Best posts made by faraday

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

See...I'm not so convinced that "consent" is across the board a 100% good thing.

I agree. I played on a few pure-consent games early on in my MUSH days and I hated it. It was like playing cops and robbers with small children "I shot you!" "No you didn't!"

I'm a fan of cooperative games, but cooperation != consent. I think it's fine to encourage players to work out a mutually agreeable solution, but there has to be some kind of fallback for the cases where they don't agree.

Total consent just doesn't cut it, even on just a logical level. "I don't consent to you shooting me!" "Well I don't consent to missing. So there."

@deadculture said in The Churn: an Expanse game:

@cura So you guys are using standard FS3 instead of the Ares release? I think Ares would work great here. Especially since it has support for bigger ships, I think.

They're using Ares. I'm not on staff but I'm helping out with tech support. There's no real difference between FS3 2nd (Penn) and 3rd (Ares) editions in terms of big ship support, but like @Seraphim73 said - neither is really designed for that. I've used it for Basestar-on-Battlestar action on BSG games before, but usually it's better to just leave those to plot points/rolls instead of +combat.

@wizz Yeah, and moving those to an "Old Ads" section could clean that up considerably.

@tinuviel But both are nevertheless paintings. It really depends on what you see as the defining quality of a "MU*" and I don't think there's universal agreement on that point.

@Ganymede said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

I honestly have never met any player who said, flat-out: "I don't want to be involved in this because my PC might die."

:raises hand:

I generally don't play on games with involuntary permadeath.

I do occasionally break this rule, as with TGG, but even then it was only after they added some kind of extra lives system. Before that, I only ever played medical support PCs who never went into battle.

I also recognize the need for staff-imposed exceptions if you do something insanely out of normal bounds. But that's a weird case that players can easily avoid.

@ganymede said in Star Wars Stand Alone - Staff Sought:

Faraday's involved? Check.

Thanks for the vote of confidence , but just to be clear (and not inadvertently steal credit from the folks doing the real work!) - I'm not involved in the actual game itself. I'm just helping them get Ares set up (at least on a trial basis to see if they want to go that way) and hammering out any issues with my FFG system.

The idea of using 'cards' instead of 'dice' seems like an incredibly semantic distinction considering in both cases it's a computer generating a random number.

That aside, I think giving people more choice in how they can influence their skills is interesting in theory. You can do this with "bonus chips", "luck points", "cards" or whatever.

In practice I have a hard time imagining it working out too well. MU skill rolls either happen infrequently (99% of the time) or in a giant deluge (like during a combat scene where you might have 20 rolls in one session).

@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

People don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Many people know what they don't want, though. Also, I have shown it to them. But hey - if somebody wants to try it, I sincerely wish them luck. I just figured I'd share 6+ years of consistent feedback that led me to maintain the old-school-client compatibility in Ares.

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

"Ya lost 10 HP, Steve, so... <dumps pile of Shadowrun books on table>...you get to play again after passing the fucking bar exam."

After so many years playing Shadowrun, I feel this so much lol. But you're right that it definitely depends on the game.

Also, TTRPG chars don't require the same degree of backstory/personality generation that most MUs demand. "She's an archer from a small village in the Delaris Mountains" was about as far as my TTRPG chars ever went. So even if the stats are onerous, overall the character creation process is probably not as big a deal in TTRPG.

What you lose with PC death in a TTRPG is progress. Progress towards a character story goal, or all those carefully-planned XP spends. There's generally not as much social capital lost, and it's not like you need to worry you're going to get left out of the story.

It's not better or worse, it's just apples and oranges.

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

Not for me. I don't really learn anything by taking other people's code. I've looked at the Arx code countless of times, but for the most part I go "...........????"

It sounds like you're talking about something different than what @Roz is saying. It's not about looking at code. I can stare at an engine all day long and never get anywhere. It's only once you start taking the thing apart and putting it back together that you really start to understand it.

It's the process of going from "......????" to "okay what does that function do" to "well, let's see what happens when I tweak this little thing" to "oh, so that's what that does" to "huh, now why did they do that" ... and so on.

This is a well-demonstrated and even researched as a very effective way to learn software. Often even moreso than ground-up tutorials. YMMV of course - everyone learns differently - but you might get more out of it with a slightly different approach.

This is like a "which do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla" type of question. You're not going to reach any sort of consensus here.

There are those who hate opening a browser for any of a dozen reasons, and those who would rather stick pins in their eyes than spam themselves with three screens of text just to find someone's skills/background/whatever.

In an ideal world you could do both, but that has a cost too. Even in a system like Ares where the game and website are integrated, somebody still needs to expend the effort to code up two parallel views for all the information you're talking about. And it doesn't always translate well.

Personally, I prefer to have the wiki/website be the primary source of all information, and have in-game commands for essential quick reference. But that matters to anyone else about as much as the fact that I like chocolate (i.e. it doesn't matter at all except insofar as what you'll find on my games or ready-built into Ares).

@Jennkryst Comparing Chontio to AoA and attributing the difference to crunchy code is a false equivalence. As you pointed out, Chontio used to have a lot more activity before staff got steamrolled by RL. And it lacked a lot of the traditional thematic trappings of a Star Wars game, focusing on regional politics instead of jedi and smugglers and rebels and such. This is not meant as a criticism of them; I'm just saying that Chontio wasn't traditional Star Wars irrespective of what coded systems they have, so any activity comparisons to other SW games are apples vs. oranges.

Also, narrative-centric games are in no way unique to WoD. "Just handwave gear" isn't inherently a bad thing for techies if there are other ways for them to get involved in the narrative. Story requires conflict. If the code isn't creating conflict, then the players/staff must create it. Our techies on BSP (back in the day) had a fair amount to do even without a lick of code.

That said, I do agree that simulation-heavy games have the advantage of letting players entertain themselves even when story is not readily available, and there are a lot of players who enjoy them. (Case in point: the popularity of Arx, Firan and every RPI/MUD). Simulation can also support the story on narrative-centric games by offloading some of the work. (e.g. FS3 combat on all the BSG games). So I'm not saying that all simulation is bad. It just comes down to what kind of game you want to run and your players want to play.

My main issue with space travel is games is when people are zipping around the galaxy just to find RP even if the theme says they shouldn't (either because of travel times or resource constraints). That just breaks immersion for me. If you want a spread-out game, make it so the characters have reasons to move around. Your bartender on Persephone just isn't going to be space-hopping willy-nilly.

@Ghost said in Stranger Danger?:

But yeah, in my perfect world, the right to remain anonymous and partake in roleplay without needing to expose who you are as an OOC persona would be important. I think that should be everyone's right to do so without being treated with hostility.

I do agree it's everyone's right to not be treated with hostility, but I don't think "Eh, I'd rather not RP with someone for <insert any reason short of bigotry>" is "hostility". People have a right to RP (or not) with whomever they choose. Nobody is owed someone else's time.

When I decide whether or not to join a game on Storium, for instance, I look over the profile of the GM and other players to see what else they've done and whether they'd be fun to play with. If someone has no history, that's not necessarily a red flag, but it does influence my decision. And it's entirely Storium's right as a platform to say that each player may have only one account. (I don't know if they do, just saying they could.)

In fact, I would argue that this idea of player anonymity (not in a PII/RL sense but in a 'different identity across each game instance' sense) is pretty unique to MUSHes these days.

I think certain behaviors in the community have made it a necessary evil, but I don't think it's good. That's why I created the handle system for Ares. It is optional for practical reasons, but in my philosophical ideal world, it wouldn't be.

Any RPG system will have its haters. I personally avoid D20 like the plague. Some folks hate FS3. Others hate Fate. I wouldn't really sweat it. If the game is interesting enough and/or their friends are there, most folks will suck it up and play regardless. And if not? Their prerogative.

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Well let's examine why people don't look at characters any more.

For me it's three things:

1. PBs. You're Chris Hemsworth. Got it. I don't give a crap what you're wearing unless you're streaking through downtown or wearing something ridiculous, in which case I would expect you to note that in your set pose.

2. Better Set Poses. As you described, people tend to throw that stuff into their set poses now. Because nobody read descs, or just a natural evolution of the genre? Who knows. But it's a thing, and it largely makes descs superfluous.

3. I am not a desc person. You can talk all day long about your chiseled jaw or ruddy complexion and my brain still has only the vaguest clue what you actually look like. I get just as much from +glance showing hair/build/eyes as I do from a desc, and it's way easier to read. So descs, to me, are 100% useless.

@Cura said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

I've thought recently that experimenting with extending that window might be interesting. What if one RL week is one IC week, but a player gets to RP those days however they like in each window, like the proverbial stretchy rubber sheet of time? It would put characters on different days within their given weeks, but that may not actually be any more problematic than leaving them to fudge things a bit in the name of getting RP in, and it would make people think about how they wanted to spend their time.

It's an interesting idea. I've actually been on a couple of games that did this. It... kinda works?

The issue you get into is sequencing scenes. If there's no general agreement on which day it is ICly, you can get things like: "Well, Bob thinks this happens on Tuesday in his timeline but Suzy was in Paris on Tuesday and Liam got shot on Monday so..."

With traditional IC time systems we have that problem with backscenes. When you have a hazy IC time system, you have to do that dance no every scene.

@Ghost Yeah, like Rinel said - definitely get a local pro's opinion. (Which I see from your latest that she's already doing, but I already had this typed, so...) Even if it's not currently standard practice to perform such testing ahead of time, there is something to be said for saying it should have been given the severity of the impact of getting it wrong. Or it may be standard practice in a specific hospital. Who knows.

@surreality said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"Yo, there's an angry screed full of completely unfounded false accusations being made here." <-- this is not a microaggression and it's not a mere difference of opinion.

Yeah, I agree. These are not microaggressions, they're full-on, "call you a stupid a-hole to your face" levels of aggression that IMHO have no place in the constructive section. But we see it all the dang time.

If it could be confined to the Hog Pit, then I wouldn't mind so much. (I'd still mind on a philosophical level, but only with as much care as I give to obnoxious Reddit forums... out of sight, out of mind.) But as things stand, it just flat-out isn't. It's in our face constantly, even in the constructive section, and it's freaking exhausting.

I can understand if the mods don't have the bandwidth or motivation to deal with it. I can understand the thinking that it's better to air the toxicity in public than private (even if I disagree with that). But let's stop pretending that this is some kind of unsolvable problem.

Set standards. Enforce them. It's not fun, but it's also not rocket science. Civilized Discourse is a thing. Moderated forums exist - heck, our games are basically this. Most of us wouldn't tolerate people talking to each other on the public channel or BBS on our games the way people talk to each other here. Accepting it is a choice, not an inevitable conclusion.

It's been done, most (in?)famously by Otherspace back in the day.

The rights issues are the obvious stumbling block there. Otherspace had an advantage in that the world, at least, was original. Trying to do that with a Game of Thrones or Star Trek MU would be begging for a lawsuit. But a lot of people (including me) were very uncomfortable with the idea that playing on a game meant their characters/stories/writing were fair game for someone else to publish.

As far as formatting goes - I think MU wikis / log formatters take the general approach of making it seem like regular fiction. I.e. no pose breaks or other intrusive formatting. Just the text, ma'am.

Where I think it really breaks down is that MU scenes don't hang together like regular fiction does. There's neither an overarching story arc like you'd find in a novel, nor the stand-alone stories that you'd find in a short story anthology.

ETA: Many MU wikis outlast their MUSHes - often by years and years. (witness BSG Cerb's wiki, circa 2011) So I think there's already ways for the story to live on.

@sunny said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@ganymede Right. The rules don't say that it is up to the game runner/etc. So if that's what the practice is going to be, I'd like the rules to be clear about it. There is nothing wrong with asking for the 'rules of engagement' post to be updated with what the actual situation is.

FWIW I would suggest not leaving it up to the game-runner, as that's just going to lead to even more confusion about what is or is not appropriate to post where.