@tat said in Choosing a MU Server:
There are a few wiki things it doesn't do (yet)
This isn't really meant to be an Ares thread specifically but feel free to toss feature requests over on the Ares forum. I implemented all the wikidot functionality I needed for BSGU.
For me there are two sides of this.
First - even with the code suites that @Thenomain @Volund and I (not intending to gip anybody those are just the only ones I know of) have created, it requires silly amounts of technical savvy to get just a basic cookie-cutter game up and running. I can go to wordpress.com or wikidot.com and get a blog or wiki set up with a few clicks in about 5 minutes flat, but a MUSH? Forget about it. That's just silly in this day and age. It's one of the problems I'm trying to tackle with AresMUSH.
But second - let's pretend you could have a MUSH with all the basic softcode set up in 5 minutes. Most game runners, it seems, aren't satisfied with what comes out of the box (even with modest configuration available). They always have some grand vision for economy code or space code or their own chargen system or crafting system or magic system or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but yeah.... you're gonna need a coder. That's not some grand failing of MUSHdom that's just like: "Hey I want to paint a pretty mural" Well guess what, you're going to need to either be an artist, learn to paint, or hire an artist you trust to implement your vision. Duh.
I've had this for awhile with my FS3 codebase for folks wanting something for PennMUSH. Even if you don't like the FS3 skills system, you can just uninstall that module and keep the rest of the globals and stuff. I know several people have used it, so I'm sure starter DBs for other platforms would get some mileage.
@arkandel said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:
You won't see much of anything rolled other than the specific archetypes the game - quite possibly inadvertently - promotes.
People often miss that this is a core facet of FS3 system design. The whole reason that "Action Skills" are separate from background skills is because it's an intrinsic social contract between the players and staff saying these are the skills that the game is going to focus on. The ones relevant to the central "action" of the game.
That's why FS3 works well in themes where, say, everyone's either a marine or viper pilot, and not so well in themes where you've got a huge variety of characters all expecting RP in equal measure.
@jennkryst said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:
two characters start, one with 1/1/1/1, and the other with 4/0/0/0. Player one needs to spend 27 XP (6 + 9 + 12) to get to 4/1/1/1; player two needs to spend 9 XP (3 + 3 + 3).
For FS3 there's an article explaining this effect. In D&D terms, the 4/0/0/0 character essentially started at a higher level. As long as the two PCs are earning XP at the same rate, the 4/0/0/0 char will always be ahead. YMMV obviously. Many would say that you shouldn't let characters start at different levels, but as long as you understand the way a system is designed, it's not inherently a bad thing.
@arkandel said in Dice Mechanics:
Hey, the question was what we prefer. That's what I prefer!
Heh, fair enough. My preference is slanted by being on the receiving end of the complaints said choice generates 
@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:
@faraday And your character can /try/ to be a cool dude in the face of intimidation, but if he fails, it's just bad playing to refuse to play the failure honestly.
I don't disagree with that basic premise. What I disagree with is the way that every system I've ever seen tries to figure out whether my character should be intimidated. It's almost always "Intimidation vs Willpower" and that, to me, is woefully inadequate.
It doesn't take into account:
And those are just a few factors off the top of my head. There are probably dozens more. Sure you could try to boil all those down into some kind of modifier, but in my experience that just never works well.
So what I personally prefer is to let you do your roll to say "Ok wow he did a really good job at acting intimidating" but then let me take into account those dozens of other factors to decide based on the situation how to react.
And for those suggesting that I'm looking for plot armor so my character never has to fail, come RP with me sometime. I routinely have my characters make all sorts of poor decisions because it makes for a good story. I just want to be the one owning their bad decisions, and not leave it up to a coded system.
But that's just me. I'm not saying the opposing view is wrong or evil, I'm just saying I don't like to do things that way. YMMV.
@Derp said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
So what exactly are you looking for when you say 'things could be simpler'? Because at the end of the day, I tend to go with "It really can't be."
A few concrete things that I've done with Ares, just to further the discussion:
Sensible Command Names - Why is the OOC profile command named +finger? Or the build command 'dig'? Or the private chat command 'page'?
Consistency - The mixed up mash of coded systems on most MUs often leads to bizarre inconsistencies - like one command uses subject=message and another uses subject/message.
Redundancy - +help versus help or +desc versus @desc anyone? MU systems overlay on the base hardcode implementation, so you end up with multiple ways to do similar things. Which is sort of related to...
Command Prefixes - Why is it @desc versus +where versus quit?
Now I personally know that a lot of this stuff has historical roots. +finger from the unix command, @/+ prefixes for softcode vs hardcode. But when you look at it as an outsider it's un-intuitive, needlessly complex, and just plain goofy.
Ares is an attempt to make these things better while still preserving backwards compatibility for the syntax people were used to.
@Derp said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
If you have a system that needs to do five things (not necessarily at the same time), then you end up with either five commands, or one command that can do between 1 and 5 things depending on its syntax, which makes it complicated. (And either way, those five things require documentation).
Yeah there I agree with you completely. I'm not convinced that remembering 5 commands is easier than 1. But I do agree with @HelloProject that you can make at least the basic versions simple. For example, in Ares the basic attack command is just combat/attack Bob and the basic roll command is just roll Alertness. But both of those commands have more advanced options that you can provide only if you need to.
@bluebird AresMUSH: https://aresmush.com/
You can find Ares games here: https://arescentral.aresmush.com/games
The specific tolerance for play-by-post style "asynchronous RP" will vary from game to game, though. It's more of a game culture thing; it's just that Ares has support for it baked in whereas on other MU platforms the players have to switch to a google doc or something for async RP.
You can also check out Storium, which is directly built around play-by-post style RP: https://storium.com/
@ixokai said in Star Wars?:
Some can. A lot can't. "I get better at basketweaving" isn't really true if my basketweaving skill is 2 forever.
Yeah. You don't necessarily need a traditional carrot-on-stick model of "experience points", but if you've got skill levels there's got to be some way of reflecting when those levels change. Otherwise you've got the guy who joins the Rebellion to fight the Empire but, uh, never actually learns to fight.
@seraphim73 said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
if you can't just walk into the room, and have to "teleport" in, it feels more private, and there's a barrier to entry. I think that our hobby would be better off with more scene code if we could get past this, but I don't know how to get past it.
Sometimes I feel like this is a no-win situation. If there's RP on the grid, some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. If there's RP in a scene room - even if it's got (OPEN) emblazoned all over it - some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. This is a people problem, not a tools problem, and I don't know how to get past it either. Maybe we can't, and just need to look at the other pros/cons and call the comfort zone/invitation problem a wash.
@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:
At some point, you have to suck it up and play the actual game. Or write a book, where all the narrative control is totally in your hands.
Or play on games where social interactions are left up to the players. Because they actually exist and - believe it or not - people have fun there. A great many of them can actually divorce themselves enough to say "wow that's really scary" and behave appropriately in that sort of environment. I can understand not wanting to play in that kind of game - to each their own. What I can't understand is the blatant hostility, disdain and "wrongfun" toward people who just have a different style of play.
@Rook said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
Try coding a combat system in a MUSH that takes THOSE things into account. I dare you.
Uh.... FS3? Cover, movement stances... okay it doesn't do acid directly but it does factor in armor.
So for instance the new Star Wars series drew the original cast back but... they didn't do jack. In fact they were portrayed, largely, as failures.
I get where you're coming from, but I didn't see it that way. To use a RL analogy, the fact that Nazi-ism and fascism wasn't entirely eradicated doesn't make those who fought in WW2 "failures". They succeeded in their immediate goal of ending the war. They brought an era of peace, but peace rarely lasts forever.
It's the same in Star Wars, plus the original 3 stood up again in their later years to guide the next generation to continue the fight. Leia led the whole resistance. Luke's standoff with Kylo inspired the galaxy. Han's arc with Kylo was instrumental in the final outcome.
That's not to say I approved of all their story arcs (Luke's in particular), but failures? Not in my book.
@surreality said in Earning stuff:
'Nobody gets enough to evolve through advancement' can hamstring things a bit too much and can readily get in the way of these story arcs.
I think there's an important distinction between IC advancement as a natural progression of the character and OOC advancement as something you "earn" through whatever rewards system the game creates.
For example - say that the Captain gets killed and somebody needs to be promoted to take their place. IC advancement would be based on some logical IC criteria - time in rank, political achievements, whatever. That's a very different metric than you'd find on a game that values OOC advancement more, which might make the decision more based on OOC factors of who could handle the role better or who had been around longer.
Same goes for XP. Even FS3 has an XP system because people do learn new things during the course of RP. When your civilian doctor is suddenly dumped into a war zone and forced to pick up a rifle - then yeah, they're going to need to get pretty competent at shooting reasonably quickly to survive. That's a logical IC progression. But that's different than saying your already-expert pilot needs to have a carrot of getting even-more-awesome just to keep the player engaged.
Again, neither is right or wrong. Just clarifying that even a "laser story focused" system needs to provide some mechanism for advancement as part of the story. It's just the motivations for the advancement that are different. Is that still "earning" them? I dunno.
Forcing people into metaplot goes both ways I think.
I mean, on the one hand you've got @WTFE's horror story about Marrach, where you're trying to browbeat players with a completely superfluous metaplot that they don't care about and can't impact even if they did. That's just idiotic.
But on the other hand, you've got something like @Arkandel's example about a post-apoc game. If your metaplot is "grimdark survival" and you've got people playing happy house and rebuilding society, I think it's fine to smack them down with zombies or raiders or coded illness or whatever till they are playing more in theme. Sure, you might lose players over it. But the alternative is to lose the players who actually want to play the original theme.
I prefer a happy middle ground, which I strive for on BSGU. The metaplot is there. It's pretty pervasive. But you're never forced to participate in a mission or give a crap about what's going on around you. You could do 100% of your scenes as the BSG equivalent of BarRP in the rec room and I really don't care.
@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:
This by itself isn't particularly a syntax issue (though I still think that these plus signs and slashes need to be burned with fire). But the fact that you need two separate commands to join combat, plus a third command to leave combat that you constantly forgot to even use, so you'd be trying to join a combat situation with someone else and you'd be like "Wtf is even wrong". Then you'd have to go and find the room you were in when you started combat to get out of it, if I recall correctly, some crazy shit like that. Then once you do that you can finally go back and finally enter combat with the person you planned to.
See that's a good example. But I can make a counter-example. FS3 combat has separate commands for starting, joining and leaving combat but there's a very specific reason for that.
It enables a GM (who is usually the one who starts combat) to set up the combat with NPCs and everything without spamming the other players, then join them to it later. Combat doesn't auto-stop when the last badguy is defeated because often you'll do a second or third wave of combatants and it would be annoying for everyone to have to re-join afterward.
Which brings us to the #1 rule of UX: Know your audience. Know what they're trying to accomplish, what their pre-conceptions and knowledge is, and then make the simplest possible thing that meets their needs. This is going to vary from game to game.
@arkandel said in Earning stuff:
Whether you have explicit rules or "don't be a jerk" policies it always has been and will continue to be up to staff to enforce them.
This, in a nutshell. All the policies in the world won't save a game from bad staffing. If the person enforcing "don't be a jerk" is a jerk, you're doomed from the get-go. But you'd be equally doomed if they had an entire library of policies to enforce because, well ... jerk.
@surreality said in Earning stuff:
It's practically an epidemic on some games.
And yet it doesn't exist at all on many other games with the exact same policy. I argue that the policy is not the cause of the problem.
Getting doxxed or stalked is horrible, but anybody who needs "don't do that" spelled out for them in policies is either willfully obtuse or beyond help.
On the flip side - sure there are some folks who will wander into unlocked rooms or private scenes because they don't know better. But if someone complains, you don't need to come down on them like a ton of bricks. You just make a gentle correction to clarify game expectations. Having a policy might stave off that step IF they bother to read it, but it's not automatically a huge deal if it happens.
If these things result in issues, I see that as staffer problems, not policy problems.
@Lotherio said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:
Going right here to skills less variable. Is that a bad thing?
I don't think it's bad at all for 6 to beat 4 most of the time. My problem actually is that with the vast majority of RPG systems (including FS3) ... that's not what happens. My character with 7 dice beat freaking everyone in a marksmanship contest on BSGU even though most had better skills than her. And while such flukes do happen occasionally in RL (David vs Goliath type upsets) they happen entirely too often in RPGs/MUs for my liking. Over 1000 rolls the 6 will win most of the time, as it should. But over the 3-4 rolls that happen within the course of a single contest? The dice are just fickle. Some systems are less fickle than others (D20 is particularly awful that way) but they all suffer from the same basic problem.
The PACE system limit is the two descriptive words.
If simple and fast is your goal, that's great. I'm not knocking it, it's just not my personal taste. Even if you never rolled a single stat, I think it's important to pause and think about what skills your character has and why. That goes beyond two words for me.
My biggest question/concern is, does it matter if two players just oocly transfer there vote points directly, do it in silly fails, or do it in combat fails?
It matters to me. It feels like unfairly gaming the system and going against the spirit of what you're trying to accomplish. If the idea is to reward failures by increasing the success on meaningful rolls, it should reward failures that matter, not "ha ha I tripped and spilled my drink, go me." But that's just IMHO. YMMV obviously.
FS3 always had that feel of some roots in Fudge to me.
Anecdote - FS3 only exists because I found the chargen and dice mechanics in FUDGE not quite to my liking. The initial version of +combat came from BSG:Pacifica, which used FUDGE.
@rnmissionrun Literally nobody is saying that folks shouldn't learn to use the tools needed for the medium.
We're saying we need better tools.
I worked on the first color phone display and the first mobile web browser. I'm very proud of that work, but I guarantee you if you put a WAP browser or 4-color phone in someone's hands today they'd (rightly) be all: "WTF is this piece of junk? LOL people actually used this?!" Technology moves on. There might be some nostalgia involved in re-playing old Nintendo games, but you don't see people developing new stuff on that platform, because by modern standards it's woefully lacking.
@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:
It's just that most other genres, people will call this out as making things less enjoyable;
See, that hasn't been my experience. In every genre I've ever played, you have a gulf created by different levels of suspension of disbelief. The "that's not the way it should be" crowd versus the "it's just a game" crowd, if you will. Historical, sci-fi, fantasy, military, even modern day. I know from tales here it happens in comic games and L&L. Is there seriously a genre out there where it doesn't happen?
Often the "that's not the way it should be" crowd gets painted as the "bad guys" for making it un-fun on the people who don't want so much realism. But the fact is that the "it's just a game" crowd can make things just as un-fun for the people who like a grittier setting. It's important to set appropriate expectations for a game, because you can't please both sides.