Best posts made by faraday

@Pandora - So just in case it was missed in all the spam... Ares does this already. It would be trivial to make Evennia do it too. The Penn/Tiny/Rhost codebases might be a bit trickier to implement. You might be able to do it with a hook on the page command though; I haven't messed around with that in years.

Point being though that I think this is eminently achievable on all codebases with minimal privacy implications because it's only activated at the receiving player's request and only for pages from a specific individual. You're not really giving them anything they couldn't already do with their client; you're just making it verifiable to avoid log doctoring.

@Thenomain said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

@faraday

Then all those times where you said you never had to deal with it were ... eh, I don’t know. I’m glad that you do understand, but they do not mathch things you have said to me in the past.

And this miscommunication would be different than the other 847 times we've crossed wires how, exactly?

What I think you're alluding to was past comments in which I meant to say that the crap is not prevalent as part of the game culture on games I've played. If it were? Frankly I wouldn't still be doing this after 20 years. But sure, scattered through the years have been a few bad apples. And I've certainly heard the horror stories from other games enough to know what exists.

@Saulot said in Historical MUSHes:

@Seraphim73 I know I sound like a pessimist, but I don't think there is a happy medium. You gotta accept that you can't please both audiences, and will have to cater to one. I may be wrong since I haven't been mushing for long, and there may have been games that have accomplished it.

I think it depends on what you mean by "happy medium". There have been numerous historical games that have done "Hollywood History". Like @Pandora says, this means that the historical setting is much cleaner, fancier, healthier, more progressive and more adventurous than its historical counterpart. Sure, there are people who grit their teeth at the historical inaccuracies, but I don't think it's any worse than Deadwood or Pick-a-Crown-Drama on TV.

@A-Meowley said in Historical MUSHes:

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

I think it would be ridiculous to say that staff allows what I've described because of an inherent desire to be sexist/racist/ableist/homophobic/etc. RL.

Good thing nobody's said that!

Except that they have. Just not in this particular thread.

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

Exactly this. I don't see why it should be different for historical places. The OP didn't even ask for accuracy, it just came up as it always does when Historical Game is intoned. I think in part, there are a handful of players that would prefer a game related to just trying to survive in a historical period. Nothing wrong with that at all, it just seems that if a place isn't historical enough for some, it tends to get negative feedback pretty quick on the accuracy meter.

I would agree with you that modern-day TV dramas and movies aren't any more plausible than their historical counterparts.

The only thing I'd note is that you have to ask yourself why people are playing in a given game. If it's WoD the answer is "I want to play a vampire/werewolf/etc." The setting itself (modern day) is decidedly secondary. If it's historical, though, I think you get more people gravitating toward it because of the setting, for whatever reason. So the more you stray from it, the more jarring it becomes to people who are interested in that period of history. And you run into weird cognitive dissonances like, "Discrimination isn't a thing in this setting but the Civil War totally still happened!" So I think it's a little more complicated.

@Cupcake Seems to be working for me.

@Ghost said in Incentives for RP:

But I can think of a few cool perks, like:

Sure those are nice perks. But do you really think anyone is going to be motivated to go out and run plots for people (a thankless, frustrating job) just to be able to pose that their X-Wing is black? So again it comes down to why you're doing it. If it's a perk for folks who were going to do the stuff anyway - sure, let them have a black X-Wing. No harm done. But as a motivation? Color me skeptical.

@Sparks said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

I'd also say the other defining trait is that the NPC does not get to be the protagonist. The story you're telling is not their story; they're not the hero who saves the day...the NPC doesn't get to be Luke Skywalker. They could be Obi-Wan Kenobi, however.

I agree with you in theory, but I think on a MUSH it gets murky because the traditional protagonist/antagonist breakdown doesn't really fit.

Even in TTRPGs, having NPCs with major roles helping the PCs can be problematic.
For instance, I could see Ben Kenobi or Gandalf being a super-irritating "GM's Pet PC Masquerading as a NPC" type of character in a TTRPG. They're more powerful, they step in and save the PCs from conflicts at times, etc.

@Sunny said in Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?:

ETA: Seriously. MOST mushers haven't even HEARD of this place.

How are you judging that? Most MUSHers I know of have. There are 67 pages of user accounts here (granted many ancient/dup/throwaway) compared to a rather paltry number of MUSHes out there (even granting that page is not a comprehensive list). How many MUSH players do you think there are?

If you're talking general MU* players including MUDs/RPIs/etc. I would agree. But MUSHes? Sorry, not sold on your hypothesis there.

This is the only active MUSH community forum I'm aware of, so like it or not IMHO it is a reflection of "the MUSH community".

@Sunny said in Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?:

What I disagree with is that this data-set can be extrapolated to mean anything about the Bigger Community, because the Bigger Community doesn't care. Those that do know of it (but don't participate in it) often have nasty things to say about it (and often, everyone who participates here BECAUSE they participate here).

I think that we're aligned in principle, and just disagree with how much there IS a "Bigger Community" out there.

On the last few games I've played, the majority of active/engaged players self-identified as being engaged here. If you look at the AresCentral handles, you'll see a large degree of overlap with MSB usernames. Just based on my personal, anecdotal experience, most folks I know who are still active in the MU community are active here. Then there are the numbers Ark has reported about users/visits in the past here compared to activity stats on open MUSHes.

I know you play on Arx and it has a larger and more diverse playerbase - a lot of folks who would probably not identify as traditional MUSH players who come from other online RP communities. But just among what I'd call core MUSH players? I believe MSB captures a wide swath of the audience. We are not a huge community to begin with.

@Sunny Yes, and look at what MUDConnector actually counts as "MUSH" and you'll see a variety of social hubs and the more in-between things like Arx that appeal to a wider audience. The number of actual MUSH games is a smaller percentage of that. Counting alts and people connected to more than one game, and 1600 connections is a very different thing than "thousands of players".

As I said - we have different definitions.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Poll: Do I enjoy this hobby more than I don't?:

Eh, while I don't know if it's thousands, the openings at Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor recently (Ares games) lead me to believe it's way above anything like 200. There are different pools of players in different genres that seem to rarely touch each other and it can be dramatic when they do.

I would agree. My ballpark would be in the high hundreds, maaaaybe just over a thousand of us, counting super-casual players. It's a guess, but an educated one; I don't think there's any way for us to establish definitively.

Mudstats lists 120 games in the MUSH/MUX category, but when you actually look at the list -- there are entire pages of games that may still have a server port open but haven't been active in years (Otherspace, TGG, Firan, etc.), are social hubs (M-U-S-H, 8BitMUSH the ansi art place, etc.), are porn places (as Ghost pointed out)... once you tick them off the list, there just aren't many MUSH games.

But it also comes down to how you define "a MUSH game". Was Battletech 3065 (basically a coded mech simulator, very MUDlike to me) a MUSH just because it ran on TinyMUSH? Is Shang? What are the essential defining characteristics of "MUSH" compared to other online text-based game types?

We could go round and round on this all day and each reach different conclusions because we're not starting from the same set of definitions.

@Cupcake @Tomorrow There seems to be a bug with the web chat if you don't have any page conversations. Will get a fix out for that soon. In the mean time, if you just page somebody in-game (or have them page you), I think the error will go away. (or not; stay tuned)

@Lotherio said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

Among old folks who've played and know where to find RP (including other games when its dry spell) and such, or who know how to get going even as a new player, its not a thing. Even as @faraday mentioned, being known means its easier if you have a good reputation. However, relative to the concept of the OOC game, its not very newbie friendly to only play with known commodities, just in my opinion.

You're equating "people can know who each other are" with "and thus they only play with known quantities".

These two things are not equivalent.

Sure, there are some folks who will only play with known quantities - just as there are some people in RL who will only hang out with their friends at a party.

But there are also people who will see the new guy in the corner by him/herself and go over and introduce themselves.

@Tinuviel said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

So long as it's only "allowing more flexibility" and not a new paradigm.

That is entirely in the hands of the MU community. MU players control what becomes the norm by how they behave.

The one practical thing holding it back from becoming the norm, IMHO, is the MU time clock. IC time continues to pass for the rest of the game even if your scene is lagging. It's the same reason people hate timestops. It ties your hands from continuing with other RP, and potentially makes your own RP moot based on other things that have now transpired.

That natural tension doesn't disappear just because somebody's using a different MUSH client to participate in the scene.

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

One method I've taken (to your standing around part) is, when STing, I start people in media res. And I know other STs who do the same.

Yeah, I also favor that approach. It does take some choice out of the hands of the players, so I think it only works if there's NPC leaders involved. But in general, it seems to me that if you leave players to their own devices to choose a direction, they just dawdle and/or argue endlessly. Then the plot goes nowhere.

ETA: If you want to have "making a plan" be an important part of the plot, that's fine, but I think it's a distinct phase. Don't mingle planning/executing into a single scene.

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

So how can we encourage more people to be willing to go first?

Beats me. How do you motivate players to do anything that requires some initiative?

I have only compensatory mechanisms for when they don't Like the turn time limit, nudging people OOCly to pose, having leaders give them some direction, starting a scene in media res, etc.

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

But, if as @Goblin suggested, the order is dropped after that point... the other issues that you mention aren't a thing.

I thought it was a strict pose order for the first round. But I mean even if it's just for the first person - what if they're AFK at that moment? Now everyone's still waiting for someone to pose first, but for a completely different reason

@mietze There's a difference between saying "you guys have 15 minutes to pose or I'm moving on without you" (which I do too) and "ok, Faraday, you HAVE to go first".

I'm not telling anyone how to run their plots. I'm just saying that kind of thing would make me super uncomfortable and I likely wouldn't participate in plots that were run that way (after the first time I discovered that's how it was done).

@Seraphim73 said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

I get that this might play into @faraday's discomfort with being called on to go first, but since we always asked the person who was going to be in charge if they were okay with it, I don't have so much of a big deal with it -- you picked the rank, you 'get' to be in charge, you have to pose first.

I don't have a problem when there's a logical reason why that person needs to go first - there are all kinds of reasons why kicking off a plot might hinge on the actions of someone in particular. Usually that's pretty obvious too - they're the leader, they're the one with the gun to their head, whatever. I just object to springing it on people as a general practice.

@Arkandel said in How important is it to be 'needed'?:

does it lead to oversaturation of certain popular archetypes, and does that matter

It all depends on how you structure your game.

On BSGU for instance, it wouldn't have mattered if every player through the door wanted to be a Viper pilot. The setting, the theme, the game structure, the plots, etc. all accommodated that.

In that type of environment, steering people toward "under-represented" roles may be detrimental if now the poor newbie has nobody to RP with or no plots to participate in.

Also some people can be really over-protective about their perceived uniqueness. "Ugh, I was the chef but now there's this other guy butting in on my 'territory'." So emphasizing/rewarding that is not necessarily ideal either.