Best posts made by faraday

@shelbeast said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Why hasn't someone just come up with FS4 or something? Take the general concept of FS3, if not the code, and create something similar that can handle these other things?

Pardon the tangent... Mostly the whole reason people use it is because they either don't have a coder or don't want to go through the trouble of coding an entire system from scratch. I mean really, that's the main appeal.

3rd edition, which is in Ares, does melee combat a lot better than 2nd. It has armor specials which give you more armor flexibility for things like shields, and lets you augment melee damage with strength, and smooths out some goofiness with the way defense skills worked, adds a distract action, etc.

What it flat-out doesn't do at all is magic. Mostly because there's no satisfactory way to do that generically. It's always going to come down to how do you want magic to work, which will result in custom attack actions, custom damage effects, and so on that will inherently vary from game to game.

Holderness Family ADHD parody "My Own Worst Enemy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cw51gLry_I

So many of those things are me.

@coin said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

Depends on how you decide to portray and approach the Native American "problem". If everyone is playing a white settler or someone on their "side" you could easily just have constant battles with injuns.
I mean, I wouldn't do that, but.

Yeah I wouldn't do that either but you're correct.

@arkandel said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

That's a pretty big 'as long as' condition though.

And yet it's worked. It takes effort but it can be done. It has been done.

Example of it working: When my western Sweetwater first opened, the metaplot was a range war between two rival ranches. There were frequent plots that involved a whole bunch of people directly and even more people indirectly. Those plots then had tendrils that spread out into everyday conversations ("OMG did you hear what happened?") and plotting, and injuries and other aftermath. It was great. Yet there really wasn't much else going on besides the range war or everyday western life RP.

Example of it not working: My game Martian Dreams was set on Mars in the aftermath of a revolution. (Basically a sequel to my novel.) Our active players included a couple scientists, a couple doctors, a corporate exec, a firefighter, a cop, a teenager and a preacher. Yeah, try working all of those people into a plot more than once They were all awesome characters individually, but their stories never intersected. Although there was an intended metaplot, it was too hard for them to work their way into it.

So I think we're generally in agreement that players need stuff to do or else you lose momentum. Just the execution is different.

A mortal-only game where you're an X-Files or Fringe type of group could work, for instance. One where you've got a motley crew like my MDM game? Notsomuch.

@bored said in A new platform?:

I think the 'the syntax has to be completely the same or the oldbies will rebel' is... exaggeration by the oldies for the sake of hating change (like most people do). Push come to shove, I do think people will play where they can play, so long as its achieving the functionality they desire.

To some extent I agree, but there are countless examples of people doing this - avoiding playing on Penn or Tiny because of the different channel syntax, acting like Rhost is some mysterious alien land, getting all up in arms over command syntax being different on one game versus another, etc.

I also agree that complex command syntax can't fundamentally be made much (if at all) simpler. But I think about 30 years of user interface design has proven pretty thoroughly that you can represent those complex interfaces in a far more intuitive way with GUI.

I mean... setting combat/stance Evade, combat/weapon Rifle=Scope is pretty simple as far as command lines go. But remembering all those commands compared to a GUI? No comparison IMHO.

@macha said in The Work Thread:

Well, I have been told it's this or nothing. Other people in my same job are NOT being forced into this, because they've gone back on site to their county offices.

Other people in your same job aren't entitled to reasonable accommodations under the ADA. You are. So it's not really apples-to-apples.

My experience with is is more from education, not workplace, and I am certainly not a lawyer or an expert. But it really does sound like you need advice from someone who is - either a disability advocate (there are many non-profits across the country) or a workplace lawyer.

@ganymede said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

I don't think you can compare FS3 and WoD Combat for many reasons. The biggest one is FS3's lack of "initiative"; everyone goes at the same time, and the combat engine takes the pre-set "preferences" indicated by each player (weapon used, target, attack-type, etc.) and finds the results lickety-split. In WoD, each person gets a turn in sequence, and, unless that person is actively engaged, they aren't always going to do this quickly; even if each player took 5 minutes to choose their action, roll for it, and pose, a 6-person combat moves at the glacial speed of 30 minutes per turn.

FS3 has initiative, it's just handled under the hood. It all comes down to how you view initiative. If you view it as "I get to wait to see what you do AND whether you succeed before I even pick my action" then yeah - it is going to be serial by necessity.

But that's a design choice. You could just as easily say that declaring actions happens in parallel because your decision to act is unaffected by anyone else's decision to act.

Then you have what I believe someone else suggested a bit ago:

• Declaration phase (in parallel)
• Resolution phase (GM-handled, in initiative order; GM spits out the results)
• Pose phase (in parallel, which can happen alongside the declaration phase in subsequent turns)

None of this is FS3-specific. It can work for any RPG system as long as you're willing to make declarations happen in parallel.

And if you're not? Well... then you get 8 hour long combat scenes. But why do that to yourselves???

Side note: FS3's code makes declarations public because it's meant for co-op PvE. But you could have people page the GM if it's PvP and you're worried about somebody cheating by seeing someone else's action first.

@grapenut That’s cool but my general point was that you have to go implement all that from scratch. Existing commands like +who and page and +finger don’t do JSON intrinsically (right?).... and is there a way to send JSON commands //to// the game?

@Thenomain One thing to bear in mind... SIN is completely a UCAS artifact. The database is managed by the UCAS government. Other countries (and probably corporations) have their equivalents, but the SIN is not global. (In canon SR anyway.)

@ganymede said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

I understand what you're saying: you could build a combat engine for the World of Darkness

I'm not even talking about building a combat engine. I'm simply talking about changing the order in which the people involved declare and resolve their actions.

Concrete example:

A pages GM: "I'm going to attack C and use my Vigor."
B pages GM: "I'm going to change into my (werewolf attack form - I forget what it's called) and attack C with my claws."
C pages GM: "I'm going to dominate B and have her turn on A."

GM makes a bunch of rolls, factoring in all of the merits and conditions and initiative and all that good stuff.

<OOC> GM says, "OK here's what happens: A attacks C and does (blah blah) damage. C then dominates B, who changes forms and wheels on A with claws bared. B - you're now dominated."

Or whatever. Then everybody poses. And while they're posing, they can be paging the GM with their intended next actions.

It's different from tabletop yes, but there's no reason it couldn't work.

WoD is designed for a tabletop gaming experience where you just go around the table and say what you're doing. Insisting on doing it this way when you have players scattered across the globe on terminals watching TV or doing whatever between poses is ill-advised IMHO, and leads to crazy-long combats. The WoD computer RPG didn't do it exactly that way, and MUSHes don't have to either.

@griatch said in A new platform?:

Well yes, that's why I pointed out a way that has worked very reliably for us. I doubt a solution like that would be impossible to implement in Penn on the server level?

Sorry I might have misread what you said then. I agree.

Also @grapenut @Ashen-Shugar -- I'm not meaning to disparage the custom APIs on Penn/Rhost so apologies if it came across as overly negative. It's a good step forward for the platform and I hope people take advantage of it.

All I was trying to say is that from a purely technical perspective, I think a JSON-based API over pure HTTP is more robust, well-structured and extensible than a websocket interface piggybacking on existing softcode commands. I would love to see somebody implement the former sort of API for the old servers.

Until they do, though, I think a statement that "you can do the same sort of web portal" with Penn that you can do with Evennia/Ares is a bit misleading. Yes, you can build a website for Penn but the amount of work involved is orders of magnitude different.

@ZombieGenesis Sure, self-starter RPers will find a way to do their own plots and entertain themselves in any theme. But, as you correctly pointed out, those people are a decided minority and we don't really need to worry about them.

There's also a minority of people who won't be happy no matter what you do. I'm going to ignore them too.

Somewhere in the middle, in my experience, are the majority of players who will drift aimlessly and fall back to Bar/Relationship RP if left to their own devices, but will gladly latch onto something to do if you give them focus and a solid reason to interact with other PCs. It's hard to do that with a wide-open world. But again, that's just my experience. YMMV.

@ganymede OK fair enough. I was operating on some misinformation or misunderstandings of what other people have said about combat in WoD MUSHes.

My only point is that systems designed for tabletop often do not fit the MUSH environment very well, and games shouldn't be chained to them. Don't be afraid of adapting the system to one that fits the environment better. If one of those other published systems you mention does that? Groovy.

I think you can use CHATFORMAT to do this?

Here's the example from help chatformat:

@chatformat me=<%1> [switch(%0,@,%2,edit(wrap(speak(&[if(%4,%4%b)]%3,%0[stripansi(%2)],%6\,),sub(width(%!),add(4,strlen(%1)))),%r,%r<%1>%b))]

@derp Here's a study from 2010: Supertaskers. I'm sure there have been others. This one is kinda interesting because while it replicated the results of earlier studies in concluding that 98% of the population is crap at multitasking, it also found that about 2% were awesome at it. So it is possible, but it's also rare.

(ETA: Worth noting it was a sample size of 200 with a specific task, so as with all studies it's important to take results in context of other research before drawing widespread conclusions. But in this case I think there's a preponderance of research that supports the same idea: people, in general, suck at multitasking.)

@surreality I usually just point people to Potato, MUSHClient and Atlantis. Covers the major platforms and doesn't overwhelm the user with choices.

@ganymede said in Paragraphs, large scenes and visibility:

@arkandel

To ride on that, I vastly prefer it when combat scenes are handled with just dice, if that's applicable, and no poses. Poses can be done later. Focus on the mechanics; worry about the RP later.

I think that depends on whether you’re aiming for combat RP or whether the combat is just a bump in the overall plot.

BSGU would’ve been pretty lame if every combat was resolved with some rolls and a summary pose from everyone

@packrat said in My first cellphone:

If you can afford to just outright buy a phone then take a SIM only contract then that is generally cheaper but you do need the money up front, it does however give a lot of flexibility

Depending on your carrier, the price may be a wash. Verizon, for the most part, is now just taking the price of the phone and dividing it up into 24 payments. So it's not really a savings deal like it once was; it's just an installment plan. Paying up front does give you more flexibility though, like you said.

Sometimes there are deals though. Right now for instance the iPhone SE is on sale if you use the installment plan versus just buying it outright.

@auspice said in The trappings of posing:

Discerning between 'who's posing' and 'who is chatting while waiting for others to pose.'
Figure that one out and you have gold.

Nope. The tricksy bit is that with the traditional telnet clients, not one iota of information is sent to the game until you hit enter (i.e. you're done posing, making the "I'm typing" indicator irrelevant). So you'd need a server-side "hey I'm typing" command that the client can trigger, then you'd need all the clients to send it if someone's typing, which of course would require people to update/switch clients, which... yeah, like @Thenomain said - never gonna happen. I'll refrain from re-iterating my various rants from the telnet thread and just point here.

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

Please answer it honestly. We all know newcomers can stick around despite a traditional MU*'s trappings; can you imagine many stick around because of them?

None. And far more are driven away by them.

But the simple, inescapable fact is that the overwhelming majority of veteran MU players will not switch to a new client. I've still got people reporting Ares issues with SimpleMU for pete's sake, and that hasn't been supported in, like, a decade.

So for all my "What defines a MU" philosophizing -- unless you want to make a game for only newcomers, you're stuck with what we've got.

Frankly the idea of a RL Anger thread in the "Constructive" forum has always baffled me a bit. How do you rage constructively? Moving it to the hog pit might alleviate a number of concerns.