@Auspice said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:
Mmmm. A10s in Terminator setting....
Oh it was cool, don't get me wrong. But, "The world has been nuked to hell and overrun by killer robots and there are just a handful of humans left living underground and.... oh did I mention we have a functional airfield with jets and fuel and..." It was harder for me to swallow than all the time travel paradoxes 
@lithium said in Heroic Sacrifice:
Those who are willing to cycle characters more often, and those who won't even bother with a shorter term story. There is not a lot of middle ground for those types to meet.
That hasn't been my personal experience. For example, everyone talks about the character death on TGG, but I think part of what contributed to people's tolerance of that turnover was the campaign length. You knew that each campaign would only be 6 months or so, so it wasn't like you were losing characters that you had been - or thought you would be - playing for 2 years. And on other games, I witnessed people who were suuuuuuper attached to their long-term characters take more creative challenges - including agreeing to killing their characters off or doing dramatic betrayals - with shorter-term ones. There will always be people on either extreme, of course, but I think there's more of a middle ground than you may think.
@seraphim73 said in Heroic Sacrifice:
What about a game with only a single stat: Karma. In order to gain Karma, you have to take losses--personal, professional, physical, whatever.
I think something like that would be more story-oriented. In fact, that's similar to how Storium's mechanic works. You start the game with an equal number of strength and weakness cards, and have to spend all of them before your hand refreshes. Systems like this have other issues, some of which you highlighted, but they do put more emphasis on the fact that storytelling is about more than victories.
@Sparks said in A fully OC supers MU:
I gather it's somewhat more focused on running a game as well where Evennia's Discord is fairly heavily focused on developing one.
The Ares discord has separate channels for help setting up/running a game and developing one. The admin help gets a bit more traffic, generally, but I think that's because a lot of the folks picking Ares are doing so because they don't have a coder and it's ready to go out of the box.
Ares does not have M&M off the shelf, but there are several other skill/roll systems one could pattern it after if you wanted to make your own. (and a tutorial for making one). If none of the systems have M&M already made, then I think it comes down to what other systems you are looking for in a game. Here is a quick comparison (It was up to date last I knew, but if Evennia has added stuff since then I'm happy to update it.)
@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:
Agreed, but I think that's not relevant to most of this debate here. I mean the question isn't really how to handle character death but overall adversity.
You don't lose the character - which we agree on carries heavy social consequences - because someone called them a poohead and everyone laughed OMG.
Absolutely - but the OP did ask what would incentivize people to allow their character to be killed or maimed, so I think it's relevant. And I think for an awful lot of MUSHers the answer is: absolutely nothing.
The laughing thing - yeah. 
Both Azure and Amazon Web Services have free tiers if you stay under their resource limits. The trouble is that their pricing structures and resource metering can be difficult to understand, so it's easy to stray from the free tier into being forced to pay for things. I prefer Digital Ocean, as @Derp mentioned (though Linode seems nice too). It's not free, but most MUs will run on their $5/mo plan and it's very clear what you're getting and what your price will be.
@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:
And I think that staff need to adopt the position as investigators as much as being mindful of their role as judges.
Agree 100%, but if people aren't willing to be candid with complaints or submit logs to corroborate their accusations, your ability to investigate is severely hampered. Staff needs to do its part, but players need to meet them halfway.
@Selerik Yeah, there are many reasons why AresCentral accounts are a) optional and b) not tied to the logins for individual games. Those are both cultural and related to security and trust. I don't think centralized accounts are feasible in MUs today.
@Ghost said in How to Escape the OOC Game:
I'm not gonna tell it out of a bullhorn, though. There's speakers at high school these days who use shock and awe tactics during presentations to show parents just how easy it is to find someone through social media for that particular speech.
Everything in life is a risk. Want to take this philosophy to extremes? Live with a family member with OCD and anxiety, or participate in hazard analysis on safety-critical engineering devices at work. Fun times! (not)
Anyway, you have to balance the risk of a thing with the rewards of doing it and the consequences of not doing it. Reasonable people will reach different conclusions based on the perceived benefits and risks, but scare tactics help no one.
In fact, over-inflating extremely unlikely events are can lead to societal silliness like kids not being able to play in their own front yards unsupervised these days without somebody calling child protective services.
Ranks I think you just have a typo - Civillians vs. Civilians.
Thanks @krmbm for the assist
@surreality Yeah totally. It’s kind of like how LARPing is the intersection of acting and RPGs, only MUs lack the unifying conventions/culture. Each game is wildly different. I don’t think LARPs have that same phenomenon, but I haven’t done much LARPing so I can’t say for sure.
@Cobaltasaurus said in Welcome to the Euphoria!:
Fixed now, though I added that this morning because I had been getting that error and wasn't certain if I needed it for the civilians org.
Yeah missing the civilians org was probably the original reason you were getting the warning, but since it was misspelled it still thought it was missing.
You only need to have one rank for "Civilian" to make the system happy. You can call it "None" or "Civilian" or whatever.
@WildBaboons said in Privacy in gaming:
you're discussing your health history on an Ares chat channel that's posted in the channel history to a webpage
Not likely in that specific instance, because you're doing the disclosure yourself in a public forum. It would be no different that talking about your diabetes to your buddy in the line at Wendys. Wendys isn't responsible for who might overhear.
But a staffer snooping on a page convo and then gabbing about your diabetes would be more problematic.
ETA: I agree with your general point about having a privacy policy though - I said so earlier as well.
@Cobaltasaurus said in Welcome to the Euphoria!:
Can the descs for each room just be: "This is the bridge, use your imagination". Or "This is the medbay, figure it out."
As someone who once literally had a room desc saying little more than: "It's a junkyard. There's... junk... in it." I say go for it. Maybe some of the early players will be motivated enough to contribute descs. You could also just slap some reference pictures on the wiki.
@Arkandel said in Punishments in MU*:
Today in Punishments in MU*: Faraday gets turned down.
It’s worse than being banned. :sniff:
@Sunny said in Hello!Project's Mysterious Game Project Thread:
This is part of why it's doubly important that you have a firm understanding of what you need the platform to do, because you may have an unmet need that Evennia / Ares don't address, but Rhost does, or some mud platform, or whatever.
Seconded. I focused on Evennia and Ares above because someone mentioned web stuff. If that's your focus, they both come with a website built in. The others have only a minimal web client, AFAIK. Anything more than that you'd have to build entirely from scratch.
That said, there are certain use cases that ONLY Rhost supports easily. So like you said, it all comes down to what your priorities are.
@Derp said in Learning Ruby for Ares:
I'm leaning toward a more traditional inventory system based on objects for a couple of reasons, really...First -- while what I want to do could probably be done with a database, I'm not sure how to do it in a database, and it might be more complicated.
Well... if you want to store something in Ares dynamically, you're gonna store it in the database. There's just no other way to do it. (By dynamic I'm excluding static configuration settings, like 'a broadsword always does d6 damage'. Those you can chuck into config files, like FS3's weapons config.)
The difference between Ares and other MU code systems is that most traditional MU code systems have four classes of objects - Characters, Rooms, Exits, Things. Things being the "yeah anything that isn't one of the above gets shoved in here, and you can kinda use parentage to classify them". They also then have a separate storage system for mail and channels (typically).
Ares doesn't really work that way. It has the big three types of objects (which we call database models in AresLand) - Characters, Rooms, Exits. But then it also has a zillion more. Scene. MailMessage. ForumPost. Pose. Damage. PageMessage. Channel. WikiPage. etc. etc. etc.
So there's nothing wrong with creating an inventory system based on objects (database models). What I was saying is that whatever system you came up with, the db models are going to be specific to your inventory system, and not some generic "Thing" object that could be repurposed easily in some other system and/or game.
@deathbird said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
Currently 'where' has the grid listed under 'other' which gives secondary importance to it. Plus the 'scene' command already exists
Grid and Scenes are different things. You can have an open scene on the grid, in which case it will appear in the "Scenes" section. The default +where display is actually designed to highlight places where RP can be found. If you're on grid, start a scene there and mark it 'open' to show people you're available for RP. Give it a description so folks know what to expect. There's a lot more flexibility with the scenes system than with "Oh look, Deathbird is hanging out in Sharkey's Bar" while still having you be physically present on the grid.
@Ganymede said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
I see it cropping up on Ares games more and more as the key to involvement in plots. I could be wrong but this is the impression I ge
You may be right as to it becoming more common, but I think you're putting the cart before the horse. IF it is indeed becoming more common, it's because the PLAYERS need and want the flexibility of asynch RP. If they were playing on Arx, that need and want wouldn't go away. Those plots just wouldn't exist, or they would be being done in google docs or TP rooms or whatnot.
Which, hey, some people may prefer. That's fine. I don't object to peoples' preferences. What I object to is the assertion (not yours directly) that Ares is somehow the cause of the culture.
Ares just gives people the tools to play their way. If their way isn't in line with your way, then maybe that's not the game for you. There's nothing wrong with that.
@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
Would could help Ares is removing these from that list, so synchronous players get a picture of what is actually synchronous activity?
Then you're relegating asynch RP to a second-class citizen, implying that those kinds of scenes don't "count" because they're not "active".
That said, I realize that competing expectations about pacing is a legit concern and I've been working on tools to make that expectation more clear. It's not as simple as adding a "speed" preference to the scenes because one person's "slow" or "fast" may mean something entirely different to someone else.
@L-B-Heuschkel said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
I for one always sit in a public room on grid when available to play, on Ares games, and I have never, ever had someone walk in on one without paging first. Not once. Never ever.
I've sat on public rooms on Penn games too and had the same experience. This isn't an Ares thing.
@Autumn said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I think the argument to be made there is that Imperial Japan is every bit as offensive to Asian people as Nazi Germany is to westerners, and that therefore permitting one but not the other indicates a cultural bias.
That's a fair point, but as someone else pointed out - the game (appears to) allow you to play Germans, just not Nazis specifically. It's unclear to me from the policy file whether that would cover a Luftwaffe pilot who was not a member/supporter of the Nazi party. That's something that could certainly be clarified.
But if a non-Nazi-supporting Luftwaffe pilot could be allowed then that would seem on the surface to be on par with the Japanese Navy pilot who was likely insulated from most of the war crime type stuff by nature of their military role. If the Luftwaffe pilot is off limits just for being on the wrong side of the war, then I agree it seems oddly inconsistent to allow the Japanese one.
Either way, though, it's a far leap from "oddly inconsistent" to "racist".
@Sunny said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:
WHY would you use Ares and then turn all that off, instead of just using a tool that does the other thing natively?
Because it can be turned off? As you said, there are many features of Ares, of which "allowing scenes to stay open and counted as active for days on end" is merely one of them. Maybe you want to use Ares because you like the built-in wiki. Or the web based chargen. Or.. or.. or... There's no reason NOT to use it for your game just because you don't like seeing scenes stay open for long periods of time.
There's a reason it's a config option that you can tune to your (the game-runner's) preferences.
ETA: I mean I generally agree that Ares is not right for every game. I've steered several people over to Evennia or Rhost because those platforms fit their needs better. I'm just focusing on this particular config option.
@Wizz said in Interest in Cyberpunk MU*?:
It is a mechanic that makes sense in Shadowrun, it just doesn't anywhere else.
Someone with All The Things (tm) in any system is probably going to be overpowered. Most games have some limit to keep you from learning all the spells, or getting all the gear, or having all the skills. All we're talking about here is an in-universe explanation as to why (you lose your humanity and go insane and are no longer playable) rather than just imposing an arbitrary point cutoff.
And part of it stems from a world-building desire not to have terminators running around. It wasn't in line with the vision of the setting, even though it could have been a natural consequence of the technology. That may or may not fit in any other cyberpunk setting depending on what you were going for.