Best posts made by faraday

@marsmrsmars said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

@Groth said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

I'm not seeing people express the idea that Hirohito wasn't actually all that bad as much as I see the expression of the idea that the characters wouldn't be aware that Hirohito was actually that bad.

Really?

@juneko said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:

don't see why there is any hand-wringing about ex-IJA characters.
Second of all: people in this thread are weirdly veering toward outright revisionism whenever they question whether or not Hirohito had any involvement in his country's crimes.

I can speak only for myself, but I am certainly not wringing hands or attempting to defend Hirohito or the IJA's war crimes in any fashion. I don't even play on the game, so I have no vested interest here one way or the other.

My point earlier was about a general cultural perspective. Someone said that learning about IJA war crimes is "elementary school history" but it isn't - at least not universally in America. I'd venture to say that the average American knows almost nothing about the Japanese war beyond the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Holocaust is discussed extensively in our schools. Nanjing is maybe a few sentences in a chapter somewhere.

Again, I'm not saying this is right or fair - just that it's reality.

Then there's the Hollywood portrayal. Here's an interesting commentary on the recent movie Midway:

As a historian, the most interesting thing about the recent Second World War blockbuster Midway is director Roland Emmerich’s portrayal of the Japanese enemy in a largely sympathetic light. Nowhere is this more apparent than the parting dedication onscreen: “This film is dedicated to the Americans and Japanese who fought at Midway. The sea remembers its own.” ... The Japanese are depicted as courageous, professional sailors fulfilling their patriotic duty, in some cases nobly sacrificing themselves for a cause that they believed was just and honourable.

This is a general trend in Hollywood, no more apparent than in the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, which presented the IJA perspective in a mostly favorable light. It won widespread critical acclaim, including a nomination for Best Picture.

Knowing these cultural factors at play, I can completely understand how somebody might want to play a "noble Japanese soldier" PC on a MUSH with no ill will intended.

Knowing a fair bit about the Pacific theater myself as an armchair historian, I can also completely understand why folks would be upset by this. The author of that Midway article mentioned as much as well.

Clearly, Emmerich’s own familial experiences and position as an ‘outsider’ helped engender this perspective. However, this characterisation is sure to test the limits of empathy for many audiences, who will view the entire exercise as somehow seeking to gloss over Japan’s reprehensible record of wartime atrocities.

I think the seasonal association is akin to the reasons why networks don't generally re-run holiday episodes of TV series out of season. You won't see the Christmas episode of Grey's Anatomy airing in the middle of the summer. Some would enjoy it (Christmas in July!), others might not care at all, but some find it downright jarring. It's all just personal preference.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in The Fate of MUSHdom:

the MudConnector is still pretty widely used as a search engine for players just looking for games. It could be better maintained than it is, but I feel like there are more usability and cultural hurdles for new players than there is a real problem with not having a dedicated MU listing.

Spot on. Especially since Evennia and Ares also now have automatic game directories. I don't think finding a game is the big hurdle here.

The bigger issue is getting a game off the ground. Just within the Ares community, there are 10 never-launched games for every opened one. Some moved on to other platforms, which is totally cool. But a good many of them gave up before ever getting their game off the ground.

There are lots of reasons why:

• Building a game is a lot of work for a hobby activity.
• Staffing is overwhelming and they don't have enough support.
• MUSHing is fraught with interpersonal drama and they get discouraged.
• They have expectations of what code they want that even Ares' complete game-in-a-box design can't satisfy, and no ability to realize their vision.
• They start working on the code but it's just too much work and they eventually burn out.

Making these issues better will result in more games. More games will provide bandwidth to absorb more players. Only then might it make sense to talk about casting a wider net of general recruitment.

Just as in Penn or Tiny games, it depends entirely on the game's customs, the people involved, and the expectations. There is no one universal constant.

On my last Penn game, I had scenes with Friend A who'd pose once every couple hours. I had scenes with Friend B who was on a different timezone and we'd pose at each other via Google Docs once every couple days. I had scenes with Friends C & D who'd pose maybe once every 30 minutes. And I had scenes with Friends E & F who were super-fast short-posers who'd pose every five minutes.

I played with all of those same people on Ares and the timing was exactly the same. The only difference was that Friend A no longer needed to worry about keeping a connection open for backscroll, and Friend B and me no longer needed to use a G-Doc because async RP can happen within the game itself.

If more non-live scenes are happening on Ares, it's not because of the server it's because the people involved have been using other tools (like G-Doc or whatever) all along, and now they just have an in-game vehicle for that type of RP.

There are already web interfaces for MUs. Ares has a robust web portal. I know there's been some click-and-go experimentation with Evennia but I'm not up on the status. Some MUDs have a pretty intricate web UI. I don't think having a web interface is a "deviation from the source material in a major way".

There are other obstacles to getting new folks into MUs though beyond the interface, as we've described ad infinitum on other threads here. Here's one. I know there are others but I'm too lazy to look them up now.

@SixRegrets said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

If there was a site like MUD Connector for MUSHes, it'd help, but the current situation of those sites existing and having the next generation of MUSHes (Ares) not speak MSSP and etc in favor of the AresCentral directory is not helping anyone.

I would have to disagree there. The Ares and Evennia game directories absolutely help players find games. The Ares one makes registering as easy as ticking a box in your game configuration, meaning that virtually all Ares games are listed. (As opposed to something like MUDConnector where you have to go out of your way to submit an ad.) Evennia also makes it pretty easy to activate a game registration AFAIK.

Sure it would be nice if there were a centralized MUSHConnector, but someone would have to build that first. And if they did, I would desperately hope that they'd do so with a modern web-based API geared towards the information actually relevant to MUSH games, and not the ancient, MUD-oriented, telnet-based MSSP.

MUSHes historically don't get a lot of traffic from MUDConnector, because it's mostly used by MUD players, but you can still list a game there. Even an Ares one. Most games just don't bother.

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.

You seem to be assuming that there's no way to make it easier to be a producer, or to make it easier to 'sell' someone on the hobby. I would argue that the development of new platforms like Ares and Evennia have the potential to change both of these foundational assumptions.

Will they? Only time will tell.

@carma said in Interest in Cyberpunk MU*?:

Have it call up a board menu where I can choose like...

MUSH commands certainly have a learning curve, which can be daunting for new players. I think web interfaces with intuitive buttons/prompts are the future.

However, when talking about command-line interfaces, menu-driven systems like the one you're describing aren't really considered among the best practices.

A menu-driven system is cumbersome (requiring multiple prompts for every activity), inflexible (you can't switch to doing thing B until you're done with the prompts from thing A), and confusing (you have to remember what step you were on to give the next prompt).

In contrast, it might take you some time to get comfortable with the fact that the mail syntax is mail person=subject/message, but once you do, it's a much more efficient. And you can easily switch gears between reading a forum post and talking on a channel without having to remember which command menu you're in.

If we were starting from scratch, an "ideal" MU command-line interface would probably look more like common script CLIs with named parameters:

mail send --subject Test --to Harvey --body This is a thing

But we're not starting from scratch; we're dealing with a user base that's been typing +mail person=subject/message for thirty years. So that's an important consideration.

@tinuviel said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Like a film. It's not my responsibility to tell the cinema that I'm triggered by X, it's the cinema's job (by law or regulation in most places) to tell me what I can expect. The same should go for plots and events.

I agree in principle that providing content warnings like films is a good idea - I said so too. But there are several important limitations to it, which is why I feel it's more of a courtesy than a safety net.

• Even the regulated film/TV industry can't agree on how to use content warnings. There are several systems in use in the US alone, and inconsistent application. (What exactly is "graphic" violence? Reasonable people will draw the line differently.)
• Since most MUs are effectively TV-MA (mature audiences only), many of the TV-based content warnings would be considered covered by the underlying rating. You don't usually see "suggestive dialogue" or "violence" tags when something is intended for mature audiences to begin with. That leaves you with only a handful of content descriptors, (e.g., rape, graphic violence), which don't cover a lot. There isn't one for "child tragedy" or (to use @Arkandel's example) "underwater horrors".
• MUs are improv, amateur events. It's just not the same as a film being reviewed for content tags by committee.

So yes - if you know something is liable to potentially trigger somebody, give them a freaking head's up first. That's just being a decent human being. But I think the film analogy only goes so far, and I don't think it's fair or reasonable to subject GMs/game-runners to the degree of content warning rigor that even professional film industries can't get right.

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

It's the inter-personal relationships I enjoy the most as a player -- and yes, I realise what that sounds like, but I'm not talking about TS. I like getting to know other characters, to form bonds and connect.

Totally. If you throw a bunch of people who don't know each other at all into an adventure, it can sometimes work out, but often it's just a bunch of awkward. It's much more interesting when there are connections between the characters, and you only get that through the in-between RP.

There will always be writers and there will always be gamers, so I believe there will always be a future for the intersection of writing and gaming.

Will it be MMO huge? No, of course not, but RPG crossing play by post boasts 40k PBP players, there are tons of MUDers, Storium has another few thousand... so I don't think text-based roleplay is quite in the realm of steam engines either.

Bit late to the party here but I wanted to chime in with another perspective.

AresMUSH is a MU server I'm developing that's similar to Evennia. It also does not support Softcode, nor are there plans to ever support it.

Why? Because Ares is not intending to replace existing MU servers, but to provide an alternative.

If you're happy with softcode (or are willing to learn), and/or allowing players to tinker with code in-game is a necessity for your game, then Penn/Tiny will meet your needs just fine.

But if you're like me, and would rather gouge your eyes out than look at another line of MU softcode, then an alternative like Ares or Evennia might be a good choice for you. (Ares uses Ruby, FWIW).

Or if you're not a coder, have no desire to be a coder, and just want something that supports basic RP-MUSH features out of the box with minimal configuration - Ares might be a good choice for you too.

Evennia is a much broader platform meant to support a wide variety of server types with different needs. Ares has a far narrower focus for lightly-coded RP MUSHes.

They're just tools. Pick the right tool for your job.

@tinuviel said in The Desired Experience:

I honestly don't get where people are getting that from. Either as an expectation, or that I've said you have to play with everyone.

I mean, you said...

Everyone is responsible for everyone else's fun, to a point. If a player mentions that they're not having much fun, then do your best to accommodate them in your play

Maybe that's not exactly what you meant? But that certainly states that I am somehow responsible for Jane having fun on the game to some extent, and I'm emphatically disagreeing with that point. Jane is responsible for her own fun. I am not obliged to "do my best" to accommodate Jane in my play, because it's a game. If all I want to do is log on and play with Bob--if that's all that I have the time and energy to do, or if that's all that's fun for me? That's enough.

Is it nice to help Jane have fun? Sure. Is it good for the game when people do it? Sure. But that's a very different argument than saying I'm "responsible" for it.

@ominous said in The Desired Experience:

I would count "logs other people can read" as being an analog to "talking to others at the potluck," so my statement would not include such an example.

Take away that specific contribution, and my point still stands.

Even if someone logged in and never spoke to a single other person besides their one BFF, never posted a single log, never participated in a single plot, etc., if they and their friend are playing the game and having fun then that's enough of a positive for me.

As @Ganymede and @Sunny pointed out, everyone has their own unique circumstances. I don't understand what is to be gained by judging people and booting them out for failing to live up to some arbitrary expectations of what you think they "should" be able to give.

(ETA: Talking about a generic PC here. I can understand exceptions for featured roles and such where they may have signed up for specific responsibilities as part of taking the spot.)

@tinuviel said in GMs and Players:

But I'm of the view that if it's happening on discord or a forum, or via email, carrier pigeon, smoke signal, or anything that is not on the game then it's not 'canon' and not 'my problem.'

Not your problem (as a game runner), sure. As everyone has said, you're on your own if something happens, just as you would be if you were just chit-chatting with someone off-game.

Not canon though? That's ridiculous. Async and off-grid RP happens. It's happened for as long as there have been MUSHes. If the game doesn't provide a convenient WAY for it to happen in-game, like Ares' scene system does, then it's going to happen off the game.

And so? What difference does it make to canon if Joe and I are exchanging paragraphs at each other via +emit, pages, discord, Google doc, a private wikidot that we both edit, a private MU server we're both on, or carrier pigeon? On BSP we used to draft scenes on livejournal then post them to the wiki when we were done. Whatever tool you're using to throw the words at each other, you're still RPing and it should be given the same weight as any other scene.

@tinuviel said in GMs and Players:

No it isn't, you simply disagree with it.

So I share a log to the game wiki. Where did it come from? Was it RPed in a grid room? A private room pretending to be the town square? Discord? Google doc? What about vignettes and backscenes?

There is objectively, measurably, no difference in the output AND and no way to verify that it did not originate off-game in part or whole. (I mean, short of spying on all RP and cross-checking against wiki logs, I guess, but that seems insane.)

And that's saying nothing about the game canon established when two players just agree what happened without playing it out, which people do every day.

So yeah... ridiculous.

@tinuviel OK so I'm legit trying to understand your different view on canon.

How would you know if it happened on the game itself?

I mean, if Bob and I post a log of space monkeys attacking the town square, it's probably equally stupid whether the RP took place in discord, on the game via pages or TP room, or on the game in the actual town square at 3am when nobody else happened to be online.

You shouldn't be beholden to nonsense regardless of where it originated.

And if it's not nonsense and is actual good story development... why do you care where it originated?

(for example, Bob and I working towards a legit game-related storyline, but we're in different timezones so literally can only RP piecemeal through google docs)

@il-volpe said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

If that's not enough, everybody starts having auditory hallucinations of Bob Dylan, for pity's sake.

Yeah on BSGU we had a policy that was like: OK try not to reference glaring things like Star Wars please but don't stress.
We understand that it's utterly impossible to eradicate all cultural and historical references from the entire freaking English language.

@il-volpe said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

A GM generates a plot-pitch and then ad-libs the thing with the 'actors.'

No, what was being described (in the "Doctor Viktor has an addiction problem" example) was a far more in-depth plot--spanning multiple days or weeks, involving several people running multiple PCs and NPCs, all centered around a single PC. It really is more akin to a TV show's writing staff generating a multi-episode plotline.

Most MU staffs simply cannot sustain that level of effort for multiple people on a continual basis.

The overwhelming majority of players will not run plots for others, ever, just as most TTRPG players are not GMs. The fact is that running plots means opening yourself up to a fair bit of stress and drama, and requires a lot of preparation and effort. No matter how grateful you are, or what OOC badges or kudos you offer, that's a high mountain to climb for your pretendy-fun-times.