have it running and work on a ticket at the same time without one spamming the other. The reason we traditionally mix every output in one window in MU* is because we literally have no choice due to telnet's limitations.

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

But do you really want to go around and create 6 different accounts and visit 6 different links just to manage your game?

No, that'd be insane! But you can hook your game into them automagically. For example when you create a character in game use the forum's API to create an account under the same name there, do the same for the ticket system, etc... all of that should be transparent for users. Then as long as they are all skinned the same way it'd look very similar. A player would only need log on once, and they'd be able to access all of them.

Sure, the interfaces won't be exactly the same but damn... the difference in time, effort and features between developing your own systems to using an already robust platform is enormous. It also lets you focus on developing the RPG portions.

@faraday I think a good bet for you could be to find the most basic but robust open source platform that does something similar - say, a chat client with a decently expandable architecture - and build on it. It'd probably save you a ton of time, and frankly a barebones interface doesn't require everything to be written from scratch. That might even be a reason to have a web project.

For example you could write your own +jobs code... but why not just skin and hook into an existing simple ticket system? There are a whole lot out there, refined and fully developed.

@TNP I kinda admire superhero MU* players for their flexibility. I've spent so much time on games trying really hard to maintain internal consistency (for example there was a big debate on a fantasy MU* lately asking if concrete has been invented IC or not) that just being able to add a bunch of alien races overnight without the game exploding with questions seems amazing to me. Not to mention people can interact with different versions of the freakin' same person and not just go 'well, you know what, fuck this. I'm gonna go home and watch TV' is downright admirable.

@Monogram said in Web-based MU poll:

I dunno. Yeah, tel-net clients might be ancient in terms of stuff, but it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with them. Or maybe that's just a thought of 'if it's not broke don't fix it' kind of thing.

Until you try to put a word in italics. Or display an image for a room. Or allow context-sensitive menus by clicking on character names to perform actions on them. Or having a UI for personal messages like Hangouts' as opposed to pages taking up half of your screen when you page several people just to display their names.

Or, you know, showing a newbie how to roleplay online. They go from polished interfaces to a black screen and a command line interface for CGen that requires 'a special program' to access the game at all.

There's only nothing wrong because we're used to it.

Already use my browser for enough stuff as it is.

I don't mean to tell you you are wrong, I just don't understand that reasoning. Can you explain?

@faraday You won't get real answers from here, only an indication of existing trends.

Basically if you give the most traditional user a good, easy to use web interface with the tools and conveniences that's impossible to do on telnet then they will almost definitely switch (especially when all their friends do). But if the game itself was hard to use, especially in its early stages when the featureset isn't as complete as MUSH-code that's taken years to develop and refine, even enthusiasts would have doubts.

In other words, it depends a whole lot on the implementation.

@ZombieGenesis said in Marvel: 1963:

To spark interest on DC Rebirth I proposed this change for our game a month or so ago and it was met with very strong resistance by my players. I was actually kind of shocked.

Well, I can see the point of protecting the thematic consistency of a game (even though I will never understand comic book MU* where the same character coexists with other versions of themselves from different eras). Adding Superman to a Marvel Universe game is kinda weird I guess.

@faraday Yes, absolutely.

@toreadorfool Why on earth would people be rude to players for making a choice staff made available?

Ah, humans.

@Coin FIIIINE.

Updaaated.