Best posts made by faraday

@Ghost said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Really, what would it fucking take to clear the air and make the environment more 'repaired'?

In terms of MSB? I don't think it can be. There's too much animosity, and too many of the active posters are now either unable (due to bans) or unwilling to return. Basically, there's no interest in repair, only in going separate ways.

Which honestly makes me sad, because I don't think the MUSH community is big enough to sustain two separate discussion forums, nor do I have much interest in having the same discussion in two places with two slightly-overlapping groups of people. It's the same reason I didn't try to promote the Ares forums more back when I first made them. I kinda hoped that people might gravitate to a more positive, constructive-only discussion environment, but I didn't honestly expect it.

In terms of MUSHing as a whole? I also don't think it can be either, because there are too many people who just don't like each other, and too many places willing to tolerate negativity.

You can have people who don't get along at the same venue, but you have to have structure that keeps them from getting at each others' throats.

It's like Thanksgiving with a dysfunctional family. You need Grandma to play peacemaker, or to rule with an iron fist (like Mal in Firefly: "Walk away from this table."). If you leave the door open to hot button topics and sniping, it's not gonna end well for anybody.

Individual games and forums can accomplish this by the rules of engagement they set forth.

@three-eyed-crow said in Earning stuff:

I mean I'm personally of the opinion that 'Other players being special detracts from me' is one of the most toxic impulses in this hobby but that's maybe another conversation.

I agree completely, but as @Seraphim73 said - thankfully those folks seem to be a minority.

They are a vocal minority, which can be annoying. I remember on Sweetwater getting people complaining about how unrealistic somebody else's concept was while they're playing something equally rare.

@lotherio said in Earning stuff:

The really good stuff on TV may be about one or two heroes who do crazy things, but the crazy things make up like 10-15% of each episode, maybe a little more in periodic advances of major arcs.

If you apply that ratio to a MUSH though, assuming somebody plays 3 nights a week (which is pretty typical for an active player), you're talking about one action-oriented hero plot per month. That doesn't seem like a terribly unreasonable expectation for an individual player, and it's eminently do-able if you have a setting/character/player-staff-ratio that supports it. It's not practical everywhere, though, which is a problem if people expect it.

@ghost said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

You had me at Colonial Marines.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Sure but design a game like that in a way that requires no ooc communication whatsoever to find RP.

Faraday does:
scene/start Joe's Pub=public
scene/set It's a pub. It could have a better desc but Fara sucks at descs. If Joe's Pub was an actual defined location, the desc would be imported automatically.

@Seraphim73 sees an open public scene in the scenes list or on where. Does:
scene/join 713

I'm not trying to be difficult, I just honestly don't see how the gameplay is fundamentally different than Seraphim chilling in an actual @dug room on the grid hoping somebody wanders in (or more likely does a meetme to hop straight there).

Now I get that the grid can offer some immersion for some folks. I'm not saying it can't be a feature. Just don't think it's necessary or dramatically game-altering.

@surreality I really do think we're talking apples and oranges here. You're describing ridiculous levels of pedantry that, yes, would be obnoxious.

The science/tech stuff I was talking about wasn't "OMG you've got the wrong color dress for this time period" level of stuff, it was more like "OMG you're wearing jeans and a t-shirt on this Game of Thrones MUSH". It's insisting that Batman can fly (under his own power) or that morphine can cure the common cold. Some things are just egregiously wrong, and correcting people (politely) to maintain a consistent theme does not make you an elitist or theme dictator.

@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

One of the differences TT has over MU* is that as much as we want to consider PCs the protagonists, it's not necessarily the case. In a 5-man party the GM can ensure everyone gets their time in the spotlight but the model doesn't scale up well.

It is a rare MUSH player that doesn't consider their character a protagonist. Trying to fight that is IMHO inherently futile.

MUs are most like ensemble TV series. Not every character is featured with equal prominence in every episode, but they all have their own story threads. They are all protagonists in their own right.

Trying to have a model where some PCs are inherently cooler than others (the "Important People group") is just making an economy of haves and have-nots that I think just leads to toxic behavior.

Put more broadly though, I think this philosophy means that failure doesn't lead to lost opportunities. A weak outcome and strong outcome are just different doors leading down different (not necessarily better or worse) paths in the story.

@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:

A lot of scenes just involve showing up to a +event at the proper time, killing enemy, then everyone fleeing ooc as fast as possible. Sometimes you're lucky if you can get players to even pose out, much less discuss what just happened.

That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody(*) does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody(*) can be bothered to engage.

(*) Grand sweeping generalization. There are always rare exceptions.

Some of that is based on the audience - I'm sure it would be different in a politically-oriented L&L game - but I think a lot of it is universal. MUSHes share a lot in common with tabletop RPGs, after all, and a lot of those emphasize combat. Fighting and gear often represent a huge chunk of most RPG rulebooks. Combat and downtime are all a lot of people are interested in.

@thenomain said in Plot session duration:

Mentioning FS3 explains a lot, though, because FS3 players tend to be a lot more laid back about "winning" (i.e., it's not the goal).

Lololol. I wish.

@three-eyed-crow Yeah, the combat system doesn't say "you're dead" but staff can always implement whatever house rule strikes their fancy and tune the lethality numbers to whatever level of deadliness they like.

But I think that players should work harder too to react as their character would to NPCs being killed. Your character knew them, lived with them, hung out with them, and then watched them get killed right before their eyes. Even if the NPC never had a name before that scene... ICly their death should matter to the characters.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I've seen lots of good from newer developments, but I'm also seeing this waltz back to hardcode that MUSH tried to get away from by giving admin all the softcode tools they need to make it what they want

That's more of a philosophical issue and folks will view things differently.

Yes, Ares and Evennia share some similarities with old MU hardcode.

BUT the languages are way easier to learn. The way you code is better. Instead of needing to monkey with stuff as people are playing you have the ability to develop changes locally and easily move them to the game via version control. These are common tools used by open-source hobbyist programmers around the world. Tutorials abound. And unlike MU hardcode, making changes doesn't require you to restart the game.

Also? Think about every game you've been on in the last 10 years. How often do they allow players to create substantial custom systems/objects? How often does anyone take advantage of that ability? How often does the code change appreciably after the beta period?

The new systems are different, sure. There's a learning curve, sure. But I am convinced that they make it easier to customize a game. Not harder.

As others have already mentioned, AresMUSH (still in beta) is intended to be a 'next-gen' platform for MUSHes specifically. It addresses some of the common issues by streamlining the command interface, offering a web interface for a lot of things, restructuring help files by topic instead of by command, and offering built-in game advertising through a central database. While there is not currently an active game using Ares, BSGU is still up in sandbox mode to check out the interface, and there are several new games in development.

Evennia does some of these things too, but it is intended to be more of a generic MU-building toolkit that applies to all text-based gaming platforms, MUDs included.

Aside from Roll20 (which offers more of a tabletop-ish experience), there are a number of online forum-RP sites. You can find many through directories like http://rpg-directory.com/. There's also Storium, which has a more "gamified" play-by-forum feel. The trouble with forum games is that they're sloooooooooow. A scene that might get resolved in one evening on a MUSH will stretch on for a month. It's an entirely different feel.

Like @Three-Eyed-Crow said, there's nothing really out there that mirrors the MUSH experience IMHO.

@kk said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

But not every character is the center of the over arching storyline.

See that’s where we differ. I think all PCs SHOULD have equal opportunity to be impactful to the central story. Whether they take advantage of that or are content to be in the background is up to them, but the choice should be there.

@auspice said in Open Sheets?:

How often have people been banned from games because in PVP they tried to lie about their sheet and multiple staffers had to get involved to deal with the fallout?

Exactly - open sheets came about as a direct reaction to those sorts of shenanigans. It's not a magic bullet; it comes with some down-sides of its own (the mystique, etc.), but it's hardly an untenable solution. As with most game development decisions, it's a matter of understanding the pros/cons of each solution and deciding which one works best for the game you're trying to run. If there were a one-size no-brainer solution, everyone would already be doing it.

@ganymede said in Make MSB great again!:

But this also bars posters from posing questions to the advertisers, and permitting the advertisers to respond to the same.

While I would support @Three-Eyed-Crow's suggestion of a locked ad thread, this is what I was getting at with the idea of a single 'Game' thread. I mean, does BSGU really need two different threads? One for "Ads/Questions" and one for "Reviews"? No. Just combine them and have ad / updates / q&a / feedback all on the same thread (minus anything that belongs in the hog pit).

What bothers me more (and I'm guilty of it too) is everyone derailing a game's thread with stuff that really has nothing to do with the game itself. But there's no real cure for that other than moderation.

@Lotherio ---

@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:

You could get coding permissions - in the same way someone could branch Ares and code a plug-in and then it could be folded into the main game.

That is the envisioned path for players contributing code to Ares, but I do not see it as a common situation.

Here's the thing -- if your goal is to have a fully flexible coding language at your fingertips that players and admins can use from the command line in-game? Penn/Tiny/Rhost is it. It's hard to imagine anything better suited to that purpose, and I'm not going to try.

But that model has tons of down-sides to it, from security to syntax to the sheer awkwardness of trying to code complex systems line-by-line. We've been fighting those down-sides for 30 years.

And what are the up-sides? @Seraphim73 could make a custom multi-descer instead of the built-in one for all the descs that nobody's going to read Someone else could make a custom notepad instead of the built-in one.

In my experience, the vast majority of players neither know nor care to create their own custom softcode, as long as you give them the code they need to play.

So I don't see this as a loss. Others will disagree, I'm sure.

@jennkryst said in A new platform?:

@lotherio Versatility for it's own sake is problematic. Not to mention sometimes a command line is different because a coder just happened to write it that way (or may have been forced to write it that way because of things in the code, I don't know how that sorcery works).

Mostly it's just because these code systems were developed in parallel and didn't always know about each other. (Or when they did know, didn't care to strive for commonality.)

I get that not everybody will like the standard Ares command set, but I think that having a standard command set is a good thing for MUSH ease of use. Many games will have custom systems, of course, but by keeping the basic day-to-day commands (mail, page, channels, meetme, friends, etc.) consistent across games, it lowers barriers to entry.

FWIW these issues were discussed at length in this thread:
http://musoapbox.net/topic/1959/alternative-formats-to-mu

@lotherio said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:

On the backend or under the hood, FS3 has a easy yet complex combat system.

FS3 combat is a good example of why I don't think the question of game and story has to be either/or. It exists not because of a "game first" mentality, but just because it's nigh-impossible to do a wholly cooperative combat scene with a dozen players in a tolerable timeframe. It's a tool of convenience, nothing more. Rolls can be similar - two players could just RP a sparring match, or they could throw in a few rolls to add some chance and/or guidance for how things go. You can do both.

@cura said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

Overhauling FS3's default BSG loadout to appropriately reflect this setting. I'm the first to admit that statbrain is not my strength. For that reason, this is probably going to take the longest of any task on the list.

I happen to know someone who's pretty good with FS3 stats if you want help with that. Y'know, just saying...

@arkandel Agreeing that it's good to have a place for Q&A. But are you only going to allow the game staff to answer? Or only positive answers? Because otherwise I can see the "answers" veering into criticism, and that's where the problem comes in.

"Is this L&L game or grimdark"

Enthusiastic player A: "It's totally grimdark. I love it. The players are so helpful."

Less enthusiastic player B: "Well it says it is grimdark but mostly what I see is just nobles playing house."

Are these reviews? Criticism? Is B's answer somehow less valid than A's just because he's not as positive about the game?

By all means, try it out and see how it goes. Just giving my opinion because, y'know, this is MSB, we like to debate things endlessly

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I know in this country at least, technology is making people less intelligent, not more intelligent, if they're not spoon fed with a few clicks then they can't be bothered. I've even seen this when it comes to some gamers, where console is better for them because all they have to learn is the controller, there's no real customization, or changing response rates of the mouse, mapping macro's or key strokes, etc.

I think that attributing that all to laziness is oversimplifying. People might like console games because they're simpler, but for casual players the dizzying array of controls and options in a desktop game can be overwhelming. That doesn't mean they're dumb or lazy. It just means they maybe have better things to do than to learn all that.

Similarly, I think if you present someone with a program that is radically different from everything they've ever seen before, it's only natural that a great many will turn their nose up or be intimidated. That's true whether you're talking about keyboard users presented with a mouse for the first time or touchscreen users told to download this special app, find this mystic address, and learn these puzzling commands just to try out a type of game they may or may not like.

Like it or not, we live in a world that values good user experience. The traditional MUSH experience fails on virtually every level for a new player.

@surreality said in A new platform?:

Making something that does what you describe, however, is not in the skillset of the majority of people who want to make a game.

Which is why I felt it was important to have a platform that did that out of the box. Because you shouldn't need to mess around with mail or finger code just to make a game. That's just silly.

Now if somebody wants the joy of building all that from scratch just to have it exactly the way they want it - more power to them. Evennia is better suited to that than Ares, though.

It's like LEGOs. Evennia is a pile of bricks, some of which have been pre-assembled into small components but mostly it's freeform. Ares is a pre-built LEGO castle, ready to play. Sure you can take the LEGOs apart and rebuild them, but it's probably going to be more work than just building your own castle the way you wanted it in the first place.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

Except spawns.....We only tolerated it because it's all we had.

100% agreed.