Best posts made by faraday

@arkandel said in New WoD digital toolset coming in 2022:

Let me put it this way. Ten years ago if you asked most people whether they'd rather own music or subscribe to a service they'd pick the former.

I don't think that's really an apples-to-apples comparison though.

A lot of the appeal of music subscription services is variety. Listen to something new every week. There's also stability. Nobody's worried about Apple Music going away any time soon.

Paying $60/year to rent game books that ideally I would be referencing for decades? Not at all appealing.

Yeah I'm not aware of anything in Penn/Tiny that would do this.

You could also ask the coder to create a global altmail() function that just wraps around mail(). Would only take them a minute, vs. asking them to build something unusual into +finger to let you capture the output, or implement your alt mail check as a global.

@Pyrephox said in Eliminating social stats:

Putting it as a continuum suggests that you can't have or want both.

I didn't say it was either/or; I said it was a spectrum. There are games where there are literally no mechanics -- that's the far right of the spectrum. There are games where there are no poses - that's the far left. The vast majority of games fall somewhere in between, but they fall at different points on the spectrum. And the degree to which someone values story over rolls colors what they're willing to handwave versus what they expect to play out.

Also, you're allowed to like different things at different times. I can be perfectly happy playing tabletop where it's "I bluff my way past the guard clatter of dice." But that's not what I personally am looking for on a MUSH.

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

So we should focus on solutions that we can enact without coded crutches.

Not to be defeatist or anything, but if we rule out manual moderation, and we rule out automated tools, and we've demonstrated that policies by themselves don't help, ummmmm..... what's left?

@Luna said in ELI5 - Discord RP:

So, can someone grown explain Discord rp to me, a lifelong MU person? Is it like playing on AOL Red Dragon Inn with a central meeting and then breakout rooms...

I don't have extensive experience with Discord RP, so it's probable there are many variations. But what you've described above is what I've seen. It's basically just a MUSH with channels and temp rooms. Private scenes can be done via DM. Some have dice plugins for rolls. Haven't seen any extensive bots.

It's functional, but it lacks a lot of the conveniences that MUers are used to. Like ooc chat being separate, logs, etc.

Higher math is not necessary for the vast majority of coding/programming tasks.

For deep computer science stuff, I'd refer you to the answers on an identical question on StackOverflow.

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

@Arkandel Most of the servers that I have played on did not have a social resolution mechanic and did not have social skills. I think that is the more common option actually. The general "solution" to making that choice is expanding the number of physical and mental skills to keep combat monster bloat down.

Same here. Actually in 20 years I don't think I've ever played (more than briefly) on a MU that had a PvP social mechanic. Most didn't have social stats at all, or if they did they were just a background thing alongside hobbies, sports, dancing, etc.

@roz said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"but don't personally attack me for this terrible behavior!!"

Well I'd have to disagree in general. If someone posts a sincere "I did something horrible and I'm sorry" apology, I think that dogpiling them for the horrible thing they've already admitted to is a crappy thing to do. Splitting off to a Hog Pit thread calling BS (or a PSA type thread in the Reviews section I mentioned) seems more appropriate there.

@Luna said in ELI5 - Discord RP:

Thinking about it, frankly I don’t see why it couldn’t have the conveniences were used to. Likely the reason why there aren’t bots now for that are likely just that no one thought about it.

Maybe, but it would be clunky as heck. MUs have a lot built into them - especially now with the web support that Ares and Evennia have. You can't do all that with Discord bots.

That's not to say you couldn't adopt a few things to make it more convenient, just that you're not going to replicate a MU interface in discord. And you probably wouldn't want to. They're different mediums.

@HelloProject I guess it depends on what you mean by "straight up". Like any software toolkit, knowing the base language is only half the battle. Then you need to learn the specific libraries and whatnot from the toolkit. I know Python, but I don't know Evennia. There would be a learning curve if I wanted to work on it.

@Wizz Cookies don't give you XP on BSGU; XP is a flat award of 1 per week to everyone and advancement is super slow. Cookies give you luck points to keep fighting if you get knocked out in combat, but since it's all PVE that's not really a big advantage.

@saosmash said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I dunno, I feel like "I reject your apology because I think it is manipulative and disingenuous" or whatever is a reasonably civil way to respond to an apology you find insincere as opposed to being like "you're a garbage person and that's a garbage apology" and then you can go to the hog pit your own self to be like "holy shit HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME."

Oh I actually agree with that. It's certainly possible to reject an apology civilly, depending on the wording. Like you said, YMMV and each case is probably different. As @Arkandel says, ultimately it's up to the mods to decide.

That’s quite nice!

@Sparks said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I really think something developers writing games nowadays should do where possible is make a standardized, generic UI library. A standardized method of headers, of footers, etc.

I dunno... in my experience the headers/footers are one of the first things people want to customize when they take my stock codebase and make their own game with it. I don't really see how this will help - especially when dealing with such vastly different codebases.

@Ganymede said in High Fantasy:

Also, brutal as fuck. My poor PC has, like, huge gaping holes in his junk, apparently.

Err... that's not a standard hit location. Somebody with a really sadistic streak or a wicked sense of humor must've added that

Which just goes to illustrate... FS3 is very configurable, so it's as brutal or as fluffy as you want it to be.

@ganymede said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The problem is that, like Fight Club, expecting no consequences from that is fool-hardy.

But let's not fool ourselves either. If the only "consequence" to being a jerk is a slap on the wrist like: "Hey don't be a jerk" -- then that's effectively no consequence either.

Then all you end up with is:

Faraday calls Bob all kinds of names, against forum policy.
Mod says "Be nice"
Bob still has to look at the post sitting there calling him all kinds of names but isn't supposed to respond.

Like... does anybody actually think that Bob or any of the other posters on that thread aren't going to respond to that and escalate it into a dumpster fire?

And even if they somehow manage to exert that much self-control ... what message does that send to the forum? That it's okay to break the rules as long as you were the one who did it first so nobody else can respond?

I just don't get how this leads to anywhere good.

@Derp That’s dumb. There’s a world of difference between two people discussing the law (which everyone knows at least a LITTLE bit about) and someone trying to pass themselves off as an attorney (or a doctor in my example). If someone is going to act on legal or medical “advice” from some random person on MSB or reddit or whatever, that should be on them.

Though I do get why someone might be confused if it were an actual lawyer saying it, hence the need for “I am a lawyer but I don’t know YOUR situation/jurisdiction” disclaimers.

@HelloProject FWIW, I don't disagree with your general point that MUSH UX can be improved. What I'm having trouble with is how you think it should be improved.

You've mentioned macros - okay, @Thenomain says his code has them, Ares has them. I don't think anyone disagrees about macros being useful.

You've mentioned simplifying rolls with abstracting commands - okay, but various people have explained why that's a conscious design choice in all the examples you've cited. Either for situational flexibility (i.e. not having to code up everything under the sun) or for copyright reasons (not being able to completely replace the rulebooks).

You've mentioned systems being different on different games (like +myjobs) but, well, frankly that's just never going to change. With the MU community fragmented as it is, you can't expect every game to have the same command set.

You've mentioned "complicated syntax" but the examples cited (rolls, mail) you don't seem to have a problem with specifically. So... I'm just really not sure what you're talking about there.

We've talked about softcode/hardcode commands and prefixes, but until you replace the old platforms, there's nothing to be done about that.

What's left?

@WildBaboons I don't know what your timeframe is for this, but I'm hoping AresMUSH will have its first public release by Christmas. That's my goal anyway - no promises! But it'll have FS3 and all the common MUSH commands. Actually several folks have been surprised to learn it wasn't PennMUSH underneath. So if you're considering using FS3 but are also interested in the newness of Evennia, Ares might be your thing.

@sunny said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I'm not sure why we as a culture/community are letting a vocal few people make us keep the hog pit around instead of making the decision that we need to be better.

Making the already-weak rules on the rest of the forums even more weak isn't a step towards getting better IMHO - it's a step towards getting worse. I don't see why we as a culture/community would want things to get more toxic unless the mods just completely threw in the towel and decided to let the whole board become gloves-off.