Posts made by bored

@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.

@Alzie said:

@bored Paulus had a mission statement? I think this is the first I've ever head of it. Was it 'If it ain't imploding it ain't shit?'

Well, early on, when the game just opened and (I think?) well before you joined, there were a lot of times he spent hanging around on channel talking about the feel of the game they were going for. He emphasized a lot of things to make it more realistically (in FS, lol?) feudal. Vassals not being your strict minions to order around, small engagements that made a single knight with a band of men a meaningful force, limited casualties, and particularly a lot of back and forth with smaller fiefs being lost and regained. OK.

He just didn't keep to most of it, or he made sure those things only applied when they were harmful, not when they were helpful. The small engagement thing was an outright lie, it was doomstacks or nothing. A single knight (or even baron's) forces were insignificant because the counts literally had orders of magnitude more stuff. The feudal disloyalty stuff, well, it definitely happened, but instead of letting that be natural (it's not like MUers won't bicker like rabid wolverines anyway) he specifically lied to people or just outright encouraged them to be rebellious. The casualty thing was applied with no consistency at all as already pointed out. The 'back and forth' mostly meant no one could make gains OTHER than the main plot force, which was all Renaud/Renaud's daddy NPC/etc. You saw that with the Ghilat stuff, where as soon as Antonio won land, they came and took some away (and made damn sure you lost no matter what you did).

@Packrat I'm sure the Kurgan assault lander existed on a spreadsheet somewhere, but that's not the point. The point is when the enemy used it, it worked cinnematically as this super scary doomdrop. When the players used one, it would either have no special effect beyond moving 100 troops around sorta quickly (which was meaningless when everything was 3-5k troops on a side) or... there was that time staff made a magic sandstorm that vetoed it completely. So there's no 'entirely fair' at play there, at all.

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.

@Apollonius I'm not sure what you mean about me being happy or not happy with what you did with Chiaka. I didn't dislike either of you especially. You both had moments where you were annoying as fuck, but I'm sure you thought the same of me and that's just par for the course MUing. I'd play with either of you again (Chiaka was actually on my L5R game for the while it lasted). I wouldn't hand you some big cheese char as you never even seemed to be the 'activity generator' that P claimed, but then again I'm not big on feature slots generally. Games I've worked on have always pretty much been coded cgen, you can have what you buy - there's really no other way to do it fairly. If I wanted different degrees of power/influence, I'd do a lifepath style thing (not unlike default FS) and work in serious downsides to being higher on the ladder.

Paulus and Lex, I'm going to agree probably have serious issues. I'm not a psychiatrist so I'm not going to throw out some couch diagnosis, but the degree of impulsive, constant lying means something. Same with Custodius on that count. They are people I'd actively avoid playing with in the future, because they're really more poisonous than the average player with their occasional selfishness or drama.

@Apollonius /@deadculture I doubt the Sidon/traitor vassal stuff was really even about anything players were doing or not doing. Your replacement got some hint of it too. I had some hint of it just from my instincts (oh you asked for backup troops for the war and you send guys to my castle? lol ok) and I even double-checked with P about what kind of troops I needed at home to effectively man the castle and be secure against some rear action. He told me, and I kept them there. But then lol KURGANS FROM THE SKY and various other shit, that naturally never worked when PCs did it (Antonio's lander getting foiled every time he tried to use it) but totally crushed me. So I really doubt you, I, Olivia, or the traitor player even mattered much. If the traitor player hadn't been there, it would have been some NPC, and the Kurgans probably still would have conquered me from the sky, or some other shit would have happened. Because that was the story they wanted to tell.

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.

That's not my recollection of things. I'm pretty sure at least two counts knew Paulus from prior games (@Apollonius can maybe confirm?). He mentioned some history of bad behavior on a prior FS game and that he was giving them a second chance (... at being in charge of everything, and everyone being dependent on them, good plan! ). Custodius' character was deeply integrated into every part of the game theme (the grand poobah was his dad, his... brother or something was the main hero of the setting, he had the only direct line of communication to one of the main villains, etc), so I really doubt that he was just 'the first guy that came along.' If Paulus told you that, maybe he was lying to you too? Welcome to the player experience of Star Crusade!

You're right on the random statting being a big problem (I was a victim of the dude who gave people shit stats, I suspect), and there were many other problems besides that. So maybe a fair, by the books chargen fixes a lot. I still don't think such a top-down structure is ever realistically going to be good for a MU when the hobby is just as fundamentally corrupt as it is.

I'm not against having the high-level stuff because having it in the mix isn't interesting (and you're right that they had both). I'm against making it the focus of the game because I don't know that there's going to be a staffer around you can trust to run it that way. Star Crusade may have had both, but the focus was definitely on the high level stuff, in a way that pretty negatively affected the low level.

Basically: If a Count is just a dude who has a lot of money and can occasionally work his rank for some access/political favors/etc (ie, how it's presented in the books, where you also have to pay heavily in cgen for it) then it's not a big deal to let people play them. If they're what they are on Star Crusade (IE, guys who get literally 1000x what anyone else had, for free, and were pretty much necessary to suck up to to do anything meaningful on the game) then it isn't going to work. Especially because even the best-intentioned staffers are always going to hand the cherry shit to their friends. That's just a rule of MUing. You minimize it by not setting up your game to focus so heavily on the have/have-nots.

Eh, we all know how Star Crusade ended. It was 100% an issue of the staff, including the guy here. It even started the same way, with a 'full disclosure, we were these guys before and did some shady stuff before, but it will be different...' Shockingly it wasn't different.

But yeah, also basically what several people said. Run it at lower level, with more of a focus on adventuring etc. People can still be lords and whatever (book rules wise, it just gives you more allowance money, right?) but don't make the actual gameplay Crusader Kings like Star Crusade was.

@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.

Yeah, it's not the easiest, and especially not for people who are learning the game as they go. I at least had fun running the stuff I got to.

Looking at the 7th Sea code, it looks like we've got a development game ... with some grid and some other Wora-folk charbits there, so I'm not sure what the status of things is. I wonder if some gentle kick-nudging might actually spawn a working game.

Someone conveniently pointed me at this. I am said guy.

I think the code is probably around somewhere, but I don't know that it would be much use for 7th Sea. Beyond sharing RnK (and you can code a basic RnK roller in under five minutes), the games aren't really that similar. Most of my coding effort was for the auto CG (validation stuff and tedious data entry). But 7th Sea's CG is a bit different (skills/knacks vs straight skills) and all the data is obviously different. Other core systems are also pretty different between the games (init, injury, etc).

Vaguely related, I do know someone who has functional 7th Sea stuff completely unrelated to my code, although I'm not sure about its level of portability. I can make inquiries.

Further related, I'd probably be pretty interested in playing on or even helping build/staff a 7th Sea game. It has a lot of the appeal of L5R system wise, without the awkwardness of that setting for RP, which definitely sunk Kishi Kaisei.

Edit since I totally misread your original post (go me): If you actually want to use L5R's system straight for 7th Sea, I suppose you could and my code would work but... I'm not sure why you'd want to. 7th Sea's is definitely better suited to its own genre, and probably the more interesting system overall, especially for high action swashbuckling style stuff.