Best posts made by faraday

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

@three-eyed-crow Don't forget, with the websocket client you can make the same sort of web portal with any MUSH.

Not effectively though. You can do a basic web client, but to do more advanced integrations requires a more advanced interface. Just shipping commands like "WHO" to the game and trying to parse ASCII text back out is not going to get you very far.

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

It feels like this part is being ignored in upgrades.

I wouldn't say it's being ignored, just that we have different views of the problem. To me, even if you have somebody who's interested in reading/writing/storytelling/collaborating, they're going to be severely put off by a 1980's era interface. I've heard this from a number of folks first-hand.

I mean, think about the next generation. My kids have never seen a command-line interface in their lives. They approach every screen like it's a touch screen. This is the next generation of potential MUSHers. Even if the hobby still centers around writing, you've got to meet them halfway with an app they can relate to. IMHO.

@il-volpe said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

I need it. It's 'Game of Thrones' and a great many PCs are related to one another in various ways and I can't approve two eldest daughters, or other such conflicts. I also have had to reject an elf and a princess of Normandy.

Yep. I've had various historical aberrations and a Vampire on a Wild West game, someone wanting to be, like, a group of six symbiotic Pak'ma'ra on Babylon 5, people who clearly had no bloody clue how the military worked on Battlestar... the list goes on and on. Backgrounds are a pain for some people. I get that. Filling out a personality questionnaire for a PC is equally a pain for me because that's just not how my brain approaches character definition, so I can totally sympathize. But I view BGs as a necessary evil to protect the existing players from insanity. It doesn't have to be a novel, just a little bit to cover the key bits of your character.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

Leave the text window the text window. ... It's our plus-commands that are the problem.

Yeah, that's basically the approach I've taken with Ares. You can RP strictly through the web portal, but it's a little clunky and I don't expect most people will. The text window will be the primary mechanism for starting a scene and posing and that's perfectly fine because both of those things are principally text-driven activities with very simple command sets.

But does somebody new to MUSHing really need to learn +bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> when they can read and post to the forums on a web portal without disrupting their RP? Even among the veterans, I know there are a lot of us who prefer to read the forums like, y'know, forums instead of typing +bbnew over and over again. Why do chargen with +raise this and +lower that when you can just click a few buttons on a web form? Those are the places where I think there's mileage to be had.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

We could absolutely hook HTML5/CSS3 into it, and probably fairly easily, but now you need someone to run the game, someone to code the game, and someone to UI the game. These can overlap, but we're adding to, not simplifying, the requirements for entry.

For a lot (if not most) programmers these days, HTML/CSS skills are part of the standard package. It doesn't take a whole lot of expertise to make a fill-in form for your chargen. If the bulk of the web portal and basic systems are already built, adding just a few new UI elements for your custom stuff shouldn't be a giant obstacle. (If you're talking about Firan levels of custom code, well then yeah... stuff gets complicated. But that's not most games.)

@Thenomain said in Telnet is Poop:

We aren't doing anything about the server problem, and while we can do minimal things about the interface problem we really aren't doing that, either. Yes, this rant was a tangent, but it was a tangent to illustrate that okay maybe "tenet bad" is a problem but if we're not solving it then it's a dead-end issue.

But when you say "we aren't doing anything" -- umm, there are people trying to do things. Evennia. AresMUSH. The reason I decided to make a from-the-ground-up new MUSH server is because I thought that it was better than trying to graft junk onto 30-year-old technology. Folks have talked about web-based clients and client-server interfaces, though I don't know if anybody's actively working on one.

So I'm totally up for discussing different approaches to the problem. I waffle about how far to go with Ares in terms of catering to what's out there already vs making it easier for new players. But I don't think it's fair to say that nobody's doing anything to try to solve it.

@bored said in A new platform?:

Maybe there's a barrier due to Ares association with FS3 and its own microcosm of players, but from a technical standpoint its ridiculously impressive

Thanks! I've mentioned it before, but since threads get buried I'll stress again that Ares is not tied to FS3. It comes with it, yes, but it's easily disabled if you want to use a different system. There's already a Cortex plugin and I'm working on a FFG Star Wars one.

I think a bigger barrier to adoption is that I'm still tinkering with it I want the installation/configuration/coding experience to be as painless as possible, which the beta testers are currently helping me with. There are a few games in development.

@apos said in A new platform?:

The format isn't really nearly as great in easily referencing old information, which puts an emphasis on immediacy, mostly because tools like mail or channel histories or whatever are so clunky

As you say, though, the immediacy is forced by the tool itself. There's nothing technical stopping it from working more like discord/slack/etc., where folks could be @-tagged and see responses later. We just need to make it work that way. Sometimes culture drives a tool but in this case the tool is driving the culture.

@surreality said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

That's different from saying 'they shouldn't allow that to happen because it corrupts the purity of the setting by skewing it too far into unrealistic territory', however.

I think the difference is that people tend to gravitate towards historical games because they like that period of history. So anything that dramatically changes the 'feel' of the historical period for them is potentially a Big Deal. We all have our hot buttons.

Contrast that with a supernatural game where, yeah, it's a bit goofy that your small town in Maine has all these supers, but it's not like a lot of people were drawn to your game because "Oh, hey, small town in Maine! Sign me up!"

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

If your body of staff is RLing when 10 players are online? Those 10 players are leaving. Bye bye.

That's not universally true. On the places I play, folks are perfectly content when staff is absent. Heck, I've run entire games all by myself; others have been run by two people. As long as things are responded to in a timely fashion it's no big deal. It comes down to how you structure your game and what you let players accomplish on their own.

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

"But muh story! My chardev" isn't really investment. People drop and pick up characters very easily

Really? My experience is the opposite. "My story!" is the most investment you're ever going to get from a lot of players, and they cling to it like it's the one true ring. "My presssccciiiouusssssss."

Maybe it's because there are so many WoD games that you can trade one for another easily, whereas you're not likely to say "Screw this! I'll go find another!" on a Western or Battlestar game since there really aren't any others.

I do agree that running a game is a crap-ton of work and not all playstyles and concepts fit on - or should be allowed on - all games. But there are a variety of possible MUSH experiences, and some of them do more closely resemble the tight-knit connections and focused stories of tabletop. It's not some impossible unicorn.

@TwoGunBob Yeah that was the sort of thing I meant when I was talking about having an environment to support this sort of thing. The heroes and villains both need some assurance that defeat does not leave them completely screwed -- that there's a bigger and cooler story hinging on it and their short term loss will be worth it. Everyone needs to be on board with that idea, and that level of trust and cooperation is sadly hard (impossible?) to come by in MU-land.

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Not enough to change, as @faraday has said.

I think that change happens slowly. I mean, every so often you get the lightning bolt, but most of the time it's gradual. We didn't go from touchtone phones to "everybody has an iPhone in their pocket and home phones are pretty much defunct" overnight, right? You convince the early adopters first, then they spread the word, and so on and so forth until eventually, hopefully, you hit a tipping point. (There's an awesome TED Talk on this idea, btw.)

But the thing is - MUSHing is a community-driven hobby. You can't convince the early adopters to adopt if they can't play with their friends. And their friends, not being early adopters themselves, are still going to be using Potato and Atlantis and (sob) SimpleMU.

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

...someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed.

Yeah this is my biggest pet peeve and the reason I tend to run away from crowd scenes. OK, I've nodded at Joe, asked Pete about his dog, followed up on a question to Sarah, and boggled at the spilled glass on the table. Whew - did I miss anything? It's just insane.

People also do it in 1-1 scenes, which I just find baffling. It ends up with the most bizarre narrative flow - almost like you're ping-ponging between two separate conversations with the same person.

I also get frustrated if the other player doesn't give anything to react to. Give me a hook. "Hi, how are you?" "Fine thanks." "So do you come here often?" "Sometimes." Gah. It's supposed to be a story scene, not an interview.

You-poses are creepy. IC/OOC boundary issues.

I love metaposes as long as they're not passive-aggressive jerk poses. We can read body language in RL a heck of a lot better than we can in text, and I often struggle to describe body language in a way that gets the point across. They can also be a good way to subtly inject things that the other character should know that the player might not. Like "Fara's been moody ever since she got back from Trappist-I last week."

@tnp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.

People find value in different things. Stuff like dual input windows, not having garbage on your screen because SimpleMU doesn't support the unicode standard used by every modern software program, separating OOC spam and channels and pages stuff in a way that doesn't require you to bend over backwards doing regex's. Incorporating things that are in every chat program under the sun - @mentions, markdown formatting, heck even something as simple as being able to edit a pose or page after you've sent it. And that's not even beginning to touch the sort of interactive things that can move us beyond the type of bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> commands that are completely alien to an entire generation of people.

There's way more we can do than 'bells and whistles', but it's going to take time to get people shifted.

@Ghost said in Web-based MU poll:

What about this project would be different from just running a mush out of Roll20 and tying in discord chat? I think there's some things that could be done to revolutionize the MU format, but I think the only thing Roll20 doesn't have that MU does is a better pose-based environment. Roll20's chat interface is very MiRC.

There are lots of tools out there for online RP. Roll20, Storium, PBP forums with various plugins for dice and/or character sheets, etc. People RP on Twitter and Tumblr for goodness' sake, so I'm sure you could cobble together something vaguely MU-like with the right hodgepodge of tools.

But I haven't seen one that really captures what I feel like is the essence of MU-style RP in a way that would be accessible to veteran MU players. If there's one out there, I'd love to hear about it and save myself a lot of work

@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

It'd sure be nice if I could fix it for more than just the wiki.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. My scene system has a feature that lets you amend your last pose. On the web, it actually edits it, as you'd expect. (Like I edited this post just now.) But in the game, the only option is to re-emit the fixed version.

The same is true of text display. On web I can use full Markdown. I can do bold and italics and links and even multi-tab displays. On a MU client, I get fixed-width ASCII with some ansi colors. Folks have asked me to display wiki pages in-game on Ares. There's nothing technical preventing me from doing so, it's just going to look like crap because the MU client can't handle the formatting.

In both cases, we're talking about the exact same functionality (edit a pose / show a wiki page) but the user-friendliness of said feature is far, far greater on a web client than on an old client.

Note: I'm just using web as an example here because it's already been done. If someone were to make a new desktop client you could do the same thing. The current clients just can't do it because they work like old terminal windows.

@Ghost Jennifer Roberson (of the Cheysuli books) expressly mentioned MU*s and had a very good rationale (now archived) as to why.

There's a handy list of fanfic policies on Wikipedia.

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

@Ghost said in Where's your RP at?:

When character death isn't a viable option, then you're playing the rpg with cheat codes. It sets a potential expectation for NPCs, bad guys, sometimes other players, but not for your character. I mean, even from a point of artistic integrity, for the people who prefer their story>game, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Look, we're obviously not going to agree on playstyles, and that's fine. But is it too much to ask to stop bashing the players you disagree with as being nonsensical and/or whiny wusses who can't handle losing a character and are ruining the hobby? (Not all your words - summarizing the thread here.)

I don't want to read a novel where the main characters get knocked off halfway through the story. If you do - great. I'm not judging.

@Thenomain said in AnomJobs - Trouble With Installation:

So the question becomes: Could you live in an ancient ruin if there’s a society there?

Judging by the number of people still using SimpleMU, survey says "yes".

That's the nice thing about software. As long as it's working tolerably enough for the people using it, nobody has to maintain it.

@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:

So, what do you think? For starters do you agree with the general premise of having PCs antagonistic to yours being a good thing or do you believe it's a lost cause, and games should stay purely collaborative?

Antagonism makes for good stories, but in a MU* environment I think it's a lost cause. Mostly for the reasons you mentioned, but it's even more than that. Let's pretend that there's a totally mature player who won't start OOC drama, needs no encouragement to play antagonism, and is an awesome RPer. I don't want that person playing my character's antagonist, I want them playing my friend. Because 95% of MU scenes are social in nature, and who wants to hang out with their antagonist? Antagonists are best metered out in small doses, and that runs contrary to what you want to be doing with your awesome RPers.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Travel in most novels and all TV shows and movies happens at exactly the speed of plot. Which is to say that if the writers need it to take a while it does and if they don't, it doesn't.

That's not entirely true though. TV shows have a sense of continuity. If in one episode the writers establish that it takes 7 days to get from Persephone to Ariel, then good writer teams will stick to that moving forward.

Nobody's perfect of course, and they might change things. When you're doing a TV show, you can own your plot holes, retcon whatever you like, and it doesn't really affect anybody else. But changing the continuity for a community-driven game like a MUSH has ripples that affect everybody.

@surreality said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Most games these days already do have a 'quiet room', which is an OOC room where you can't speak or emote. If one you're on doesn't, suggest it; spaces like this are a genuinely good idea for the folks who don't like the chatter spam without treating the people who enjoy chatting with fellow players like they're doing something wrong by socializing at all. (That's a pretty bad message to send.)

Yeah I've always had a designated quiet room. It's the only 'private' OOC place to hang out. There's always one or two people in it, but never a flock. And I've never had a complaint about the chatter in the OOC rooms. But then I run on small games.

TGG had no OOC room, and people then would hang out on the grid. This was good because sometimes you'd get people dragged into RP instead of hanging out when the scene was interesting, but bad because you never knew who was actually RPing and who was just hanging out.