Posts made by faraday

Back up.

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

Games using established systems are where this comes into play, and theme / source fiction material is different than mechanics.

I was talking about mechanics too, until I replied to Tinuviel talking about theme. I'm not questioning or challenging your experiences. I'm just explaining my own differing experiences. I have never once in 20+ years of MUSHing seen anybody get "pissed" that a person didn't know the RPG system before showing up. I'm not saying it's never happened. I just don't think it's as universal as you seem to believe, that's all.

Now I have seen people (rightfully) get pissed at lazy/entitled doofs that show up expecting you to explain everything so they don't have to read a single news file. That's obnoxious, but that's a different situation.

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

If I set a game in the Harry Potter universe, I expect you to know what a horcrux is.

That's your choice, naturally, but it's not universal. BSGU welcomes people who are unfamiliar with the theme. The only requirement is that you be willing to learn. Some of our most active/contributing players have never seen the show, and they do just fine. If I ran a Shadowrun game, I would not expect anybody coming in to know the system or have read the umpteen zillion splat books. I would, however, expect them to read the game's wiki files, which should teach them all the basics they need to know.

It's totally fair for a game to post on their news files: "We expect you to know the theme/system". They can have whatever policies they like.

What I was responding to was @Derp's assertion that in general people would be pissed if you turned up to a game without knowing the system. My experience over dozens of games and multiple decades has been the opposite.

@tinuviel Sure, anyone coming to a game should be willing to do the work necessary to learn the game (by this I'm including the setting and the system). An entitled expectation to have everything spoon-fed to you is obnoxious in any game.

ETA: What I said though was that teaching was a burden to the game. By this I mean the game documentation, with the staff available to answer questions / clarify docs as needed.

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

If someone joined a DnD game and didn't have at least a basic grasp of how it works, people would be pissed.

I don't play on WoD so I can't speak to that, but other systems? No, that has never been my experience, either in MUSH or in tabletop. People are generally happy to help/teach someone who doesn't know the system.

Certainly I don't expect anyone coming to one of my FS3 games to already know the system, any more than I expect them to know the theme/setting. The game files should teach them what they need to know to play the game.

Teaching them is, of course, an extra burden for any game based off a non-open-source RPG, since you can't reprint material or point to a free and public PDF. Doubly so for a complex system. But I have never seen a game where it's like "If you don't know the system already, go away."

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

It would be like trying to write a "Operating a dump truck guide" for bicyclists.

I don't think it's that different. All programming languages share many core similarities.

The way you input the code is very different, and that's a big learning curve. No argument. But switch vs if? Dolist versus each? Emit versus ... msg (I think that's the Evennia equivalent)? These are not universes apart. Comparison tutorials exist for many other languages (C#->Python for instance) and there's no reason why one couldn't be made for MuCode->Evennia. I'm working on one for Ares, in fact.

@ashen-shugar said in Questions About Evennia:

Ergo, build it as an engine API and allow the method they want to connect up to the end user. But who the hell has the time for that?

:sheepishly raises hand?: Though we can disagree slightly as to what constitutes the "right" technical architecture, and that's veering off-topic for this thread anyway.

@lithium 3rd Circle Wolfman Space Marine?

(I love ED's dice system btw - even if it is very easily min/maxed).

@thenomain said in Questions About Evennia:

+finger, +who, +where, in that order. These are the base three Learning To Mush Code systems that everyone should do. As +where is a nightmare in Mu*, I think that it would be a good example of why not to learn Mushcode.

Yeah. What I meant was - what would you consider to be a good example of one of those in MUSHCode to use in contrasting the two? My +where or +finger are customizable and briared in with my global functions and install system, so they wouldn't really make a good example. And you didn't like the current Evennia example so... is there a good contrasting example?

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:

it's not our intention to make misleading comparisons so if the example comes across as disingenuous we can remove it.

I think that a MUSHcode vs new code example is helpful. If the existing one isn't good, maybe @Thenomain could point do / provide a good tutorial-worthy example in MUSHcode and then someone can make an Evennia version.

@tat fyi stress and subdue were in 2nd ed too.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Could probably change how people enter a scene to accompany a set, to formalize the culture for whether someone is 'in' or not, compared to the whole, 'I'm here but I'm not here because I haven't made a set' thing that I find vaguely ridiculous and awkward.

That's again one of those things that I think becomes much easier in a web-only game. The scene is a web page. You can access it if it's public, or if you've been invited to. You join a scene when you pose into it, and you can do so from any of your alts. The lurking state is still there - it's what you do when you're reading the existing poses on the page to see what's going on. But it's invisible to the other participants.

But alas, telnet.

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

But FS3's combat engine seems to be a simultaneous-action-resolver, right? It doesn't lend to sequential events well.

No, there's initiative. The only thing is that KO's don't happen till the end, so nobody's action gets cut off. Of course if their damage mods get up to -10 from all the hits they took before their action, it's a hail mary but at least they get their dying gasp

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Sure but design a game like that in a way that requires no ooc communication whatsoever to find RP.

Faraday does:
scene/start Joe's Pub=public
scene/set It's a pub. It could have a better desc but Fara sucks at descs. If Joe's Pub was an actual defined location, the desc would be imported automatically.

@Seraphim73 sees an open public scene in the scenes list or on where. Does:
scene/join 713

I'm not trying to be difficult, I just honestly don't see how the gameplay is fundamentally different than Seraphim chilling in an actual @dug room on the grid hoping somebody wanders in (or more likely does a meetme to hop straight there).

Now I get that the grid can offer some immersion for some folks. I'm not saying it can't be a feature. Just don't think it's necessary or dramatically game-altering.

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Unfortunately, I don't see a place for those specific powers on the game, but FS3's combat has things like "aim" and taking aggressive combat stances that serve as a substitute. With my custom system, I had those abilities in there, but I'm willing to sacrifice it for the wondrous combat engine.

Having only played ME for about an hour before it started collecting dust on my shelf, I can't really comment on the specific abilities.

In general, though, adding new combat/foo actions in Ares is pretty easy, and the tutorials will have instructions for how to do that. There are certain generic system behaviors that are easy to hook into - modifiers (initiative, attack, defense, damage), doing damage, healing, and certain pre-defined special effects (like stress or shrapnel). It's only when you want to do something really unique - like a tazer that stuns you for three turns and then reverses itself, or a superspeed power that gives you two attacks - that you're going to run into hideous code obstacles.

@lithium said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Then I would tweak the combat code to hit that /first/ before affecting health.

Yeah I have no idea how ME shields work, but assuming "generic energy shield" sort of behavior, I'd do something similar. Start with a number of shield points, tracked like ammo. Recharge value would add back so many shield points each turn. Damage would subtract shield points based on damage level. When the shield reached 0, the shield would go down and the damage would go through.

Or something like that. You'd have to touch a couple code functions but it wouldn't be too bad.

@tat said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Wait wait. 3rd edition has SHIELDS? Is there a place where I can read more.

It's not quite done yet, but there's this new thing called "armor specials" which work like the new 3rd edition "weapon specials". They can augment protection or (in the next patch) defense. So a shield special could give you a bonus to defense rolls and some extra armor on your arm. A helmet special could give you armor on your head. You can also, of course, code in whatever special coded effects you want.

@seraphim73 said in Mass Effect MU*?:

I would say that -combat- magic works fine. I would even say that non-combat magic outside of combat works fine too

Depends on your definition of 'fine' really. If you treat them as skills and/or custom weapons, then yeah. But there are so many different ways to represent magic and/or superpowers: skills/powers/gear, learned/innate, leveled/unleveled, etc.

@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.

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Sure, but I don't see how that's what I argued.

Sorry I apparently misunderstood what you meant by providing technical capabilities.

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's an easily solved design issue too.

Yes, for that extremely trivial example it's not so hard. But in general? No, it isn't easily solved. Things designed well for an immediate-feedback telnet-based text environment just fundamentally work differently than things designed well for an asynchronous web environment. Supporting both requires considerable complexity.

@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In this thread's context though all I'm saying is that the key isn't so far to do away with some features we are familiar with or to do them differently, it should be to provide the technical capability to do so.

I disagree. A platform that tries to be everything to everybody is by its nature going to be either

• incomplete - requiring you to fill in the blanks yourself (e.g. current MUSH servers) or
• insanely complicated. I mean, it's nice to talk about magically-functional Wordpress plugins, but have you ever tried to write a Wordpress plugin? There's a reason why almost all of the decent ones are behind a pay-wall.

So it comes down to what your goals are. With Ares, my goals are 1) Make it easier to play, 2) Make it easier to create a game, and 3) Make it easier to code.

All three of those core goals get screwed if I try to keep every existing feature, plus every conceivable feature you could build with current softcode, plus a web UI on top of that.

Keeping to those goals requires compromises. There are many compromises I've made with Ares. Some of those will turn off some people. I don't really care as long as it doesn't turn off everybody. (Which is why it's not web-only even though I'd like it to be, because that would turn off almost everyone.)

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I think there's a confusion here that if we allow backwards compatibility with telnet it's an all or nothing agreement. This isn't true. You could allow a telnet client to connect and make the same commands people have always been used to, but also provide a web client that runs off a restful API. These things are not mutually exclusive.

They're not - Ares has done it. But as @Roz said, that choice has added a lot of complexity to the code that I wish wasn't there.

Just a trivial example, let's say you want to have "Race" as a new chargen field for your space-game-with-aliens. With either telnet-only or web-only you'd only need to touch two things: the command/screen to set it, and the one to display it. But when you try to support both, you now need to have the telnet command to set it, the telnet command to display it, the web screen to set it, the web screen to display it AND the Rest API to allow it to be set via web. And help files for all of that. And oh-by-the-way they're in different languages, because web uses Javascript/HTML and the backend uses Ruby.

And that's just for one extremely trivial command race <race>. Now multiply that by a thousand or so different commands/features.

Now imagine explaining all that to a novice coder trying to learn a new platform and you hopefully see the problem.

@saosmash I don't see how organic RP and multiple scenes are inherently in conflict. Someone can 'open' a scene in the mess hall and leave it there, hoping others join in for "random RP" while still doing a back/forwardscene in another tab with someone else. You just have to sort out your character's internal continuity and work out where any given RP fits in. That doesn't mean other scenes have to be fluff, just that there are some constraints to what you can and can't do without causing massive retcons.

@apos You're never going to stop people from doing multiple scenes on their character, backscenes, etc. People do that already; the only difference is that they're using crappy workarounds (like OOC alts or spoofing one char with another) or going off-game to G-doc or whatever.

That said, if a given platform doesn't let you execute your vision, no biggie. That's why it's good there are multiple platforms to choose from.