Posts made by BetterJudgment

@Ganymede said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Have a code-bit that creates a "transit room" for players to enter that represents their ship in travel when a trip is initiated, and essentially locks it down for a period of time equal to the "real time" travel time.

Something like this was done on Elendor so that groups could travel from one culture to another on their gigantic grid where travel times were strictly enforced and where intercultural contact happened almost entirely through staff-run plots. The object used was a "tent." When you set out, everyone got in the tent, which was taken by the person leading the plot. That person would then drop the tent in rooms on the grid along the route throughout the period of travel, which could last for a week OOC.

Characters could leave the tent, RP in that location, then get back in the tent. (Or be transported to the right spot the next time they logged in if they forgot to get back in.) Things could be planned along the way. Once you got to the destination, everyone would RP there for the duration of the event, then get back in the tent for the return journey. Want to go traveling but can't be there when everyone sets out two evenings hence? Just log out in the tent, which is set up in a public room, before the departure.

Maybe this is dead ordinary, but I always thought it worked well in that particularly restrictive setting.

I think that the Firefly "'verse" could be a very good game setting, in part because it's like it was sketched on a cocktail napkin. Space with no aliens, people who talk like Hollywood cowboys, cannibals, anti-establishment fantasies, lots of cool Chinese slang that's easy to use because nobody ever said it right to begin with... you could spend an afternoon watching the shows, and you got it. All you have to do is to not add in stupid things like pirates and staffers playing perpetual kidnap/rape plots.

I've thought about making a character, but I realize that when I go on the game, I find myself asking things that basically boil down to, "Are you all still mired in bad craziness?" That's a fair question in one way, but in another way it's something that is really unfair of me to ask current staff and players. If I don't trust them, then I shouldn't be asking them to convince me that I can. Nobody has time for that.

@surreality said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

@Pandora I think it's more a case of 'of all the databases to steal, why steal one that you know has a zillion errors in it?'

Yep. This was also the DB that at one point managed to emit three messages every time an object negotiated an exit. So, if you were playing in a public room and someone came in one exit and left via another, the characters in the room would see three variations of "X enters from up the street" in a row, followed by three variations of "X leaves down the street." It was hilarious in a way, but I ended up gagging @odrop messages in my client to get some peace.

@Pandora said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

@Alzie said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

...Most of the staff and players who were considered part of that, are no longer around on the game.

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

Fanty's in charge now.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm, willful ignorance or a statement of the belief Fanty's specific type of corruption was A-Ok.

Tell us more.

I have the vaguest of recollections that there were accusations at some point of a staffer stealing the DB. I'm not sure why anyone would bother; SerenityMUSH is the only game I've ever seen that had a notice in the login room announcing you would get a minor OOC reward for finding and reporting the many typos the head wiz made while descing objects.

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH – Still Flyin':

Mal and Inara have left.

That's the key information.

@Wretched Corn starch baby powder. Really. A sprinkle a day helps keep itching away.

@Pacha I don't know what they're doing now. I followed them briefly when they revived the game, but I'm not interested in their approach to games or their system being applied to Tolkien's legendarium. If I want to deal with complex series of commands and mobs and whatnot, I'll play on HellMOO and have much more fun.

@Pacha – I'm a gay man and also played on Shadows of Isildur. That game was and is fucked on many levels, and that certainly was one of them.

I'm back casually playing again, and I only play gay or adamantly asexual male characters. I'm neither an actor nor a writer, so I can't really go too far outside. Really, the most comfortable character for me, and the one who I probably played best, was a Silvan Elf on Elendor who was as elvish (i.e. non-human) and non-sexual as possible. Too bad that there was someone else playing there who kept wanting to involve their very unthematic "elf child" character in hurt/cuddle/comfort RP with mine (ick).

@lithium said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

The only C&D letter I recall actually being a thing in MU*'dom was either from Kevin Siembieda cuz he's a fiend about his system not being automated and people not needing the books, and Steve Jackson, cuz, Steve Jackson.

Those were a long time ago though when MU'ing was /much/ bigger.

Shadows of Isildur, which was a large Lord of the Rings MU*, was hit with a C&D letter from Saul Zaentz Company around 2004 (?) and had to shut down for a month or so while the owner negotiated with the company. By my memory, the main issue was that the game's site might have made some money from Google ads.

@WTFE said in But Wait, There's More!:

@Admiral said in But Wait, There's More!:

Darn, and here I was wanting the responsibility and power of the board so I could...

...well shit. How does one abuse their power on a small, niche internet bbs again?

Ask Rasheem.

Who?

@Catsmeow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@BetterJudgment said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

A few years later, I got a LinkedIn invitation from Brice, the whiny little bitch who co-owned the game with his "Rape Plot of the Week" wife Brooke, at that same email address.

LinkedIn really does cover EVERY vocation, doesn't it?

<chucklesnort>

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Tehom said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@WTFE said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

1. I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.
2. If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

I am honestly confused how anyone could ever imagine that an email would be anything more than a convenience for automating the application process so that a GM doesn't have to be on hand.

Because there have been several times in the past where people have taken those email addresses and abused the trust of the people who've asked for them. We here, esp. us dinos like WTFE and myself, have been over this and we can't come up with a considerately valid reason why having the email in the first place has more benefits than risks.

My first post to WORA was the story of how staff at SerenityMU* shared the email address I gave during registration with a player who tried to convince me to rejoin the game. A few years later, I got a LinkedIn invitation from Brice, the whiny little bitch who co-owned the game with his "Rape Plot of the Week" wife Brooke, at that same email address.

Shit. I had missed hearing that Alan Vega had died.

@tek said in Historical Mu* - Looking for interested Staff:

Hold up. Historian here.

The art of studying history isn't about empiricism. It's about interpretation and being able to draw from the sources to support your interpretation.

I'd say simultaneously drawing from the sources you select and letting those sources shape your interpretation, but otherwise I agree completely. You also have to convince others (and yourself) why your interpretation of a particular part of history matters--what one of my mentors always calls the "So what?" question. Given how little historical research is actually read, that's probably the harder part.

Anyway. Anything that gives a game a lively setting is probably good, but I'm probably not a good judge of what is lively. I loved the "1001 Nights" game I briefly played on and couldn't imagine a more fun and interesting alt-history setting, but that game was essentially stillborn. I don't know what people want.

@Lotherio said in Historical Mu* - Looking for interested Staff:
I believe no one really understands history, none of us were there truthfully.

Christ. I spend weeks trying to pound this block-headed antiquarianism out of my students. They, too, think that because no golden tablets and spectacles are presented to them, then everything is just opinion. So be it.

I know that, over time, I have come to realize that I have no desire to dedicate my playtime to practicing history, but more power to you if you do. I hope you're not too disappointed when, assuming your L&L game opens, you realize that all anybody wants from your game's backstory is that it's not painfully inconsistent and that they get to be special in it. The rest of it likely will be cheerfully ignored, which is what most history deserves, anyway.

I was interested, but when I saw a character on the roster whose bio stated he has a romantic attraction to another PC, that turned me off. I don't want to play romance, and I especially don't want to play it with a stranger just because we picked particular characters off a roster.

@Lotherio said in Historical Mu* - Looking for interested Staff:

@Lithium said in Historical Mu* - Looking for interested Staff:

Doing a 'historical' game based only on information one can get from Wikipedia is... not a good idea imho.

Basing it on opinionated historians, when one can find historians that support the extreme opposites as well, is just as not good of an idea either.

If you think that all historians offer is opinion rather than inference based on evidence and reason, then another problem with this idea may be that you don't really understand history, either.

Here's a proposal: set it later, make the PCs all Muslims, Jews, or Mozarabs, and have any forces of the Reconquista be mooks. That will give you a setting with lots of "exotic color" (exotic, at least, for many of the players), opportunity for intra- and inter-group conflict, and the religious-based conflict people will expect without PC-driven religious conflict that is going to spill over into OOC arguments on channels, etc. I'd think that, if no one can play a Christian crusader and any Christians in the game are going to be culturally Arabic, then anyone arguing Christian vs. Muslim on a channel would be clearly outside of what the game is about and easier to identify as an asshat picking a fight.

Lotherio, I teach medieval history, and even I got lost in that background explanation. I think you need to make this a lot simpler to understand or very few people will bother to look at it.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

I don't care so much about people who don't like pets. You can't help what you like or not, so if they just leave it at that they are fine in my book.

But the people who'll go out and get a dog then return it to a shelter because it's too much work, or they let it get really bad habits they won't deal with, or just far worse just abandon it somewhere to fend for itself... fuck those people so much.

It's even much worse if they have kids. Nice life lesson you are giving them there, buddy.

Late, but the worst thing I've seen recently: a man nearby got a puppy, didn't train it, had it (likely rambunctiously) nip his kid. So, he wrapped its nose and mouth with electrical tape, shot it in the back of the head, and threw it in a dumpster.

The jury of his peers found him not guilty of animal cruelty.

Some people are just fucking awful.