@Ganymede Because players throw fits and cry foul when their McAwesomePants character fails at something if they can't "see" the actual die results.
(They sometimes throw fits anyway, but slightly less often.)
@Ganymede Because players throw fits and cry foul when their McAwesomePants character fails at something if they can't "see" the actual die results.
(They sometimes throw fits anyway, but slightly less often.)
@Jeshin Lots of dice code has that baked in though. It might say "Jeshin rolls Athletics - Great Success" or "Jeshin rolls Melee and gets 2 successes" or something like that based on the system. You don't have to provide the raw dice results to provide meaningful output. But many players still want to see the dice.
@Carma Not really interested in debating it. There are plenty of articles on best practices in command-line interface development if you care to read more about it. Also, yes, this is off-topic but the mods are always free to migrate the posts to a different thread if they care to.
It's absolutely reasonable to clarify expectations, and that sort of thing is the intended purpose of the scene notes field.
I've played Storium a bit, which is entirely async, and i've noticed that the most successful games are ones where they post and enforce expectations of regular activity. (By enforce I mean moving the scene on without them if someone doesn't make a move.)
@squirreltalk That is a game-configurable option. Some folks like the pose breaks; others prefer the unbroken flow and find the breaks distracting.
Most games, I've found, leave it off. I don't know if that's a conscious mirror of the old wiki style, a widespread preference, or simply an unawareness that the feature even exists.
@carma said in A healthy game culture:
That depends entirely on the community that gets fostered. If you remove people who express poor sportsmanship, then you'll have a game with close to 100% good sportsmanship.
When "sportsmanship" is exhibited outwardly in terms of penalties, rules, etc, then I agree.
But unfortunately most of the "poor sportsmanship" equivalent on MUs is more subtle than that, and is nearly impossible to police in the same way you can in other venues.
@mietze said in Battling FOMO (any game):
Which means that I'm not sure you can really truly eliminate that through policies.
You can never eliminate fear. And as Gany points out, you can never eliminate the inevitability of missing out on some percentage of Things.
You can only do your best to ensure that people have a chance of being involved, so they are not actually missing out on everything.
It depends. Do you care about tracking wounds and healing? How complex is the game system you're trying to model? How often are combats likely to come up and what will the scale/scope be?
A big dogfight on a BSG game or an assault on TGG? You'd be insane NOT to have a full-fledged combat system. It'd take all day to resolve one scene and it would be a tremendous burden on your GMs and players.
A duel on a low-stakes swashbuckling game? Who needs stats at all?
So I don't think this should be up to player preference of vanilla vs. chocolate. Different games have different needs.
@Arkandel, I think the strict dictionary definition certainly applies in many cases (emphasis mine):
a narrow exclusive circle or group of persons; especially : one held together by common interests, views, or purposes
This is distinct from what I presume @Thenomain was referring to as "play groups", which would be a non-exclusive circle or group of persons.
Having a lot of cliques can be very detrimental to a game, since new players just throw up their hands and leave when they can't break into RP.
At the same time, I think cliques are a natural part of any social endeavor. And frankly, if I choose to log into a game just to play with Bob and Harry, who are my best buds from elseMU and we've got our own little plotline going on that doesn't readily open itself to strangers, that's my prerogative. It may be a DUMB prerogative because eventually we'll get bored playing with just each other or Bob will idle out and then our story will be up a creek, but it's still my prerogative.
Most of the apocalyptic games I've played on have suffered from what I'll dub Isolation Syndrome. When new players arrive, there's no easy place for them to arrive from. They often have to play the "I've been here all along, really" card, which can be awkward for a new person. When players inevitably idle out, there's nowhere for them to go. You're forced to roster/NPC them or kill them off.
I've had some experience managing these types of themes, but I'm looking for other peoples' insights. What's worked well, what hasn't?
(Btw, "never run a game like this" is not very constructive. It's just the only option for some themes.)
@ThatGuyThere said:
Thing is I don't mind being the pilot/Driver and quite frequently make that.
What i hate is being not that guy but having folks trying to guilt me into blowing points on a skill I will never use for the nebulous reason of "you should have that."
For me it's not a question of guilt it's just a question of consistency. When I review character sheets, it is mainly with an eye of "do you have all the skills that a character with that background should have". For me, it's not a nebulous reason - it's 90% of the review process.
Why? Because for me the primary purpose of character sheets is to reflect your character. If they don't do that... if they're just "hey this might be useful someday so I'll take it", it bothers me.
Not saying it has to bother anyone else; we all have our pet peeves. But that's what I do on my games.
Side note: Even if Drive isn't an action skill you can still take it if you want to be the wheelman.
@Coin Well if someone comes into with the assertion that PrPs are horrible, then I think it's important to be on the same page as to what it is we're talking about.
@ThatGuyThere It depends on what you look for in terms of justification. Improving a skill at "hobby" levels was basically automatic when I did it, unless they were trying to do something weird like pick up Fighter Pilot when they're a doctor At higher levels, it's more about time and training, so no amount of goofy justification would help if they didn't have the IC experiences to back it up.
@Thenomain Yeah when I said the "FS3 codebase" I was talking about the Faraday Code. People started calling it the "FS3 code" even though it's more than just FS3. :helpless shrug:
Anyway, it's a pre-loaded database that has everything already set up just waiting to be configured, including FS3. That's what I used to help @tangent set up the Marvel game.
I mean, yeah, you've still got to configure it but that's no different than your WoD setup right? You don't have to write new code to switch it over to Game of Thrones or Wild West, you just change the weapons and skill list.
And it's modestly plug-and-play-able. For Marvel, I removed maps and groups and a couple other things they didn't need just by running +uninstall. It's not perfect, not by a long, long shot, but I think it's pretty close to what you're describing.
@Caryatid said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
It sounds unfun to me but it isn't inaccurate by RL standards.
Except that the idea of a Golden Hour has been disproved as a myth. Response times matter, but it varies widely. For a cardiac arreat, it's more like a Golden Ten Minutes, with bystander CPR being a huge determining factor.
For a game... yeah, sure, do whatever you like. But there's no real basis in reality here.
(Paramedic and former medic instructor here)
@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:
You do have a lot of the great globals that seem standard plus a lot of your own that, including some of the new standard globals like tracking PB or porting to wiki. I admit I used it for Realms, but stopped at FS3 to make something towards the Chaosium d20 for the stat code.
Thanks. But yeah - that's what I was referring to about the system being plug and play to an extent. You can ditch or replace FS3 or pretty much any AddOn and it'll work OK. Changing the Core packages can be done, but you have to do some surgery to resolve the dependencies that other Addons have on them. So it's not completely plug-and-play, I get that. My only point was that even having a MUSH-in-a-box softcode package still doesn't help people get over the installation and configuration hurdle, nor are they comfortable managing it without a coder.
@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:
Without any risk of death... what is there to really fear in the ruins of your destroyed society? 'My stuff might get stolen... but its okay because I'll somehow get new stuff so I won't die of starvation' Where's the risk? Where is the ACTUAL risk?
You're equating OOC risk with IC risk. Just because you, the player, know that your character won't die doesn't mean your character knows he/she won't die. Think about an author writing a novel or a writer on a TV show. They know exactly what's going to happen and yet they can still manage to have characters react appropriately to the situation and exhibit the necessary angst and pathos.
Now maybe you haven't ever experienced that working well on a MU*. That's fine. But I have, so I reject the assertion that it's impossible. Just this past month I killed off a beloved NPC and spurred a lot of RP about it because people did care.
It's okay if people play differently. I've played on games with PC death. I had a character on TGG get blown to bits because I AFKed to get a snack while in the base and there was an artillery strike. I lost a Star Wars character to one bad Athletics roll and got sucked out of an airlock. I once participated in a PK plot to take someone out. I respect these styles of play, even though it's not my personal playstyle. But it doesn't feel like people are extending the same courtesy to the opposite point of view.
The interesting question would be, do females names RL also have that tendency?
In modern day America, yes. For example: "Baby girl names ending in a and ah are climbing the popular baby name charts with no signs of slowing down, so choosing a baby name like Ava or Hannah will give you top baby name that is sure to stand the test of time. " (source) Just look at historical "top 50 female names" lists like this one from the 1950's and you'll see tons of ones ending in -a or -ah.
@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
So let's say all of the great players are playing your friends. In fact everyone is friendly to each other. Now, obviously you can have as many scenes with these guys as you want - there's no reason not to - but what are you going to be playing about? If all challenges come from the environment then the game is stagnant in the absence of someone playing its elements.
Sure, that relies on having something in the environment or NPCs to react to. But I've seen that work successfully an awful lot more often than I've seen people play healthy IC antagonists (outside of short-term 'bad-guy' type plots). And I'd personally rather a game stagnate and die if I don't feed it enough than have it blow up spectacularly due to OOC drama. YMMV obviously.
FS3 is designed around the concept that you should be able to make a skilled veteran right out of the gate. Now it's configurable so not all games use it that way, but that idea was central to its design. Many of the Battlestar games have used it along with a hodgepodge of other MUs (Game of Bones, 100, Wing Commander, at least one Star Wars game, etc.).
Because you can start high, XP is intended to be superfluous, and the slow advancement pisses some people off. Also some folks don't like it because not everyone starts out "even" in terms of their power level. But both of those things are by design, so c'est la vie. Can't please everyone.