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    Best posts made by crayon

    • Last One Standing

      We're opening character creation tonight and plan to run the opening event for our alpha next Friday 1/14/2022.

      Last One Standing is at its core a gritty survival game, though it incorporates heavy elements of mystery, horror, action, and science fiction and takes inspiration from media like Squid Game, LOST, the Hunger Games, and Survivor among many others.

      Last One Standing uses a loose and episodic framework for storytelling that allows for diverse survival-themed stories, impermanent death, and threads of continuity and overarching plot to connect the pieces.

      Characters in Last One Standing wash ashore on a mysterious island - with no memory of who they are beyond their names - and discover that death, on the island, is impermanent; those who are killed disappear once their remains are out of sight, sometimes in the midst of a blink, and wash ashore the following morning alive once more.

      At times, survivors on the island wake to find themselves in new surroundings, and sometimes with false memories, playing out different survival games only to once again wash ashore on the island when they inevitably die. The island provides a central mystery and establishes continuity between otherwise disconnected stories and allows characters to explore the relationships they build from their experiences. While we allow for PVP (with consent) we hope to focus on facilitating PVE as much as possible.

      https://los.aresmush.com 4201
      https://discord.gg/56ZNY8xuTr

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: Things I've Learned Running Horror Mu

      HorrorMU* brought me out of the overcrowded old folks' home for dissatisfied text-based roleplayers who have retired from the life and given up on the hope of finding a community that is, or at least strives to be, what they were looking for.

      Prior a lengthy stretch of time wherein I'd seldom manage to stomach a game for more than a month, most of my experience had been with the MUD side of things: RPIs and RPEs, and what-have-you. Some of that time was spent on Haven, which whetted my appetite for a horror roleplay experience but rarely satiated; my, and other players', experiences there stirred an awful lot of debate on the difficulties of cultivating a horror experience in a persistent text-based game, on prospective approaches, work-arounds, and solutions to those difficulties, and on a multitude of other issues, some specific to Haven and others nearly universal throughout the larger community.

      The initial hook that brought me out of this slump and back out to write was taking a look at the game's wikipedia and seeing how @Botulism had found solutions to so many of the stumbling blocks I'd run into in my experiences with past games. At a glance, I could tell that the game was designed to be the sort of experience I was looking for, and I've been really glad to get involved and take part.

      Rotating stories set with a persistent backdrop in the form of the Facility and its Archetypes enables the game to really embrace the horror theme and allow for players to be more free with their actions and worry less about the risk of death without entirely sacrificing the sense of extensive and permanent character development. Moreover, it helps keep the playerbase churning and reengaging through new incarnations of their characters, which remedies the near universal problem of players forming into tight-knit and often exclusive groups which can be impenetrable to newer players. I'm not going to say it completely removes this tendency, but it's certainly impactful in offering substantial mitigation.

      The lack of typical progression elements removes much of the "gamist" feel from HorrorMU and allows its community to focus more on roleplaying and story, which is a welcome relief for somebody coming from the more heavily gamist-leaning RP MUD communities where the game often starts to come at the expense of roleplay and story.

      This sort of experimentation, at least for me, has certainly paid off and resulted in what I feel to be a fantastic game and a fantastic community. There's certainly still room for growth, though, and I look forward to seeing how HorrorMU evolves going forward. While the game finds solutions to a lot of the issues that have plagued many players' -- or at least my -- experiences, a few things do come to mind besides minor tweaks to the fairly simple gameplay mechanics and updates and streamlining to make things more intuitive for newer players.

      At times the story is so reliant on staff storytelling that I feel guilty, and which sometimes results in a dichotomy between overcrowded and highly-impactful scenes and less-crowded low-impact social scenes and infodumps, with little in-between. This might be something that could be solved as a community, by encouraging players to run small- to medium-sized, low- to medium- impact scenes using the gameplay mechanics, which could also help with aiding newer players to get a feel for things and start getting involved before diving into a larger event; they'd just have to be careful to keep things in-theme and avoid stepping on the toes of the larger story.

      My experience with HorrorMU has been fantastic, and it's the most inclusive and upbeat -- astonishing when you consider how much time our characters spend in soul-destroying misery or terror and our players spend sobbing over death poses -- community I've been a part of so far; and that's been shaped as largely by the experimental way in which @Botulism has approached things as it has by the excellence of the people that have come to participate.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: What Types of Games Would People Like To See?

      @vaermithrax said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

      What if Pathfinder kingdom-building in a persistent game-world, with time acceleration for one kingdom-building turn (one month) turned up to per-week? Players would form their own principalities and start building out. Civilization meets D&D?

      I always liked the idea of a kingdom-building RP game as an evolution of the typical Lawds&Laydies featuring a little more engagement with ruling one's lands, plotting, etc., since these games have a tendency to devolve into a lot of generic social RP (re: sex) and an excessive reliance on staff for real story.

      posted in Game Development
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff

      I love working from home, but I think I probably love it too much for my own good. As an introvert and somebody who's had issues with anxiety and panic attacks, being able to work from home has probably made it far too easy for me to avoid going outside and interacting with people. While that may be a good thing in some respects given the pandemic situation, having a routine that forced me to go out five days a week was helpful in forcing me to push back against agoraphobia and made it so much easier to go out and be a social person. Being able to work from home, have groceries delivered, etc. has made it far too easy for me to withdraw and be a hermit.

      posted in Tastes Less Game'y
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: Things I've Learned Running Horror Mu

      @Jeshin

      Nah, I just picked The Killjoy as my Archetype.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: The Wheel of Time

      ***=Spoilers***

      click to show

      I'm not super fussed with that particular change in the context of it keeping the audience a little more in the dark (especially with one of the three potential dragons in the text being written out mid-season and recast). However, I think Rafe's justification there completely falls apart given that he has the Dark One('s followers) buying into the female dragon potential narrative, too. Thousands of year old prophecies aren't in as much doubt when the actors involved are thousands of years old.

      posted in TV & Movies
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: Last One Standing

      The opening event is scheduled for tomorrow (1/14) at 5pm MST, though the timing may be adjusted an hour or two back or forward depending on players' availability.

      Players will all be washing up on the Island fresh and will be given an opportunity to interact with each other and their environment and get a feel for their characters before diving into more intense scenes scheduled over the course of the weekend. I intend to run at least one scene in the late evening on Friday or Saturday and one in the early afternoon (MST) on Saturday or Sunday so that players in both the GMT time zone and in the Upside Down where everything tries to kill you and the toilet swirls backwards should hopefully both have a scene scheduled at a tolerable hour.

      Edited to add: Thanks to some creative players, there are also quite a few ready-made characters available on the roster!

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: What Types of Games Would People Like To See?

      I've always wanted to play a game based on Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or on Piers Anthony's Xanth. I think there were one or two Xanth MUSHes in the late nineties and early aughts but I don't think I've seen a Neverwhere game. To be fair, I don't look very hard anymore. Brian Lumley's Necroscope is another setting I'd love to play in but I don't see it being popular enough to reach critical mass.if I'm being honest with myself.

      I've also always wanted to see a zombie survival game or a vampire plague survival game with a seasonal restart and maybe some sort of procedural generation or heavy staff babysitting to add unique challenges and an episodic quality to every new season.

      I think there's an entire swathe of what I would call travel stories in the vein of Oregon Trail, Hell on Wheels, BSG, Ascension, etc. which feature a journey with clear beginning and end and episodic and recurring challenges along the way that I think would make excellent candidates for an automatic procedurally generated revolving story setup. I've always been kind of attached to the idea of automated storytelling that sort of provides prompts for players to pick up the slack, but if I'm being honest with myself it's probably not imminently practical or an especially good idea.

      Also some variant of "Mafia" or "Werewolf", think Town of Salem or SC2Mafia, translated into RP Mu* form would make me very happy.

      posted in Game Development
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: The Wheel of Time

      @arkandel
      cat hiss

      posted in TV & Movies
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: What Types of Games Would People Like To See?

      @Auspice

      Yeah, that was pretty much my main worry and the reason I eventually gave up on the idea. I think it's probably possible to make it work but it would require some serious creativity and experimentation.

      posted in Game Development
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: The Wheel of Time

      @runescryer said in The Wheel of Time:

      But it also just left me shaking my head. Because this series is defining itself on how 'extra' it can be; and that whole sequence just took 'extra', shattered it, then re-assembled the broken pieces.

      Agree, I actually didn't really care for the opening scene.

      It was way over the top.

      @arkandel said in The Wheel of Time:

      My theory is it's due to whatever happened with Mat's actor.
      I simply think he wasn't available to shoot episode 7 (or 8?) at all.

      Yeah, my understanding is that the actor noped out of the show or was noped out of the show for some reason during one of their COVID breaks, so he was completely written out for this season and is getting replaced next. (Which is unfortunate because I rather liked him and thought he was doing a great job of outshining Mat's otherwise less than stellar portrayal in the first few books with pure snark.)

      ***=***

      click to show

      They'll probably have the new Mat get captured by the Red Ajah or something in time to be forcibly joined to the horn arc.

      posted in TV & Movies
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: What Types of Games Would People Like To See?

      @peasoupling said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

      I feel like a lot of post-Apocalyptic stuff tends towards some kind of reskinned Western (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because I would also like to play on a Western game). But some really do lean more into what that means, thematically, than others.

      I'd love to play a Western game. Hell on Wheels or Deadwood would be perfect.

      posted in Game Development
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: The Wheel of Time

      My thoughts, more specifically:

      ***=Whining***

      click to show

      • The show seems to be making a concerted effort to go out of its way to justify the Aes Sedai in various ways. I think we can see this happening with the episode 8 opener where instead of confusing the audience with the political squabble over Choedan Kal vs. Seals they had the female Aes Sedai predict exactly what wound up happening and where the tenor changes from Lews Therin feeling betrayed and politically stonewalled to it just being kind of an amicable disagreement. I suspect we'll also see this with Elaida getting rolled into Liandrin and all of the bad Aes Sedai being Black Ajah. The correct way to accomplish this justification (and to add proper stakes to male channeling) was to show Lews Therin losing his fucking mind in the episode one cold open. Sure it takes a minute before the audience understands what was going on but it's worth infinitely more than the cold open they wound up using for episode one.

      • The power levels are completely skewed. We have Nynaeve - as a complete novice - awing Logain who, even when Nynaeve is experienced and the strongest/most accomplished female channeler outside the Forsaken, is at worst on par. Nevermind that male and female channelers can't see each others' weaves. In the books Nynaeve couldn't even channel for shit, for multiple books if I recall correctly, because of a mental block. Egwene bringing her back from the dead just destroys stakes for the rest of the series. It seems like there's a concerted effort to preemptively juice the power of these two well beyond what's reasonable or necessary for the story. There's no reason narrativistically to have Nynaeve burn out and then be healed, or to have Nynaeve handily overpower Logain, and it takes away from the characters' growth.

      • I suspect this is something nobody really had any control over, but it seems like Mat's actor leaving the show prematurely drastically changed things and I don't think they did the greatest job of patching the rest of the season back together in his absence. It's weird because in the series Mat was by far my least favorite character for several consecutive books and he was mostly kind of whiny and annoying, but the show was doing an excellent job of making him more relatable and interesting with the slight alterations and embellishments to his backstory. Unfortunately, they didn't do so well with Perrin, who didn't disappear halfway through the season. I think this is mostly their attempt to portray the mental gymnastics of axe vs. hammer since we can't peek inside his head, but they're still doing a pretty bad job of it.

      • I'm big mad over the skipping of Caemlyn. I think Caemlyn was absolutely critical for worldbuilding in that first book, and I'm very concerned that Elaida is going to get clipped from the story which, in my opinion, means less nuance and a push in the direction of very clear 'good' and 'evil' characters, with all of the latter being darkfriends.

      • I think the ending of EotW was a disaster even in the book, so I can't be too mad about the show ending being a bit of a trainwreck too, but still feel like they threw away a lot of opportunities and butchered much of the canon worldbuilding.

      • On the plus side, Ishamael's portrayal and casting was perfect.

      Tbh I think I preferred Rafe's run in Survivor to the show.

      posted in TV & Movies
      crayon
      crayon
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