Posts made by faraday

@lithium That's fine. I'm not trying to knock people who read descs here, not at all. I'm just explaining why I personally don't need them and don't feel bad for not using them.

@lithium said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Problem with this is that you then have people who come in not knowing diddly about what everyone's wearing or general appearance is.

Repose systems solve that handily. Or so do re-sets for new arrivals.

Side note: I'm not convinced that people ever used descs as much as we'd like to believe, even back in the "good ol' days". I've had an @adesc on every character I've ever played, and it didn't get triggered as much as I would expect, even way back when. So I think these alternatives have filled a void that was always there to some extent.

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Well let's examine why people don't look at characters any more.

For me it's three things:

1. PBs. You're Chris Hemsworth. Got it. I don't give a crap what you're wearing unless you're streaking through downtown or wearing something ridiculous, in which case I would expect you to note that in your set pose.

2. Better Set Poses. As you described, people tend to throw that stuff into their set poses now. Because nobody read descs, or just a natural evolution of the genre? Who knows. But it's a thing, and it largely makes descs superfluous.

3. I am not a desc person. You can talk all day long about your chiseled jaw or ruddy complexion and my brain still has only the vaguest clue what you actually look like. I get just as much from +glance showing hair/build/eyes as I do from a desc, and it's way easier to read. So descs, to me, are 100% useless.

I seriously did not intend to send the thread off on a tangent about Cyclops. I'm not a comics person - it's the only 'ship I could think of from the movies.

@templari said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@faraday To clarify on the lack of search function comment, Arx has a true website, not a wiki.

Yes, I was aware. I was speaking more in generalities. My point was that having a repository of information you expect people to use and not have search is a problem with that particular repository's design, not a problem with repositories in general. It's user experience 101 type stuff.

@templari Bot abuse, lack of search ... those are just a sign of bad wiki design and not a problem with wikis in general.

As for whether PBs and lack of secrets has killed the hobby? That's back to the chocolate/vanilla argument again. Secrets don't interest me, finding RP does. Transparency, open sheets, open wikis help me personally immensely in that regard.

I hate static descs and would much prefer just tossing a brief note in my set pose about what my character's wearing if it's unusual and/or relevant. Otherwise I just assume people are wearing clothes. Couldn't care less about the color/style/etc. of their outfit. Wikis and PBs are a godsend in terms of visualizing characters and add incredible depth to the experience.

But again... chocolate/vanilla. What "kills" the hobby for one person is the greatest thing since sticky velcro for someone else.

@roz said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Even I won't argue for that.

Yeah even a wiki zealot like me wouldn't argue for that. That's what I was getting at when I mentioned "essential game info" being in-game. To expand on that thought - my bar is things that you may want to look up while in the middle of a scene.

For example, Ares has a whois <name> command that tells you their full name (including rank and callsign) and lets you look people up by first name, last name, or callsign. 90% of the time you don't need the whole spammy finger-style profile, it's just the clunky way we've gotten used to for figuring out "who is this person again?".

@collective said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

With respect, that's kind of a feature of a comic book game, rather than a bug. ... I know that if my first days on a game were expected to be in scenes where some random stranger wants to RP what a bastard my character is for breaking up with their character, I'd nod politely, pretend I had to run an errand, log out and never, ever come back.

That's fair. Like I said, I've never played comic games which I way I prefaced my initial question with "Maybe this is a standard thing on comic games..." What you just described (holding a char to RP based on their previous player) is the standard, accepted norm on games I've played.

I know that if my days on a game included walking into a scene with someone I'd spent months playing as a BFF and then being treated like a complete stranger? I'd never come back either. To each their own. As long as @Enoch's policy is clear one way or the other, folks know what they're getting into and decide if it's a game for them.

@collective said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

Do you play a lot of superhero games? Because the continuity builds up fast and thick.

No I've never played one, in fact, but I fail to see how it's any different from B5 or Firan or Aether or Star Wars or BSGU or a dozen other roster/FC games that suffer from the same basic problem. Taking over a character that's been played by someone else for months or years comes with baggage, no question.

ETA: To clarify, I'm referring specifically to in-game events and relationships, not pre-conceived notions from this or that version of a comic.

Sometimes you don't want to deal with somebody else's past fuckbuddies. You just want to play Spider-Man.

And if that's a given game's policy, that's their business (which is what I said to @Enoch's original policy). But if you want your game's RP to have lingering/persistent meaning, then you can't just ignore it whenever a player feels like it.

@enoch said in Mutant Genesis (X-Men):

What say you, people? It sounds strange to me, but I have warmed up about it. Need opinions!

Cheers for being open to feedback. FWIW, maintaining the IC continuity of relationships during a player transition has been the norm on every game I've ever played. Sure, there can be issues, but that's true of anything. It works pretty well for the most part.

As for taking the RP in a different direction (breakup, falling out, whatever)... that can happen even with an existing player. I don't think anyone should ever be forced to RP their character in a specific way or be shackled into an IC relationship.

That said, apping Cyclops when you know full well that he's ICly married to Jean and then on day 1 saying: "I want a divorce" just to go hook up with Rogue... that seems like a pretty craptastic thing to do. The kind of thing that can screw up other characters pretty badly.

The new player knew what they were getting into when they apped the character. If they didn't want to be married, there are other characters they could have taken. Encouraging new players to take a wrecking ball to existing relationships on a whim just seems... kinda cheesy to me. But it's not the red flag that retcon was, for sure.

@enoch Fair enough. That's a deal-breaker for me, as it would essentially involve a re-write of my character if anyone close to them happened to leave the game. But kudos to you for setting up a nice site with solid policies (other than that one IMHO) and interesting enough hooks to briefly tempt someone who's not normally into the comic genre.

Maybe this is a common comic game thing, but this policy really baffles me:

Relationship RP and activity of the sort is not protected or enforced under our Continuity policy and are generally considered to be retconned the moment a player leaves a character. We don't really want to see anything more than "Golly jee willickers, I really like Jean Grey!" in people's +canon.

How does that work? Like... okay, I've spent six months RPing a BFF relationship with Ganymede's character, we've shared our deepest darkest secrets and had loads of adventures, there are tons of logs on the wiki, etc. Then Gany gets bored and quits and someone else takes over the character and ... all that gets erased? I'm supposed to now invent some kind of alternate reality for my character where none of it ever happened?

I get that a new player will never be exactly the same as the old one and should be free to take the character in different directions. (We have a falling out, drift apart, whatever.) But to not be bound at all by the in-game continuity makes it seem like the game doesn't have a continuity, which is kinda an alien concept to me.

The wiki looks very nice btw.

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

Just blame me for that instead of @Ganymede, because I do think that. I also think we should dump telnet and play the whole dang game on the web. But that's neither here nor there.

Coding the same thing twice (once for web, once for game) is frustrating, error-prone, maintenance-heavy, and at some level IMHO just insane. This is 2017 and the web is ubiquitous. Expecting people to use it does not seem like an impossibly high barrier to entry for a game.

BUT I know it is. So I coded both ways for a lot of things in Ares, even though I hated every minute of it.

@sparks said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

but you have the same information on-game.

Not all of it though. The supplemental profile fields are only available on the web portal, as are the setting/wiki files, etc. Because seriously, double-coding everything is a PITA. The only reason as much of it exists in-game as it does is because there are still so many MUSHers who abjectly refuse to use the web portal at all.

This is like a "which do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla" type of question. You're not going to reach any sort of consensus here.

There are those who hate opening a browser for any of a dozen reasons, and those who would rather stick pins in their eyes than spam themselves with three screens of text just to find someone's skills/background/whatever.

In an ideal world you could do both, but that has a cost too. Even in a system like Ares where the game and website are integrated, somebody still needs to expend the effort to code up two parallel views for all the information you're talking about. And it doesn't always translate well.

Personally, I prefer to have the wiki/website be the primary source of all information, and have in-game commands for essential quick reference. But that matters to anyone else about as much as the fact that I like chocolate (i.e. it doesn't matter at all except insofar as what you'll find on my games or ready-built into Ares).

@Thenomain It was numerous people across several games spanning multiple years. Which is why I brought it up here as a 'lesson learned' about MUSHers and computer-based skill systems.

@Lithium I think you missed my point. Yes, giving players agency in how they use their skills is different than a purely random system. But it has nothing to do with cards or dice. Falkenstein is a card-based system with no agency, for example (*). There can be dice-based systems with agency if you have a pool of "success points" or "luck points" or "auto successes" or anything like that.

(*) At least I think it was Falkenstein. Perhaps I'm misremembering. It was some system anyway.

@thenomain Yeah I did that too. Didn't help. But I'm glad it worked for you.

@thenomain said in Alternate Game Systems:

where we realize that the entire game lives on a computer so why not let the computer do all the work.

One thing to note - in my experience, MUSHers don't do too well when it comes to trusting the computer when it comes to skills.

Entirely too many actual conversations (give or take):

"Should I pick Good or Great for my Firearms?"

"Well which one describes your character more?"

"F-- that. I want to know how many dice I get for each one."

"There are no dice. This is a computer RPG. The probabilities of success at different difficulty ratings are posted <here> if you really care."

"This system sucks."

Couple years later...

"OK! The system now uses dice. Each rating rolls 1d8."
"Argh. I failed and I can't see the dice results. This system sucks."

The idea of using 'cards' instead of 'dice' seems like an incredibly semantic distinction considering in both cases it's a computer generating a random number.

That aside, I think giving people more choice in how they can influence their skills is interesting in theory. You can do this with "bonus chips", "luck points", "cards" or whatever.

In practice I have a hard time imagining it working out too well. MU skill rolls either happen infrequently (99% of the time) or in a giant deluge (like during a combat scene where you might have 20 rolls in one session).

For reference/feedback, here is the sort of command I had considered.

help suspect

The suspect command helps you guard against OOC harassment. If someone is bothering you, you can set them suspect. This will start a running log of any private pages between the two of you, and any poses/OOC chatter when you're alone in a room with them. It does not log any other commands. If something inappropriate is said, you can then report them and the log of recent chatter will be automatically sent to staff.

suspect <name>=<on or off>
suspect/report <name>