Best posts made by faraday

@derp said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I don't even think this would be the first big fire that you'd have to put out. The first big fire that you'd have to put out is figuring out how every single job that a player puts in is going to be resolved before that player logs out.

I mean... just use Ares, have everybody make up a playerbit character for the OOC stuff, set all the 'cast' characters to NPCs, give everyone the control_npc power, and code up some kind of 'today I claim Bob' queue to say who can pose who. (Or don't, if you want a true collaborative novel approach, and just let anybody pose anybody at any time).

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but from a purely technical standpoint it's not all that difficult to execute.

@ixokai said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

Is this just me being weird? It might be. If I can't get an introduction to Bob over there I'm just not gonna permanently pay to talk to Bob. I won't. If I can't have even ONE SCENE, just one, or some other mechanism to just figure out if we click in RP at all? I'm NOT going to buy that bridge.

I don't want to speak for @Demiurge since I have no connection to this game (other than being stoked that somebody else is using Ares) but I think this comes down to the philosophy of why you're playing.

For many (most?) of us, RP is the whole point of the game. We log on for the sake of RPing - period, end. When we don't have any better RP on offer (plot, relationship, whatever), we fall back to bar RP because a) some RP is better than no RP and b) it can build up connections to cooler RP.

In an environment like that, obstacles to RP seem completely counter-intuitive and even annoying.

But what if RP were just a means to the end? What if the game had other goals (like exploring the connections between dreamscapes)? Then spending your limited resource to buy connections to strangers is not only desirable, it's necessary to play the game the way it's meant to be played.

That might mean it's not for everyone, but as with @Botulism and HorrorMU - I applaud them for trying something different.

@alzie said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

So we change to another data source, the popular idea so far seeming to be a database backed RESTful front end, but what do you actually want out of that interface? What should it do differently? It's still only going to have text to display to you. How should the text look differently? Yeah, we can do some better things with CG that way, but we could do the same things with telnet and pueblo.

A short list? I want, in no particular order...

• A GUI, so I don't have to remember/type obscure command-line syntaxes just to do everyday stuff.
• Standard text formatting like bold and italics and links.
• To edit a pose after I've posed it, like you can in any other forum or text chat program.
• Graphics embedded in descs and character profiles.
• An integrated MUSH and wiki so you don't have to update your wiki page when in-game data changes.
• To configure a game without /grabbing attributes in obscure formats off of obscure objects.
• To code in a normal programming language, not line-by-line interpreted commands pasted into a telnet client.
• To play with a decent experience from a web browser, when I'm not at my normal computer. (Which oh-by-the-way also works for new players who haven't downloaded a MU client.)

I could go on, but I'll stop there because isn't that reason enough?

A few of those things you can do crappily over telnet (witness pueblo, which never caught on because it was non-standard and clunky as heck), but most of them you just flat-out can't.

@demiurge said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

Yes. And a lot of them are very upsetting to a lot of people. But I've decided I'm not going to forbid the views of large segments of the U.S. population from having an IC presence in my game. I'm sorry.

I'm not telling you to forbid anything, nor am I judging you for allowing IC bigotry. I once ran a Western game that allowed historical attitudes and even subjected my own PC to heaping doses of historically-appropriate sexism. So really, I get it. All some of us are saying is, to quote Wizz:

@wizz said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

For the love of god man, if you don't want a meltdown, then put up a disclaimer.

Because seriously - there are a lot of MUSHers who don't want to deal with that kind of crap in their pretendy-fun-times.

You can yell all you want about how "it's just IC" but that's fooling yourself.

When you're a woman or African American or LGBTQ (or any other marginalized group) in real life and get subjected to hatred and discrimination all day long, the very last thing that a lot of those people want to do is have their avatars (who, quite often, fall into the same demographic as themselves) subjected to the same crap in their interactive fiction. So if you're going to require them to do so or else excuse themselves from the game, then that is the sort of policy that needs to be spelled out up front.
Otherwise I absolutely guarantee you're going to end up with serious drama sooner rather than later.

@Arkandel @Ghost I have immense respect for you guys, but the more I read the more I just think we come from polar opposite RP worlds.

The kind of metagaming you hate? I love. I view MUSHes not as games first, but as a collaborative storytelling community with some mechanics to keep things moving smoothly.

The key words there being collaborative and community. You can't collaborate if you don't metagame to some extent. You can't have a community if you have no connections to the other players beyond the IC interactions.

Now there's a disclaimer on that in that I think everything has to be justifiable ICly or it's cheating. If you and your OOC buddy have IC reason to team up? Go for it. If you read something in a RP log and say "Hey that sounds way cool I want to work with Ghost to get in on that". Awesome. Find a way to make it work ICly.

But if I read something in a RP log about Ghost plotting to poison me and somehow, for no sensible reason have my char decide to start poison-testing all her food? No, that's BS. That's cheating and it needs to be smacked down hard.

:helpless shrug: As usual, I'm in the minority. I'm just gonna go back to my coding hideaway for a bit.

@Arkandel said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

FCs like that don't belong in bar RP. If they are then it's a problem.

Kind of an ironic thing to say given that some of the most iconic scenes in Star Wars movies take place in cantinas.

But seriously - for those who think it's a bad idea for FCs to be PCs, or to be in everyday scenes, or to be less awesome than their movie counterparts, maybe just... don't play there? Constructive criticism is one thing, but I don't get the need to rain hostile critiques down on a game just because it isn't to your tastes. Especially on their own advertisement thread.

Constructive: "Looks neat, but I won't be playing here because FCs as PCs is a dealbreaker. I think history has proved that it rarely works out well for (these reasons)."

Not so constructive: "Having FCs as PCs is a horrible idea. They don't belong in everyday scenes. They should only ever be questgivers, period, end of discussion. This game is doooomed. But hey, good luck trying the same thing that 72 other games have tried and failed at. I'll just get the popcorn and wait for the Luke TS logs."

@thenomain The average rate for a seasoned programmer is about $50/hour IIRC, so it would not be unreasonable to charge anything up to that value.

Of course, those kind of rates would likely be beyond the budget of what most folks would be willing to pay for a hobby project. $1000 for a custom chargen anyone? Heh.

Which brings us back to the age-old debate about "fair value" vs "what the person can afford value" that tends to devolve into flame wars whenever people ask for people to work for below-market rates on hobby art or writing projects.

Which just leads me to say, in all seriousness (but probably not very helpfully): Charge whatever your time is worth to you.

@Meg If you feel that it would be courteous to ask before linking to something, that's certainly your prerogative to do so. Just seems like a strange thing to expect. I have plenty of MU resources (including now this one) linked from the AresMUSH site and certainly don't feel obliged to ask every individual creator if they're OK with me saying "Hey here's a helpful site, check it out". That's generally not how resource linking works on the internet. YMMV though.

@Ashen-Shugar suggested awhile back that I make an AresMUSH version, and I finally got around to it. See the Dealing with Trolls tutorial on the Ares website.

Seriously folks, can we not even have a discussion about freaking IP Addresses without resorting to name-calling and hostility?

And people wonder why some of us think these forums are toxic.

@kanye-qwest said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

What a rich and fertile ground for storytelling! Problem: no great setting or narrative element survives (a lot of) players. So if you do it well, and it's popular, you'll have people doing social scenes and bar rp and sleepovers, etc, in your stressful/limited/dangerous environment. Unless you have a team that can commit to offering NON STOP STORY to keep people from drifting into these comfort zones to amuse themselves. Maybe even if you do.

I've never understood this objection. Social RP is what drives MUSHing. Like... what do you think people should be playing instead when they log in 4-5 days a week? Scenes where they wander through the forest looking for berries? Or through houses scavenging for another can of soup? Boiling water? Tending crops? Day to day survival is tedious and freaking boring. I don't blame anyone for falling back to drinking moonshine around a campfire and socializing whenever there's a lull in the zombies/bandits/plague/whatever. I don't even find it that unrealistic - I think people in that sort of environment would crave connection and normalcy, or at least the illusion thereof.

@ominous said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

The popularity of Minecraft, Subnautica, Day Z, Ark, and Don't Starve contradicts your supposition that players avoid menial tasks.

It really doesn't. It proves the supposition that if you make the menial task fun or worthwhile then it's no longer menial.

@lotherio said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

It less a question of would it happen then someone defining theme differently. One person wants zombie apocalypse with bad hygiene, halitosis, and body bugs, someone else wants hollywood version where people can kiss even if there is no toothpaste left in the world?

Yeah I think this is the larger issue. I never played No Return, but I've seen the "people playing house while the world is ending" complaint about a number of games. Obviously players RPing wildly out of theme is a problem, whether that's folks acting like there's food enough for a banquet in a zombie game or folks walking up and hugging the queen in a L&L one. I fail to see how that's related to Social RP specifically.

@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

In other words geographical separation - or even isolation - in fantasy settings is often too big a factor to just discard... at least for me, others' mileage may vary. Without that regional fragmentation it's arguable events would (should) simply play out differently.

I don't think you're overthinking it at all. How different would Firefly have been if the crew could just zip around the galaxy with hyperdrives? How different would a Wild West setting be if you could take a train and be back in New York City overnight? This isn't just a matter of OOC inconvenience - it's a critical factor of what stories you can tell in that universe. I'm not saying you need to micromanage it, but a sense of scale is vitally important to maintain some degree of plausibility in the game's theme.

But OOC inconvenience is definitely a thing. @RnMissionRun brought up folks who wouldn't tolerate a 40 minute travel time. I would assuredly be in that group myself. I have a limited amount of time to play, and I'm simply not going to burn 40 minutes of it twiddling my thumbs waiting to play. Reminds me of the early MMO days where you'd have to get in the queue and wait 30 minutes before the game would even start. It was intolerable then and it's intolerable now. If it takes 40 minutes ICly, fine. But there's no reason not to assume that my character started their journey 40 IC minutes ago while I was logged off. As long as such a journey is plausible in the setting, don't put up silly barriers to people getting together to tell stories.

@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

If I don't then I'm bad and I should feel bad.

Or be up-front about it. "Look, this mission will take you guys off-grid for a week and you'll only have each other to RP with. You in?" The problems I've seen are not so much about occasional one-off plots, but occur when getting from A to B is a regular and routine part of the game (like on a Star Wars MU with multiple planet settings).

@arkandel said in Game Restarts:

But for most games creating custom code does take considerably longer than writing theme.

Yeah that’s been my experience as well. Game runners spend way more time on wiki and theme material than code. When the code takes ages it’s either because of lack of a coder with spare time (or lack of a coder period) or some extravagant vision for coded systems. The code for most games simply isn’t that complicated.

@arkandel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

@faraday said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

Haven't we proven time and time again that the community doesn't regulate itself?

I don't know that we have. I hope not.

What exactly is your definition of self-regulation then? Because people yelling "you're being a jerk" "no I'm not!" at each other until it escalates badly enough to get chucked into the hog pit is really not my definition of regulation.

Quiet admonishments to be nice only works if the people on the receiving end actually care. When the only consequence is the thread being moved to the free-for-all area, then there's actually no consequence at all to the offenders. The only consequence is that those of us who choose not to participate in the free-for-all area get cut out of the conversation.

@arkandel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

What I don't want is to make this forum unwelcoming to anyone who doesn't share my personal views.

But by allowing trolls to troll with thinly-veiled cracks, you're essentially making the forum unwelcoming to anyone who wants to have a non-troll-bombed conversation. That's where we are right now. The mods have to decide if that's where you want the place to remain. We can have another 20-page long thread about moderation but it really feels like we're just arguing in circles every time this comes up.

@auspice said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

The "ftfy" imo fell into attack on idea rather than person.
Which goes back to my: learn to tell the difference.

This is why I don't like the whole "attack the idea not the person" strategy.

Because the root of the concept is still attack. People don't respond well to attacks, and particularly when the idea is some deeply held belief, or the attack is "that's f-ing insane" then it's really really hard for even an even-keeled human being to respond to it rationally.

I prefer the The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse mantra of Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree.

We don't need to attack ideas (or people) with over-the-top baiting remarks or vulgar insults. We can be better, if we choose to be.

@deadculture said in Horror MUX:

I think HorrorMUX essentially proves that it's possible to make an episodic game that is enjoyable throughout limited runs.

TGG also proved it was possible over a decade ago. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but that's perfectly fine. As long as people are playing and having fun, that's what matters. Props to the game staff for trying something different though.

@apos Yes, I think "open" is a better criteria than "active". Players can judge for themselves if a game is active enough for their tastes.

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

No, Social Stats aren't 'magic powers' but people who lose dice challenges (Example: Intimidation to get somone to back down from a fight.) and then do whatever they want anyhow are called assholes and cheaters.

Do we really have to do the "if you dislike social stats you're an a-hole and a cheater" argument again? It's not about ignoring dice, it's about disagreeing about what the rolls represent. The whole "you can't kill a dragon with a toothpick no matter how well you roll" silliness. We've gone round on this one literally in circles on at least three or four threads that I can think of. Maybe we can just skip to the end where everyone leaves in a huff and save ourselves some effort?