Best posts made by faraday

@lithium said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I think it would give us a greater chance to get new people into the hobby too if they could just be pointed at a web page and go.

I don't disagree, which is why Ares has a web client built in and also some non-traditional ways of doing scenes via the web (more like Storium or play-by-post) on top of the traditional MUSH format.

But there've been no fewer than what - five? six? - different MU coders taking a crack at a web client that mirrors the traditional MU interface, and they're all pretty bare-bones. It's not because we all suck, it's because web development is a black hole of mismatched tools and browser incompatibilities that makes developing web apps a real nightmare sometimes. Heck, I just spent countless hours this week trying to improve the way Ares' web client connects to the game due to firewall issues with websockets. It's a ginormous time sink.

Could someone really dedicated to the problem tackle it? Sure. Slack and Discord have a web UI that's not too different than what a MUSH might look like. But they also have a whole team of developers working on it full-time -- and they're very centralized; not something you can customize to every game-runner's whim. I think we need to scale our expectations a bit.

@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

Sometimes people like to play a game of chicken. Am I going to kill them off in some random Wednesday evening PrP? No? Then hellz yeah they'll stick around to fight when I say "you can hear reinforcements arriving! Thankfully after you rummaged through the Bad Guy's desk you discovered a secret passage out" two and a half hours after we began.

Yeah, I've run into this several times too. It's like as long as they think death is off the table, folks will fight long past the point at which it ICly makes any sense to fight. There was one time when the PCs literally charged down a tunnel into Cylon machineguns, WWI style, even after I repeatedly warned them.

Now you might say "Just kill them, then they'll learn" but we'd still see gung-ho stuff like this on TGG, the king of PK. It's just a player mindset issue. There are some folks who like adversity, who see failure as the building block to more interesting stories, but most? Just flat-out don't.

Count me among those who are confused that we have a 7-page thread spawned because someone used the c-word. Like... I'm not a big fan of it personally but I don't consider it any more of a "slur" than any of the other vulgar name-calling. "You're an <a--/b--/c--/d--/f--/m-f-->" -- they're all pretty horrible things to call each other and shouldn't be used in the constructive area regardless. In the hog pit? No comment.

I thought this was a more general topic spawned by some of the tangents we occasionally get into - like the "women in tech" discussion on the video game thread or someone posting something about healthcare in Less Gamey. There, I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had about moderation. Because as @Templari said - it's pretty easy for folks to be dogpiled just for expressing an unpopular opinion. (I'm not talking slurs or racism here; just general social hot-button issues.) I don't think that kind of dogpiling is constructive for the community any more than people trolling just to get a reaction.

@bored said in Horror MUX:

Like the plot speed stuff is mostly a matter of finding the happy medium.

Yeah it's tough to find a happy middle ground when you have some (usually the most involved/active) people trying to do stuff every other night and others who just pop on once a week. It's extremely easy for the once-a-week crew to feel completely left out - especially if their online night doesn't line up with a scheduled event. I don't really have a good answer for that. MUSHes are just not very casual-friendly in general.

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

I don't buy that at all. Where are the magical positive, happy games where no one is a dick? Which genres are those? What systems attract that unicorn of a playerbase, rather than the eeeevil terrible one WoD draws in?

I've never played on WoD games, but I have to say that the degree of toxicity attributed to them, described on these boards on a regular basis, simply has not existed on the range of games I've played on (not just my own, but any I've played).

Does that mean that the other games have been magical bastions of unicorn players singing kumbaya? Of course not. People are jerks sometimes, no matter the game. But I do think that "light Hollywoodized historical fiction" or "PvE combat vs evil robots" attracts a different playstyle than "PvP dark supernatural horror". It just does. That doesn't mean the players are inherently better or worse - it just means that type of environment comes with a different set of issues.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

I am of the opinion that every game needs not a PHB but a Hammer: the person that will come down and without hesitation intervene when a player comes off the rails. Too often, there's no such staff member; everyone believes that if we all just play nice, everyone will play nice.

Sometimes you need a Hammer, but in my experience what's even more important is for staff to play Mediator.

The number of times where someone's being a rampant, unrepentant a-hole are rare. Far more common are the times when players disagree, feelings get hurt, tempers flare, or misunderstandings are had. In those situations, a cool-headed authority figure can often (but not always) help sort out the mess.

So even though I prefer a more consent-based approach to social conflict, as a thought exercise I worked out how I would create a system if I wanted to do so. Here it is: https://aresmush.com/fs3/fs3-3/social

In a nutshell, it codifies the kind of modifiers I was talking about (that aren't reflected by stats), explicitly states some guardrails and expectations, and provides some mechanics that I think could be turned into a simple command like:
social Faraday/Persuasion+Obligation+Trust vs Ganymede/Composure+Consequence

Staff may still need to be called in for idiots being idiots, but at least it offers a framework where reasonable people can work things out when they can't agree. I believe it gives defenders reasonable accommodation for agency without giving them veto power.

Obviously it's designed for FS3 and not WoD, and I'm not specifically looking for feedback on it (since it's just a hypothetical system). I just posted it to show that I a middle-ground solution might be possible, and because I thought there might be some ideas in it that might be useful to somebody somewhere.

@seraphim73 I don’t think “Hollywood” is an adequate framing adjective for a game, because it could mean anything from Band of Brothers (highly accurate without being a documentary) to Inglorious Basterds (total fantasy) to Kellys Heroes (vaguely plausible but not meant to be taken seriously) and a dozen other levels in between.

@kanye-qwest said in Historical settings:

@faraday I mean there many ways. There's speculative fiction, historical fantasy, alt history...I am just not sure any of them are a GREAT idea when you are introducing a wide swath of rando players.

Yes, I listed alt-history and historical fantasy as alternatives to historical settings. I was not counting those as "historical" games because they are not beholden to the actual historical setting.

I don't think too many folks are looking for a super-accurate documentary. But there's a difference between "we're not going to make our heroes die of dysentery" and "we're going to act like nobody ever dies of dysentery in this setting". One is "Hollywood Historical". The other is just fantasy. Accuracy is a range of grays, not black and white.

@apos said in Historical settings:

The thought of the million conversations about someone upset about something being jarring, and other people thinking it's a non issue but finding something else jarring and immersion breaking strikes me as the most miserable game of whack-a-mole that a staffer could play.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at when discussing with @Arkandel earlier. It's not that it can't be done to some measure of "success" (however you describe it). It's just that it's a lot more headaches than other kinds of games in my experience.

...
the amount of bad feels over people upset at each other who gets to play the exotic character or watch the setting to get overrun by Exceptions To The Rule characters strikes me as zero fun to administrate as a game runner.

Indeed. Everyone wants to come in as the Exception to the Rule, but then most of them get pissed off that there are so many other Exceptions to the Rule around town. The amount of flak directed at staff was kind of astonishing, really. This is, again, where an extremely narrow focus like TGG can help. The character options were extremely limited, which made it hard for anyone to try to be The Special.

@kanye-qwest said in Historical settings:

objectively, 100% - discrimination is bad. If you are taking part in it, you are doing a bad thing and deserve the corrective heat that comes your way for it.

Yes, 100%, no question whatsoever, discrimination in real life is bad.

But this is fiction we're talking about. Do you really think that whoever wrote Schindler's List is a terrible human being because they had some historically-appropriate bad guys in it doing bad things?

I 100% support anyone who doesn't want to engage in these themes because it makes them uncomfortable. But I'm not going to judge someone poorly because they react to my 1866 female doctor with historically-appropriate skepticism or disdain. It would actually be a little jarring to me if I were playing on a modestly-thematic historical game and they didn't.

@mietze said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

I think people can truly adore unlikable characters based on how they're written (or like in the case of a TV show, how they are portrayed), in a love to hate way. For me an example would be John Smith in the latest TV series of Man in the High Castle. Do I like him as someone who I'd love to hang out with? NO.

I think this is the rub when it comes to MU characters... a crap-ton of RP is just, basically, people hanging out. So if you have a character that you wouldn't love to hang out with, that really makes it hard to work them into a lot of scenes.

So I think characters like that on a MU are best left as alts who show up occasionally, stir up some trouble, and then go away for awhile. That also helps to create a buffer for the players of both the antagonist and antagonized.

@arkandel said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

A number of things.

I think Ark hit it on the head for why the hobby is kind of messed up, socially-speaking. A tabletop RPG crew may get overly invested in their characters. A tabletop wargame crew may get overly competitive. But those people still have to look each other in the eyes week after week and (generally) get to know each other pretty well. Internet gaming doesn't have that very important social filter.

I've forgiven MUSH folks many times. Sometimes I tend to be a little too forgiving, actually, and just end up getting burned again in the same way by the same person. I'd choose that over endlessly holding grudges, but there's probably a happy middle ground I haven't found yet.

@ganymede said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

I guess this might speak to how detached I am to certain parts of this hobby, but if this stuff is actually commonplace,

I think it varies by game. I haven't seen a lot of that "mean girl" nonsense either, either personally or in terms of player complaints.

There are certainly some instances of what @Ghost described as "red card" offenses, but the vast majority of player disputes boil down to the MU equivalent of "He shot me!" "No he didn't!" playground nonsense that escalates into toxicity and grudges. "OMG he broke my toy / min-maxed more than me to get ahead / made me look bad / etc. He's the absolute worst and now I will behave like a jerk about it!"

@misadventure said in MU Things I Love:

How do the players actually RP through any of this, without any details? How many times can they RP through that kind of thing with that level of abstraction?

Yeah, you can't have an actual RPed-out conversation about an abstract idea. At some point, asking "what are you going to do now" requires somebody understanding what they can do now in enough detail to RP about it.

For example, take a Scotty-type character. If it's a big space battle and your part is fixing the engine before it explodes, it's fine to technobabble your way out of it with a few hand-wavey poses. But if you want to do an entire plot about some tech challenge, you're going to need to get into the gory details a bit.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

I've noticed, of late (ie the last... five or so years?), that the demand part of 'on-demand' seems to be more and more at the forefront of considerations for both players and game-runner-designers. Especially in the form of 'this game has to last forever because I want to keep doing this specific thing forever.' Is this sort of open-ended-sandboxy-thing something we should be encouraging, or working away from?

I don't know - I haven't seen that, personally. I think folks expecting their game to go on forever and ever aren't being very realistic. Most games just don't last like that. But at the same time, there's such an investment in building a game that people don't want it to just fizzle out in a couple months. So - a happy middle ground, I guess, is what I think people should shoot for? If I can get 2 years out of a game (either as a player or as a runner) I'm happy.

What I meant by on-demand was that if people can't log in and find RP, they just won't log in. There are too many competing forms of entertainment for the majority of people to sit there twiddling their thumbs looking at an empty who list night after night. If I want to wait days between activity, I can do PBP.

@arkandel I think that in these cases though (MMOs and MUSHes), the activity itself is very different than it was 15, 20 years ago.

With MMOs we've gone from a subscription model to a micro-transaction model. You also have a vast gulf between people who are just starting and the dinos who have been there forever. These kinds of things fundamentally shift the way the game is played. The influx of "casual" gamers to the video game industry has changed things as well.

I think a lot of that applies to MUSHes too. Sure, I like different things now than I did decades ago. But the games are different too. There are fewer games to choose from, less random RP, more "appointment RP", more metaplot, stuff like that.

@skew said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

I've helped a few people set up games. I've offered up my help to more. I've yet to see any of those games go live, and it's def not because the code isn't there. I've even recently given someone an entirely set up and functional game, but they want to go another direction. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, likewise. With my old Penn code suite and now even moreso with Ares, you can get a game set up and fully coded with standard systems in a few hours. Volund and Theno and skew and others have all helped set up games.

Now, sure, if you want some Arx-like economy/clue/etc. or Spirit Lake magic system, that's gonna take some custom code work. But that's a choice (a completely valid and understandable choice, but nevertheless a choice). You can get a game going without a coder.

@kanye-qwest said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I don't have data on this, obviously, but if people are idling on grid and someone wanders up and poses at them, it seems like a 50/50 they might say screw it and pose back and get into an rp scene.

Obviously I have no hard data either, but my anecdotal experience was that it was more like 10/90. Sure it happened, but it was rare. Far more common was people ignoring you, hiding away in private places, as @farfalla said, or just not logging in at all (and thus missing out on potential community aspects).

I do agree with @Ganymede that the rise of OOC rooms and the rise of "appointment RP" were correlated, but correlation does not imply causation. For me the causation was the other way around. With more and more people doing "appointment RP", they looked for something to do while they were waiting for their appointment. Enter the OOC Room as a convenient outlet. Around that same time, many games also started reducing or even eliminating private residences, forcing people to idle elsewhere.

The benefits of channels over OOC Room are many, IMHO: You can segregate the chatter by subject so it isn't one giant free-for-all, people can tune in and out at will, you can chatter while RPing, (on Ares) you can chat from the web portal, there's a convenient history (which is good for curtailing abuse and catching up) and it's easier for staff to monitor. The down side, of course, is that channels require more work to talk on.

So I don't want to sound like I'm pro-OOC room, by any stretch. I just don't think removing them will drive RP.

@roz said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

To my memory, the reason for not locking the initial ad posts was so that people could ask game questions and have them answered. Which is not an endorsement or condemnation, but I think at least one person was like "I don't know why they don't just lock the threads." I believe that was the idea.

I realize that was the idea. My observation is that it just doesn't work because people can't limit themselves to just Q&A. It swiftly becomes Q&A+commentary+random enthusiasm+criticism.

Of course we could make the ad threads be "anything about the game, good or bad" dumping ground, but that kinda seems to defeat the purpose of an ad to me. The other easy alternative is just having two threads - one that's just an ad & updates, the other that's game discussion if people want to discuss.

Nobody is saying there shouldn't be a place to discuss games and ask questions. The only thing at issue is where.