Agency in the sense of "doing stuff that matters in the world" isn't everything, either. Take TGG for instance. In most of the campaigns, the PCs were grunts. They couldn't impact the war. They couldn't choose their missions. The battle code could kill them at any moment. BSGU was in a similar vein, though not as hard-core.
People want different things. There's no one perfect recipe for a game to be successful.
@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:
If staff does not intend to service a particular concept, then they shouldn’t allow that concept as a PC.
Why? If somebody understands that their concept isn't geared towards the central 'action' of the game and decides to play anyway, why stop them from having fun?
Someone had a lot of fun with a cook character on one of the BSG games, even though they never got involved in a single central plotline. To each their own.
@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:
@faraday That's a matter of scale. The biggest thing the grunts can do is win battles, right? That matters in their world. So in BSG Abelard saves the team and makes the objective with minimal losses and Brigid does a good job wiping down the mess hall.
It's also a matter of perspective. There have certainly been people complaining about not being able to be a "mover and shaker" in various games.
One of the campaigns was WW1 trench warfare. It's hard to imagine much 'agency' when you're cannon fodder. One of my more memorable scenes from the game was a couple of medics cowering in the hold of a transport ship being attacked by a U-Boat, wondering if they were going to survive while there was literally nothing they could do. All players have agency over their characters' actions in any given situation; that's just the basic nature of RP. (I mean, short of mine control I guess.) That's different than having agency to affect the world in any meaningful way, and sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that's a selling point.
@derp said in The Desired Experience:
Craft something that you would enjoy playing. Staff are not diviners. They cannot foresee your future. Do the thing you wanna do, try to find a way to make it click, and if it doesn't work -- I mean. You know you best. How are staff supposed to do better than you yourself?
I agree with this, though I don't think there's any harm in having some general guidance. My games always have a "What Should I Play?" page with suggested roles, and I may supplement that with some extra info if someone specifically asks. "If you're looking to fill a niche, we don't have a lot of combat engineers" or "If you want to go where the people are, the Viper pilots have been doing a lot of RP lately."
But none of that is intended as a guarantee of future results. Maybe the main Viper RP-magnet quits tomorrow and that group falls apart. Maybe you and some of the Viper pilots rub each other the wrong way. Maybe you really hate being a combat engineer. I have no idea.
As @il-volpe says, recruiting somebody for a group/faction/role you intend to ignore is crappy. But sometimes as staff you just can't predict the way the RP blows, and no amount of breadcrumbs help.
The main thing is that If somebody asks for help getting involved in the central plotlines, I'm always happy to steer them in the right direction--even if that means concocting a plotline where their videographer starts a militia, or their priest becomes a combat medic. That still requires them to take some initiative and not just sit back expecting RP to fall into their lap.
@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:
If they don't think about it too much they may easily misguide (without any malevolence on their part) someone to play one without considering what RP or plot points they can make available for these new players so they are relevant and get started.
But when you stop and think about it, this is really no different than if someone of their own volition decides to play a Gangrel biker. They should consider what RP opportunities would be present as a Gangrel biker, and whether that's something they would be interested in. If they're not sure, they can ask.
It shouldn't matter what staff needs/wants - what matters is what YOU are capable and willing to play.
@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:
@faraday You've got this assumption that Zane feels all high and entitled to people eating his brownies. But that is what a potluck is for. And in the MU potluck, you can't eat your own dish, only the dishes you trade it for. He didn't expect to show up to the potluck with brownies and not get to eat. Is he wrong?
Yes, he's wrong. The idea of a potluck is that you bring something to the party hoping that others might enjoy it, and hoping that you might find something there you might enjoy as well.
The key word there is hope.
Nobody is obliged to eat the brownies that you brought.
Nobody is obliged to bring a dish that you will enjoy eating.
Zane may leave bummed and hungry, but that doesn't mean the other partygoers did anything wrong, and it doesn't mean that he's a bad cook. Things just didn't work out. If that happens a lot the host of the potluck may want to revisit their strategies.
The whole concept of "NPC" is kind of inherently broken when it comes to MUs.
Most know the original definition from TTRPGs, where it referred to characters controlled by the GM. This encompassed everyone who was a part of the world who was not played by one of the other players. Some were important to the plot; some weren't.
You can extend this definition to computer RPGs by substituting AI/computer instead of the GM. Anyone not controlled by a player is a NPC.
The term gets real murky real fast when it comes to MUSHes, because a) there is no single GM, b) regular players can control NPCs in equal measure to staff in many cases, and c) those who GM can also play with their own characters.
We're not going to find a consistent expectation of "what is a NPC" because the term just doesn't quite fit our environment.
@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
BS Pacifica managed a proper closer (I actually came back for the finale after taking a hiatus, and it was a great experience), but @faraday puts us all to shame, in a zillion ways.
Aww shucks. You're being overgenerous, but thanks. I am very proud of the Pacifica finale, though.
I wrote down my thoughts about running BSP in two editorials awhile back: Director's Commentary and Lessons Learned. The first article goes into some of the ins and outs of running the campaign, although I'm not sure how much of it would make sense to someone who didn't play there. The second is more about running a MUSH in general - and I'm not sure I agree with all of it now that 8+ years have gone by. But there are some ideas in there anyway.
The Greatest Generation also did an awesome job at campaigns, but it was kind of a unique setting. Each campaign ran for a few months with a different historical setting and a different cast of characters. It wasn't one big gigantic campaign, but each mini-campaign had an arc with a beginning, middle and end.
@derp said in Races in fantasy settings:
I'm not really sure that we're talking about the same things though.
Yeah that's where I'm at. Races in a fantasy or sci-fi setting are generally different species, which makes it very different than RL prejudiced ideas about other homo sapiens.
Wookiees and Cave Trolls are seven feet tall and can rip your arms off. Giving them an inherent bonus and higher maximum to their "strength" stat does not strike me as racist; it strikes me as common sense.
But when you also give trolls a negative to charisma and elves a bonus, I think it's wading into more problematic territory. Are they really less charming due to inherent characteristics of their species in your canon, or is that just a reflection of human prejudice?
@tat said in Meshing Groups:
Or just be okay with less interaction IN the scene, and build in time for those characters to connect around what happened later.
That's what I do. Like if the plot starts at 9 and I know that most players pumpkin by midnight, I'll make sure that the "meat" of the plot ends by 11 so there's still time for folks to do wrap-up and stuff afterward.
Personally I don't enjoy doing a lot of interaction in the midst of plot scenes (which tend to be action scenes on my games). It's hard enough to keep track of what everyone else is even doing without then also trying to respond to a bunch of different conversations. And it tends to bog things down.
@derp said in Positivity Going Forward...:
If there's one thing that we learned when MSB was dying a slow death due to Redis weirdness, it's that there really weren't any alternatives out there if, for some reason, the server that MSB is stored on catches fire tomorrow.
I mean, there have been? Reddit, the Ares forum, the Evennia group... other venues exist and have for years. I'm not saying competition is bad, but people go where the people are. That's been true ever since WoRA and Electric Soup back in the day. I applaud the shift to a more positive environment, but I'm skeptical as to whether the community has the bandwidth to really support multiple forums.
This caught me, I don't think I've ever seen you throw in a gif. I laughed, good thing its my planning period and no students where in the room (in which case I wouldn't be on-line but still).
Lol. It's rare for sure. Glad to amuse.
Some day, when I have more time and energy, I want to convince you to help me set up an original space fantasy game.
Sounds fun! When I have more spoons I may run another BSGU spinoff. Continue my battlestar expanded universe. Who knows.
Pose order can be useful for async scenes or play-by-post roleplay so I think it has its place, but I just personally don't enjoy it in an immersive roleplay environment.
Pose order is a conundrum for me. I don't like that it slows things down, but at the same time - without it, I have an even harder time holding the threads of conversations. You'll be in the midst of typing up a reply to one thing someone said, then suddenly somebody else replies to them first and the convo goes off on a tangent and your pose no longer makes any sense. So I view it as a necessary evil. Honestly 3-per and free-for-all pose orders just give me a headache and suck the enjoyment right out of a scene.
@Misadventure asked over in Too Much:
Do you happen to have or recall a list of the pros and cons for the setups (for places code) you looked at?
There was actually a big discussion about this a few years back in this other thread, but I'll summarize where I ended up.
TL;DR; - no system is perfect. The main variable is what you think is the main purpose for a places system. For me it's organizational - where is everyone? The spam reduction aspects always caused more hassle than help for me. YMMV. If you see "reducing spam" as the main goal, you might go in a completely different direction.
This is mostly a data dump, but everyone feel free to share other thoughts and other places code alternatives you've seen.
Traditional Pros/Cons
In old-school systems, a player joins a place and uses a special command (usually tt) that emits only to people at that place.
Ares Pros/Cons
In Ares, you pose as normal and everyone can see your pose. There's just an informational tag around it, like:
[+ At Table in the Corner +] Faraday falls off her chair.
Hybrid Pros/Cons
I also considered a hybrid system where it would use normal pose commands, but still only emit to people at the place.
Miscellaneous Considerations
As someone mentioned in the other thread, in traditional/hybrid, you could conceivably allow GMs to join multiple places to monitor things. That just causes some added complexity and potentially confusion (where is their PC really?)
In Ares' web portal, the scene pose output isn't customized per character, and you could conceivably have multiple characters in the same scene browser. This makes filtering output very challenging.
@kk said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
The whole if everyone is exceptional, nobody is exceptional on mushing is def a thing
It is, but IMHO it's kind of a petty thing that I have no patience for. Because the people who have a problem with it are (generally) not willing to be the not special person to let others shine. So it's basically just them saying: "Well I want to be special, of course, but I don't want you to be special too because then I won't feel special and I should be the only special one here." That's some nonsense.
It's also a bit illogical - like if you're in a room with Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors and somehow "nobody's special" just because everyone there is outstanding.
@Ghost said in Bring back the Hog Pit:
Fuck bringing it back. Delete it and nuke the history.
Could also delete it but maintain a readonly archive on some fileshare somewhere for posterity. I've been told that buried in with the toxic sludge are some useful tidbits, but YMMV.
But bring it back? Oh heck no.
Folks who wanted the hog pit already migrated to the other forum, along with the ones who were banned from here. Bringing back the hog pit isn't going to magically reverse-migrate the community. It's the same basic problem that faces all the Twitter/Facebook competitors. Social media requires people, and the MUSH community isn't big enough to sustain two active forums.
@il-volpe said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
I can see a deal where you get a fifth of an extra die, or a tenth of a reroll for every fail/botch, so you can save 'em up and do spectacular stuff if you screw up enough. That could be fun.
So I remember TTRPG and early MUSH systems that incentivized XP through skill use. The only thing it incentivized was rolling for the stupidest stuff as often as humanly possible so you'd bank up the XP.
Then of course there are the merit/flaw systems, which basically just incentivize players to take silly or toothless flaws in order to "balance" their merits.
Or the systems where someone takes a -2 in some little-used attribute in order to get a bonus to one that's going to come up all the time.
These ideas almost never work out the way the designers intended.
@skew said in Choosing a MU Server:
I have to say that I still do not understand why no one has set up a "blank" database, which has not just the TinyMUX core stuff (SGP?) but also a package of the most used features on it. It seems like it would be incredibly simple to do.
Well, I can't speak to TinyMUX but I did exactly this for PennMUSH with my Softcode Package (which everybody calls the 'FS3 codebase' even though FS3 is a completely optional addon.)
The trouble, I think, is that there was so much variation in softcode packages. Should your starter DB include Faraday's +who or Volund's? Brandymail or Faraday's mail? Also, configuring these things required code knowledge (because it requires monkeying with attributes on objects and softcode formatting functions). If you need a coder just to set the dang thing up, then having a pre-built code package for simple globals was of minimal benefit.
But this speaks to a core philosophical difference between Evennia and Ares. Ares is designed to be a 'MU in a box'. There are a bunch of things you can configure easily, but if you want a radically-different +where display, or to completely remove the BBS system, it's going to take some code surgery. Whereas Evennia is more of a blank slate. If you like Sparks' BBS you just install it. Or you can use some other BBS. Or make your own. In this regard it's more like the old servers. Harder if you just want something that works out of the box, but easier if you want to go off the beaten path or just do something your own way.
@skew said in Choosing a MU Server:
I'll be documenting my stuff as best I can ... Super easy to copy+paste it!)
Probably worth noting that both Evennia and Ares have repositories for community contributions. So it'll be easier to share your stuff and have people actually find it.
Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. It was the first sci-fi/fantasy adventure book I ever read that had a girl as the main character.
@deadculture said in General Video Game Thread:
@thenomain Without going too much into that, she's the only person in the world who gets paid 20K dollars to make a (free) Discord channel. That should pretty much tell you the intent there.
Look, I'm not defending everything she's said or done, but that's just not factually accurate. They had a fundraiser for a registered 501(c) non-profit charity organization. One of the fundraiser "reward tiers" was a promise to set up and for the leaders to be available on a discord server. Equating that to them asking 20k to make a discord server is like saying Idris Elba charged thousands of dollars for a dinner date. That's just not how fundraising works.
@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
As an analogy, consider a Call of Duty multiplayer match. I'll accept getting shot to pieces by some 12-year-old kid, but I will log the fuck out in a second when he starts crowing about how he "raped" me or how girls shouldn't be gamers.
Of course. But that's OOC abuse. We were talking about IC behavior. Everyone has sensitive subjects they would prefer not to RP about. For me it's "kids in mortal peril". For someone else it might be assault, or suicide or losing a close relative, or - yes - IC discrimination/harassment. I think there's general agreement that nobody should be forced to sit at a keyboard and be subjected to things that upset them. I mean really - is there anyone here arguing against FTB? What's being debated is whether and how people should be allowed to avoid such parts of the theme entirely - and what impacts that has on other players.
@horrorhound said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
but rather, through CodeMagic, make it so skills are raised by the number AND quality of rolls made
How do you measure quality though? On MUDs or RPIs you have coded difficulty levels that have actual meaning - a level 20 mob, or crafting an item with difficulty 7.
These structures simply do not exist on MUSHes.
Even the concept of "only GM rolls" is inherently flawed - many valuable scenes occur between players, not involving GMs at all. Even in GM scenes, rolls can be few and far between. (I defer to narration more than rolls in the vast majority of my GMed scenes.)
Any such system would necessitate shifting to either judged RP logs (which has certainly been done, but is problematic for all the reasons @Lotherio mentioned) or a more RPI-like framework (which runs counter to the reason most of us MUSH vs. MUD in the first place).
So in short, I don't think this that mechanically rewarding rolls with XP will ever be a viable solution in a MUSH environment.
