@Groth Personally I would have the 'help' system contain only the help for the player commands. Code documentation can live elsewhere.
I fail to see how extending the 'mail' command to do something more (what I'm suggesting) is any more confusing than disabling it and forcing players to use a +mail system instead (which is what people do today). The player doesn't care whether it's softcoded or hardcoded; they just want to send mail.
@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
But even then I guess I wouldn't even call it an 'enforced travel time'. There's basically zero difference between "hey, I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm" and "hey, since you guys will be on the road let's have a scene about the trip tomorrow at 8pm".
Not to be a nitpicking twit, but the difference, of course, is whether everyone is scene-locked between today and tomorrow (or whenever they get back) because they're on the road, unable to RP with anybody but other road-trippers.
That's what I think @Ganymede was alluding to with "you barely even noticed it" on BSGU. There were enforced travel times, but I took care to set up most of the missions so the travel time didn't inconvenience anybody. Most games don't care about +time beyond the 'day' level, so as long as you can get there and back in the span of an IC day, you can easily avoid continuity issues or scenelocks.
"Hey I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm... it's going to ICly require you to spend the prior 8 hours getting there, so don't RP anything that happens during the IC hours of 12-8pm."
@mr-johnson said in Tenuous Tie-In or Original Universe?:
No issue with it being a prequel or even just being a different sector of space disconnected from the Xenomorph threat.
Well, the only issue is if you label the game as "Aliens: Whatever" and there are no actual xenomorphs in it, people are going to be some degree of disappointed and/or mad. I think it would be fine to use the universe as long as the theme descriptions say: "This is set in the same universe as Aliens but there are no actual Aliens" but I wouldn't play that up in the ads and name and stuff. But then again, if you're not using the actual selling-point of the world, why not just make it original. Draw from the source but give yourself freedom.
@bobgoblin said in Wheel of Time mechanics:
Not being uber familiar with Ares I'm not sure if such a system is feasible; however it has been what I've experienced as closest to the book feel as I've come across and is very simple to implement.
I don't think the choice of servers is important in system design. Ares, Evennia, MUSHcode... they're all just attributes stored in a database and commands to use them. There are other factors that can drive your choice of servers, but the system mechanics are a negligible concern.
ETA: Unless of course you're looking for an already-bulit implementation, like FS3 for Ares, or Theno's WoD for Tiny, or Dahan's Star Wars for whatever MU it runs on.
@tat said in Heroic Sacrifice:
Yeah, that's what I mean... Done right, it might even mean that there's a lot of RP around other players trying to save your butt on the battlefield and freaking out about you being down or too injured to fight well, which again - attention, man. It's intoxicating.
Yeah sorry I misread part of your post 
But yes, I agree. A system like FS3 makes it easy for people who are inclined to do those things to do them. It's just that most people aren't.
@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:
@faraday
Isn't this kind of ironic for someone who runs/ran a BSG game? In the five year run did they have one single unmitigated and unconditional success?
I don't see the irony personally. I can think of many victories throughout the course of the series, and only a few "wow sucks to be you" outright botches on the part of the main characters. And even when there were failures, those failures were part of a bigger arc leading to something meaningful, not just "wow, bad day for the Viper pilots I guess" randomness. So for me it's not about having unmitigated successes, it's about having the right level of challenge and meaningful failures that dovetail into a bigger story.
RL has the Olympic failures @WildBaboons mentioned, but we generally don't write novels or movies about those people (unless it's the punchline in a comedy). Nobody wants to tune into American Sniper and have him just randomly miss the critical shot in the movie for no reason whatsoever.
@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:
I think this can be mitigated through the hobby think that we are telling a story and not I am telling my story.
Theoretically yes. In practice, I see that as a bridge too far for people. Because there is no "the story" in the game except insofar as it comprises the sum of the individual parts. And if that's the case, who's to say which individual story is the one that should end at any given moment?
I think it's a game industry problem more than a MU problem. You see it in tabletop, where players are often reluctant to part with their characters. There are rare souls who play all games like they would Paranoia (character death? bring it ON!), but those are the exception rather than the rule in my long experience. You see it in video games. How many have permadeath any more? Almost none right? Because it sucks.
I agree with @Cura that players are complicated, and I'm likewise uncomfortable with incentivizing failure as a form of victory. That just seems like an extremely slippery slope to me.
@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?
As someone who has done exactly that, I can answer yes to every one of those questions with ease.
That's great. I'm genuinely glad it worked out. For me personally - I would only be comfortable inviting a new player to someplace I ran or played on, or where I had friends who could serve as mentors. I think the barrier is just too high if you have someone brand new to MUSHing and you just dump them onto some random MU with no support.
@lotherio said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
how does it get to less overwhelming and welcoming?
Well, I think changing some paradigms in our tools will help. Like, it's a heck of a lot easier to say "click here to play via the web browser" than trying to explain how to install a MU client and whatnot. People will more easily grok a web-based game forum than Myrddin's BBS commands. And it's a heck of a lot easier to say "scene/start <location> starts a scene" than to try and explain the grid and rooms, as @WildBaboons mentioned.
Beyond that, I think staged tutorials are better than Wall O Text. Have an 'escape chute' from your welcome room and your wiki landing page that screams out: "If you're new to MUSHing - start here" and walk them through the necessary topics bit by bit.
Bonus points for multimedia. Storium has a really neat interactive tutorial btw, and I did one for FS3 Combat. I tried to do a series of Youtube videos for my Ares introduction but they kinda sucked. It's not my forte. But I think that would be a great project for someone with a good "announcer voice" who's comfortable speaking on-camera.
Double bonus points for folks who are dedicated to mentoring. Again, to use Storium as an example, they have dedicated "beginner games" run by mentors who help people learn the ropes. (There hardly ever are any, which is sad, but it's still a sound idea.)
Having an in-game way to self-identify as a beginner might help too. Then if you wander into a private scene, folks know that you don't know better and hopefully won't bite your head off.
Then we need more games and a way to find them. I hope that Ares and Evennia will make it easier to build a game, and both come with dedicated game directories.
@coin said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Question: how easy was it for people to make a new character on TGG? How long did it take to approve new characters?
Super-fast. It was pretty fast on the BSG game I mentioned too.
My point with TGG was that if you have a higher PC death rate, you can end up with people just not getting invested in their characters, as opposed to people actually being more cautious.
I agree with @Three-Eyed-Crow that TGG proved that short-term games are possible in the MU community - especially if you can center it around a theme (like TGG's war theme, or a Twilight Zone kind of thing) or develop a core group of players who become friends (like an extended tabletop gaming group) and are willing to try new themes.
I would caution against roster chars, since I think even folks interested in short-term games mostly like to make up their own characters. You can avoid the "everyone make whatever they wanted" by providing guidelines. To use the TGG example again: "You can be a British pilot or a nurse." or "You can be a British or French infantryman." or whatever. Limited and focused, but still allow people the creativity of having their own characters.
@ixokai said in New Games and Feature Characters...:
You couldn't give players a three day headstart? You'd think that's asking too much of you?
Yes. Staff are players too. A staff is signing up - on a strictly volunteer basis - for months or even years of taking crap from dozens of strangers while simultaneously working their butt off trying to provide said strangers with a fun place to play.
Letting those people play the characters they want to play is a small price to pay for those services.
@tempest said in New Games and Feature Characters...:
The problem is when all their friends also get first dibs.
Staff letting their friends/siblings/spouses camp characters they never intend to play is not only poor planning, but is going to open them up to cries of staff favoritism to friends. That seems like a dicey proposition, and also a very different thing than allowing staff themselves first dibs.
@arkandel said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:
Everything about CGen should be automated so the numbers check out and that's it. The rare outlier cases crossing some kind of line can be caught and dealt with later on without causing everyone else having to wait for days to be approved
I used to think that too until I tried it on a couple games with "no apps required" or "I'll check you over after you hit the grid".
Never again. shudders
@apos said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
@templari But you're literally posting on a thread about slurs saying that pushback against saying slurs makes you feel uncomfortable as a moderate, when I'm a moderate and think that is dumb. So I mean, if you're not saying that, it's kind of off topic, no?
Is this topic specifically about slurs? It sounded like it was more about potentially-hot-button topics in general. That's how I read it anyway. I wasn't following the thread that originally spawned this one so maybe there's more context that isn't being provided.
@tinuviel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
In reality, though, I don't ever want to not be able to argue with someone simply because what I'm arguing against is a strongly held belief. The stronger the hold, the stronger one's ability to defend should be.
I agree. All I'm saying is that I'd prefer for people to argue respectfully.
ETA: You can disagree with my strongly-held beliefs all day long and not bother me until (generic)you start diving into "you're an idiot" or "that's the most insane thing I've ever heard" territory.
Alas, with strangers on the internet, that seems to be a bridge too far without pretty strenuous moderation.
@arkandel said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
In a forum that's largely about presenting ideas for others to comment in it would be counter-productive to discourage the concept of 'attacking' them. That's what peer reviews are about, after all; you invite conversation
Peer reviews are a central part of my job, and I can assure you that not making the other person feel attacked is an integral and essential part of a peer review. Read any of the million articles on effective peer reviews if you don't believe me.
There is a vital difference between a criticism and an attack.
ETA - again I think the civil discourse "rules" get it right here:
You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:
Name-calling.
Ad hominem attacks.
Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
Knee-jerk contradiction.Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.
Nobody's going to be perfect at this (including myself) but if we shared that central goal it'd be a lot easier to steer things in a positive direction. Right now, though, we don't.
@friendlybee said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
Sure it's happened in the past, but.. it didn't happen this time...There is a social cost with being an asshole (using sjw as a pejorative, saying the c-word, etc.). If you don't want to pay the social cost of being an asshole (being made fun of, ostracism, hyperbolically negative replies, etc.) then don't be an asshole.
I wasn't speaking of just this one instance though. As I've stated before - I thought this was a more general thread. And, as others have mentioned - at the moment there really isn't much (if any) social cost to being a jerk. All that happens is threads get turned into dumpster fires and then shuffled off to the hog pit.
There are many folks here who have no problem with that. To wit...
@haven said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
I don't come here for useful information. I come for the GIFs, bad descs, and the shitposting. I can F5 for 10 hours in this place and never be disappointed.
But there are others that do have a problem with it. Hence the discussion thread.
@friendlybee said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
the majority of my position has been 'Calm down about people disagreeing with you online everyone. It's not the end of the world.'
While I agree that it's not the end of the world, it's also not pleasant. I have better things to do with my time than to come to a place where I'm going to be treated disrespectfully. If we can have civil discussions, as the current forum rules dictate we should be able to have, then I'm all for that. If it's just going to be like Facebook comments where people shout obscenities to each other about how wrong they are? No thanks.
@friendlybee said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:
If you don't want to provide evidence that's fine, but it doesn't make your arguments very compelling. I'm not trying to be rude, but I've asked two or three people for examples now, and they've been unable to provide them. It's starting to look like maybe this problem is imagined more than experienced.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. If you really care to research, you can find tons of discussion around the issues in this thread. I can't really go and look up the ones that got moved to the hog pit to cite them for you because, as mentioned, I don't participate in the hog pit. I can't see those posts any more. But anybody who's been here for any length of time has seen this happen repeatedly. The Arx thread, the UH thread, the OC thread... I could go on and on.
@deadculture It's an example of an "episodic game that is enjoyable throughout limited runs", which is what you said, and people not being so attached to their characters they'd throw a tantrum when the episode is over. I'm not saying it's exactly equivalent. But even if it were, it still doesn't detract from this game being well put-together. ETA: I meant it as a good thing, that there's more of an audience for trying different things than many MUSHers think.
@seraphim73 said in Do we need staff?:
My opinion is that you can run a game with minimal staff (1-2 Staffers) so long as it's under about 40 regular players. ... but for an open-invite game, it's just asking for bad actors to come in and effectively take over.
I think it's more about game setup than size. Multiple factions going in different directions, players expecting to be spoon-fed individualized plots, a work-intensive plot or clue system, PvP... those sorts of things require more bandwidth than a minimal staff can sustain.
But for a game like TGG or BSGU, where you can toss out a single self-contained mission once or twice a week and entertain a dozen players at once? Or a Wild West game where it's pretty much "do your own thing" apart from the occasional bank robbery or blizzard? A single staffer can support a much larger population, and there are ways for the players themselves to mitigate the bad apples.
@ashen-shugar said in Do we need staff?:
maybe more than 1-2 staff so when the 1-2 staff have family emergencies...people who think their online personas and players are special little snowflakes don't feel enraged that someone dared think real life had a higher priority than a game.
That's never been an issue for me. Those people are just being unreasonable. If you build a game that requires minimal staff intervention, you can miss a couple days and generally nobody's going to notice or care. As long as you're responsive the rest of the time, most players understand.
Sure, there's the possibility that something horrible explodes the one weekend you went to the beach or whatever, but on the flip side - I've had plenty of cases where a game had a half-dozen staffers and it still took a week to get an answer back on something. It's all relative.
@thenomain said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:
There is a "WoD Lite" system, the ones that introduced the nWoD v1 games in the quickstart guides. It might not be the "lite" that Ganymede wants (and almost certainly isn't), but it exists and is light.
All the more reason not to use FS3 
(ducks)
@apos said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:
It's hard to think of a game system I actually get excited over that isn't implicitly tied to a setting that I'd find interesting. oWoD Demon single sphere, Ars Magica, Earthdawn as examples that come to mind
Earthdawn is a neat system but it's pretty tied to the lore of the game. And it has some interesting min-maxy quirks (step 7 is my nemesis). But I still enjoy it.