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    Posts made by 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
    • 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: MU Things I Love

      @kestrel said in MU Things I Love:

      I swear the latter grew a whole new set of teeth somehow

      @Salvation has always had that extra set of teeth. If you know you know.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      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
    • RE: The Wheel of Time

      I kind of feel like the show is making a concerted effort to dumb down plot elements and to preemptively defuse some of the gender conflict that was canon to the series, which is understandable but I'm kind of pessimistic about their ability to do it without watering the whole story down? The opener for episode 8 just kind of gave me bad vibes across the board.

      posted in TV & Movies
      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: 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: The Wheel of Time

      @arkandel
      cat hiss

      posted in TV & Movies
      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: The Wheel of Time

      I'm wary of the Wheel of Time series, to be honest.

      I was able to enjoy the first three episodes. I don't think the more glaring changes that early in the adaptation were all that bad, though the fridging was concerning.

      As the show has progressed, though, the enjoyment has died down a little and my wariness has ramped up. We seem to be moving away from logical changes that make sense for adapting the text to screen to changes for the sake of (the drama of) them. Also seeing some of the subverting expectations for the sake of it thing that soured Game of Thrones for me.

      The plot's starting to feel rushed and I worry that maybe for a non-reader it's becoming a bit of a blur. I'm not really okay with a major part of the story they skipped recently, and while I think one could make an argument in support of the fusion of certain characters, I'm not personally a fan of it. It's kind of like fusing Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolores Umbridge into the same person; it doesn't really work because Umbridge is meant to represent an entirely different type of evil.

      There's also a major character that I think might be getting cut from the rest of this season and recast in the next and that's always jarring. I don't know. I'll ride it out but I'm afraid there's probably disappointment ahead. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe it's easing into becoming WoT fanfic rather than WoT adaptation.

      jaded

      ***=Clarification***

      click to show

      While I think there's a good argument for the apparent Elaida/Liandrin fusing, I think that having them separate was better. The tragic thing about Elaida is that she had "good" intentions, she was just wrong/not a good person/kind of wildly incompetent and authoritarian in the extreme. Her not being a darkfriend made her story infinitely more compelling than just rolling her into Liandrin.

      I'm also not a big fan of the skipping Caemlyn in favor of Tar Valon thing, though I guess it kind of naturally follows from cutting Elaida and some of the other changes. I'm just a big fan of the scene where Rand was introduced Elayne, Gawyn, and Galad but maybe they can recreate it in a future season.

      Apparently Mat's actor Barney Harris left the show and Mat won't appear again this season until he gets replaced by a new actor next season. Big sad because Mat was one of the more interesting characters and better actors thus far, which was kind of weird since in the books he was rather dull until book three or so. All of the changes they made for Mat as a character really hit well, I thought.

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

      @Ghost

      Yeah, I definitely agree and that's why I've been keen on the reset model for a long time. It also allows you to eventually close to new characters so you don't have the ones that die simply getting replaced without having a real sense of profound and widespread loss. That particular approach to storytelling was one of the main features that drew me to HorrorMU* and it works pretty well there. You're more likely to see players trying too hard to get killed than trying to avoid it.

      posted in Game Development
      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: What Types of Games Would People Like To See?

      @Auspice
      I remember that game! I never got around to playing it, and now I have all the regrets.

      @Roz
      Funny how that works out, isn't it? I had a sort of similar experience with the Xanth game that Auspice mentioned, insofar as I found the game, discovered there were more than three books, read most of the rest of the series that summer, and never got around to playing.

      @Too-Old-For-This
      Same.

      @bear_necessities
      Yeah, I'd come at the zombie survival game from the MUD side of things and had built and progged most of the stuff it would need to function on the RPI engine, but as my tastes and views on RP and coded environments evolved over time and I considered the necessity of a coder to solve some of the problems with an unwieldy engine, I eventually had to let it go. I'd worked in a lot of mechanics revolving around randomly triggered events to try and get people on different ends of the quarantined city to go out and take risks and run into each other, though. From swarms of zombies passing through to violent gangs, air drops, weather effects, military pass-throughs, etc. I think there were some serious flaws with my original conceptualization, though, and it definitely wouldn't have worked. I'm not as attached to the idea of sandboxes anymore as much as I am to games that reset frequently.

      posted in Game Development
      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: Things I've Learned Running Horror Mu

      @Jeshin

      Nah, I just picked The Killjoy as my Archetype.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      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: Optional Realities & Project Redshift

      @Thenomain said:

      I would like to note that the only reason I did so was because I was shown. When @crayon simply said I was an idiot, I did not say a damn thing.

      Hey man, I was trying to point it out as casually as possible the first time. I quoted it at you at least twice, so when you kept replying like, "NO MAN, YOU CAN'T COUNT. LEARN TO COUNT," I probably got a bit aggressive, because reading comprehension has been brought up a few dozen times in this thread and people persist in giving us zero faith and treating it like an us vs. them thing even when we're actually objectively correct, rare as that is. So if it felt like I was being a dick, sorry about that. I probably was.

      @il-volpe
      The reason we persist in the weekly updates is because not all of the content on OR is going to be interesting to everybody, but on occasion there will be something that is interesting to somebody who may not be a regular user. @Thenomain's gone out of his way to read at least a few articles and has even given feedback, and I appreciate that sort of discussion. Without updates I'm dubious that people who might be interested in some of the topics that get discussed would ever learn they're being discussed to go take a look. Weighing the harm of "Wah, something pops up in my unread feed" against the benefit of letting people who might be interested on a selective basis, and admittedly it's probably a tiny minority, know what sort of content we have in the event they're interested in reading it or discussing it, I'm going to favor the latter. If nobody at all here was ever interested in reading anything on our site it'd be a different story, and while a few of you have tried, I can't say I care for arguments based around universal disinterest.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      crayon
      crayon
    • RE: What is a MUSH?

      @Thenomain said:

      Yeah, something like that. Maybe there's more to a code-base than simply the code.

      Absolutely. I wouldn't call it definitive, though. There are plenty of cultural trends in code-bases that have contributed to their becoming both engines and, in a sense, their own genres. I definitely think this creates a lot of misunderstanding and confusion, but this is basically why I'm more interested, personally, in categorizing games based on their design approaches and philosophies and the sort of gameplay culture they're trying to build than by their codebase itself. While the codebase may or even oftentimes says a fair bit about the game, it doesn't always and it doesn't necessarily. If that makes any sense?

      I'd rather talk about a "Storytelling Game" or a "Hack-and-Slash Game" etc. than the MUD/MUSH classifications because while the latter can say something about the game the former doesn't really leave a whole lot of room for confusion.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      crayon
      crayon
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