@seraphim73 said in Star Wars?:
@faraday Oh yeah, any large-scale CvC component puts FS3 out of mind for me, definitely. And I might be allowing my FS3 familiarity to get the better of me, but I don't consider tweaking weapon stats and stances as much more than tweaking.
It's more than weapon stats and stances IMHO. But it feels off-topic for here so I created a discussion over on the FS3/Ares forum for anyone who cares.
@rnmissionrun said in AresMUSH Updates:
It was the date of my last post in this thread prior to today, so Dec 7th.
Ah, yeah, I should've thought to check the backscroll. The install scripts were still a work-in-progress then, and as I mentioned at the time my primary focus was on documentation...
@faraday said in AresMUSH Updates:
So, y'know, people who are not me will actually know how to use it.
Anyway, if you prefer waiting until the 1.0 release that's groovy. I'm not generally a fan of being a beta-tester myself with most things, so I don't hold that against anyone!
My only point was that things are in a much better state now than they were a few months ago. And if anyone is still having issues either installing it or figuring out which end is up, I'd love to know about it so I can make it better.
@surreality I guess you didn't see my note at the bottom about not making light of the McDs coffee lady, because I'm well familiar with the case. In fact, part of my actual job involves putting warning labels on medical devices, so I'm well familiar with the entire concept of advisories and liability. That's part of why I'm sensitive to it.
By placing the onus on the storytellers to apply warnings to scenes or to check preferences set via the tool before including someone, it's giving players some measure of expectation that they're going to be warned if something comes up. That then opens storytellers up to "liability" (in the MU sense of responsibility, not the legal sense) if they fail to provide appropriate warnings. I reject that responsibility utterly and completely.
If you're playing on a WWII game, it is entirely reasonable to assume that Nazis, concentration camps, gas attacks, death by land mine, etc. are all entirely fair game for the theme. If those things are potential triggers for someone, then they probably shouldn't be playing there.
@Sparks Yeah that does sound feasible, but it's still not something that your off-the-shelf Penn/Tiny/Rhost game is going to support. You'd have to have that intermediate server to manage the connections to the various games. That's a bit more involved than just making an Alexa skill to talk to games directly, and it invokes privacy concerns and so forth.
And I share your concern about the skill UX too. Having to say "get me new activity from <game>" over and over is not great UX.
@bobgoblin I think some places took Reports to an extreme and expected it to be written up in an IC, professional and detailed manner. That’s just annoying. A pithy OOC summary can convey important plot details to players and staff who weren’t there, but hardly anybody wants to read (let alone write) a realistic AAR. They’re long and dull.
@griatch said in AresMUSH Updates:
I'd not be too fixated on the "1.0" version number though.
Thanks. While I agree that the stability is more important than the actual number, I do think that in the software world numbers have meaning. People generally have certain expectations from 1.0 no matter what you say 
(ETA: I meant no matter what the software publisher says.. not you specifically!) Then again, there are always exceptions - how long was Gmail in "beta"? Is it still? Heh.
@Rook said in How to Change MUing:
My ideas are these:
What you've described in your three points is essentially BSGU in a nutshell. Narrow focus, there's almost no plot-related jobs, and XP is constant and ploddingly slow. It's not some rare unicorn; it's been done. It's also not a magic bullet. It has pros and cons the same as any other sort of theme. It all comes down to what sort of game you want to make.
@Sparks said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:
That said, despite all these hassles, it's an interesting project to tackle! If you choose to go forward with it, I wish you luck; it'd be an interesting result to see, and might well be useful to folks out there!
Yeah I have concerns about it being feasible from a technical and UX perspective, but I think it's a worthwhile goal to try out.
@mr-johnson said in Star Trek?:
@faraday Poor, poor Chief Obrian.
Hmm? I don't follow. O'Brien was a bit-player on TNG because who wants to write stories about the transporter operator on a regular basis? To make him viable as a main character on DS9 they basically had to put him in engineering, which is one of the "main" departments on Trek.
You can make anybody the focus of a story once in a blue moon, but most MU players want more to do than that.
@ixokai said in AresMUSH Updates:
which seem to support my instinct, it looks like you have a data model for action skills. But for the life of me I can't find where they're defined to mimic such a setup for a different RPG entirely.
Okay, I can add a few more details about that. But basically - you can do it however you want.
A data model makes it easier if your abilities have their own properties (like FS3 has ruling attribute, rating, XP spent, last learned, etc.) but not every system needs that level of complexity. You can store everything in a simple hash, just like the traits example.
Similarly, FS3 is designed to be configurable without touching the code, so the list of abilities are stored in config files - config_fs3skills_action.yml and so forth. But for a system you're designing for your own game, there's probably no need to do that. A simple Ruby array in the code could suffice.
I really don't think there is such a thing as a "simple" RPG skill/stat/RPG system, which is why I don't feel that a concrete example is going to help anyone. They'd all be as complex as FS3 - and you've already got an example coded for that.
@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):
There's no obligation to check prefs; I do think there should be one to mark specific common trigger content likely in scene. ... Yeah, I do think excluding that player from the game on the whole because someone simply can't be assed to say 'hey, <thing> is likely in this scene, be advised' is a massively crappy attitude to take toward any potential player.
And I think that any player joining a WWII game who can't be assed to say before a scene: "Hey, I'm leaving my codebreaking cubicle to venture out into the battlefield, there aren't going to be any land mines are there?" is taking a massively crappy attitude by putting responsibility for their hangups on their storytellers. And that is the crux of our disagreement. I don't think there's anything more constructive to be said.
@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:
use the established telnet connection and hacking wares (that are so obsolete that they are easy to obtain and can be used by kids) to manipulate what they can on your machine through the telnet protocol session you initiated on connection.
So... I agree with 99% of what you said, but this one made me raise an eyebrow.
Most MU players aren't actually establishing a "telnet connection". They are connecting via a MU client to a server running a listener on a specific port. A malicious actor could 100% snoop on your insecure connection, but I fail to see any way that they could manipulate anything on your machine unless there were some kind of underlying exploit in the MU client that they could leverage. Right?
Tangential side note - most Ares MUs use https for the web portal, so if you play via the portal your connection is secure. Even so, anything you transmit to ANY server (a MU*, Discord, Google, whatever) is ultimately accessible to the owner of the service and anyone they choose to share it with (coders, admins, etc.) The only difference is that statistically you're less likely to be personally targeted by a disgruntled Discord worker than a disgruntled MU staffer.
@goodstarbuck said in Anomaly TrekMUX:
Though exactly how I'd get a +report system up and running on AresMUSH, I'd have to do further research on.
I've seen other games just use the bbs forum for it, but creating a custom system wouldn't be too bad. You could crib a lot from the bbs code because it's so similar of a concept.
@griatch I assume for completely room-less you'd also need to write custom code for say/pose/emit/etc., since game communication is normally centered around what room you're in. And any object-interaction commands like 'take/give' (if Evennia has those), describe, look, teleport, etc. Sure with enough work it could be done, but the effort involved strikes me as massive.
Not relevant to OP, but FYI for anyone referencing this thread later - Ares doesn't have a wilderness contrib, but if you were going to attempt such a thing I would suggest doing it in exactly the same way that @Griatch described.
@Rook Thanks but don't overestimate its success. There have been a number of people who got bored and quit because they're looking for something the game doesn't offer. And despite being a success by my standards, we can't hold a candle to somewhere like Arx in terms of logins (which many people use as a barometer of success). Narrow focus has both pros and cons.
@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:
Also, Telnet is not only susceptible to snooping, but also MITM/DNS Spoofing, because telnet makes no attempt to validate the host it is connecting to.
Absolutely. And in the case of someone spoofing your bank, that's a very real concern because they could do all kinds of nefarious things. I don't think that same degree of danger exists with someone doing a MITM attack on a MUSH server... like, what are they going to do, spoof RP with you?
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that any real harm seems very unlikely. I would argue this is borne out by these kinds of attacks being pretty much unheard of in all the decades of MUSHing.
Social manipulation and stalking from giving someone your personal info? Absolute valid concern. But that can happen just as easily with a secure connection as an insecure one.
Edit for your edit: The IP address is also visible via a secure connection too. I would argue the better defense is firewall software rather than trying to always hide your IP from everyone but that's just me. (Also running with a VPN these days is a PITA due to all the sites blacklisting them. Can't even do a freaking google search any more.)
FWIW I think you could look to the Battlestar games for a less-onerous +report paradigm here. Some folks liked to do a full-fledged IC "After Action Report" detailing a combat scene, but all that was really expected was a brief "Hey there was a fight and Bob died..." bbpost for a plot scene.
@auspice Thanks for the feedback.
The automatic scripts are for a super-easy install when you're using a standalone Ubuntu VPS (Digital Ocean, Linode, or whatever). That is the standard, supported configuration for Ares.
If you're going outside of that configuration, I assume that you (or a buddy) already has some server-admin experience and can follow along the comments in the scripts to make whatever necessary adjustments make sense for your environment.
Your specific use-case was pretty simple (supplying a different username), but there are a million other possible subtle variations like that (changing usernames, directories, apache instead of nginx, yum instead of apt-get, etc. etc.) and it really isn't practical for me to make an installer flexible enough to support them all.
I've toyed with the idea of creating a text version of the script (like "install X then Y" in generic terms), but honestly I think the commands with comments would be more useful to server admins than plain text that's liable to get out of date. If the prevailing sentiment says otherwise, though, I can certainly create that.
@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):
Everyone has a measure of responsibility.
Nope. I'm not taking that responsibility. My game policy is this:
if you are sensitive to a particular kind of content, it is your responsibility to communicate your boundaries to those you scene with. Resolving things off-camera is always an option if something makes you uncomfortable.
And for those who think that makes me some kind of uncaring monster - you're entitled to your opinion. But I shoulder enough responsibility for other peoples' health and well-being as a parent, in my job as a medical device programmer, and as a volunteer paramedic. I don't need that level of stress in my pretendy funtime games as well, thankyouverymuch. Anyone who expects me to take responsibility for their mental health should do us both a favor and play someplace else.
@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:
WHOEVER has access to Player A's device (could be a Player or something black hat) can snoop the telnet transmission unknowingly to either player.
You're still fundamentally just snooping on the traffic between A and the game. You're just doing it in a different way.
You made it sound like like the game connection (which again, isn't "telnet" per se) opened up the rest of the machine to vulnerabilities, and I don't believe it does. If you've already got a Trojan on your PC, that's a separate issue.
@Ghost said in Telnet Safety:
LITERALLY EVERY PERSON IN THE HOBBY CHECKS IT OUT AT LEAST ONCE (because this happens for almost every new live game. Boom. IP addy.),
They literally don't.
request your Ares handle in the app process...
That's not how that works.
But could someone set up a game that's just an elaborate phishing exercise? 100%. Is that particularly likely? Nope. Does that have anything to do with telnet? Nope. It could be done just as easily with a game that runs entirely on SSH/HTTPS.
I don't disagree with your fundamental message to be careful what you share online. That's good advice no matter what, and I echo it in the Ares data privacy guides.
I do disagree with the assertion that connecting to a game with a traditional MU client is opening you up to vulnerabilities beyond someone snooping on the traffic between you and the game.