@Thenomain said:
Were you talking about something more specific?
I think they're saying if you OOC know your character isn't going to die, you need to stretch a bit to have the PC act like they're afraid of death anyway.
I don't see the difference between that though and any number of things I know that my characters don't.
@crayon said:
Let's say you wanted to make Risk into a game. Rather than writing all of the rules into the game as mechanics, you write it so that the game effectively just simulates the Risk board. You can move pieces in ways that defy the actual rules of the game, if you really wanted to, but everybody's there to play Risk so nobody really does that, and if they do they get slapped around for it. You can roll dice and such with the system, but you have to sort out how many dice you should roll and when. This is not an automatic system.
The way I'd put it is the difference between Magic Online and a lot of free multiplayer Magic: the Gathering game clients.
Basically Magic Online is the portion of the game Wizards of the Coast makes (or, well, has a developer make for them) to play uh, online; it contains the actual rules, so you can't play more lands than you're allowed per turn, cards can only be untapped in the right circumstances, etc. The code enforces these things, you can't do anything against the game mechanics.
The free clients only facilitate the game itself. You can draw cards, tap them, send them to the graveyard... basically do whatever you want with them - it enforces nothing, it just lets you do things without knowing or caring what's actually on those cards.
For obvious reasons the first is also way buggier than the latter, but I digress.
I saw this at work today somewhere, hopefully not at MSB. 
@Thenomain I think I like having more than one parallel system of measuring character growth.
For instance in an implementation such as the one described above (or AetherMux, which does seem quite similar) we had 'RP XP', which were awarded automatically as you roleplayed with other people and quality criteria which defined your PC's raw potential based on your quality as a player overall. That meant if you wanted to play someone powerful you had to be active and good at the same time - a fair requirement. Various systems I've seen in nWoD utilize different ways of assuring the same thing although some are better and some are worse for achieving what they set out in the first place (+vote and +recc for quality, time delays for buying up more dots of things, staggered XP awards, catch-up XP to help level the field between old and new PCs, justification requirements to ensure IC viability, etc).
My preferred rule of thumb is allowing your community to guide the approach to such things. A system which is either routinely exploited or routinely ignored is most likely a bad system no matter how good it looks on paper; on HM +vote was bastardized to the point people joined gigantic scenes to farm them, for example, so the original intention became irrelevant. Sure, staff can go after players in such cases to try and punish them for doing unintended things with their toys, but when the underlying problem is systemic solutions should be found in the design itself.
An additional difficulty here is that, once you adopt a system to facilitate power growth, it's difficult to make adjustments over time without upsetting some of your players by either making oldbies inherently better off (the dino problem) or by invalidating their challenges after the fact by removing hurdles.
@Thenomain said:
Of my untested theories about RP-Mudders, I want to theorize that the severe stance on What RP Is comes from how these games grew out of the Mud culture. I mean, last I knew, a Mud was about running around killing things and having fun coding your own Mud macros, speed-walking, auto-mappers, so forth. The part of Adventure/Zork that became MMOs.
Let me give another anecdotal take on it, perhaps you'll find it useful or at least mildly entertaining.
When I first played A Moment in Tyme back in the mid-90s it was a MUD's MUD. Everyone was a 'channeler' (which in the Wheel of Time theme is an anathema, especially for males) since that's what the coders had made for the setting. People walked around throwing fireballs at mobs or used teleport to go places. RP was pretty thin (think aliases which emoted "Die, evildoer!" before casting said fireball) and so on.
However more people started liking the idea of emoting more and throwing fireballs less. It was small things at first, such as justifying the constant casting somehow ('cast refresh self' was perhaps aliased to 'emote eats a cookie') but it grew, and eventually a new version of the code came out which actually allowed people to make non-channelers. It was pretty organic; the culture started to shift to where better roleplayers were valued - and gained positions of IC influence - more than people who simply had a more powerful characters, knew where the best mobs to farm were, etc.
I mean this wasn't a quick process - it literally took years. By the time I took over coding there we put out more versions of the code where your sheet-power was dependent on how much respect you had as a roleplayer from the community. It was a pretty convoluted system in retrospect but it worked unlike anything I've seen since - each person participating in the system would submit a log of a spar or lesson with someone else, which was anonimized then distributed randomly to other participants who graded the logs and sent them back. So at that point the most powerful characters ended up being the best roleplayers - at least in theory.
But I mean if you look at this from where it started, with the priorities we had given the tools handed to us and where we took things in a natural way - this was never the original plan of the administration who originally owned the game in any way - it's pretty cool. I'd say the quality of posing (we called it emoting) at its peak on Tyme was pretty damn good on average, easily on par with what we consider the same today.
And it started with folks aliasing stuff to say to mobs as they killed them.
From one of the occasional TripAdvisor e-mails:
You're in the top 10% !
With 13,075 readers, you're one of the most popular reviewers in Toronto. Keep those great opinions coming.
I haven't reviewed a single place in Toronto. I haven't used or even had TripAdvisor installed on my phone (or anywhere else) since 2013.
@Tempest said:
On the topic of automated combat, I really loved Firan's last version of combat code.
What we were doing in the Wheel of Time MUD I was in a long time ago was try to bind posed combat with coded combat. The problem in particular was that, if everything was only posed we'd run into players who weren't willing to lose or take hits, resulting in sparring/combat scenes lasting for too long. On the other hand if everything was only hardcoded there was a big disconnect between typing "kill <X>" and the roleplay about it.
The solution we came up with was to turn the combat system from a real-time into a turn-based one. So if my character is trying to hit the other player's leg I'd pose it, then type something like "attack Bob left leg". The code would calculate the chances of success and assign damage and/or secondary effects (lowered defense due to lack of mobility, for example).
The full version of that was to turn combat into something more tactical as well by adding encumbrance for armor, weapon effects, disarm modifiers, etc.
Basically if you want to have coded combat turn-based is the only way to go. It's essentially what the WoD MU* are using, only most of the calculations happen on the players' side as the game provides the dice system. Some games facilitate it a bit further (say, by calculating your defense based on merits), but it could be automated further - moving it further from the table-top paradigm by hiding some elements from the players but increasing ease of use.
Is it not likely that speaking to a couple of people on a MUD for 30 minutes might not give you a general consensus of how things are done on all MUDs, any more than having a 30 minute conversation on a MUSH might not speak for the MUSHing community as a whole?
Although yes, the lingo is different. I remember thinking when I made the jump to MUSH that "tiny sex" was a hilarious term.
@Thenomain said:
What I am discovering about people who are exclusive Mudders: They have a very specific, almost draconian idea of what "RP" means.
Back in the day I had been playing MUDs exclusively for years when I made the leap to a MUSH.
A lot of things were very confusing, from moving around using uniquely-named exits instead of n/s/w/e, to everyday communication through page, navigating help file structures, figuring out the commands to set up a description, etc.
Roleplaying? It was exactly the same thing I had always known. We used emote instead of @emit but that's about it. Even the quality was about the same on average.
Obviously this is anecdotal, so take it as you will.
@Ganymede said:
@Arkandel said:
What's important is for me to have fun, not my character. In fact most of the time those two goals are mutually exclusive.
Then don't have the ST roll. Let him or her concoct stuff for you to tilt at. There are few players like you or I.
I don't even care how it happens, so as long as they're having fun too, let them figure it out. Some people like @Coin just want to watch the world roll, so that's fine with me too - whatever! Then I've run PrPs where not a single die was rolled (I had a great such scene last night in fact). All that matters is being entertained.
@Sunny said:
It's not. But it could very easily be used to cheat. Easily.
Well, sure it could, but so what? If I'm surrounded by friends having fun, is it really important if the ST faked a botch to add drama to the scene?
What's important is for me to have fun, not my character. In fact most of the time those two goals are mutually exclusive.
I never felt the screen was there to allow the ST to cheat - that's not the point. It's for the anticipation, not knowing what that asshole just rolled (or even if he did it to mess with our heads), so it's not about trust in the first place.
On a MU* I couldn't care less how these things are calculated. If I know the ST whether he tells me my character has some crippling Condition because he just pulled it out of his ass or because he rolled something, whether I can see it or not, is irrelevant. It happened - move on.
I'm not telling anyone how it should be done. If people are comfortable Storytelling scenes their PC is in, more power to them. If I know them I probably wouldn't have an issue going along with it, either.
I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it myself. It's as simple as that.
@Derp said:
Find two or three people and run plots for each other. Your PC can even be in them, just try to let the other people have the spotlight.
YMMV but I could never do that. If my PC is directly involved in a scene I'm running I'd be too self-conscious about it - am I giving him too many breaks? Am I trying too hard to not hog the spotlight? Awkward all over.
I just need a good excuse for the character to not be present and his friends can go off and get themselves into grand adventures without him. Those jerks.