Controversial posts made by bored

@faraday said:

Perhaps you missed the part where I specifically said "And, btw, I'm not saying the people who do #1 or #2 are "ZOMG evil min-maxers" or anything. It's just a different approach, totally valid on some games. But that's not what I want on mine." I don't want automated bots or character classes/levels on my game either. That doesn't mean I look down on people who play MMOs. In fact, I quite enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies and WoW. It's just a different style of play.

I didn't miss it, I just don't think its genuine. It's like adding a smiley to a nasty remark, or saying 'no offense' before you offend someone.

No offense, but you seem like a smug elitist with a poor grasp of the narrative-mechanical relationships you claim to be promoting with your badly designed XP system

See how that works? I harp on it because its a really pervasive attitude and I think you're doing a lot to promote it here, including by stamping your feet down at a widely-made suggestion in a thread where you were supposedly looking for feedback. Even in your supposed clarification above, the attitude is there. 'Some games' and then you start talking about MMOs. Right. You're totally not painting in people who know and care about the rules as much as, or alongside of and in support of RP as some kind of vagrant tribe of powergamers, inferior to your soulplaying contingent of deeply immersive writers who don't care about those rules things because RP first man (who, I think history tells us, have just as many shitty twinks in their ranks).

I cannot physically roll my eyes harder.

It's also totally bizarre, because your concept of design-promoting-philosophy is actually backward. Your design doesn't promote your philosophy; it promotes min-maxing in the extreme (as I've demonstrated repeatedly with the basic math). All your 'well your BG has to justify it' shtick does is force people to come up with BGs to support their twinkery, which isn't hard (see my 'rural hunter turned weapon specialist').

It's not agitation, its lack of equivocation

There's a lot of 'oh well good staffing can make anything work' in this thread, and on this forum in general, but I think that's BS. The sort of thing @Ganymede is suggesting is a) not actually different from how MU* have always worked and b) fundamentally terrible, as the history of this stuff tells us.

Its fine to make adjustments in game, as I hope I've clarified, but the 'casting' analogies are just kindly euphemisms for nepotism. If you don't promote equality at the fundamental first step, when people are joining your game, you set a precedent of favoritism and bullshit permanently.

@Arkandel said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Not quite. Lots of game have had narcissistic despotic owners over the last couple of decades - most of them were incompetent and, as such, died the quiet and quick undignified death they deserved.

Firan did not. It ran for a long time, attracted a lot of people and some of them must have have fun. That's not a sign of incompetence; you can argue its bullshit and many people will agree, but not that this is what this is the game it gets you.

It takes the combination of consistency, skill and effort to make a successful game no matter if you're an asshole or not.

Yes, you can be a nepotistic douchebag and create a successful game (or be ethical and create a failure, and yes, vice versa). Firan could have done all its good things and not been shitty to their players. Rampant favortism was not a key element contributing to its success (indeed, lack of ethics was still what killed it, when they got past a certain ratio of shitty to actual fun shit).

That is not an argument in favor of being a nepotistic douchebag.

@Bobotron said:

@bored
I dunno. Many MU*s I've seen have had an 'audition process,' especially for FCs, and it seemed to work out pretty well (again, not WoD, so different cross-section).

I think basing handing out certain things that have to be handed out in game, based on in game observation/behavior is fine (although this is usually beyond the CG process, and on to things like 'who gets to run the org' - I think everyone should use the same CG). That is not what I understand @Ganymede's suggestion to be.

@Ganymede said:

@bored said:

I think if you want to cast your MU like a play, you should consider OTT or an invite-only game instead.

You say this like someone that has not been involved in the casting of a play.

Correct, I do not have your level of amateur theater wisdom/dictatorial megalomania.

I have seen most games run like this, and mostly it has shitty results. Because I don't understand that you're advocating for anything other than the pretty much bog-standard (and bog-shitty) approach of 'just give shit to my friends.' Everyone pretty much does what you're suggesting already, except its just a way of justifying their nepotism. We've seen the results, they usually suck.

@Sunny said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Nobody is claiming what you're responding to.

Sure they are. What do you think happens when you cast a bunch of your friends as all the key players, give them all the toys, and then open the game to 'other people who aren't as OMG awesome.' You get a bunch of haves and have-nots, stars and extras, and all the bullshit we see on every WoD game ever.

Saving the interesting reply for last:

@Apos said:

@bored said:

Sure. Your game, your dime for the server, you can do anything you want, include being a nepotistic scumbag.

Because that's what you're going to be when you decide to play director, cast your stars, and then oh yeah, we need some extras too.

This bullshit gets you one thing. It gets you Firan.

Serious question. If you were the one running Firan in an imaginary scenario where you somehow had the game and were in complete control, how would you have handled their roster system with its playerbase at peak?

The full answer to this is beyond the scope of this thread I think.

Relevant to this argument, not designed it with 3 tiers including characters that were purpose-built to be shitty nobodies who could accomplish nothing?

@faraday said:

None of these ways is "right" or "wrong" in the absolute sense of the word, but #3 is what I would call closest to the "spirit" of FS3. There's very little thought involved in chargen. You just go through the very short action skill list and pick the descriptive name that best fits your character in each one. Then you pick a couple interests to round

The 'spirit' of FS3 is still that the guy who apps, say (using your fondness for military stuff), a hunter turned weapons specialist, with max for CG firearms will be a fundamentally better character than the guy who apps, I don't know, a military college trained commissioned officer turned desk jockey with a broad range of academic and social skills on top of military stuff from basic.

The redneck hunter, after a couple months, will be just as good at all the random stuff the above character has, while the other guy will never be as good of a shot. BOTH people are approaching CG from your #3 option 'organic CG' approach, yet one is punished by your system.

Hence, that part of your system is bad. No amount of your vaguely smug elitist RPer justification will change that.

Stealing board games is an interesting idea. I feel that a lot of the RPGs that try to come up with large scale systems ultimately kind of fail at it for being either too abstract or just giant piles of tables, but I'd never really considered that a lot of board games probably get the level of detail/crunch vs abstraction a lot closer to what you'd want.

This definitely gives me some thinking to do in regards to future games.

@Misadventure said:

Including common mistakes is not the sign of a good game system. Good enough, perhaps.

Sure, but the initial comment on the topic called it 'utterly terrible' (and worse than 1E White Wolf, which I don't really see).

I'm not saying the design is amazing but singling it out as especially bad is... odd, and maybe ill-informed on the larger hobby. The lifepath stuff still puts it above most similar skill based games that give you zilch guidance on what skills your character should even have. And that's important in terms of 'getting' an original setting and making appropriate characters.

@Packrat To be fair, the 'allocate some dots in chargen' vs 'scaling XP costs later' is a trap that just about every skill based game system has fallen into at some point. WoD was a pretty serious offender too (and only seemed to realize it in GMC, which is only how many editions in?) So singling out FS for it is kind of silly. A lot of the other stuff you list is hardly somehow FS specific or even weird. Yes, there's 'best' equipment, strong items, magic-users are generally more powerful than non, etc. Name a game where that isn't true.

On the other hand, I love lifepath based CGs (Burning Wheel's, or the one from the old Darklands CRPG are some of my favorite cgens ever), and I think that aspect of it makes it very player accessible (especially as @ThatGuyThere there said, for newbies). You don't have to sit there and read a huge skill list and then figure out every little skill you need and worry you'll forget something. You just say 'oh, my dude was a noble of house X, he was raised on a farm and then joined the navy, he saw action a few times and got a promotion.' That part is BRILLIANT in its absolute accessibility and direct translation of narrative into numbers.

Edit: You also mentioned grappling. Pardon me while I laugh, and refer you back to the 'show me a game where it isn't broken' thing

@mietze I was making the assumption that since people here have been saying the SC way wasn't a good way, and you come back with a vague 'nah it could be fine' that you were arguing back against that notion which... would be in favor of SC style stuff, armies included. Apparently I'm wrong (though you can see how I might be confused!)? Anything setup like SC is going to be a shitshow like SC. There's no possible level of staffing that will overcome the issues given the extant population of the hobby.

Beyond that I'm not sure what you're saying. Every game will have interpersonal politics still. They just won't be trying to simulate Crusader Kings at the same time. People who want to play that, complete with the running armies over each other? Well, the game does have Multiplayer.

@Apollonius Well that escalated quickly.

I've... repeatedly said I didn't have any major issue with you (or Chiaka, who... you seem upset I don't have issues with?). It could be the disengagement I felt from you was already a result of you not giving a shit due to Paulus. So, meh. Again I don't fully understand what you're upset about or are trying to express beyond the P stuff that everyone seems to agree on.

As for the chances of a game overall, I think it just, as many people have said, needs not to be the kind of game SC was. So that means, @mietze, that no you don't really do the PvP politics, at least not on the level where people are flinging armies at each other. People will be catty and backstab each other no matter what you do, after all.

@Apollonius Well, if he'd actually just let you murder people for free no dice involved etc, that wold have been a whole different problem. I'm glad he didn't. No one likes the masturbatory 'my faction can kill your faction hur hur' bullshit. So in what you're posting now, I'm not sure what you're particularly upset about with in all of that or what you would have preferred to happen, at least in terms of Karl, Chiaka, Auberry, etc.

Most of the gripes that I recall of you specifically were that you were hard to actually RP with directly, played by bbpost a lot, and did seem to get overly upset when your vassals weren't 100% loyal which obviously made things worse and made Paulus' sowing-seeds job easier. The vassals agitating was a necessary part of the game, the issue simply was the degree to which he was trying to micromanage that conflict, and the fact that he totally burned down all OOC player trust both for staff and for each other while doing it.

I'll add, I wouldn't have even minded the loss of Sidon if he didn't also cheap out on the actual battlefield victory. Compared to Renaud, Amber, and that Li Halan guy staff couldn't stop jerking off to, who never once got serious opposition and were fighting literal 'you have to crit fail to lose' battles for the entire duration of the game, P threw a comparable top-statted enemy general with a doomstack of troops at me. We had a bunch of PCs work together to raise troops to fight and won the battle on 2 out of 3 rolls. Yet that did nothing because of P's arbitrary 'oh its medieval combat there's not many casualties' rulings (despite part of the battle being described as me leading a charge right into the side of an isolated flank, and giving specific orders for my cavalry-heavy knightly army to chase down routed troops). So the victory meant less than zilch, despite being something that had been building for my entire tenure on the game.

So that was the issue. They told one sided stories. It was never you win some, you lose some, it was you look like you win a little and then LOL WHOOPS NOPE THAT WAS BAD FOR YOU HUH? The funny thing is, from what I could tell most of the playerbase was telling them this for months. I won't say the players were always super mature, but I think they would have tolerated some losses if they ever got any gains to match them. It's just that somehow that side of the equation, despite being in P's mission statement, never seemed to make it into play.

Yeah, I definitely mixed Emmanuel and Lextius up. Lextius was Paulus' right-hand bad news service. It's been a bit.

@Packrat: My bad!

Yeah. 'Known activity generators' is a code word for 'my friends.' 'First come, first serve' is also code for 'my friends,' because when you're opening a new game the first people who know about it are usually your buddies. So in the end, it's back to people giving shit to their friends. If there was some legit exception that made it 3/4... oh well then.

How much you knew about this shit, @Packrat, I don't know. I do have a recollection of my 3-way interactions with you and Paulus being a nightmare, and the pair of you consistently telling me different things or changing your mind, going back on things you said etc, to the ultimate result of me being fucked no matter what I ever did. IIRC, you had the rep on game of being the guy who loved to tell brilliant, evocative stories... about PCs getting fucked over. That was actually what drove me off. The favoritism only factors in, in that there was a very obvious subset of people actually succeeding. Everyone else, it was 1 step forward, 2 back.

@Glitch said:

@bored said:

It kind of just makes you sound like a hipster douchebag infatuated with the newest thing.

Evennia, on the other hand... is specifically a project with the goal of recreating a MUSH/MUX like experience and feature set with a modern programming language and other bells and whistles. It already does many of the things we want it to do and is adding features constantly.

I assume you're going to tell me, in your analogy, that Evennia is not some hipster German kitchen knife, but is obviously better because it is, in fact, the newest Swedish hatchet that comes free with a stylish beard and fitted plaid?

Well, you're already confused. The !MUs were the knives, and the MUs were chainsaws! Evennia is explicitly MU-like, and thus a new chainsaw. Whether it's ultimately going to replace anything, I have no idea (the original discussion about softcode is still relevant). But you cannot argue that it's not based on modern libraries or doesn't provide some interesting features (the twisted game-to-web stuff). It is, as a matter of fact, a new kind of chainsaw.

Better? I have no idea, that seemed like the point of discussion... until your 'all chainsaws are lame, we should really be using knives' bit, which seemed highly dismissive, to say nothing more about the value of those specific platforms.

Your hatred of Storium aside,

I don't hate Storium, and I'm even willing to bet I spent more time with it than you did, along with several other MU people who all went to try it out together. It's a well-organized play by post with a light resolution system with no customization. But it had all sorts of problems, and many of them seemed quite particular to not having the kind of robust OOC arena a MU does. In the end, most games I saw died of inactivity and the people went back to MUs or other things. And glancing at it now, the number of games looks waaay down. So it doesn't even seem that successful in its own niche.

So, with no snark intended, I just don't grok how it's a prototype for anything. What in it is actually worth adopting? Surely not the resolution system, nor the inability to handle parallel scenes or locations, nor the very limited capacity for out-of-game communication, organization, and so on. Is there some technical point that I'm missing? (It didn't seem like it, as it still had most of the usual browser limitations, refreshing pages to see new posts etc). Nothing about it seemed very new other than it having a slick design, but that's just lipstick, to use your parlance.

As I started clarifying further, I noticed I'm starting with "I never said" to another one of your quotes and it's going to start adding up to too many "I never said" and "I specifically said". So let me tl;dr it for you so there's not as much for you to quote and then fail to read:

MU'ing needs an overhaul. Evennia does not go far enough. There are good, if incomplete, ideas in things like Storium and roll20. I sure hope something nifty comes out. The end.

That's a much more palatable rewrite of your initial comment. I don't think it really represents the spirit of the initial 'lipstick on a pig' line, but I'm not gonna quibble beyond that. I am very curious what some of these good, incomplete ideas are, or at least, the MU-applicable ones, because there seems to be a lack of specifics on that front and it really doesn't jive with my impression of those platforms (to be clear, I have no issues with roll20, I just don't see how it's MU-relevant).

@Glitch said:

@bored You don't see how a web-based VTT and a free-form story "logger" and platform have anything to do with this? Seriously?

I see how they're vaguely related, in the sense that they're platforms for roleplaying online. But that's like saying a kitchen knife is related to a chainsaw, in the sense that they're both used for cutting things. It's true, but if I ask for something to cut down a tree in my back yard, only one is really relevant to that request. If I'm discussing with chainsaw enthusiasts gas vs. electric chainsaws, it's not terribly helpful for you to hop in and tell me that chainsaws are omg so passe, because some German company is making really great kitchen knives. It kind of just makes you sound like a hipster douchebag infatuated with the newest thing.

The reason people haven't abandoned MU'ing entirely for these other options is because neither roll20 nor Storium offer the style of gaming MU'ers are familiar with, as you say. But the building blocks are there. Storium is lacking in that their system is immutable and the real-time feel is a bit lost in the "post" nature of interaction. As for roll20, it has that real-time component, but little prominence is given to text-based RP and it doesn't do a good job at handling scenes as anything more than one long log.

... right. So why do you think it's relevant? You agree that those things you think obsolete MUs don't actually do any of the things that MUs are or MUers want. It seems like you're treating all roleplayers are some homogeneous mass, and asserting that any roleplaying related tool can replace any other if it's modern and fancy, despite our actual preferences and feature requirements. If anything, the lipstick on a pig line seems a more apt description of Storium, as it's basically something old (play by post) with a slick modern interface.

However, there are people that use roll20 for text-only RP (they have even recognized this by adding a text-only search option for people looking for games). It's basic, really only offering /emit, but it allows people to fold it in with the visuals of a "scene" with the rolling and combat that can accompany any PrP. Storium puts scenes into terrific order and flow and does a good job tracking the components of what could easily constitute any MU scene.

The former sounds an awful lot like AOL chatroom RP. The latter is PbP 2.0. But most MUSH/MUX players have already tried those formats for their RP fix and found MU to be the superior experience. You're literally telling us we should go back to something we already tried and found wanting simply because it's been delivered in a new package.

If people want exactly what they have now, then no, there is nothing that will replace it. If there's something that eventually comes out and offers things like always-on connectivity, flexible enough code to build a game around any theme or setting and the mechanics to play it? I'd certainly move on at that point.

... ok? So if Storium evolves to be something completely different and 100 times more complicated than what it is now, folding in all the MU features it doesn't have, we should move to that. Hopefully it will give out free blowjobs, too.

More realistically, checking in on it again after... 6 months or whatever since the last time I did and seeing only the most minimal and superficial updates? I don't think your optimism for it evolving into something suitable for handling MU-style play is warranted or even remotely realistic.

Evennia, on the other hand... is specifically a project with the goal of recreating a MUSH/MUX like experience and feature set with a modern programming language and other bells and whistles. It already does many of the things we want it to do and is adding features constantly. It seems more like a badass cyborg pig, than one in trashy makeup.

I'm actually very interested in/optimistic about Evennia, following it is one of the things that's kind of kept me out of mainstream MUdom recently. Python seems a good fit for MUery and some of its built in game-to-web stuff seems like it could be a big deal for non pyschoders who still want access to those kind of modern features (it can, for instance, publish character sheets to a website right out of the box). Now that they've got a sort of official example game project in development, it should help people jump in by providing more complex examples to look at, copy and modify.

@Glitch said:

@Loki So I've given this a lot of thought too. I dug into the Evennia code a bit and also took a look at Jasmine a few times (just enough there to get a sense of things) and the conclusion I always come back to is that it is, mostly, "lipstick on a pig". With things like roll20 and storium out there, I feel like we should be moving beyond all the old MU codebases.

I don't see how these remotely have anything to do with each other. Roll20 is a VTT. Storium (I didn't realize it's even still a thing) is basically slightly structured but still nearly freeform forum rp. Neither has much in common with the average MUX/MUSH style game at all. Unless people have hacked/converted them for radically different purposes than their design without my being aware of it, anyway.