@Ghost said in Not even sure what to title this, but here goes..:
Arrrrresssss issss the gooooood offff waaaaaar and weeeeelcomes attaaaaacks.
Lol yes.
But really, keeping yourself anonymous on games has been an uphill battle for 30 years for anyone who does the Social Thing at all on a MU (which is most people). Ares is just trying a different approach of encouraging (but not requiring) transparency instead of whisper-campaigns of "I wonder if that's so and so from such and somewhere."
@Lotherio said in How to Escape the OOC Game:
I concur, and I don't think I meant to imply people only play with known others. I did concur with @Rook such that I've seen differences where if no one knows me, I get less RP (sometimes none), and if I am myself I get a little more RP. Correlative, but not direct statistical relation, certainly not equivalent; didn't meant to imply some slippery slope there, sorry..
Just to be clear, I'm not disputing your basic point about getting more RP when people know you.
I think the "ideal world" I'm talking about is a little different than what we've had before, though. It's like that George Carlin quote: "What is an unknown person? Surely everyone is known to someone."
In the old-school MU world, your only identity (unless you labeled and broadcast yourself) was Bob@ThisGame. You're an enigma. Enigmas can be off-putting, especially when so may folks have been burned by creepers in the past.
But with something like the Ares handles, you you at least have an identity as a player. A profile. A history. Even someone who hasn't RPed with you might have crossed paths with you on some game in the past, or at least be peripherally aware of who you are in the community. They may not know who you are, but they have some inkling of who you're not.
Like @Ghost said, I don't think that player identities is some magic bullet solution for all social ills, but I do believe it's a net benefit.
@surreality said in X-Cards:
if staff won't ban for that kind of RL-targeted aggro behavior, get the fuck off that game and burn the world setting in your client like a bridge to ne'er deign cross again.
That's where I think the hobby can improve. Staff needs to make it clear that setting boundaries is okay and then enforce that to a reasonable degree.
I say 'reasonable' because I do think there are some gray areas. "I don't want my character to be choked" (a very specific attack) or "I don't want to be in a scene where my PC has to react to a suicide or a dead child" (a fairly uncommon plotline) are things that you can reasonably work around.
But it would absolutely not be reasonable for me to sign on to play on a WoD game and demand "I don't want my character to interact with any supernatural stuff" or to play on a BSG game and claim that I'm triggered by PTSD-related war situations. Sometimes the game just isn't for you.
@mietze said in GMs: Typical Player/GM Bad Habits:
Unless you are the ONLY person running events and stuff though, I'm not sure you should worry about doing something to fit everyone's style.
Even if you are, you shouldn't worry about doing something to fit everyone's style. It's okay if a game is not for everyone. Nowhere did staff sign up to say "I must entertain everyone who logs into my game equally". Fairly, yes, according to whatever rules you set forth for your game. But as I remind my kids daily, "fair" is not a synonym for "equal".
@Ganymede said in Empire State Heroes Mush:
no conflict resolution system is free of staff adjudication, so it all falls to staff to figure this stuff out, make the rules, and stick them.
Yep. I will say though, echoing what @ZombieGenesis said earlier, as staff, I think stats can help reduce some headaches.
When players can't agree and call me in to sort out the mess, they generally react better when I tell them to roll some dice vs when I just say "Arsenal wins". Either way the loser grumbles (because if they didn't mind losing, they wouldn't have needed to call me in the first place!) but I'll take "your system sucks" grumbling over "clearly Arsenal is just your favorite because he's your buddy" grumbling.
But the presence of stats doesn't really help too much for players sorting things out amongst themselves. Sometimes, sure. But usually low-stakes things don't come to rolls at all, even on a stat-based game.
@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:
So you're telling me that Ares says that functionality is being withheld unless you engage with a system? Because this does not sound like a neutral informative.
Oh for goodness sake, it's not withholding functionality. You make it sound like a punishment. You can't do functionality like "reviewing prior poses" unless you first LOG those prior poses. Similarly you can't have the game save the log to disk for you at the end of the scene, if you don't let the game keep the log in the first place. That's just... obvious. If you enable a scene log, you enable additional functionality that is not possible without one.
Starting a scene (aka log) is completely independent and orthogonal from whether you then share that scene when it's over, which is what was originally the topic under discussion (sharing OOC information, like logs).
@Bad-at-Lurking said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:
Eh, experience is lovely, but talent and enthusiasm are more important in RP. And reliability. And sanity. And ... a lot of things, come to think of it.
This. I don't care how old somebody is as long as they can RP decently and aren't a creeper/jerk OOCly.
@gryphter said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:
If I'm a Corporal and there are Captains and senior NCOs around, mine is not to 'lead the way' (at least until I'm ordered to).
Even when there's no implied IC hierarchy, the first person to respond to a plot often sets the tone / takes the lead in some fashion. This has an aspect of leadership to it, and many people are reluctant to take on a leadership role. It's easier to just react.
In this vein, I see this 'nobody wants to go first' phenomenon less when I bake the leadership into the scene set via a squad leader or some other kind of authority figure. Then you're not just setting a scene, you're giving some direction.
@gryphter said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:
being the one to do this every time is also not a good look.
Also this. It's like in school if you're always the first/only one to raise your hand. At some point you feel like an overeager show-off.
@Seraphim73 said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:
most of the poses are going to flood in between 10 and 15 minutes.
That might be part of it, sure, but I know that there have been numerous times where it's stretched on well past that mark, to the point where I'm internally thinking 'Oh FFS would someone pose please?' until someone breaks the ice. Then there's a flood at the 20-25-30 minute mark. I really do think people are waiting.
@Auspice I think in large part it's just a universal 'nobody wants to raise their hand' thing, because I see the same thing in Storium. The sets are perfectly clear, and many times the characters are even doing their own thing so there's no reason not to go independently. But the silence will stretch on until finally I'm like: "FIIINE, I'll go first." Because I really don't mind doing it (it actually helps me, so I don't have to keep it in my ADD-fragile 'pending todo list' column), it just gets tiresome and self-conscious always going first.
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
We need to stop calling everything to a halt to go 'No! That's not the term I use!'
I'm less concerned with the word than the behavior itself. (Shared terminology is nice and all, but that's not what defines a culture.)
Take one of the examples @Ghost used: metagaming.
I don't think our clashes are over the definition of the word, but the behaviors surrounding it. One game X, it's perfectly legit (even encouraged) to look at someone's sheet/wiki, pick something out, and use that as a hook to generate RP. "Hey our chars both surf - let's do a surfing scene." On game Y, that exact same behavior would be scandalous. On game Z it's not even a concept because they don't have public sheets/wikis/etc.
You could say the same about scene organization, pose order, background writing, consent... pretty much every aspect of roleplaying I can think of. That's what I'm talking about when I say that the culture is wildly variable across games.
@Auspice said in Consent in Gaming:
man how many times did the Trio get chewed out in Harry Potter?
And those scenes are important to the story. If you never saw Starbuck getting in trouble on BSG, then you could walk away thinking what she did was acceptable.
Also just to note - the original point was about opting out of anything embarrassing or humiliating for the character. This could mean anything from a prank to an argument with a SO to disciplinary action. I saw that as a general theme for avoiding RPing out negative consequences. It's not specifically about getting reamed out by a boss.
@Ghost said in Privacy in gaming:
Telnet is the current MU standard, replaced in every other industry by SSH around 2005 due to horrific vulnerabilities.
SSH won't protect you from the game owners snooping though. It falls into the same vein of Gmail employees reading your emails, Discord employees snooping on your juicy gossip, or Ark & company here on MSB choosing to sell our emails. The only thing really stopping them from doing so is their own internal policies. That only goes so far.
The GDPR theoretically applies to MUs and provides some data protection "rights", but good luck getting that enforced. Or even understood.
I think that any reputable MU should have a privacy policy and informed consent via some sort of 'terms of service' acknowledgement. While I don't think it needs to be as elaborate as, say, Blizzard's Privacy Policy, it should set expectations. Blizzard is very up-front that chat logs, etc. ARE logged and subject to review for abuse and whatnot. That doesn't stop people from playing WoW.
The difference between Blizzard and your average MU is accountability. If some Blizzard employee is discovered getting their jollies by snooping on random chat convos, they're going to get fired. We lack that accountability on MUs because - as someone pointed out on the other thread - MU players generally tolerate that kind of nonsense and continue playing even after such abuses are 'outed'.
@Jeshin said in Privacy in gaming:
I still just assume every command I enter include quit and RP posts gets saved to a runlog somewhere even though I've been assured in multiple threads that isn't how things work in MUSH circles.
It can be. Even if the game server doesn't let you turn on full command logging with a switch, it can be done. Bottom line: if you're sending data to the server, then the owner of the server has access to the data. It's what they're gonna do with it that's the interesting question.
@Arkandel said in Privacy in gaming:
It's fair to argue most people would find the idea of being recorded without their knowledge in a house they're visiting to be disturbing, creepy or at least frown on the idea of such a practice.
Would they? Judging by the trends in smart home security cameras, I think we're on our way to an era where being recorded in someone's home is as much a presumed non-event as knowing that I'm on camera when I walk into Wal Mart.
If you're not talking about laws, though, you're talking about social norms. And judging from the replies on this thread, there is quite a bit of variance in what players expect.
I put together a general privacy article for Ares games if anyone's interested. (Feel free to send me any comments on things I've missed, explained poorly, etc.)
In the next patch it'll be available on the games themselves in 'help privacy'.
@Thenomain said in Punishments in MU*:
Which brings me back to the question: How are not earning and losing all that different?
Basic human psychology?
The guy who had a million dollars and then went bankrupt is going to react very differently than the guy who never had any money in the first place. Even though in the end both of them end up with nothing in the bank.
I am genuinely not clear where you're going with this.
@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
MU can't seem to decide if these are RPG games where the systems matter, or if they're just writing with systems used for dispute resolution. (RPGs with writing or writing with some RPG systems thing).
I don't see why this needs to be a global decision. Narrative->System is not a boolean but a continuum. I agree that each game needs to be clear about where it falls on that spectrum, but that decision doesn't need to be the same for every game.
My games are heavily consent-driven, but not entirely. When you join a combat scene, you're implicitly consenting to injury and trauma. If you mouth off to the CO, you might be demoted or brigged. If you choose to commit treason and get caught, your character is probably toast. Death is only one type of consequence, and its minimization does not equate to the absence of all risk.
@Ghost said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
If a brand new PC is allowed to join a 3 year old dinosaur PC in going into Leviathan to fight Pinhead himself and death is only on the table for the new PC if they choose it to be, then does power level TRUUUULY matter?
Sure it does. Because if the new PC is just ineffectively whiffing in the background while the high-level characters do All The Important Things, that's not fun.
You see that sometimes in my combat system. Instead of matching targets based on skill (as a TTRPG GM might, or a writer crafting a challenge that includes both Thor and Black Widow), you can easily end up with a rookie pilot trying to take down a Cylon ace and being entirely ineffectual. Sure, it's IC, and it can drive "hey help me out" type RP and whatnot, but it can also be frustrating.
@Arkandel said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
So does the existence of PvP/PK and/or a +warn mechanism relate to whether the power curve is normalized (and where) on a game?
I think it does. It's like how many (most? all?) MMOs do level-bracketed PVP. It isn't really fair or particularly fun if you've got lvl 1 people going up against lvl 100 people. But how do you do that in a pure open world like a MU where anybody could be pitted against anybody else at any time?
That's one of the reasons why I warn people in the game design section of the FS3 docs that it isn't well-suited for PVP games. The way chargen is structured, it allows two people to spend an equal number of points but walk out of chargen with essentially different "power levels". That's OK when one of them is the rookie under the wing of a veteran against a common enemy (as long as the rookie doesn't feel completely marginalized/useless in plots, as I mentioned earlier) but it's not particularly fair if you are putting them against each other IMHO.
I mean there's always the "life isn't fair why should the game be" mentality, but I'm not a fan personally.
@Groth said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
For a long while now I've been a fan of the idea of keeping the power level of PCs relatively level while trying to find ways they can feel they're shaping the game world itself.
I think FS3 games show that this philosophy can be successful. Anne and Bob may start out at different levels, but we're talking "rookie vs veteran" degree of difference here, not "Darth Vader vs Wedge". And the level difference depends more on where you started than how long you've been there.
You can start with level 6 (out of 7) in both Piloting and Gunnery if you want, yet you don't see Viper pilot players leaving in droves like: "Wellp; I've maxxed out my skills. There's nothing more to do here." There are other ways to measure achievement -- story arcs, relationships, thrilling heroics, even to a lesser degree medals, victory tallies and promotions.
Getting back to @Arkandel's original questions, I don't think there is such a thing as ideal power level as a universal constant. I think that there may be an ideal answer for a particular game depending on what kind of game you're trying to build.
It largely comes down to preferences and learning style.
Some folks prefer to just take a basic intro like Try Ruby and then learn the rest by tinkering. The Ares coding tutorials are a good starting point once you have the basics of the language down.
Others would rather take a more in-depth Ruby course, like the ones at Udemy, Pluralsight, CodeAcademy, or many others. I don't have any specific recommendations on that front.
It's worth noting that if you also want to make web portal modifications, you'll eventually need to learn Ember Javascript in addition to Ruby. But it's suggested that you get familiar with the MU-client side of things first before diving in to the web side.
I'm not sure what you mean by "while actively constructing the game". Unlike other MUSHes, Ares comes with much of the code you'll need out of the box. So you can still play, chat, etc. while you're off crafting whatever skill/magic/etc. systems you want custom for your game in a separate test/development instance. Typically you'd make sure the code was solid and well-tested before 'promoting' it from the test instance to the real game. So you can definitely do that in parallel with setting up the wiki, building, configuring the plugins, etc.
@Darren said in Well, this sums up why I RP:
When I first got into MUSHing, it was an attempt to replicate the tabletop gaming experience I lost when I went away to college and was separated from my gaming group. I quickly figured out that that RPing online was a totally different thing from the tabletop games I was used to.
That's pretty much how I started as well. I do like TTRPG, but it's a wildly different experience.
But from there, my early games were mostly lightly or no-coded, cooperative/consent story-focused games. We just hung out and told stories. Sometimes we'd use dice or skills to figure things out, but often not. As @L-B-Heuschkel alluded to earlier - it's a creative writing outlet that's more social, more chill, and more immediately gratifying than writing alone (which I also do).
That's not to say that these places were grand utopias - people are people, and petty drama can happen anywhere. Every few years I get burned out by something and take a little break, but I keep coming back. Because on the whole? I've met lots of good people and written (yeah I'm still sticking with that one) lots of cool stories with them.
