Best posts made by faraday

@Derp It already shows time since last activity. The average is easily thrown off by outliers, so it's not really a reliable measure.

@ixokai said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

You say, "in fact", yet in fact is more nuanced. You can not sue someone for copyright infringement for ideas. Flat, stop. You can't. You can, with a much harder burden of proof, sue someone for plagiarism That's a more complicated case that has nothing at all to do with copyright..

Worth reading on this account: MZB vs Fanction.

Lawyers were involved, hassle was ensued, and yet, notably, there was no actual lawsuit at all - let alone a case where a fanfiction writer actually won a copyright case against an established author. Even more importantly, the situation could have resulted whether the author had a prohibition against fanfic or not. Because, as @ixokai said, this is America and anybody can try to sue anybody about anything. Whether it will actually hold up or not - that's the question.

Also worth noting that even the claims that the publisher refused to publish the author's novel due to the overlap is in question:

“one of the fans [Lamb] wrote a story, using my world and my characters, that overlapped the setting I was using for my next Darkover novel. Since she had sent me a copy of her fanzine, and I had read it, my publisher will not publish my novel set during that time period, and I am now out several years’ work, as well as the cost of inconvenience of having a lawyer deal with this matter.” [1. I’ve heard claims that DAW killed the project. I’ve also spoken to Betsy Wolheim at DAW, who states that this was Bradley’s decision, not DAW’s.]

In regards to Evennia or other platforms, there are a few nifty UIs for MUDs that do room navigation and whatnot.

https://play.achaea.com/
https://www.mudlet.org/

I decided to go in a different direction with Ares obviously, but they're still sleek designs and could give other folks some ideas.

@arkandel said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

Guys, please respect the OP's request. Make a different thread for the copyright stuff.

Why not split it off and move the posts so the discussion isn't split up (or, since I think it's pretty talked out, so it isn't buried in a random thread for posterity).

@Lisse24 said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

while I can be more relaxed on another scene type to accommodate people's desire for asynchronous play.

Except that then you're relegating all asynchronous play to private scenes. I'm not in favor of that. But if some game wanted to do that, they could certainly make some custom code to adjust the timeouts based on scene type.

@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

Either they are enforced, or they are not, I'd rather see them enforced.

We enforce lots of things without code. If a game wants to enforce travel with keystrokes, I find that absurd and just won't play there. Just like (one of the reasons) I stopped playing WoW is because I have better things to do with my time than sit on a griffon watching fake scenery go by. My character exists in the world even when I'm not logged in. There's no valid reason (IMHO) to say they can't be traveling when I'm not logged in.

@Three-Eyed-Crow For FS3, it was planned from the moment I started seriously considering a web portal for Ares. That was in 2017.

The other skill systems were added later, because folks kept equating FS3 and Ares, and I wanted to make it clear that Ares wasn't actually tied to FS3. So I whipped up a few alternate skill systems just for demonstration purposes. They're functional but pretty bare bones.

It's never been my intention to personally code up support - especially not on web - for endless varieties of skill systems. It's just too much work, and I don't have the interest. I created FS3 because I don't think most TTRPG systems are a good fit for MUs.

@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

If IC my PC is supposed to be on the road for a day and there'll be a PrP about it tomorrow at 8 then I just continue to RP on the grid until then if an opportunity comes, and simply place all those scenes in the timeline before the trip takes place.

That works as long as everyone else in the scene is on board with that plan, which is totally fine. But it takes coordination. If you're mentally slotting that scene into Tuesday and I'm mentally slotting it into Thursday (because that's what +time says it is) then you run into continuity issues. Maybe your games have been less concerned with continuity. I've been on games like that. There was one Victorian game where +time was just a month. It drove me crazy. But on the games I've played, continuity was more important. You could do backscenes or even forward scenes, but you just had to be careful.

@Tat said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

It's not just 'earning' the pool, but limiting what happens when you don't have enough points in your pool (ie, what triggers that nosebleed).

As a generic "point tracker" system that's all done with manual effects, it could certainly be done as a separate plugin.

pools - Show your pools.
pool/award - Staff command to award pool points.
pool/spend - Player command to spend pool points.

That really has nothing whatsoever to do with FS3 though. A GM would have to manually apply modifiers or limit what abilities you could roll or whatever.

FS3 itself has no concept of point pools by design (apart from luck points) and as @Tat mentions, it would be impossible to build that in without some heavy custom modifications to the core code.

@arkandel said in Real life versus online behaviors:

On a MUSH or even MSB the pool is so much smaller, and possessing a recognizable identity is super important - your reputation matters, which is one of the reasons being an oldbie often conveys advantages either formally or otherwise.

I don’t think it matters as much as you think in some respects. I mean, how long did people play on Serenity? Or that crazy pants supers game that had a gazillion flamey posts here? Have hog pit posts really cost anyone RP?

MU players are shockingly tolerant to bad behavior. There’s also the illusion at least of being able to start fresh because we have no global screennames or other player identity. (And it may in part account for why so many MU players are resistant to such identity tracking.)

The reaction in most cases is just to be more insular, rather than actually confronting the bad behavior. So even when there are consequences, you don’t get the “you’re a jerk so I’m not going to play with you” feedback.

@il-volpe I understand. I was just trying to clarify how it could be done as a separate plugin, without needing to tie into FS3 at all -- which I think is what you ultimately want.

@wildbaboons said in Wheel of Time mechanics:

How do people feel about turned based more automated combat system (like FS3 and DSS) vs more GMed types? (the various WoD places out there)

I don't really know much about WoT, so just something to consider ... the automated systems in general only work well when there are limited actions that can be automated. When you start throwing in powers and modifiers from merits and all kinds of special situations ... you either end up with something massive like TGG's combat code (which was a work of art but had a wicked learning curve) or you end up constantly having to work around the automation (which kinda defeats the point).

Yeah FS3 wouldn't work well for wookies and stuff. It's good for regular humans.

@ganymede said in Heroic Sacrifice:

For many, you have to make the incentive greater than the loss.

Sound theory, but that's where I think the "player proxy" bit makes it hard. If the reason people are playing is to feel good about virtual status and badass heroics of their avatar, what possible incentive would be big enough to get them to accept losing virtual status and not being heroic?

Side note - I think the indefinite timeline of MUs is another factor at play here. I've run a few short-term sub-campaigns on various games, and I've noticed that people are way more likely to take risks and accept losses when they know that the storyline has a finite shelf-life.

@coin said in Developing a WoD Codebase for Ares:

more common vision

It hasn't been the "common" experience I've had with people asking for help with WoD code for Ares, which is why I always bring it up as a caveat.

@lithium said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And I know for a fact, a LOT (relative to my perspective) of people never played on TGG because of the short campaign length.

Oh, yes, I agree. I must have misunderstood your point. All I meant is that there are many people who will cling tenaciously to their character in a long-running campaign but at the same time happily take risks and sacrifice themselves in a short-running campaign. These people are not polar opposites, they're just behaving differently in different environments.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So for me, this is very much a key aspect that needs to die. ... This is a good example of something I see as a game culture issue. Ideally (in a perfect, utopian MU) people shouldn't be focused on 'my story' — this is hero-think; protagonist-think. It should be first and foremost about the story, and sometimes for the benefit of the story, an important character has to die, or suffer.

I don't think you can kill that part of the culture though. It's been fed by decades of RPG culture, video game culture, and media culture - all of which is what we (as a collective) base our games on. We use RPG systems. We retell stories from books, movies, etc. that are often about the Hero's Journey, the awesome badass(es) who may struggle a bit but ultimately save the universe.

Trying to fight that culture through incentives, I think, will just lead to what @Pandora and @Seraphim73 said about making "losing the new winning", with people just min/maxing their failures in order to build more success.

Incidentally, it's funny you mention FS3, because in FS3 you never die unless you consent to it. (And hardly anybody does.) I've seen far more sour grapes and whining about how someone wasn't as badass as they thought they should be in +combat than I ever have people taking creative license and failing/struggling in an interesting fashion. The stuff you describe exists, but it's a minority.

So I think you'll get more success just by trying to attract the scattered folks throughout the hobby who are already craving more of a story environment than by trying to bribe people into playing a completely different style of game than the one they want to play. As @Lithium said - find like-minded people and cater to them. Even if, as with TGG, that's just a small group.

Side note - Cooperative tabletop games work by making it all about the group rather than the individual. The group wins or loses together. You're investing in the group, not in your own character. There are mechanics that make it easy for you to trade cards or moves or whatever so you can enable somebody else to do something that furthers the group's agenda more. I have no idea how you'd try to apply that concept to a game with dozens of individual characters played by strangers on the Internet, but food for thought maybe.

@cobalt said in Birmingham: The Entangled City (BhamMu*):

I just need to go in an make a note of "No Unentangled PCs".

You can do that with custom code easily FYI. https://aresmush.com/tutorials/code/hooks/app-review.html

@thatguythere said in Heroic Sacrifice:

but after a PC death and doing again...ungh there would be nothing I would want to avoid more.

Yeah especially because you, the player, already know so much about these people from your old character. There isn't even the pleasure of social discovery. It just becomes monotonous. I just can't support forcing that on people just to provide some illusion of "stakes" in the story. When main characters die in a novel or on a TV show, there's a point to it. Their death serves some purpose in the story. It's not because "Oh, you rolled a 1 on save vs death... sucks to be you. Game over."

Not meaning to harp on PC death since that's only a part of the discussion here, but I think you can make the same arguments for failure in general. Characters in (good) stories don't just randomly fail. There's a greater narrative purpose, and the failure feeds into the next part of the story. That just doesn't happen in MUs. So can you really blame people to not want to fall flat on their face for no narrative reason other than a fickle die roll?

@reason No offense meant or taken. I was just responding to your assertion that it was solely a matter of personal preference. I see it as a usability issue, which goes a bit deeper.

@surreality said in Search Broken:

perhaps she could offer instruction for a means of setting something like that up?

It's not really that complicated, technically-speaking, it's just a PITA. Any time you have multiple tools working together you have a fragile ecosystem trying to keep them all independently up to date and working happily with each other. And as @Arkandel mentions, that's then multiple "fronts" that you have to police against trolls.

I looked into this issue extensively when exploring solutions for AresMUSH, and ultimately came to the conclusion that having everything under one roof was for the best even if that roof has limitations. But that's just my 2 cents. Either way could be made to work with enough elbow grease.