Best posts made by faraday

The game wasn't perfect, but Andi and Orion surely tried. They were two of the nicest staffers I've come across. Even when I was criticizing some of their decisions, they were receptive and good-natured about it. How often do you find that particular trait among MU staff?

And yeah, I think centering plot around their PCs was a thing early on, but they seem to have deliberately made an effort to tone that down in the latter 2/3rds of the game's tenure. They were more foils than stars while I was there.

So say what you will about the game itself - heaven knows it frustrated the heck out of me sometimes - but I don't agree with all the bashing of A&O personally.

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

The grumpy old people clinging to outdated foundations and standards.

Then web-mu is definitely out of bounds

But if you instead define it as:

• an online multi-player text-based RP community
• where time in the game world passes at some constant ratio relative to RL time and
• where roleplay can happen 24/7/365 in elements called 'scenes' and
• which typically incorporate elements from tabletop RPGs, like skills system, but not full automation (like a MUD)

Then sure, why not have a web MU?

ETA: That was a MUSH definition so I guess general MU* would be even broader. You hopefully get my drift.

Yes as well. "Out of sight, out of mind" is definitely a big issue for me. I never knew it could be related to ADD. I can't rely on calendar apps. I need one on the wall of my kitchen, at eye level, in a place I pass multiple times a day. And I also need sticky notes plastered over everything.

@sparks I like your example much better. Churros for everyone!

@gasket said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

In my opinion, things don't tend to improve unless people speak up when they think they see a problem, and aren't told to pipe down because it might be a little mean. I suppose your mileage varies from mine.

There's a difference between saying "pipe down" and saying: "hey, how about conveying your points with more empathy and less hostility". But apparently our mileage does vary.

@Lotherio said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Taking onto feeling of big versus actual grid big. Most of those follow one group/crew, there is lots of new planets, but the central focus is a space port or ship or some such.

I think this is an important point. Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars (within a particular set of movies), etc. - they had the whole galaxy as their playground, sure, but the story being told focused on a group of characters who were together in that playground. (Occasional side quests and away team missions aside.)

There are TV shows that can make disjointed storytelling work - GoT for instance, where characters are quite often in completely different parts of the world doing their own thing. But on a MUSH, that physical separation limits the population of players you can RP with at any moment, and imposes additional burden on the storytelling staff, who now have to manage multiple parallel storylines/casts.

@Ghost said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

So if I'm right, this has less to do about the desire for coded space flight, but the desire to move away from light systems in favor of something crunchier and more technical.

I think this is at the heart of the issue, yeah. I was talking to someone about that demo Firefly site I set up, and we got to talking about the fact that it doesn't have a gear system. But the thing is - a gear system can't exist in isolation. What does the gear do? How do you acquire the gear? You go down that rabbit hole and pretty soon you're talking a fully integrated economy/space/weapons system. There's nothing wrong with that, but these systems need to be in balance somehow.

@Wretched I never understood those questions. People plan? Like, their lives? My brain doesn't even comprehend how that's a thing people do.

@ixokai said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Or I'm an idiot, quite likely. But that's what I hear to those words.

I seriously did not mean to be passive-aggressive and I certainly did not mean you're an idiot. You replied with a number of particularly emphatic points that sounded to me like you were stating them as objective fact. I was merely attempting to say that we have different opinions based on our experiences.

But this is kinda exactly the sort of thing I'm complaining about. I state an opinion about the generic hobby as a whole and get comments like "I have serious questions about your experience and history elsewhere" and a personal rant calling me passive aggressive. Seriously?

@meg Glitch certainly deserves kudos for designing such a thing (nice job, Glitch!), but I'm confused why you think they would or should ask if he wants it linked. It's a public resource, and it's up to the forum admins to determine which resources they want to allow easy access to for the community.

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either. (Weirdly corrupt favoritism aside.) You see the same thing in MMOs with coded economies too. People with more time on their hands end up with a decided advantage over casual players pretty quickly. That's what I remember from my brief excursions into sim-based MUs early on -- feeling the grind. Nothing against folks who like that style of game (or want to run that kind of game), but if I want a grind, I'll go play a video game. (Or not, since I don't much like grindy video games either.) I do MUSHes to tell stories.

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

Is that... not a thing for most people?

It is not. I learned that sensory processing issues are common in ADHD (one of the overlaps with autism spectrum). I have the same feelings Auspice described, as well as a general aversion to anything tight-fitting or itchy. Actually 'aversion' feels like too mild of a word. More like: "AAAAAAAH GET IT OFFF!!!!" I loved softball, but the uniforms (those stiff itchy poly ones) were sheer torture.

@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

But at least it helps, y'know? Knowing you aren't alone.

Totally.

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I'm still gonna go with 'a bunch of my (anonymous) friends agree with me!!' is always a bad argument. They're not relevant as long as they remain anonymous.

Look I don't know what you want from me here. It's not like I can provide specific citations to dozens of conversations had across a fifteen year period. They're relevant to me even if they are not compelling evidence to you.

I like to discuss things about MUSHing. Not just "game design" but random stuff like "What's your favorite scene" or "What would you like to see in a Shadowrun game" (which is not exactly design-by-committee but could spark some ideas) or @Arkandel's recent post of "How do you create your characters".

It saddens me that some portion of the players in this hobby feel alienated from these boards - and thus from the "cross-game community" that @Arkandel mentioned - because of the negativity here. It bothers me that I feel like I can't express a dissenting opinion without getting pounced on, as has happened in this thread. If you want people to post more constructive stuff, there has to be a constructive environment to post in.

Various people have said "Well if you don't like it, leave". Which maybe is the only answer here. But given how small the community is already, splintering it further doesn't seem like it really does us any favors. And frankly it's depressing that the response to "Can't we all just be civil to each other?" is, essentially, "No - so quit your whining or leave."

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

I don't consider the above 'benefits'; I consider the ability to tell stories with others -- as GM, without a GM amongst players with understood parameters (adherence to policy and the system and the game reality of the setting), or GMed by either staff or players as either is willing or able -- the point of being somewhere in the first place.

That's how I feel as well. I don't want plots or ranks or skills to be behind a pay-wall; I just want a place where people (including myself) can tell stories.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

This means you can do what Apos describes quite well: reward the behavior you want to encourage, whatever those behaviors may be.

The behavior I want to see is players who don't need to be bribed to play the game. That's why my games have extremely minimal incentives.

Funny enough - even with those extremely minimal incentives (like getting "kills" in battle or medals for valor in missions or even meaningless cookies for scene participation), people still manage to gripe about "it's not fair - he got more than me". That sort of behavior really does not incentivize me to create more OOC incentives.

@ashen-shugar said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Sure it does. But most highly professional jobs don't have this as HR tend to go down on them like a ton of bricks.

This. You can't prevent people from being jerks. What you can prevent is people displaying jerkish behavior in your space by being intolerant to such shenanigans.

That said, we had like a 50-page thread on this very issue not that long ago and the overwhelming sentiment was that folks relish having a place where they can display jerkish behavior in peace.

@krmbm said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

If you try to moderate that away, you wind up like IGU: Dead for years, and no one gives a damn.

Yes, some of us give a damn. We've just been outvoted. (to wit: look at the poll)

+1 for Digital Ocean. If you use my referral link, you get a month free (and I get a referral bonus). The only thing with DO (or any VM) is that you need to be responsible for security updates yourself.

Rhost, Evennia and Ares are all good codebase options, but they offer different things.

• Rhost offers a more traditional MUSH environment, including the full softcode experience.
• Evennia is a great building kit for building exactly what you want with a modern codebase (Python+Django for web).
• Ares is a MUSH in a box with an integrated website/wiki. It gets you going quickly, but may be more work if you want something very different than what comes in the box. Also, Ares is still in beta. It's very stable, but be prepared for some bug-related updates.

I have a more detailed server comparison here.

@krmbm said in Hosting and codebase recs:

If you don't want to use FS3, you can take it out and replace it. This may not be easy, but it is doable. Or you can just turn it off if you're going stat-free.

You can turn off FS3 with a mouse click. Plugins for Fate, FFG, Cortex and a simple Traits system are easy to install. If you want something else, you'll have to develop it from scratch, but that's true no matter which codebase you use.

Just saying... The Shopping Cart Theory is Ableist.

There are many reasons why someone may be unable to walk the extra five yards to return a shopping cart that have nothing whatsoever to do with their character.

I myself have done it on occasion - for instance, when my kids were very little and it was winter out, I would buckle them into their car seats first and unload the groceries second. I wasn't going to then take them back out of the car and repeat the whole car seat shenanigans if the cart return was too far from the car. (I tried to park very close to the cart returns for this reason, but that wasn't always possible.)

There are millions of parents in this same boat. To say nothing of the other millions of people with chronic fatigue, depression, mobility issues, or a whole host other physical and mental challenges that might turn "push the shopping cart an extra 5 yards" into a monumental challenge.

Yes, it's nice to return the shopping cart when you can. But quit judging people when you don't know their struggles.

@thatguythere said in Regarding administration on MSB:

If you want a board with the level of discourse seen on game channels then it is a given that we will never be happy on the same one since games channels to me are only useful for the occasional Hey anyone want to RP? shout outs, otherwise they tend to been dead silent or filled with nothing.

I didn't mean literally just the "<Public>" channel - I meant public chat channels in general. And perhaps our experiences have been different. I've seen numerous games with chat channels filled with constructive policy discussions, theme discussions, code discussions, and chats about everything from healthcare coding to superhero movies and sports teams. Occasionally somebody goes overboard, but for the most part these conversations are civil and harmless because many (most? I hope?) staffers don't tolerate anything different on our games.

@apos said in Earning stuff:

And the trick is reconciling those two, does that sound right?

I think some people are going to perceive themselves as being treated unfairly no matter how detailed your rules are. So for me it's more of a philosophical difference than a matter of goals to be reconciled IMHO. I don't mean this with any disrespect toward @surreality's approach. We just see the problem differently.

If your system does have clear-cut steps to earning something (1 XP per week, here's what it costs to raise things), then by all means spell it out. But if it all boils down to staff judgment calls, I think that trying to spell out how you make those judgment calls is just inviting people to become nitpicky rules-lawyers when a call doesn't go their way.

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@krmbm said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

[citation needed]

http://www.oocities.org/idealisticgamersunite/

The "OMG somebody tried this once 15 years ago and it didn't work therefore nobody should try this again ever" argument is getting tiresome. Games and forums fail for all kinds of reasons.

And frankly, if the community can't manage to have a forum without being awful to each other all the time? Then that says something about the community.

@surreality said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@shelbeast I think that's more or less what @faraday is doing with Ares. I think.

Not exactly, but that's mostly because the overwhelming majority of MUSHers have indicated that they'd abjectly refuse to play on a game that was entirely web-based. Heck, a non-trivial number of them refuse to play on a game with a mandatory web presence at all.

Ares has tons of stuff available on the web - chargen, bbs, events, mail, combat, help, character profiles, logged and auto-cleaned scenes, admin jobs and config, and more. But the game is still principally played in a MU client. Not because it needs to be for any technical reason, but because I actually want people to play it.