Best posts made by faraday

@thenomain Castle Falkenstein is more steampunk-themed fantasy, and Shadowrun is cyberpunk-themed fantasy. I don't really see them as co-existing in the same genre at all.

@Thenomain said:

So in asking how writers come up with this, what I hope is that through example players can be encouraged to think of themselves as writers of the story and not players of a character.

I can't speak to comic book writing specifically, but certainly in general fiction writing, you don't bust out a RPG handbook, make up a protagonist, and roll dice to figure out what happens to them.

But when writing a story (be it a comic book or a novel) you are writing a story. You may have whole team involved (as @Roz described), each with their own ideas and agendas, but (hopefully) you're all marching toward a unified vision. You have lots of meetings to plan things out, review and revise drafts, etc. It's a lengthy, collaborative process.

That is very different from a MU*. For starters, you have a whole bunch of players each wanting to tell a different story - one where their character is the main protagonist. Many players are resistant to planning things out in advance, preferring an experience more like improv acting. So decisions have to be made quickly on-the-spot. There is no revision process (barring the extreme, dreaded retcon).

So sure, in principle I agree that players should put story over stats. I am very happy when players can just work things out amogst themselves without resorting to code or rolls. But when conflicts arise, I think it's beneficial to have a way for them to be resolved speedily and impartially.

Dice systems are neither perfect nor absolutely essential, but I for one find them quite handy.

@bobotron said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

But there's tons of 'NON INTIMIDATABLE' or 'OH YOU ARE SO TRUTHFUL BUT I THINK YOU'RE LYING ANWAY'. None of us want Social Stat Dominate, or at least that's how the thread has read to me.

I don't see anyone arguing the 'you're so truthful but I think you're lying anyway' stuff in this thread, and yet you and I both know it happens sometimes in games.

I don't see anyone arguing 'Social Stat Dominate' in this thread, but people trying to use it that way has actually happened a lot in games too.

And that's why folks on both sides are so darn sensitive about this issue. We've seen these systems (or lack thereof) be horribly misused in ways that few on either side are advocating for.

Side note: Even the 'not intimidatable' arguments posited were about someone who couldn't be subject to a particular kind of intimidation. Not someone who couldn't be intimidated ever.

@coin said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

Noir is a style and a theme.

Yeah but how do you do "noir" with medieval-fantasy people transplanted to 1920's earth? Not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to picture what that would even look like.

If it's purely a question of tech level, I think the 20s are kind of a weird dead zone of popular culture compared to the more popular late-1800's (Wild West), 30s (gangsters) and 40s (WWII).

@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

How do MU*s try to handle this disconnect between individual character narratives and the more global.... time-fabric?

On the MUSHes I've been on, time is generally synchronized to the day. So you'll see logs tagged as 2015-05-26 and can keep track of events that way.

Within a given day, time is more flexible and you're just kind of expected to keep your own internal timeline consistent. So if you've already RPed a lunch scene on Tuesday with Jane, you normally wouldn't then go backward and do a breakfast scene with Bob. But you could do dinner with Bob.

There are occasionally times when you break this rule and do a "backscene" that happened in the past. This only works well when the scene is completely inconsequential, or the events have already been agreed-upon in advance. After all, if you backscene a breakfast with Bob on Tuesday and die, it would cause a paradox with your lunch scene with Jane on Tuesday.

Clear as mud, huh?

@apos I like the general idea. I prefer a more minimalist approach (assigning a number and defining will/won't for "Total Coward" or "Soft Spot for Kids" seems a bit overkill, but I'm all for something like (Trait - Description).) But I think we're on the same page in principle.

@kumakun said in Potential Supernatural Game:

I'm a long time MUX coder, but I've been looking to learn other platforms.

FWIW, Ares has a bare-bones Cortex plugin available. You'd probably end up expanding it for your own needs, but it's a start at least.

@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

And of course narrative paradoxes would occur, but it's apparent that they would stand separate. I suppose if a game were to try to cater for all diets, the question would become how this system handles scenes that extend longer than a day - or insert timebox here - ala PbPers.

Yeah, continuity problems crop up now and again, but you can usually just handwave them away or work it out somehow.

You're absolutely allowed to play fast and loose with the timeframe. You can do backscenes, forward scenes, scenes that span a three-day period... whatever. But you always have to keep in mind that the rest of the game is following the day-by-day timescale. If you're doing something weird with your timeline, the onus is on you to figure out how to work that into the global timeline. It can get tricky, but it is possible.

@arkandel said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

As such I wouldn't think a system is getting in my way when I do this but rather that it attracts me.

I think we're talking apples and oranges. I'm talking about people who come in with a particular character vision in mind - "I want to be a badass archer who grew up on a farm" or "I want to be a doctor with an interest in child psychology" or "I want to be a fighter pilot who played the violin when they were younger". You might be surprised how freaking hard it is to make well-rounded characters who don't suck (or are at an extreme disadvantage compared to their companions) in some games, especially when systems throw in a lot of skills that everyone should have to some extent, like Athletics, Persuasion, Awareness, Driving, etc. You never have enough points to get all the things you "should" have, so you are basically forced to min/max.

Your approach of making a numerically-optimized character just for the fun/challenge of it is a completely different approach so my statement doesn't really apply to you. Nevertheless, in my experience the former has been far more common.

I'm not aware of anyone doing a game in node.js. Part of what you need to consider is how people are going to extend your code with their own custom code, and I think a more approachable language like Python/Ruby helps a lot there.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Are we moving in a direction where we're going to have to figure out how to ditch the classic terminal and adopt something more accessible? What keeps us from becoming another PbP community, or Storium, or is that where we're headed?

I think the "live" nature of MUSHing is a key ingredient that sets it apart from those other kinds of communities. I don't see it going full PbP, but I do see it shifting more towards chat clients like Slack and Discord in the way we interact with it. Especially on mobile.

@zombiegenesis said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

can't have 2 word names, it capitalizes every word, can't have lower case aliases, and a few others

Side note - some of these have already or could be addressed, if you'd like to discuss more in a separate thread.

@Ashen-Shugar Penn has a function list too showing the DB# and MU* function for all of the global functions.

APPEND                               16    FUN_APPEND

My code attempts to be modular, so I use separate Command/Function/Data objects for each softcode system. The function object's @startup will register any of its functions it wants to make global.

@startup FS3 Skill Functions=@function roll_ability=me/fun_roll_ability

@kanye-qwest It depends on the system obviously, but I've seen countless cases where one person will say: "Well I'm not a stunt driver - I don't need Drive" and someone else will say: "Well, you don't have the Drive skill so you never learned how to drive."

I remember on B5MUSH back in the day - if you didn't have Swimming it meant, literally, you couldn't swim. We had a lot of people who min/maxed that away (since how likely was it you'd actually need swimming on a space station game) and had some lulz when the garden flooded from a water main break and nobody could swim.

This issue is compounded by the systems themselves. Many systems have specific descriptions for what the different levels mean and people generally just ignore them. This actually penalizes people who actually pay attention to them and try to make their character "fairly".

For example, I'll pick on @Seraphim73 (because he knows we're pals :)) and the 100's skill descriptions, where there were things like:

Resolve:
1 - Someone who might turn down a knuckle sandwich.
2 - Someone who can go hungry for a few hours without complaining.

Alertness:
1 - Someone who notices when someone close to them shaves their head.
2 - Someone who notices when someone close to them gets a haircut.

Deception
1 - You told a lie once.
2 - You told a lie once — and it was believed.

Seriously - can you imagine a single MUSH character that wouldn't have at least Resolve-3 / Alertness-3 / Deception-3 ? I can't.

I tease 100 but it's by no means unique to them. Has anybody actually taken time to read what the dot levels or skill examples are in WoD or other systems? If you actually follow what they say, people would have low level skills in a lot of things.

But most people think "If it's not on my sheet, it just means I'm not particularly good at it" not "If it's not on my sheet, it means I don't notice when my BFF just shaved his head and literally cannot tell a lie to save my life."

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Plus I can't think of another language where creating a plugin architecture is as easy as Python. Not that I've used in recent memory anyways

Actually the reason I chose Ruby of Python for Ares was because the dynamic language features of Ruby were better-suited (IMHO) to a plugin-based architecture.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

I've noticed a trend in Discord discord since returning. ... Or if it's the accessibility of the platform.

Chat client RP has been around almost as long as MUSHes have. Once upon a time it was AOL chatrooms, later IRC, now Discord. For simple, freeform RP it's hard to beat "create an account on Discord and go!" - both in terms of game setup and game playing. MUSHes are way more involved. The learning curve is steeper, the culture is in many ways off-putting, and setting up a game is prohibitively difficult.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@Thenomain said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

I still don't know Django. Installing Evennia, more than just getting the raw code on my computer, is still daunting as hell. I strongly support @faraday's notion that it's a rough toolkit, maybe a framework, and little else.

I am a programmer. I am not a system administrator. When you tell me: "Oh, you 'just' need to install SQL, and install Django, and install Python, and do this, and do that, and configure the web server, and get a DNS name if you want one, and oh by the way don't forget about all the security updates..." I just want to run screaming in the other direction. (I know how to do these things, but they're not my forte and thus very un-fun.)

Contrast that with a typical MU* host where you go to genesismuds, click on a few things, and now you have a shell account for mymush.genesismuds.com where all you have to do is install the game itself with a couple make commands.

(This is not a problem unique to Evennia, btw... I'm struggling with the same thing on AresMUSH. Trying to make the install/config as painless as possible is my #1 goal.)

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

In other words, most games are designed around the idea that if you 'should' know how to do something you already do. You don't lack the points to buy everything you 'should' have because you've already got everything you 'should' have for free.

I'm just saying that if you actually read the game system's descriptions, that's actually simply not true. It's a disconnect between the descriptions and the way people play, which I feel leads to issues. But apparently I'm in the minority and don't really feel like arguing about it any more.

@alexraymond Sounds neat. FYI, AresMUSH supports the FFG Star Wars system out of the box (along with lots of other stuff). The FFG system hasn't been field-tested on a real game yet, but I'd definitely offer what support I could for anyone trying it.

@WTFE said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

In the end I may finally implement the program's final version in a compiled language, but nothing beats a hosted interpreted language (or a language whose compile/link/load cycle is so fast it emulates one) for raw exploration of concept space.

I completely agree with you that this is MUSHcode's strength. And if that's your primary goal in your game and you're willing to learn MUSHcode to do so, then clearly the first-gen MUSH servers are for you.

But as @Griatch pointed out, the workflow for Ares/Evennia is nowhere near as onerous as the C example you cited. I logged in yesterday and someone reported a bug in the mail system. I fired up my SSH client, edited one file, typed reload and voila - the bug was fixed in about 2 minutes.

Yes, it requires an extra step of having an ssh client running in a separate window. No argument. But IMHO that is an extremely minor addition to the workflow. And in exchange for that small amount of friction, I get, among other things:

• Coding in Ruby instead of in a 30-year-old derivative of a language (Lisp) that nobody uses any more, with all associated benefits (off the shelf libraries, whitespace, comments, community help, editor tools, etc.)
• Easy version control, without having to run things through a MUSHCode formatter/unformatter, with all associated benefits (history, merges, backing out changes, easily accepting contributions, etc.)
• Seamless sharing of code between my local development environment and the real game server. (Having a local environment is an option, not a necessity, but one way to address @Thenomain's point about fiddling with code before publishing it live.)

If none of that appeals to you, that's totally cool. First-gen MUSH servers aren't going anywhere. My goal with Ares is not to replace them, but to provide an alternative that makes it easier to install, play, and code a game. If nobody uses it but me, I'm fine with that

To @surreality's question about out-of-the-box config, I'd say that's another core difference between Evennia and Ares: Evennia is set up with basic "talker" commands like Penn/Tiny, without the game-specific stuff. Ares comes out of the box with all that plus all of the things you'd normally find in a softcode package like mine/Volund's/Theno's. (List of AresMUSH Plugins) It's a difference between open MU* framework vs. MUSH-in-a-box.

@seraphim73 Yes I agree. As you know (but not everyone may), that's one of the things I adjusted in FS3 3rd Ed. The level 1 skill is expressly named "Everyman" and everybody starts there. The idea was to make it more obvious that even though you don't have Drive or Brawl on your sheet, you can still drive your car to work and try to throw a punch. You won't be particularly good at those things under stress, but nor do you live under a rock.

My issue with folks just ignoring the "nonsense" skill descriptions as @The-Sands has suggested is that some people actually pay attention to them. If I've never played WoD before, how the devil am I supposed to know that the skill descriptions are BS? I read the rulebook, it says (as @ThatGuyThere pointed out) "1 dot in drive means you can drive normally and 2 dots in drive are required to drive a stick shift". I'm gonna think "Oh - well then I probably should have Drive: 2".

That now means I'm now 2 dots "behind" someone else who comes along and ignores the skill descriptions and plays a driver without the Drive skill. It creates a situation that is inherently unfair between those who follow the rules and those who don't.

So @Arkandel - I don't see that as a strawman argument at all. It's a very real problem that creates an imbalance between the PCs.

But I agree with @Seraphim73 that the "max" part of min-maxing isn't the problem. I frankly don't care if you want to play an ace fighter pilot with exceptional reflexes. If that's your thing - go for it. I do however mind if that's all they can do, because I think it's silly. Even an ace fighter pilot went through basic training and knows how to pick up a pistol, has to pass physical fitness tests, and went through the military academy where they took something as their major. Those skills should be reflected on their character sheet, even if they're low. My definition of well-rounded is "not one-dimensional". It doesn't mean "one man army who can do All The Things".

@zombiegenesis Yeah, no server is perfect for every game. It's important to fit the one that meets your needs the best. Sometimes it's definitely better to work with a blank slate than to try to adapt an existing set of code that doesn't quite match your vision. I will point out, though, that Ares is still in active development and many things (including some of the ones I know you had issues with) have been addressed in recent months.

@krmbm said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

Will it be that way with AresMUSH when it's done? Legit interested. Can you uninstall default plugins and not break your game?

It's still a work in progress. Ultimately yeah I'd love for it to be completely plug-and-play, but it's not there yet. Some plugins are more central than others. But I like to think it's a marked improvement over my Penn codebase because each plugin clearly defines the interfaces (APIs) that other plugins are allowed to use. For example, the BBS plugin defines has_unread_bbs?, post and system_post. If you were to remove that plugin, you'd just need to either stub out those methods so they do nothing, or edit the places that are trying to use them.