Best posts made by faraday

@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU*:

Ares would be awesome for Wheel of Time. FS3 is probably going to be an uncomfortable fit.

Yep. From the docs:

FS3 is designed and optimized for games that are:

• Near-Modern - Regular humans in a tech level not too unlike our own (no magic, super powers, augmentation, energy shields or death rays).
• Cooperative - Players who are on the same team (PvE).
• Focused - A narrow focus on what action mechanics can be detailed and/or automated through code.

None of that sounds particularly well-suited to a WoT game.

There are several other skill systems Ares supports, or you can use that code as a model to craft your own.

@testament FS3 and Ares are completely independent. You can use Ares with any system you want, including any edition of DND.

The broader issue is whether your game requires "immersive" components like crafting code, economy code, magic effects, auto-combat resolution, etc. All that would be a massive investment in any codebase. Ares just has a secondary consideration of how those systems would interact with the web portal and scene system.

Players in Ares interact with scenes and systems, not rooms and objects. So you could absolutely do some kind of 5e game in Ares. Whether it's worth the effort to fulfill your vision is gonna depend on what you're looking for.

@three-eyed-crow said in Wheel of Time MU*:

FS3 isn't actually a very good generic dice roller, even if it is sometimes shoe-horned into that role as well.

Ares has a generic dice roller plugin too.

@songtress said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

it was more me pinning for the pretty colored clothing objects with their pretty ansi colors and descriptions. Vs. Say the actual how you get there.

Maybe I'm not following then. Without the "how you get there" - you just use the desc command and put in whatever ansi you want? If some other tailor char is providing the clothing, they can provide you the fancy desc of what it looks like.

If you just want an inventory tracking system to control who's got fancy hats and who doesn't, you don't need immersive code for that. You just need an OOC way to assign clothes to people.

What is the point of XP?

Until you answer that question, which is going to be different for each game, you can't answer detailed question about how much XP should be awarded / required to progress.

Some games (D20, MMOs) treat character growth like a carrot on a stick. Players expect constant rewards to motivate them to keep playing. ("Gotta make it to level 60!")

Some games are more story-driven, where there is no XP. If you need to adjust your stats due to IC character growth or learning, you submit a request and justification.

Some games use XP as OOC rewards for doing things that the game runners value, like helping newbies or running plots.

Some games use XP to reflect IC character learning. Since people don't learn things overnight, this tends to necessitate a slow-burn progression. (FS3 subscribes to this model.)

There's no right or wrong answer, but there are pros and cons to various options. Carrot-on-stick works best when players start out low. OOC rewards leads to the dino effect, where new players suck compared to veterans. etc. You have to figure out what kind of game you want.

@arkandel said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

is much easier than doing so for a table-top RPG

I mean... kinda? Having done both, my 2 cents is that they're each royal pains, just in different ways.

A MU is kinda like a MMO in that you can adjust on the fly (like you said), but it's also like a MMO in that people get very attached to doing things in a certain way. If you change (or heaven forbid nerf) something, people can get super pissed off. They also have a direct channel to gripe at you about it.

Also you seem to be presuming that you've got some kind of metrics to tell you whether +3 initiative is as useful as +3 defense. But how? How many combats have you really got going on in your game on a daily basis? How many skill rolls? How many times does the 'mass stun' spell get used? Probably not many. Compare that to how many vocal players who are just ticked off because they imagined their character performing differently than the dice worked out to be. That's not necessarily a problem mechanics (or with the players, for that matter), it can just be a clash of expectations.

On topic though, the whole idea of skill points, levels, dice... it's all just weird. It's a pretty crappy way of modeling humans.

I don't do plots with actual mystery for the players any more. Every single time I've tried - and I'm talking many games, across many years - it's been either:

• Players figure out the mystery in 0.2 seconds even though the characters should logically struggle more to piece the clues together.

• Players cling to red herrings like a dog with a bone, then get frustrated and bored when their investigations don't pan out.

• Players show zero interest in the mystery and just go about their daily lives expecting someone else to solve it.

It's just not worth the effort/frustration for me.

There have been a lot of pay-to-play MUDs, and ones that offer premium benefits like the Iron Realms family.

My friend worked for one of the big paid MUD houses back in the heyday. It was quite a venture - IT staff, paid GMs/admins, and so forth.

It's hard to imagine successfully translating that to a MUSH environment. You'd have to have an absurd GM-to-player ratio to provide enough entertainment to satisfy players, and that would be tough to scale up to a level where you could pay them all.

There are different ways to play RPGs. None are inherently right or wrong, or better or worse, but it is vital that players and game-runners be on the same page.

Both Little House on the Prairie and Deadwood are westerns, but they are vastly different experiences. If you try to have a game where half the players want Little House and half want Deadwood, you're gonna have issues.

I prefer games that are cooperative storytelling experiences. In order to cooperate, some measure of OOC communication and transparency is essential. I've had good success running these types of games, but they're not for everyone.

@juniper said in The Desired Experience:

This is a hobby, not charity.

Yeah, I really don't get this expectation that you should even try to play with everybody. Just no. It's a game. It's meant to be fun. If you're doing something that is torturous for you, then you're doing it wrong.

Sure, it's nice to reach out and take chances on people, especially new folks. It takes a certain amount of critical mass of players and RP to keep a game open, so one can argue it's in your own best interests to do so at least occasionally. But never in any way would I expect people to treat it as an obligation.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For many people, studies are finding that multitasking is actually a bad thing. And how many of us already gripe on the regular about our RP partners taking 20, 30 minutes to pose?

I think that expecting people to stay focused on the game is unrealistic given that the nature of the medium means you have to wait for other people to pose. Even if there are only two people, it's going to take 10 minutes on average for someone to come up with a halfway decent pose. Add another person in? No. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to stand there twiddling my thumbs staring at a screen for 15-20 minutes. Multitasking is inevitable due to the genre.

But I agree with your basic principle, which is that spreading the game across two mediums is ugly. The difference is that I think the web is the medium we should be moving towards. There is nothing you can do in-game that can't be done on the web. There are many, many, many things you can't do in-game that you can do on the web. If we have to stick to only one platform, web is a no-brainer IMHO.

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

But they're not. They are playing on your game. Or rather, at your game venue. But they are playing their game. Nobody else gets to play. They are showing up at your pot luck, availing themselves of your tables and napkins and comfy heated rooms...

Yep, and I'm fine with that, because my job as an admin is to provide a venue for people to tell THEIR stories, not to tell MY story. If they're entertaining themselves and having fun in my tables, more power to them. That's awesome. If they contribute somehow through the sorts of "spill over" I described (logs, ancillary RP being spurred, etc.) all the better, but it's not required.

and insulting your other guests by replying to "Hey, that looks good, can I have some?" with "Nope, I only have enough for just us," and "Want some of the potato salad I brought?" with "Naw, I'm too full from eatin' this delicious sandwich that you can never try."

Whoa, when did "insults" become part of the scenario here? Everything we've been talking about has been people minding their own business RPing with their friends. If they're actually NOT minding their business but instead being obnoxious jerks, then you deal with that. One really has nothing to do with the other.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

See, I think it'd cause more BarRP, not less. And likely less if not cancel out combat altogether. Who wants to engage in combat when it might be days before you get an answer to a question from your ST before you can take your action?

If the expectation is that a scene will be completed in 1-3 days, then a storyteller taking 2 days to respond to a question is breaking the social contract, just like a storyteller in the current MUSH form who took 2 hours to respond in the middle of a combat scene. Not every request would need to be answered immediately, but urgent ones about a scene in progress? That should get priority.

I mean, come on - how many times a day do people check their email, or facebook, or heck - this forum? This is not a revolutionary idea. Lots of people are on from work. They can't devote their entire attention to a traditional MUSH scene, but I'm willing to bet that a fair number of them could handle tossing out a pose an hour when they had a free moment. Add that up over a day or three, and you've got yourself a scene where previously there would've been none.

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

"I don't know you and don't have the time/energy/inclination to see if you really suck or not, but go away until you suck less."

I really don't understand why you keep equating "I'm here to RP with specific people" with "you suck", or why you equate "Sorry can't play right now" with "go away until you suck less". They're just... not connected.

It shouldn't matter why I'm here to RP with specific people. Maybe I'm shy. Maybe I'm self-conscious about my RP. Maybe I have a newborn baby at home and only have an hour to RP and choose to spend it with my bestie. Maybe meeting someone new/unfamiliar requires an extra level of creativity that I don't have it in me to give.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with you.

@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.

Yet this pacing is the same thing that die hards love about MUs.

I believe there can be a middle ground between snails pace storium/PBF and traditional MUing. But most folks seem to see it as all or nothing.

@carma said in The Desired Experience:

Maybe what I'm really asking is, Sandwich Club members, what kind of storyteller attention do you want?

I don't think there's a universal answer here.

There are some Sandwich Clubs that, as @Ganymede says, just want to be left the heck alone.

Barring that, though, I think they're entitled to the same support as anyone else on the game. That doesn't mean you have to personally craft events/hooks/scenes just for them. It just means you shouldn't actively prevent them from accessing plot hooks you dangle for the game at large.

Most Sandwich Clubs I've encountered (including the ones I've personally been a part of) are not 100% insular. They may prefer playing with each other, but there's enough tangential encounters that anything you give to them has a chance to spill out to the rest of the game -- especially if the thing you give them leads to some kind of public event, or requires support from the science department, or whatever.

There's nothing wrong with staff gently incentivizing people to play beyond their comfort zones; it only becomes a problem when it's forced and/or expected.

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.

It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.

So if you do scene/start Mess Hall=public then it starts up a scene using the Mess Hall desc.

@derp said in GMs and Players:

What then? Because I tacitly gave a nod of approval to 'yeah I am not going to explicitly ban you from doing a thing I cannot prevent you from doing anyway' I am now supposed to play the judge of the thing I couldn't stop you from doing had I wanted to?

I mean... you just say no? I don't see the big deal here.

It doesn't matter if Bob was mean to me on Facebook, Discord, MSB, ABC MU*, or whatever. If it's not your game, you have no obligation to discipline Bob for it.

It also doesn't matter WHY Bob was being mean to you off-game. Maybe it was RP about your game; maybe it was a conversation about your game; maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with your game. It's still not your problem.

Unless of course you WANT it to be. If you feel Bob's off-game behavior crosses some intolerable line for you (hate speech, doxxing, stalking, whatever) and you want to ban him for it, that's your prerogative. But by no means is there any reasonable expectation for you to do so. Any player who demands that of you is just being unreasonable and you can tell them so.

@ashen-shugar said in Alternative Formats to MU:

• First... rewrite the whole damn thing. From scratch.

That's what we did, though, with Ares and Evennia. Are they perfect? Of course not. But they’re new. Imagine them once they've had 30 years to evolve like the existing MU servers have.

Actually, no... if you guys are still using Ares in 30 years I think I'll cry.

So if you all want to see it happen, you all are going to have to help us with it.

Speaking just for myself, what I want isn't coding help it's player help. Like @Ganymede mentioned - she doesn’t use the BSGU web portal. That’s understandable (and she's certainly not the only one), but the only way these platforms are going to get better is by people using them, finding the glitches and pain points, and providing feedback.

And when providing feedback to devs, a little bit of patience and kindness goes a long way. It’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm for a project against a barrage of criticism. A bug is a bug, but it matters whether you report it as "Grr, this is broken again..." or "FYI I stumbled across this..."

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For me RP needs to be real time. Again, it doesn't mean this is the only 'valid' way to do it, but that's what would work for me.

I really do think it’s just a matter of establishing a social contract about how things are done on web-MUs. We already do that for telnet RP. Nothing about the technology says you can’t take 2 hours to pose. The people control that. The same can apply to web. You’re expected to pose every 10-15 minutes or excuse yourself. And the IC:RL time ratio can help force folks to resolve scenes in a timely fashion because otherwise it’ll be so stale it won’t matter.

The only thing the technology impacts is making sure it’s easy to receive notifications so people don’t routinely lose track of scenes the same way I forget about the Verizon guy I started a tech support chat with.

@devrex said in GMs and Players:

Verified that the page log history spans interactions back to the first pages exchanged on game.

I applaud all your efforts. Just FYI though that unrestricted page and scene storing can lead to performance issues, which may necessitate upgrading your droplet with more RAM. Deleting unshared scenes defaults to off because on most ares games it seems that most scenes get shared anyway and it won't matter, but that's going to depend on your game culture.