Best posts made by faraday

@Ghost said in A.I. in the Community:

So I guess my argument is: if the emphasis is less on writing and more on titillating your writing partner,

I don't think this practice is as widespread as you assert it is. (Though doubtless it does exist.)

I am against generative AI on principle, so I don't like to see it used anywhere.

Yes, many games fall into the "fanfic" realm of copyright, but IMHO fanfic has never actually harmed anyone's livelihood. Gen AI is actively doing so on an unimaginable scale. The majority of the tools are making millions (billions?) of dollars on the backs of stolen work products, including my own. It's also horrible for the environment in terms of the computing power used. And the prompts people use are leveraged to improve the tools, participating in the destruction.

I hate them. I think they're dangerous.

There is no "harmless fun" involvement in using them, but I realize most people don't understand or agree with that, so I don't translate my hatred to them. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

ETA: I also disagree that replacing a static description with a PB is an evidence of writing waning, since most novels/stories don't pause the action to give you a multi-paragraph data dump on the character's looks and clothing either. That was always a MUSH quirk. But that's a separate convo.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

People need to know what they can report.

Yeah I'm gonna have to go with @Thenomain here and fall back to: "Adults need to adult." I'm not going to give somebody a laundry list of what they can/can't talk to me about or can/can't ask for. If they have a concern or a request, my door is always open. Is it a perfect system? No, no system is perfect. But it's worked pretty well for me.

@roz said in Earning stuff:

@ganymede said in Earning stuff:

Poe was really angry when Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo took over the Resistance. Sure, she was a friend of Leia's and had some success in the field, but she didn't earn the command of the Raddus.

She didn't??

There's every reason to believe she did, in fact, based on the whole discussion about her being next-senior and "Wait, that's Admiral Holdo from the Battle of Whatever?" But I agree with @Ganymede's general point that IC resistance toward the incoming leader can make for good storytelling, so long as the players can keep it IC and not get their noses out of joint over who they think "deserved" it more -- or heaven forbid staff giving a position to somebody they're friends with just because that's somebody they can trust not to flake out or be a jerk.

@seraphim73 said in Earning stuff:

I do, however, like to have some mid-level roles available to players/characters who step up and earn trust, both of staff as players and of their superiors as characters.

I'm not horribly opposed to that in principle, but on my games it's just too much of a headache. I've just had too many people in that position go idle or just never do their duties. It's annoying. I'm over dealing with that.

@Carex Obviously there are specialties within the field, but you can't escape the basic dictionary definition. But even that is beside the point. Their policy clearly states that no new automotive or mechanics businesses are allowed (but you can be a mechanic working for an existing shop). It doesn't matter whether I want to open a motorcycle repair shop or a lawnmower repair shop. It's restricted.

You're obviously free to think the restriction is unnecessarily tight, but it is nevertheless clearly stated in their policies IMHO. I see nothing wrong with the way they handled it.

@derp said in Great TV:

I disagree with this premise. If you want to relive the story from the books, then you should read the books. Every video adaptation of a story that doesn't have a LOTR budget has to make allowances and changes to fit the story into the narrative that you have.

I think it's a balance.

Budget constraints are a real limitation, like you said. So are time constraints. If you tried to film every scene in a novel it would be a mini-series, not a movie. And some things that work fine in a novel don't translate well to screen. Adaptations are almost always necessary.

But if you're not going to be faithful to the spirit of the original story, then don't try to pawn your movie off as that story just to ride its coattails. Do your own thing.

@bored said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

While I'm unclear how attached/detached it is from the game (ie is that roll actually pulling from the db, both sheet wise and roll code wise? it doesn't seem to use the grid but rather it's own locations? etc)

It's completely attached. The sheets that you see on BSGU's web portal are pulled from the DB. When you edit your profile on the web, it updates the DB so those changes are reflected in the game too. The list of 'locations' you see is just a list of grid rooms. Having a tightly-integrated website/wiki and telnet game is what makes it cool.

It's also what makes it complex.

TL;DR; Folks shouldn't trivialize the impact that this "oh sure let's do both" idea will have on the future ability of people to create custom code for their games. It's a big deal.

Long-winded version...

Like @Sparks said - the issue is that you have to duplicate everything in your front-end. Not only is that more work (which makes coding anything more onerous), it makes the codebase twice as complicated. Instead of just MU command or Web client/server, now you have both and a shared back-end API. For me? Hey, I do this crap for a living. This is nothing. But for someone trying to learn the new codebase it matters a lot.

@Ashen-Shugar - Ares uses a templating system. But that's still not a magic bullet because the templates are different for web and telnet. And even if you share a back-end, any decent web UX is going to need some amount of processing on the client side. You can minimize it, but you'll never eliminate it.

Then there are some more subtle impacts. Let's say that you allow people to log in on the web side and submit bbposts or post to scenes. Should that person be reflected on the 'Who' list or the scene's room in-game? How? Let's say you allow a GM combat management screen on the web. How does it know when someone has updated their action in-game? How does it alert the GM to that fact so they don't accidentally overwrite someone's changes with their own?

These problems have solutions, but those solutions add work and complexity. So of course I'd prefer it if we could do just one or the other and not both. But the current MU* community as a whole flat-out won't accept web-only, and I see no point in doing telnet-only, so... here we are.

ZOMG that was hideous. The idea of converting this to MUSH code makes me want to cry, so I'll just leave this Ruby version here for anyone who cares. It optionally does the double raises and exploding 10s that you get at rank 4/5. It probably has bugs but worked decently enough on the modest number of tests I did.

Ruby 7th Sea Roller

This reminds me why I created a custom skill system (because most tabletop ones aren't designed with computers in mind).

Output:

=============================
Rolling Dice
=============================
Rolled [5, 10, 6, 5, 9, 10, 2, 9, 8, 6, 10]
Exploding 3 dice
Rolled [1, 2, 6]
Final roll: [1, 2, 2, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10]

=============================
Counting Combos Making 15
=============================
Found a combo! 10+5
Found a combo! 10+5
Found a combo! 9+6
0 groups of fives
6 raises so far

=============================
Counting Junk Making 15
=============================
Junk dice: [10, 9, 8, 6, 6, 2, 2, 1]
Adding up junk: [10, 1, 2, 2]
Double Raise!
Adding up junk: [9, 6]
Double Raise!
Adding up junk: [8, 6]
10 raises so far

=============================
Counting Combos Making 10
=============================
Left over: [8, 6]
0 tens
0 groups of fives
10 raises so far

=============================
Counting Junk Making 10
=============================
Junk dice: [8, 6]
Adding up junk: [8, 6]
Raise!
11 raises so far
-------------------
11 Raises Total!

Edit: Fixed the link since Gist wasn't working the way I wanted.

@apos said in Code Discussion: Ambiance Emits:

@faraday I don't think it would stay that way or that it is unlikely that players would adopt whatever is the norm. That is more what I was getting at.

Fair enough. I disagree (that it'll change or catch on), because I think having more control over your environment is one of the key factors distinguishing a MUSH from a RPI/MUD. That said, I realize that it's a spectrum not a switch, and games like Arx and Firan straddle the fence. So I'm not saying it could never work, just that it's not the norm.

@surreality said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

This is my mental flow chart:

I really like this. My personal thought process runs much the same way, albeit with fewer sub-conditions under the "YES" column.

@Ghost said in About GenAi (ChatGPT, etc) Safety:

and a need for Ai engines to purge personally identifiable information stored in their databases.

Which will be hilarious to watch, since they would then have to invent a way to erase data from a neural network. Since (as I'm sure you know, Ghost, but not everyone does) it's not a "database" or "data" in the traditional sense, but a vast array of "connections". That's what makes it so hard for these things to correctly attribute sources, avoid regurgitating copyrighted information, and stop the hallucinations.

But that aside, your other points are spot on.

@ganymede said in Earning stuff:

It’s a little more difficult to do this on a WoD game.

Is it really? WoD is not my thing, but I am passingly familiar with it. It seems that there are any number of 'important events' that you could build stories around if that were your aim and if you steered characters into story-appropriate roles. (Which is why BSGU forced everyone to be in the mission-oriented departments.)

There's nothing wrong with saying that's not your goal - with having more of an "open world" concept where people can make anything they want. But... as @coin said:

@coin said in Earning stuff:

Many people come to online gaming to replicate and immerse themselves in the kind of stories they see the heroes and protagonists partake in on television and the big screen, or they come trying to find a way to do what they used to do in real life in tabletop with their friends back when they had time and didn't all live further away and didn't have life-sucking jobs

If a significant part of your intended audience is looking for something that your game design just flat-out can't provide then you've got issues. It's like saying: "OK I know you want X but I'm going to give you the complete opposite of X! Enjoy!"

@Ashen-Shugar I hate to quibble over your obvious generosity, but... why a thread? We already have an entire category for "MU Questions & Requests". And aren't threads like "Help my MUSH is being attacked!" or "Need help installing RHost" more useful to posterity (and more obvious to people who could potentially answer) than a giant sprawling thread of "this one guy who needed help one time"?

@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:

Shit, fara, you're the one that put https out there as an option for these games. Why put effort into it if it's no biggie?

Because I don't see the equivalence you do.

HTTPs is the default for websites. Web servers are easily set up with HTTPs, browsers support it out of the box (in fact, most web browsers will annoy you with warnings if you're NOT using HTTPs). Also you can't do browser notifications without HTTPs in some browsers.

Open ports is the default for MU servers. Many MU clients won't even connect over a secure connection.

I started off by saying I agree with 99% of what you said, we started qubbling over the last 1% (which is just that I don't think it's factually accurate to say that someone can manipulate your machine through an insecure MUSH server connection), and now it kinda feels like you're acting like I'm an idiot who doesn't support basic internet security principles. So I'm taking a break for awhile.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

It's how we are brought up - there are simply very few paradigms outside of MUSHing in our pop or gaming culture that prepare a player for not being one of the main protagonists of their own setting.

Those expectations can even be found in multi-player video games. In MMOs the quests (once you get past the "slaughter 20 bunnies and bring me their hides" stage) are designed with your character as the protagonist, even when there are umpteen million other characters on the server.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

From a certain point of view our expectations are unreasonable. It's not natural for players to change the way they think literally everywhere else other than in MU*.

There are, of course, teamwork-based games (e.g. Pandemic) and teamwork-based situations in games (e.g. a 20-man raid in a MMO) where it's not about stealing the spotlight. But those require the team coming into it with a set of shared expectations, and more of a community mentality. We just don't have that in MUSHland.

@arkandel Spot on. And getting players engaged is harder. “Kill orc” is way simpler than following breadcrumbs in a mystery or figuring out a clever way to solve a social problem. It’s also astonishingly difficult to involve a whole bunch of people in a social plot as more than spectators. Whereas a battle can involve dozens easily.

@Ghost I feel like we're arguing in circles and you're saying that I'm dismissing concerns that I'm not dismissing.

I am simply saying that many of those things you're worried about (honeypot MUs run by malicious actors, scraping IPs, social engineering, data within the game being compromised/spied on) are just as much a concern if you're using a secure connection as if you're using an insecure one. That is supporting your call for vigilance, not undermining it.

I just do not agree that you can compromise a MUClient connection in the way you seem to be describing. MUs do not use telnet/23, they use a simple, custom TCP protocol. It's a dumb-as-nails text connection that sends text to the game and displays text back from the game. The primary vulnerability is simply being able to snoop and/or manipulate the text sent back and forth. Which is a point I've agreed with from post 1. If there is some other technical exploit I'm missing here, I would genuinely love to know (even if it's by DM if you don't want to advertise it). But nothing you've said so far has convinced me that there is.

Tangentially, for the record, each Ares game has to set up its own security cert.

@roz said in Earning stuff:

You're misunderstanding my point. Note that I didn't say the purpose needs to be about plot. ... I'm saying that, in good writing, every word has some sort of purpose. Sometimes that purpose is plot, but sometimes it's about character... but it's still relevant and interesting in some way. Good writing has a point.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say as well. One of my favorite scenes on BSGU was the pilots going to a karaoke bar during shore leave. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but it was funny. And the uptight squadron leader kicking loose with a self-deprecating song was an important icebreaker for the group, and a key moment for that character. In contrast, some of my least favorite scenes were random "let's stack some Cylon planes up and mow them down" combat missions, because they had no real point other than people turning up to pad their kill counts.

And when people have limited time to RP, they may not want to risk ending up in a total dud of a scene, even if there's also the possibility that they'll get something brilliant.

That's it exactly. If the ratio of "dud to brilliant" was high, I wouldn't mind chancing it. But it sadly isn't. So I view the random social scenes as a necessary ice-breaker to something more fun, as opposed to the reason I play.

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

It's why the 'more games is better' principle is one I still believe in pretty strongly. It's why I worry when there's too many loud voices pushing for a 'one true way' all games must be in some respect or another, whatever that is.

I agree wholeheartedly, and want to clarify again that what I'm talking about here are just my preferences, not "The One True Way of RPing". I have nothing against Theno's preferred style. It was the "Remember when people actually liked to write?" remark I took exception to, thinking it implied an unhealthy disdain for the modern status quo.

Long poses, short poses, inner monologue... whatever. I don't care as long as it's interesting. A good scene is like a tennis match - you have to serve something your partner can hit back.

For pose times, it's less about the individual times than the collective time between my turns. I tend to RP late at night. If it's more than 20 minutes between when I pose and when I get to pose again? There's even odds that I've either forgotten I'm in a scene or fallen asleep. And it's not very satisfying if turns take 60 minutes and you only get three poses in before bed. This isn't a general condemnation of slow powers, just a sad reality of my schedule.

My personal pet peeve is folks who try to put a bunch of things into one pose. It really makes the conversation feel unnatural. It's more common (naturally) in people who do longer poses.

Jane says X. Poses walking across the room and getting a drink. Asks if Harvey would like a drink. Says Y about some completely different topic.

Harvey overreacts to X, but then has to figure out how to reconcile that with all the other crap Jane just posed... or is forced to ask her to amend her pose.

This gets magnified tenfold in a bigger scene when multiple people start doing it and/or start responding to everything around them.

Jane asks Harvey a question. Says something completely unrelated to Greg. Smiles and nods to Tom, who just walked up.
~
Greg replies to Jane. Begins to engage Tom in conversation. Waves to Amanda across the room.
~
Amanda waves back. Says hi to Harvey.
~
Harvey now has to answer Jane's question, greet or ignore Tom, and acknowledge Amanda. And perhaps address two other parallel conversations (Greg-Tom, Jane-Greg) going on in his immediate vicinity. And heaven forbid if any one of those things causes a disruption that would have pre-empted anything anybody else posed. (like punching Tom as he walks up.)

That, coupled with the longer pose times, makes me avoid scenes if there's more than three people.

Side note - all the griping about tabs seems a bit petty to me. We're all entitled to our preferences, but "OMG you're the worst / I don't want to play with you" seems like an extreme overreaction to a formatting peeve. Maybe get a better log editor?

@Juniper Heh. Though just for the record (in case it wasn't clear by the nitpicky arguing) Ghost and I agree on the core technical risks:

1. Anything sent between your computer and an insecure endpoint is susceptible to being snooped by a third party. This includes both http(without-the-s) websites and virtually all MU* client connections.

2. Anything you send to another MU player can be snooped by a third party if THE OTHER PLAYER is using an insecure connection.

3. Anything you transmit to ANY internet service is potentially visible to and exploitable by the service owner, anyone they choose to share it with, and anyone who compromises THEIR security.

Since #2 and #3 are still risks on a MUSH even if you connect securely, I don't personally lose sleep over #1. But I do think it's prudent to follow general precautions no matter how you connect:

• Avoid sharing sensitive information with other players, and if you do - it's safer on discord or via email than on a game.
• If you're on a dodgy public network (like a coffee shop) or have a dodgy partner/roommate, use a VPN.
• Follow general internet safety practices on your PC to protect it from vulnerabilities (e.g., use firewall/virus software, be very careful with email links/attachments, etc.)
• Be extra cautious/suspicious of sites that have insecure connections, and never trust them for anything truly important (ecommerce, banking, email, etc.)

With those general precautions in place, I'm perfectly comfortable connecting to my favorite MU via Atlantis/Beip/etc. YMMV.

@ganymede said in Managing Player Expectations:

While I concur that it's not possible for a game to meet everyone's needs, I would posit that, with the right set-up and players, you can fill in some of those gaps. It's not going to happen all the time, but it can be done.

It's possible to get around the scheduling issue IF you have player STs willing to step up, but there's no guarantee of that. And the other issues I mentioned were more fundamental.

At the end of the day, I think players need to be responsible to either do something about it (e.g. get together to run plots themselves) or recognize that the game isn't a good fit for them. This idea that "I want to play Battlestar, so it's your duty to entertain me in the way I wish to be entertained and I'll rake you over the coals if you don't" is just entitled and unreasonable.

@thenomain Agreed.

Personally I like to view the categories like movie genres. You may have a favorite, but most people like more than one genre to varying degrees and at different times. And sometimes a movie doesn't fit neatly into a box and you end up with "dramedy".

Nevertheless, it's a convenient short-hand. In games, it can lead you to good considerations about what sorts of things might appeal to different interests and how those interests can cooperate and compete.