Best posts made by faraday

@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I want public scenes to time out rather quick. This is where people should be going for immediate RP right? But with private scenes, I'd be willing to tolerate a much longer time-out.

Open scenes can be slow paced too. @Auspice for instance ran slower-paced event scenes that spanned multiple days. There'd be nothing stopping players from having a longer-running slow-paced open BarRP scene that people could drop in and out of throughout a week.

While some folks may object to the existence of slow-paced open scenes on principle, I think the larger issue is that it's not immediately apparent from the scenes list which scenes might best fit your preferences. I'm working on making that better, but it's complicated by the fact that RP doesn't neatly fall into categories of "slow" and "fast". Everyone has different gauges and preferences.

@ganymede said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

Well, you are my hero, so this definitely works out.

:beam:

@ganymede said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

But, yeah. Like any RL relationship, set clear boundaries where applicable and don't budge.

This - 100%. I'm maybe not the best at enforcing boundaries soon enough, but I do have my limits. And I really do believe that a lot of the folks in this hobby who have boundary issues honestly don't realize they're doing it. I've been in a couple of IC relationships where the other player started blending IC/OOC too much for my liking, and I've found that a polite but firm "Yo, you're being creepy - I am not my character, knock it off" works wonders.

A lot of players are loathe to do this, but the drama caused by avoiding it far outweighs the potential drama caused by confronting the issue. And by confronting such behavior, you're saving other players headaches down the road. Consider it a public service. Player X being told a half-dozen times "Yo, you've got boundary issues and I don't want to play this relationship any more" sends a much different message than players just mysteriously bailing.

@ganymede said in MUSH Marriages (IC):

The worthy suitors and lovers will come by and enjoy the living shit out of you because, lo, you're being an adult in adult situations.

I tend not to do serious IC relationships any more. Been burned too many times by either players with boundary issues or players who just bail on the game without warning. (Like... yo, if you're not going to play that's fine -- but at least have the courtesy to write your character out and not leave somebody hanging.)

The only time it really worked out was on BSP. It's great when you've got two mature, chill people who are there for the story and not some sort of OOC relationship proxy. You can actually do dramatic, potentially difficult storylines without worrying that the other person is going to freak out or get OOCly jealous. Sadly, that's pretty rare.

@krmbm said in Game Pitch: Three Letter Agency (modern horror setting - X-Files, Fringe, Control, SCP, etc):

Isn't it still missing a web interface (at the very least for Chargen)? Pretty sure that's been the deal-breaker for most people.

It has the sheet display on web but no chargen.

But like... we haven't had web chargen on games for the last twenty years. That strikes me as a pretty bizarre deal-breaker if the system is otherwise a good fit for your game

@apos said in Favorite Minigames:

Definitely correct me if I'm wrong since I don't want to misrepresent your position, but it sounds like the objection is against anything that represents alternate advancement because it undermines the focus on RP by getting people invested in some kind of progression for characters that aren't narrative/story focused, in a video game-ish way.

That's a fair assessment. And it's definitely a style thing. Again, I'm really not trying to cry 'wrongfun' here on anyone. I realize that the consent-based narrative style of RP is a dying breed in MUSHland, but that's the kind of MUSH I "grew up" on and that will always be my ideal. (Which may seem ironic coming from someone who designed skills and combat code, but I see those things as necessary evils for my game-running sanity.)

But anyway -- yeah, things like checkers or BSG pyramid/triad code would be harmless diversions. I'd rather just wing it, but if someone wants to use it in a scene it's not going to send me running for the hills.

The systems I dislike are ones that supplant the story, get in the way of telling stories, or limit imagination in ways that I find a hassle. A few examples:

• As @Lotherio mentioned, I've been on several games (including SW1) where people were so focused on the trade/economy minigames that it supplanted RP. People were off doing code-y things and just not involved in telling stories.
• I've been on games resource management systems that got in the way of telling stories. "Oh I'm sorry, I know you have this really cool plot idea involving finding some meds, but you failed your +scavenge roll so sucks to be you..."
• Some folks have mentioned outfit code. While I don't have an issue with this as an optional system, I get really annoyed when I'm forced to +buy and +wear crap just to avoid my character running around naked. It's a hassle. It adds absolutely nothing to the game for me and it's just a drag I have to worry about.

Now as @Arkandel mentioned, some of this is down to crappy minigame design. But that ties into my other issue with all of this...

MUSHes are run by hobbyists. Players now not only expect these volunteer admins to be their personal GMs, constantly feeding them plots, and interpersonal-conflict mediators, but now they also expect them to be expert game designers building fun and engaging 'minigames' (and coding them, too, of course)? Look at some point enough is enough.

(ETA: This isn't a knock on game runners who want to do these things. More power to them. It's the player-side expectation that grates on me and again has led to game-running burnout for me and others.)

@L-B-Heuschkel said in What do player-STs need?:

I need to not feel that anything I do may result in angry forum posts or retcons or otherwise having staff telling me I am not doing things the way they want. If this is the case, I very quickly stop doing things at all, because I'm not on a game to cause trouble. I will read the framework put to me before I do things, obviously -- but I have, once, been on a game where the message was 'go do all the things', and then every single time someone did, there were 'please don't do those things' from admin staff. That wilts an urge to be proactive fast.

There are good player STs out there, to be sure, and you definitely want to encourage those with positive feedback.

But unfortunately there are also a lot of folks out there who are only in it for selfish reasons (Get All The Things with minimal effort), aren't interested in following the theme, or can't plot their way out of a paper bag (I'm talking far beyond the typical Hollywood Plot Hole here). There's no way to legislate common sense in a policy, so sometimes it's inevitably going to result in corrective discussions, forum posts, or - in extreme instances - retcon. That's just part of running a game.

It's a hard balance to strike, maintaining continuity, theme and fairness without discouraging folks in the process. You can try to be positive and encouraging, but some folks are just going to take it hard no matter what you do.

@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

Hell I remember back in the day on some WoD games where all the sudden a person would be ambushed, and miraculously people who were all the way across town at the time it happened showed up!

But that's BS even if the person happened to be in the next store over. It's not an issue of travel times, it's an issue of people abusing OOC knowledge in a metagamey way. And it's easily regulated by storytellers/GMs/admins saying "Uh yeah... no."

Either a scene is open or closed. Either it's plausible for your character to be there or it isn't. If the scene is open and it's plausible for you to be there - then there should be no reason to prevent you from joining, even if you happened to log off across the galaxy.

Now "plausible" takes many forms. Is your character's bank account tapped out because you've made three trips to Coruscant already this week? Were you RPing on Yavin IV earlier this morning and couldn't possibly make it back there in time for this scene? Do you have no sensible reason to be in a backwater cantina on Tattoine? These are all valid reasons to keep somebody out of a scene. But "you didn't press the right keystrokes to get to the right place at the right time" is a BS reason for preventing someone from telling stories on a storytelling game IMHO.

Star Wars as a whole has a big fanbase, and people like it for all kinds of different reasons.

While certainly the Jedi and smugglers are a big draw for many, there are definitely those who are more drawn in by the rebels. And yes, the SW TTRPGs are very gear-oriented and the SW MUs are traditionally code-heavy, but there are plenty of SW discord RPs and Storium games and such with no code/gear/etc. whatsoever.

I think the trap many games fall into is trying to appeal to everybody in order to maximize audience. It's okay to have a smaller game, as long as you can get a passionate group of players and keep them entertained.

@thenomain said in Game Restarts:

What's your best game-restart experience?

TGG. It's famous (infamous?) for the "blink and you die" PC turnover during the first WWI campaign, but that actually toned down in later iterations (with PCs essentially having multiple "lives"). What really defined the game for me wasn't the deaths but the fixed-length campaigns with a restart in-between. You maintained the (admittedly small) core playerbase, but it didn't get stale because there was always a new setting and a new mix of characters and relationships. I was one of those who grumbled about having to start with a new character every time, but even I sucked it up and had fun. Like - you can't do Guadalcanal forever. It's cool, but it gets old eventually. I think most MUs suffer that problem even if they don't want to admit it.

I don't consider a timeskip to be a restart, but I think it's another way to shake things up. We did it successfully on Battlestar Pacifica because the game was ending and we had a specific finale in mind that would have felt forced if done in the IC present. So we mirrored the show and did a "one year later" timeskip. There was some grumbling, of course, but most folks did pretty well with it. It gave them the chance for some big character changes (marriages, babies, promotions, job shifts) while still maintaining the core of existing relationships. And it set us up for a pretty cool finale.

I tried the one-year-later timeskip again on Sweetwater towards the end of the game's tenure in an effort to rejuvenate a stale setting. I thought going through a boomtown sort of thing would bring new life. Didn't work, but I think that was more to do with player apathy than player anger about the timeskip.

Battlestar Unification went through several mini theme-resets as the crew shifted from being crew on the Galactica, to being part of a special operations force on a smaller carrier, to being part of a base cadre, to being guerrillas stuck behind the lines. While I don't consider these restarts, I do think that this sort of shakeup helps to keep a game from getting stale.

@zombiegenesis said in Interest check: Early Rebellion SW game:

C-gen is done on the MUSH, a sheet can be accessed through the game or through the web portal, and they use a basic dice command for rolls.

A bunch of games have done something sort of similar now - PDF or off-site sheets just referenced from the game, coupled with a generic die roller. There's a plugin now that lets you do that with (hopefully) minimal seams.

If you're looking for 100% web portal integration with coded dice commands and web portal c-gen, I'm still not sure how it'd be more complicated than most other systems out there.

It's not that it's MORE complicated. But what you described - even just for an in-game command-based chargen and die roller - is a ton of work. I poked at it briefly because the game interested me, but it was just gonna be more effort than I have to give right now.

TTRPG systems generally do not adapt well to MU code. They're too fraught with special exceptions and things that are easy for a human to handle but a PITA to program. Like "You get 6 dice but you can take some number of them and break them apart into 'pips' for a +1 or +2.. but not +3 because then that becomes the next die level..." Or "Everyone gets 12 dice for skills...except FooAliens, who get 14 dice, but have to spend 2 of them on knowledge skills..." (I made that one up) They're designed for people led by a governing GM, not for automated systems. It can be done, sure, but it's a pain.

And if you want coded space and blaster objects and stuff, Ares isn't the right choice anyway.

@surreality said in Real life versus online behaviors:

@mr-johnson That, IMHO, is just a matter of adhering to the rules of a space. Which I'd call a good sign, not a bad one, really.
We should all be trying to do that.

I would disagree with that. Just because Facebook draws its line at "as long as it's not hate speech, you can be as cruel to each other as you want on this platform", does that make it okay to be cruel to strangers on the internet? IMHO no. Being a decent human being is a more-or-less consistent bar to clear no matter what rules a given online space may or may not have.

The title could maybe use a facelift - why do people think Ruby is harder to learn than python, or something. But the first paragraph does seem to clearly frame it as a Ruby vs. Python/softcode question.

I think it's also useful to note that within programming education circles, there are some languages that are objectively considered easier for beginners than others. (to reiterate - easiER not EASY).

This could be due to features of the language itself (a strongly-typed language like C# has extra hurdles than a weakly-typed one), the environment needed to run it in (Javascript can be experimented with straight in a browser using tools like jsfiddle), and other factors (block languages like those used in Scratch and code.org are visual and great for beginners).

There's not universal agreement on this, of course, but there is general consensus. And from that angle, both Ruby and Python are considered good "beginner" languages. No programming educator on earth would recommend starting off learning programming with a Lisp-based language like softcode.

(Site note: That doesn't mean softcode is a bad language - on the contrary, it's quite impressive and serves its intended purpose well. It's just such an unusual paradigm that it's not a great foundation for learning other programming languages. And I think that's why people struggle a bit with the softcode->Ruby/Python transition.)

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Because if you fail your character doesn't typically end up in jail (fatal or truly bad endings don't happen very frequently) but there's a worse hell than that for PCs to end up in; irrelevance.

And there's an even worse hell than irrelevance: embarrassment. Because @Apos is 100% correct that the overwhelming majority of players would rather be banned for a meltdown than see their character suffer a humiliating setback. Which is ironic since many of the heroes they're emulating did just that in the stories (Luke in Empire Strikes Back, much?)

It's good to say that we want to make people more amenable to failure, to cater to the people who are, but how is the million dollar question.

@reason said in Games:

So only configurable in a sense of the word that includes hacking apart the parser.

I mean... the parser, hundreds of commands and help files... I genuinely cannot fathom why you would want to do a massive amount of work, take a step backwards in usability, and alienate many/most existing Ares players, all for no tangible benefit. But technically, yes, it's possible.

@betternow said in Games:

The games are both Ares, but their CULTURES are entirely opposite. That is in no way due to the codebase, but to the staff and players and how they prefer to play.

Exactly. Though to be fair, it is somewhat related to the server. Before Ares those async players would've just been out of luck and had to take their game-related RP off the game. So would many of the work/school-slow players.

And they did! Through the years, I have had so much RP over google docs, email, private servers where we could just stay logged in for ages posing intermittently, even LiveJournal (to date myself). Async and slow-paced RP on MUSHes has always been a thing. The only thing that changed with Ares is that now that RP is happening on the game. And since it's easier, more players are taking advantage of it to play in a way that's more convenient for them.

Which seems like a really weird thing to get upset over honestly.

@Ganymede and co. please feel free to move like the last page or so of posts to a different thread. "Why are so many new games Ares" or something. I feel bad threadjacking but it's an interesting convo.

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem.

That's not been my experience, sadly - or the experience of a few other folks I know who were new to MUSHing. MUSHers often offer help to other MUSHers, sure, in terms of theme or code questions specific to a given game. But I haven't seen that extend to hand-holding brand new players.

I'm not saying people will start screaming in their face or anything, but I've seen a lot of intolerance to little stuff - like you said, the newbie who enters a scene all "Hello friends!", or who forgot to page before entering a private room, or who asked too many MU-101 type questions on the public channel and got snippy responses. These are the things that swiftly turn into active or passive avoidance, which makes it that much harder to actually find RP.

@apos said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I think it might be fair to say that a large percentage of players join a game because they have friends there that also help them get acclimated to a game and provide them a foundation of RP that they can then develop from.

Agreed. The only people who have a prayer of getting over these barriers are the ones who have existing relationships to help them. But I thought Ark was asking about bringing in people who didn't necessarily have that life preserver.

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

Like you said, it's kind of hard to avoid 'dogpiling' if your definition of dogpiling is 'multiple people disagree with me'. I don't feel that to be a useful definition.

For me it's more about the way multiple people are disagreeing.

If it's six people all making rational arguments like "Have you considered..." or "I see it differently because..." then you can push back against claims of dogpiling.

But when it's six people with variants of "OMG are you insane?" and "That idea is the worst thing ever!", mocking the idea or ripping it to shreds with malice, then it can absolutely feel like being set upon by a wolf-pack.

@thatonedude said in Do we need staff?:

Allowing PCs to spend XP, gain XP, and to automate tasks that don't REALLY need someone to manually process means players don't have to wait for manual review/setting by a person and means staff doesn't have to do /busy work/.

I think that's something a lot of folks don't get about FS3 -- The system is designed to enable games with a solo staffer. Most apps take 5-10 minutes (depending mostly on how long their background is). XP spending is automated. Combats can be run by anyone without the "but wait, how does this power work?" stuff. Sheets are public to enable PC storytellers and there are commands to roll for other people and whatnot. It's not a perfect system by any stretch, but it's really good at letting staff be hands-off about apps/skills/combat.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

...and a tight, easily-understood theme.

This helps a ton too. "Here's a city - go wild!" opens up a lot more potential for player craziness than "You're all pilots fighting Cylons on a space carrier and here are the kinds of missions that you're doing right now." TGG was the same way with a laser-focused theme and tight-knit group of characters. There are tradeoffs to this in terms of pigeonholing players, so it's not for every game. But it does make it a lot easier to keep things from going off the rails.

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

It's not weather you 'like' them or not. Social Rolls are part of the game as written.

And the effects of social rolls are governed by the GM's interpretation of what should and shouldn't even be possible given the situation at hand. Those are actually the rules as written, and that is the key piece missing from the argument that social rolls are a black and white "play by the rules" issue.

But again, we've been over this here and here and here and those were just a couple dedicated threads, not even counting all the side tangents on various other threads.

So to @Ganymede's original question - you'll never get people to agree. Just make the game you want and folks will self-select to play or not play.

@kanye-qwest said in Historical settings:

Not even remotely. But I think straight up comparing a work of fiction to interactive fiction where there are multiple people taking part and playing single characters and investing emotion into those singular arcs is a false equivalence. It is absolutely not the same thing.

I respectfully disagree. To use another example - actors engaging in interactive fiction in improv troupes has a lot in common with MUSHing. A given group may create boundaries of what stories they're going to tell for the comfort of the group, and that's totally fine. They may avoid historical settings with particular hot-button types of characters for that very reason. But I think any acting troupe worth its salt who decided to take on a historical setting would acknowledge that they're each playing characters and that their characters' views do not equate to the views of the actors.

ETA: The tone of the story is important too in this discussion. Dr. Quinn, for example, was a very family-friendly show that probably wouldn't have offended a lot of people. But even there they addressed bigotry and the treatment of Native Americans inherent in that historical setting as important parts of the story. It was done with a light touch befitting the audience, but it was still there. Reflecting the historical time period doesn't have to mean people running around yelling slurs left and right.

@kumakun said in What drew you to MU*?:

Another problem with the PBEM model, if one important person goes missing the whole story crumbles. I love how MU*s can continue and even thrive as individuals are active or not. The possibilities for storylines are endless!

Yep. The scale works in favor of MUSHes. If one person drops or is on vacation that week it's (generally) not the end of the world. The on-demand access to entertainment 24/7 is part of what sets it apart from other forms of online RPGs. It's also why MUs pretty much need a critical mass of players to function. Without that it becomes more like PBP where you're constantly trying to catch up with a few specific people.

@paris said in What drew you to MU*?:

A lot of us MUSHers are disabled or struggle to get out of the house in general

This. It's a social activity that you can do from home. You can get a similar experience in MMOs with guilds, but MMOs are grindy and guilds are more hit-or-miss than MUSH communities. Also, if I AFK for a few minutes to take care of my kid during a MU scene, people pose around me. If I do that in a WoW raid, everyone dies. (LoL my char was never important enough for that. But the analogy still holds.)

@tat has done a lot of snazzy work integrating the magic system with FS3. Kudos. Good luck!