@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
Because as you say, someone with 5 Reflexes and 1 Sword is just as skilled as someone with 1 Reflexes and 5 Sword.
That was always my biggest beef with WOD though.
Someone with Medicine 2 (First Aid) + Int 4 SHOULD NOT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM have equivalent skill to someone with Medicine 4 + Int 2. I don't care what the dice say - some skills have knowledge attached.
</petpeeve>
@Arkandel said in A fully OC supers MU:
draw from the established pool of superhero MU* players
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most of the established pool of superhero MU* players all about the canon characters? An OC game might inherently be targeting a different audience, and definitely has a different set of constraints because you've got folks defining their own powers instead of having a common shorthand of "It's Iron Man, duh".
@Macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
And, admittedly, 2 people saying "I'm not trying to judge, but it feels a little soon."
They're literally judging. Everyone's different. You do what's right for you.
Tangentially, this twitter thread describing grief as a ball in a box is the best explanation of grief I've ever seen.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
The subject is 'should skill descriptions be treated as rules?'
I think a better way to frame the question is: "when mechanics and fluff text are in conflict, which do you believe?"
Because really... how do you define "rules"? Lots of stuff in the player's guide describing a given nationality/clan/world/faction/classes/weapons/etc. is "fluff text". None of it has any mechanics associated with it. That doesn't mean it's not important, it just serves a different purpose. It provides information about the game world or - in the case of the skill descriptions - indications as to the game-designer's intent.
Do you really think the authors of WoD intended the guy with Medicine 1 + Int 4 to be able to do brain surgery just because he's got 5 dice? Or the guy with Piloting 1 + Dex 4 to be able to fly a space shuttle? I really don't. As a GM I would have absolutely no problem telling those characters: "Lol, no." And I daresay my players would agree with me.
@HelloProject Ruby and Python are pretty equivalent in terms of difficulty. Everyone's different, though. I personally picked up Ruby easier than Python - it just gelled more with my brain. But there are plenty of other folks for whom the reverse is true. If you can find a way of picking up Python that works for you, it's probably going to be just as easy as Ruby in the long run.
Here's the bigger thing though - the Ares web portal does a ton of stuff, which is why folks like it, but that comes with a lot of complexity. So if you're going to want to make significant modifications, the learning curve for the web portal code is WAY steeper than either Ruby OR Python.
Anyway - like krmbm said, feel free to hop onto the forum, or stop by the demo game to chat, or I can PM you an invite to the discord.
@hobos said in MUers in the news?:
It's like... stealing someone's appearance for pure aesthetics, with none of the burden of that appearance, and not even trying to respect its roots.
In a modern/real-world context I can understand that. But we're talking about fantasy settings here. The only "roots" are what you define within the context of the fantasy world.
It's just as easy to snap your fingers and say "denizens of Fantasyland have a variety of skin tones due to the mixing of various ethnic groups umpteen thousand years ago" as it is to say "Fantasyland is majority white and the only darker-skinned people here are foreigners or slaves".
If you're making your own personal novel/story/etc. and want to do some kind of discrimination allegory - I can respect that. But more often the white-washing of Fantasyland is completely unnecessary and brings nothing of value to the story. It's just implicit biases and assumptions at work.
What it does cause is that people who want to play non-white characters are forced to jump through hoops to justify their presence, made to play "the other" or face IC discrimination, limited in their opportunities to join the story, etc.
So like Ghost said...
@Ghost said in MUers in the news?:
Don't racelock your games, people. It's uncouth.
@the-sands said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:
I would dearly love for someone on the 'it's a rule' side to explain where I am mistaken
OK, new day. Let me try one last time, a different way...
It seriously depends on your definition of "rule", which is why I'm with @ixokai in thinking that the argument is a bit of semantic pedantry. So I'm going to answer the question in a slightly different way.
I think that the Player's Guide (any rulebook, really) contains different kinds of information:
If your question is whether the oWoD skill descriptions are category 1, then no - I don't think they are.
I place them somewhere between 2-3. I don't think they're just category 4 "fluff text" and here's why...
If Bob makes up his character assuming that Drive means "stunt driving" and I make up my character assuming that Drive means exactly what it says in the skill descriptions, then our characters are not on a level playing field. Same thing if Bob makes up his character assuming that Medicine-1 means First Aid and I make up my character assuming that Medicine-1 means "medical/nursing student". This can have impacts down the line if we try to use said skills and are told by the GM "No, you can't splint that broken bone / drive that stick-shift because you lack the requisite skill". It also effectively gives Bob more points for “useful” skills since I spent some unnecessarily to get basic driving and first aid.
I think that's a Bad Thing.
That doesn't mean that Bob is a Cheating McCheater because he "didn't follow the rules". But it does mean that skill descriptions are important and games should clarify what they intend the skills to mean if they're not going to follow the pre-written skill descriptions in the Player's Guide.
@Derp said in Hello!Project's Mysterious Game Project Thread:
I dunno, man. Xanatos's pad was pretty dope:
That is pretty dope. And hey, if you're happy with the castle/highrise Ares hybrid, go for it. It's open source. Go to town 
You could build a MUD or a super-immersive thing like Firan with Ares if you took enough of the pieces apart and reassembled them. You just have to ask yourself whether it's worth the effort compared to just building it in Evennia (which is an equally-solid platform more geared toward that sort of game).
@il-volpe said in MUers in the news?:
I've always found the "we don't allow concept Y because we can't think of a reason such a person would be in our setting" to be, eh, arrogant. As if game-runner being unable to think of a reason for a woman to be at Guadalcanal means that nobody can possibly think of one.
Sure, I don't like blanket prohibitions either. I think every character should be taken on their own merits. But at the end of the day, character plausibility is always going to be a judgment call.
With well-established settings, whether a concept did exist is often easy to establish. There were no women nurses at Guadalcanal in actual history.
It's when you ask whether a concept could have existed that it gets sticky. What one person considers a plausible explanation will tweak someone else's suspension of disbelief. Also, having 1 one-in-a-million character in your game may not be a big deal, but what if you have 10 in a small town setting? It can definitely have an impact on the thematic feel.
The main thing for me is to be careful that our bar for suspending disbelief isn't rooted in implicit biases or ignorance.
I'm not sure what value a few data points on a poll are. In real social media people fall all along a privacy spectrum, from "I'm a ghost" to "My life is an open book" and I would expect MU folks to be the same. I do think that the Bad Actor history of MUSHing does tend to sway people a little more towards the privacy side though.
FWIW, I fall more on the open side because I am a writer and it's kind of a PITA to maintain a separate identity for a pen name. I've found that my gaming and game-code experience is a selling point in my industry and not a drawback. But I get why other people are more privacy conscious, for reasons from industry stigma to security clearances to Bad Experiences.
Though I do think that many MUSHers are irrationally resistant to supplying emails. It takes sixty seconds to create a burner Gmail account for spam and even my mom has managed it. The entire internet runs off of email validation, and I seriously do not understand the resistance against it in MU-land.
@wildbaboons said in What's your identity worth to you?:
I don't mind sharing who my alts are usually, but so long as I am the one doing the sharing. It's why I wish the profile piece of Ares was opt-in on sharing.
There's actually a reason why it's not, which I bring up (even though it's kinda off-topic) because it may be relevant to @Arkandel's master plans.
Selective privacy is ridiculously hard.
Think about Facebook and it's gazillion privacy settings for who can see what. Have you ever tried to explain that to someone who isn't very tech-savvy? It's insanity.
In Ares, for instance, your handle appears next to your name on channels. <Public> Cate (@Faraday) says, "Yo.". If only some of the people can see the @Faraday bit it gets weird, because nobody knows who can see what. All it takes is one person slipping on channel: "So Fara - when will that be done?" and all of a sudden you're outed. Plus, as soon as you register an alt then the game admins can see it. And we all know that game admins are super-trustworthy about keeping alt info secret, right?
So after a great deal of prototyping and careful consideration, I decided it was best to make handles public and not give people a false illusion of privacy. The only safe way to opt out is to just not have a handle. Even having a handle but only selectively linking alts is not foolproof because your IP follows you.
Yeah, the whole point of Ares is so that people don't need to know code to run a game.
But it all comes down to what type of player experience you want. Sure, if you want to use a custom system (not FS3/Fate/FFG/Cortex, which are already built) and you want coded chargen/xp and automated dice rolling to account for modifiers, skill+attribute, opposed rolls, etc. you're going to need to write a crap ton of code. There's no avoiding that. But that's not the only way to run a game. Text or PDF-based manual character sheets and dice 2d6 works fine for some folks.
@icanbeyourmuse I think everyone is responsible for their own fun, but in a cooperative storytelling environment there has to be some degree of compromise. If the GMs aren't having fun themselves, swiftly you'll find yourself with no GMs. If the GMs don't run things that are fun for players, you'll quickly find yourself with an empty MUSH.
That said, I don't think every MU has to cater to everyone. BSGU was very combat-heavy and there wasn't much in the way of social/non-combat plots. (Of course there was social /RP/ but that's different.) Similarly, I can imagine a game that's 100% political/social stuff where all combat is off-camera with massive armies. There's nothing wrong with having a limited focus, as long as you're up front about it.
@Wizz said in Spitballing for a supers Mush:
what place would your typical shadowrunner have in a world where even as a team they are frankly outclassed by even a single lowest tier super? Why would you play as anything else?
Yeah it seems like an odd mix. What made SR unique over generic CP was the existence of the metahumans and magic. When you've got Dr. Strange doing his thing and The Thing knocking down walls... your Troll Street Sam becomes nothing more than cannon fodder. And dystopian all-powerful megacorps doesn't seem to jive very well with Superman.
Now OC supers in a near-future cyberpunk (non-Shadowrun) world? That would be something different without the problematic genre clashes.
@apos said in Make it fun for Me!:
Some games just can't decide if they are competitive or a collaboration
@apos That's a problem, sure, but even competitive games expect a certain degree of good sportsmanship.
@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
If someone is on the portal in a scene, but not logged into the game, they don't show up on +where.
I mean if that's a big deal, I can add a "In Web Scene" section to +where, but most of the non-grid scenes are typically private anyway. I don't really understand how that "actively discourages" people from using the grid? You can still wander to the grid and start your own scene?
@thatguythere Yeah, I think once you compiled the list of everyone saying what they think is a dreadful faux paus, the poor new player would be navigating an impossible minefield of things that might piss somebody off.
While that's probably an accurate depiction of the new-person MU experience, I don't think it's all that helpful.
@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
This is already how it feels on Ares games for synchronous players when they see a place that is heavy on private scenes, scenes that have been playing for weeks and such. It feels like traditional synchronous play is 2nd class citizen.
There is a world of difference between a codebase that gives equal weight to both styles of RP and PLAYERS preferring one over the other...
versus folks suggesting that the codebase itself somehow relegate one style of RP to the back burner because it doesn't count as their definition of "active".
@kanye-qwest said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
Why do people need to be logged in to the game 4-5 days a week?
Why shouldn't they be? The game is "on" 24/7 and some folks who have nothing better to do like to play when they can.
@kanye-qwest said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
I'm not objecting to social Rp. I'm saying some settings are damaged by it.
A solid 80% of RP on every single game I've ever seen is social RP. If you want to try build a game without it ... hey, go for it, but I don't really think it's practical. And I think that we've seen as much with every post-apoc game that's ever been attempted.
@ganymede said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
If you're running a post-apocalyptic game, survival is kind of important. Why overlook the struggle to survive by making food and water an after thought? You may not need to force people into a harvest mini-game, but threatening the PCs' collective existence should be part-and-parcel to how the game works. If not, then, again, I think you're missing a chunk of a game that could yield interesting RP situations.
Oh I agree that the struggle to survive should be a part of the game. But I think you need to address that in a fun and interesting way if you want people to engage with it. Computer games (not just MUSHes) have been trying to "force" people into menial tasks since the beginning. Players as
a general rule hate it. They avoid it whenever humanly possible and they resent it when it's not possible to avoid. If you can make a survival mini-game fun for the majority of the population, or if you can figure out a way to make "foraging for berries" interesting, then as @Thenomain said, there's no reason not to go for it. But taking something that the majority of your game's population isn't interested in (as demonstrated by what they are playing) and trying to force them into it sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
@TNP said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
With people logged on through the portal not showing on +where in scenes, you don't know who's in that scene. Maybe someone is there you're avoiding. Maybe +where shows 3 people but when you get there it's actually 7 because there's 4 portal people and it's too large a scene for you. This is one of the things I dislike about Ares.
That's a good point, and I can certainly look into that more.
The reason it works that way is because +where is traditionally designed to represent WHERE people are in the grid. The web people aren't really ON the grid.
So you can either:
a) Not show them in a room on +where (current implementation -- they show up at the bottom)
b) Potentially show them in MULTIPLE rooms on +where based on what scenes they're participating in. (ETA: which opens a can of worms because even people who ARE on the grid can also be in other scenes).
So in this example below:
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====
Ares Demo
-----[ Open Scenes ]------------------------------------------
#3 Sharkey's Bar Cate
-----[ Other ]-----------------------------------------------------
Web Portal Faraday[Web], Sara[Web]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3 Online 1 IC 7 Record
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====
In Ares, the scenes command generally gives you a better view of what scenes are going on. It shows you the scenes, status (private/public), who all is in them, whether they're online, when the last pose was, etc.
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
Scenes
-----------------------------------------------------
#3 <Open*> Organized By: Faraday Social 3m
Sharkey's Bar (Temp Room) Players: Faraday, Sara
Hanging in the bar. Come one come all.
Notes: Test
-------------------------------------------------------
Scene views: scenes/open, scenes/all, scenes/unshared.
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====
I think the scenes command is better for finding RP. Yes, it's different, but c'mon, it's one command: scenes versus where.
Also, players who like to grid-camp can still plant a flag in that list by opening a scene with a summary like the one above. "Hanging in the bar. Come one come all." Which I feel is better than just seeing somebody randomly on grid and not knowing their intentions.
@surreality said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
That not all games have the things they want does not make those games wrong, bad, or failures, they just make them not what that person wants, and they seem incapable of comprehending this.
Yeah, and the "logic" there is pretty mind-boggling.
It's like... "ZOMG look at the box office results, people! Comic book movies made eleventy bazillion dollars in 2017. Why haven't you nitwits figured that out yet and stopped making these lame art house films? Just make everything a comic book movie and all your problems will be solved!"