Posts made by bored

@surreality Like I said, if he doesn't think this suffices, whatever.

But I think the latter part of his 'defense' of his position is a wishy-washy non-position that sets it up that nothing would ever suffice. If it requires the clear abuse of 'official powers' per @Tinuviel, that also means that everyone who private messaged him with whatever personal details (I did not, for whatever its worth) was pretty much wasting their time because there was zero chance of action in the first place unless she was going into people's accounts and stalking their IPs or something.

Ark talks a good game about toxicity, but that's as far as it goes. He's happy when people are flaming me, he's not apparently very concerned with patterns of shitty behavior among his mods, etc. As usual, we get the MSB we deserve.

@botulism said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@arkandel I felt the same way recently, that in order to ask someone to leave I had to catch them breaking an actual rule.

Then I realized it's perfectly valid to do it because someone is a shitty person who bullies and hurts others, even if they don't do it right in front of me on my game. This hobby is toxic for a reason - we tolerate toxic behavior from toxic people out of a misguided sense of fairness. No one has a right to play on a game.

Yeah, this.

If @arkandel doesn't want to fire his buddy in this particular instance, whatever. But the idea that there's ever going to be some kind of 'clear' violation in situations like this (in the general sense) is asinine. The obvious and egregious problem cases in our community are, comparatively, very easy to solve. They do shit and get banned. Then they come on here to whine and scream about getting banned, and get banned again. But behavior like this? It goes on and on. And on. For years.

The VASpider comparison is useful, even if not precise in magnitude (maybe). She doesn't tend to break obvious, actionable rules either. So... what level of 'toxic, manipulative, serial problem player' does someone have to be before we actually acknowledge it and "yeah but they're my friend and I'm sure they're cool and were just acting out of stress" stops being the assumed, default excuse? And, in terms of administration, what the fuck actually counts as 'misconduct'? Do things on games even count, or does someone basically have to rageban a poster to get the axe?

@bobgoblin The Blizzcon footage was legit hard to watch.

The guy who asked them if it was an off-season April Fool's joke is my new hero.

Just chiming in since I actually got mentioned in this whole fiasco:

The idea that I've ever been 'plotting' against either @surreality or @Auspice on HM is pretty funny. My activity level there is minimal, and my investment is mostly for @Jealousy's sake, and I'll pop on to do scenes when she nudges me. It's no knock on the game, but my excitement/investment level in it just isn't high enough to warrant cloaks and daggers. My interactions with @surreality, as far as I can recall, boil down to 1 perfectly normal IC scene and one conversation in the OOC room about Penn Dutch furniture. Go figure. She may not be my favorite person in the world, but MSB interactions are always more toxic than even online face to face ones and I don't wish her any deep ill or spend my days acting against her. I happily welcome anyone to supply evidence of my 'plotting,' because it would be news to me!

Obviously, I do discuss other players (candidly) with @Jealousy off the game, but shockingly, she's her own person and has her own opinions (and some other people on here who know her will attest to how fucking stubbornly she holds her own mind on things). In fact, while I've always told her I think @Auspice (on HM) has been passive aggressive, cliquish, and a bit of a twink, she has largely defended her to me because the two of them became friends while playing on the game. For instance she always though the headstaffer on HM favored @surreality unfairly, which is supported by the discord conversation @Auspice herself linked a while back.

Anyway, it's no secret I've long held that she's a bad mod and a laughable choice. Her very first moderation on this board caused a huge ruckus (and reeked of abuse of power) and I've never doubted that she's that kind of person. While I'm not going to join any 'boycott' like @Cobaltasaurus, I think the reaction to this thread should be very telling to @Arkandel.

I think hard boundaries are definitely a good idea. We say no to evil characters in tabletop when it's not appropriate, and we set other boundaries to enforce the general RP themes we want (ie, its not uncommon for medieval games to nonetheless keep people from playing actual dirt farmer serfs because those characters would have few opportunities). So I don't see why there's any problem of 'Grimdark fantasy' plus 'but srsly no raping.'

There will still be gray areas if you want some historical verisimilitude, but setting the red lines helps. After that, it's probably easier to address the players who is nonetheless continuing to press things too far (IE: excluding the female doctor above from plots vs. 'A lady physician? My word!') as individual problem cases. There are always going to be people who want to press that RP whether or not its supported in your theme (I think I recall mention of hostile sexist players on, say, a BSG game, where the setting is totally fantastic AND does nothing to support it).

This turns back to the old adage that you can't design around bad players.

@jennkryst Hiruma don't play.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

This is useful experience! Let me ask - which tutorials/texts did you read before getting into things? Did you go through the python tutorial part 2 for example? Just checking since that one includes a tour up the dependency tree into the "DefaultX" (DefaultObject, DefaultScript etc) base classes. I hope you found you could work with the X classes (Object, Script etc) directly after the initual confusion.

I'd tried using Evennia once some while ago, so it wasn't strictly a first-look. I read the basic 'basic python with Evennia' tutorials back then, because at that point I had no knowledge of either! So I had a recollection of the setup, it just wasn't necessarily intuitive. This time I was generally using the search to try and grab specific wiki entries/manuals on whatever I was trying to do. I didn't go back to that file (its title makes it sound very beginner oriented), but instead found... there's a diagram version of it somewhere?

However, one that's still baffling to me is how commandsets are set up. Breaking the usual pattern, the file in your game directory in this case is default_cmdsets.py (vs. characters.py, objects.py, etc) and then imports (from evennia) default_cmdsets to inherit from default_cmds.CharacterCmdSet compared to, e.g. DefaultObject or DefaultCharacter. And where the heck does CmdSet fit into that whole mess?

The contrib also does this, and it seems strange you're using a base class like that vs. a 'local to your game' version as with the others. It didn't stop me, but it felt like cargo cult programming.

Do you think something in particular could be done to make it easier to figure out the relationships of classes/modules etc? Or to guide you to the right info about it etc?

I think, as you've pointed out, the info exists (its also in the code comments, which are great) so people can find it, although it's not the best organized and there's a lot of repetition and overlap. The tutorials wiki page has... at least five entries named some synonym of 'basic tutorial'? Then many of the other examples seem way too specific to be helpful to someone starting a project (Weather Emits seem like they'd be pretty close to the bottom of a priority list).

Conversely, that I'm not just being critical, I think the Developer Central page is much better laid out, if more technical.

In my case, I ran into a really arcane (to me anyway) problem with the base classes, commandsets, and circular imports. Totally my bad, and while I did figure out how to get around it (basically, that I needed to refer to commandsets explicitly vs. importing), I think it's an example of the many ways a new user could get stumped.

Could you elaborate more on what the issue was there, not sure what you mean by "explicitly vs importing"?

I can but it's convoluted (hence not going into detail before). Hopefully you can follow, it feels like the only thing worse than reading someone else's code is... someone else second hand explaining why their code didn't work! Spam follows:

Since I was working from the turnbattle contrib, I had a bunch of modules for each aspect of the system (tb_range, tb_equip, etc). They had lots of redundancies (each one defines an alternate version of the same new player typeclass). I'd combined those, thinking about how I'd structure it for a game since it was meant to be practice. So for instance I moved the character stuff into characters.py as it was more logical to me than having a child class, making it default, and having it defined somewhere obscure.

For the same reason as above, I'd moved the hooks from tb_range.py into objects.py vs. creating a new object class. This required some of the functions from tb_basic. I left the new child typeclasses for weapons and armor in tb_equip, which also had the wield, unwield, etc commands. Meanwhile the commandset definitions were still in tb_basic, though I'd split them to create a general set (that I added in default_cmdsets.py exactly as in any tutorial) that included the commands to initiate combat and an 'in-combat' one that would get added and removed in play. Again, I wanted to practice a real design, and this seems common (it's how Arx does it, I believe).

Long story short, tb_equip was importing Object, which imported tb_basic functions, which imported tb_equip (for CmdWield etc). ImportError. However even when I reorganized stuff (I split tb_basic to have the script, commandsets, and functions across 3 modules so objects.py could import the functions and not the commandset), it still happened. Basically, the commandset was importing everything and so anywhere I imported it (to add/remove the set to combatants as they joined/left) it would throw up the error.

The solution (and what I meant by 'explicitly') was adding it via its own path: char.cmdset.add("path.to.CommandSet") vs. importing and doing char.cmdset.add(CommandSet). Perhaps not the correct professional programmer term! So, very simple solution (and i think this was shown in one of your examples somewhere), it just didn't occur to me for a long time because I didn't see why the way I was doing it wasn't the way I should be.

Ultimately it's worth repeating that I still succeeded in getting everything working (uh, except the spawner, which seems buggy as heck), so the clearly the resources and information is there. I think organization could help, as well as what people have suggested in terms of system tutorials or base example worlds. Right now there's a gap between TutorialWorld (that's very... mud and minigame centric) and Ainneve/Arx (which are great examples but maybe too advanced for some to unpack).

So, following up on my weekend project: I decided to take all the individual turnbattle contribs (which are each a self-sufficient system for one aspect of a system), merge them together, and make something using several parts at once. For instance, combining the range abstraction system with the magic system to make an AoE spell. I was able to do it, so, mostly a success!

What I will say struck me as the greatest frustrations along the way were all more about figuring out where something was or how I was supposed to implement it vs. strictly not having any idea how to do it. Sorting out the relationships of the various modules and classes, your game code vs. base evennia, understanding which ancestor you should be inheriting from or overloading (DefaultX vs. X), where you can put your code and have it actually work vs. needing to call it in some other thing, and how to get your functions and commands accessible.

In my case, I ran into a really arcane (to me anyway) problem with the base classes, commandsets, and circular imports. Totally my bad, and while I did figure out how to get around it (basically, that I needed to refer to commandsets explicitly vs. importing), I think it's an example of the many ways a new user could get stumped.

Overall, I was still able to build something really impressive for the time invested, so I think that says a lot for how powerful the codebase and contribs are. In terms of what trips people up, I only have my own experience but I hope its useful representing one kind of potential user.

@thenomain said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

My goal right now is to get to "code python".

I think this is actually a good summary. The greatest challenge is getting past the libraries, APIs, etc toward actually doing the code you want to write.

As part of the 'wants to use evennia, but finds it challenging' club I definitely think more help resources would be valuable. Of course this is a pretty vague ask, and I'm not sure how to narrow it down.

To this purpose, I went ahead and installed it again today and I'm gonna devote the weekend to some kind of 'basic' coding project and see how far I get and where I stumble. I'm thinking maybe trying to implement something from contribs and customize it a bit, since that seems a realistic case for the 'average' coder's point of entry and interest: wanting to implement X system, customized for their game.

Let's see how it goes!

@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:

social situations make up, what, 90% of MU scenes?

While I have no interest in rehashing most of this discussion, this is a really key point to keep in mind. Whatever level of dice authority you want, whatever rule system you want follow (I agree with @Thenomain and @Ganymede that you ought to do that, whatever you pick), you need to keep in mind that it will be happening with this degree of frequency and players need to be comfortable with that.

Or in other words:

@seraphim73 Oh yeah, and particularly if you're playing 'Fringers vs. Imperials' (as is the conceit of EotE, vs the later books), it's thematically perfectly appropriate that the Empire's faceless enforcers are scary.

Game mechanic wise, it's a facet of equipment and mook rules. Minions combine attacks into one pool and end up becoming highly accurate, while both the stormtrooper armor and blaster rifles have high soak & damage. So you get otherwise 'fragile' mooks behind hard to pen damage reduction shooting accurately with their high damage E-11s.

This also means that as soon as one of the (combat oriented, it's a separate skill) PCs steals a dead stormtrooper's rifle, their own damage shoots up dramatically. Add some of the talents or, gods help you, a repeating weapon and things get kind of hilariously out of control very quickly.

Re: FFG system and @Misadventure's comment, I want to echo somewhat and stress that while it's really innovative (I ran it for about a year in a VTT), the narrative stuff can be counter-intuitive and requires really good GM supervision and player buy-in.

It also has a really sharp combatant/noncombatant divide. Due to soak, a rando with a 1h blaster will struggle to do meaningful damage to any target, and be unable to touch Stormtroopers (who are kinda scary in this game), whereas a combat-teched person is one-shotting most of the printed 'boss' types before they even hit their first top-tier talent.

Not telling you not to do it, but be aware of this stuff and plan accordingly. PvP would definitely be a nightmare in this rule system.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

Without it, you get raped by otter furries. And I don't want to get raped by otter furries.

You know why you're bored? The absence of otter furry rape, I reckon.

Probably. You guys should get on unbanning Nuku, I guess?

re: the rest, I honestly don't follow your argument. You say WoD = toxic players, but then point out WoD games that are exceptions. So it's the specific game, not the genre/system, right? Are you just arguing 'a few quality staff' > 'lots of bad staff'? I don't disagree with that, but my point was never 'get tons of shitty staffers,' either. Just that WoD probably requires more staff input per capita than some other things do. A good staffer will still pull more weight in that equation than a shitty one.

@faraday said in Do we need staff?:

I've never played on WoD games, but I have to say that the degree of toxicity attributed to them, described on these boards on a regular basis, simply has not existed on the range of games I've played on (not just my own, but any I've played).

What do you play, genre/system wise? Its pretty trivial to come up with tons of systems/genres that have infamous horrible reputations: Lords & Ladies (Firan, SC), Sci-fi or Space Opera (tons of shitty SW games, that Serenity/Firefly place), Comics (UH, BNW), etc. Even at the height of the BSG craze weren't there a couple drama GOMOs? So I'm curious which are the 'good' ones. It seems like you'll have to engage in the same exercise @Ganymede is, ie picking out particular games not the genres/systems.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

The big problem is the player base the games attract, and how the handful of foul, power-gaming, goal-oriented, fun-sucking, must-be-dominating players really take the piss out of the fun that others have.

I don't buy that at all. Where are the magical positive, happy games where no one is a dick? Which genres are those? What systems attract that unicorn of a playerbase, rather than the eeeevil terrible one WoD draws in?

If you want to talk strictly about staff size, I think RDC's comment may have some merit (mostly illustrating that on many games, 80% of their bloated staff doesn't actually do any work, and that those are just cronyism spots). But the game still requires a degree of staff input that is demonstrably greater than, say, FS3 BSG games need.

Without it, you get raped by otter furries. And I don't want to get raped by otter furries.

It obviously really depends on the game. People have given single parameters in some case (size, genre, level of conflict, etc) but it's really going to be a mix of all of these, sometimes.

The traditional Pern games had massive player counts in their heyday and ran 99% on player faction leaders. Some of these were naturally wizard alts but on those games, the wizbits were really there for code reasons and nothing else. This included the dragon-getting process which was ridiculously drama-filled. Still, all handled at a PC level. Everyone kept to (an albeit thin) theme, but they were also low-conflict close to nearly full-social games.

A raw PvP-fest game could be run with little to no staff at basically any size if combat was automated. See the standard MUD/MMO model.

WoD is kind of the perfect storm of being shitty for this, though. It's high conflict but generally can't be automated because it's a fundamentally exception-based rules system with tons of separate moving parts. It risks a lot of thematic drift because while it has source material, the abundance of crazy power shit perfectly well lets someone play out their RapeOtter fantasies as if it was FurryMUCK.

I'm gonna ditto 'fun as a novel but kind of unsustainable as a game.'

It seems very likely to me that people would spend all of a week or two RPing about "learnin' stuff" and then everyone would be an expert and you'd just have orcs taking selfies. Which, I guess if that's the end-goal is fine.

It was also just kind of the tone/genre-deaf nature of the character. As I said, I think there are plenty of try-hards on the game, and quite a few people with the same homogenous list of combat-oriented traits etc. However, at least in this play through, many of them are soldiers, killer robots, etc, where there's at least some justification.

The character in question was an 'emo kid,' who was... statted like a ninja. In a setting where people had traits related to things like sports they did (for physicals), social media, journalism, music, etc, he had: 'Strength (Melee Weapons)' and 'Finesse (Stealth)'. If we were playing a story where WoD-esque trenchcoat samurai were applicable, it would have been OK, but we weren't.

I will say I put this partly on staff for even approving him, although I think they've gotten a little more proactive in terms of monitoring quirks for breadth and genre-applicability in the newer round of apps.

@deadculture Yeah this is largely why I enjoy it, and the buy in thing from that thread. There's no game outside the theme, and if you're not into the theme that much you can wait for the next one. You're not waiting on plot, because it's all plot. Etc.

Its funny, because it made the predictable behavior of the probable-Custodius that much more laughable. Who are you even min-maxing to beat with your ridiculous, paper-thin character, brah? What do you think you're gonna win?

We have some try-hards, sure, but if anything more people seem in it just to get a lulz-y death.

This is probably the thing that kills my MUing interest, these days. Basically any larger game either waters down their concepts to the point where buy-in is minimally required, or have big themes but no buy-in and fail to address it. Everything is sandboxy with the occasional side of 'Big Fuss metaplot' that usually railroads pretty predictably to success or failure.

It's kind of why I find HorrorMU interesting, since there's really nothing to it but buy-in. It's not easy to make work (structural problems are many) but really there's nothing there for you if you don't engage.

@misadventure said in Horror MUX:

@deadculture Hmm, I was hoping that clever folks out there had other approaches as well.

I don't think this is a case of obviously right/wrong approach (aside from the one already identified and addressed).

Like the plot speed stuff is mostly a matter of finding the happy medium. Obviously you need stuff happening, but it seems clear the first plot shot by (and ramped up) way too fast, denying people time to get into their characters or organically find their place in stuff.

For the next run, the inspirations are very psychologically-driven stories so I do hope we will get some 1st and 2nd act setup before we get into the full guns blazing Colonial Marines with flamethrowers and miniguns vs. alien hordes. I think that's actually really a big thing for me, it always feels like wasted potential when the 'full truth' gets shown so quickly (same issue I had on 8th sea, for instance). Like we went from... 'Everything's fine' to 'there are weird boars' to 'there are native hordes kidnapping and sacrificing people' to 'there are skeletal hordes' to 'we're gonna be nuked' in about a week?

It's hard to RP being scared when the stakes get raised every scene (or twice in one scene last night, birds then nukes!)