Posts made by faraday

@silentsophia Hiya! It’s like the Old Home Week thread

@tinuviel said in The trappings of posing:

@faraday Almost like any culture or sub-culture.

Okay? I mean, maybe you run in some pretty rough sub-cultures, but if someone bows to me in greeting at a party, I'll raise a curious eyebrow but I'm not going to be all: "Wow, what an idiot. I never want to invite him to another party."

We're talking about things like using you or past tense or tabs in writing. It's not like these are alien ideas in prose.

@surreality said in The trappings of posing:

This is partly why I ask so many times about the things people think newbies should know.

I tried to capture some of them in my MUSH 101 tutorial, but yeah - I think a lot of them are just subconscious.

@tinuviel said in The trappings of posing:

Just because something is the norm somewhere doesn't mean we have to just accept it, of course. Bowing is the norm in Japan whereas a handshake is more common in the United States. Adapt to where you are, or look like an idiot.

To a point, yes. But MUSHing has a crap-ton of unwritten rules and a crap-ton of people who are quick to leap to "OMG you're the worst kind of idiot" just because somebody does something differently. And then we wonder why so many newcomers are turned off.

@surreality said in The trappings of posing:

...except second-person posing. Don't. Just don't. If only for the nightmare of editing those logs -- or worse, seeing them posted unedited, oh gods. That's probably the one I can't ever forgive.

But, see, even that is the norm on other types of forums. I mean think of all the codey type games where game emotes are considered part of the RP (Faraday waves at you.) It irks me a bit too but I remember when it was pretty common on MUSHes and remind myself it's still pretty common elsewhere, and it no longer seems like such a horrible transgression.

@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.)

@arkandel said in The trappings of posing:

Yeah, I agree with that. We're really used to the way we do things - but I'm not so sure we're not in the minority, and that we're not just holding our arbitrary way of doing things as the golden standard others should be conforming to.

To be clear - I don't think there's any real problem with the way we do things. Tabletop is usually present tense ("I say..." "I hit the ork with my sword..."), and MUSHing has a lot of roots there. But I think it's pretty obviously a quirk of the genre, rare in writing, and I can't really fault anyone who slips up sometimes or has a hard time adjusting. Now someone who's been doing it for awhile and just refuses to adjust? That's different.

@brent said in The trappings of posing:

I've seen a few past-tensers on Arx (we get people from eeeeeverywhere) and just mentally rewrite it and move on, myself.

I had the opposite problem when I tried Storium. Everyone there does past tense and I kept having to mentally adjust. With MUSHing you don't have the luxury of editing your poses. If you're switching between environments, it's hard to bust ingrained habits.

And if someone is unfamiliar with MUSHing they're probably going around thinking: "WTF, why are all these weirdos writing everything in present tense?" because it's so uncommon in most other kinds of writing.

@tributary Yes, sometimes that can work. In general though? Often not. Not everyone is a high-energy frenetic person who isn't paying attention to their surroundings. (Most in fact aren't.) So it bugs me a little. It's not the end of the world.

Long poses, short poses, inner monologue... whatever. I don't care as long as it's interesting. A good scene is like a tennis match - you have to serve something your partner can hit back.

For pose times, it's less about the individual times than the collective time between my turns. I tend to RP late at night. If it's more than 20 minutes between when I pose and when I get to pose again? There's even odds that I've either forgotten I'm in a scene or fallen asleep. And it's not very satisfying if turns take 60 minutes and you only get three poses in before bed. This isn't a general condemnation of slow powers, just a sad reality of my schedule.

My personal pet peeve is folks who try to put a bunch of things into one pose. It really makes the conversation feel unnatural. It's more common (naturally) in people who do longer poses.

Jane says X. Poses walking across the room and getting a drink. Asks if Harvey would like a drink. Says Y about some completely different topic.

Harvey overreacts to X, but then has to figure out how to reconcile that with all the other crap Jane just posed... or is forced to ask her to amend her pose.

This gets magnified tenfold in a bigger scene when multiple people start doing it and/or start responding to everything around them.

Jane asks Harvey a question. Says something completely unrelated to Greg. Smiles and nods to Tom, who just walked up.
~
Greg replies to Jane. Begins to engage Tom in conversation. Waves to Amanda across the room.
~
Amanda waves back. Says hi to Harvey.
~
Harvey now has to answer Jane's question, greet or ignore Tom, and acknowledge Amanda. And perhaps address two other parallel conversations (Greg-Tom, Jane-Greg) going on in his immediate vicinity. And heaven forbid if any one of those things causes a disruption that would have pre-empted anything anybody else posed. (like punching Tom as he walks up.)

That, coupled with the longer pose times, makes me avoid scenes if there's more than three people.

Side note - all the griping about tabs seems a bit petty to me. We're all entitled to our preferences, but "OMG you're the worst / I don't want to play with you" seems like an extreme overreaction to a formatting peeve. Maybe get a better log editor?

@three-eyed-crow said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

I have a lot of nostalgia for Gallipoli.

Indeed. The WWI arcs were awesome, though Guadalcanal is still my fav.

@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 Spot on. And getting players engaged is harder. “Kill orc” is way simpler than following breadcrumbs in a mystery or figuring out a clever way to solve a social problem. It’s also astonishingly difficult to involve a whole bunch of people in a social plot as more than spectators. Whereas a battle can involve dozens easily.

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

@ashen-shugar said in Shout for Help:

Because this way if other people run into similar issues of other people, they won't have to dig through literally hundreds of threads for a random post with a questionable topic.

I can do a search for "Mush attack" and the first hit is the specific thread What to do if your mush is attacked where I can find everything I need to know about that topic. I search for FS3.3 and the first hit is the specific thread FS3 3rd Edition with the same effect.

IMHO that is waaaay more useful than trying to sift through dozens of pages in a single thread hoping that somebody at some point has answered my question.

But it's your thread. I'll shut up now.

@Ashen-Shugar I hate to quibble over your obvious generosity, but... why a thread? We already have an entire category for "MU Questions & Requests". And aren't threads like "Help my MUSH is being attacked!" or "Need help installing RHost" more useful to posterity (and more obvious to people who could potentially answer) than a giant sprawling thread of "this one guy who needed help one time"?

@chime Yeah I was just trying to determine what the command and expected output were if you issued that command on penn or tiny, since any hypothetical MUSH list wouldn’t be complete without including them. It’s it like we can reasonably expect Penn to respond to a Rest request.

@chime I can't find anything about the pre-login command in the spec. Where's the info on that? Do Penn and Tiny support it?

@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.

@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.

@ganymede you’re missing my point. A, B and C are fighting. They each (in parallel) declare an action meant to take their opponent out. Then you resolve the actions. B goes first. He takes A out. A doesn’t get to actually do his intended action.

Resolutions can be serial even if the declarations are not.

I’ve played WoD combat in tabletop and there’s no reason why it can’t be done this way. If a game chooses not to, that’s fine, but that’s a choice.