Posts made by faraday

@Thenomain said in Adapting FATE for MU*s:

I think the takeaway here is that the more a game system is geared toward storytelling, the harder it will be to adapt to Mu*.

That seems like a particularly ironic statement for a hobby built around storytelling

I would say it's more about subjectivity than storytelling, but they're definitely related. The more subjective a system is, the harder it's going to be to achieve consensus and balance among strangers.

Example: FS3 is also geared toward storytelling. It gets criticized because chargen is subject to the whims of the approval staff and can be min-maxed. Those same problems are magnified like 1000x when you not only are debating whether Joe Viper Pilot should have "Good" or "Great" in Piloting, but also debating what sorts of aspects and stunts he has.

@Auspice said in Adapting FATE for MU*s:

The last time I sat down and tried to puzzle out a good way to do it, I got a headache.

Yeah, I mean... the mechanics are easy enough to adapt. But what makes Fate cool are the freeform epic aspects/stunts and the collaborative chargen / resolutions. Those are exactly the things that make the idea of using Fate on a game with dozens of strangers sound like a nightmare. You could strip them out or tone them down, but then you're getting away from what made Fate neat in the first place.

@ShelBeast said in Interest Check: Assassin's Creed (CofD/2nd Ed) Game?:

Does FS3 take care of things outside of combat?

If you're looking for specific code/mechanics for things like investigation or research, then no - there's nothing like that. Outside of combat, it falls back to more of just a freeform roll system, which is not dissimilar to most tabletop RPGs I'm familiar with (FUDGE, Fate, Shadowrun, Cortex, 7th Sea...) There are some guidelines for the types of games FS3 is suited for.

@WTFE said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

FATE has some rules for making a magic system or ten. And in the FATE System Toolkit there's even more.

That's what I meant though. Contrast with FS3, which not only doesn't have anything like that in its toolkit, but doesn't balance well once you throw super-human abilities into the mix. I mean, much as I love it when people use the system, it's designed for a certain type of game and doesn't work well everywhere. Shoving a square peg into a round hole is just going to cause you problems in the long run. You're already going to have to write a bunch of custom code to do talents and magic and stuff... just take an extra couple hours and change the five commands that let you pick and roll your skills too. Then you have the system that actually works best for your game.

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

@faraday Heavily modify because I need to add in the channeling system and maybe some feats/talents a la Fate style stunts

My point stands If you want Fate style feats/talents, why not just use Fate? Plus doesn't it already have a magic system?

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

I am leaning towards a (maybe heavily) modified FS3 at the moment. Folks are pretty familiar with it and with AresMUSH most of the heavy lifting is done.

If you need to "heavily" modify it, I think you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you just start from scratch. Enough people are familiar with it that if you start throwing in all kinds of extreme modifications, you're just going to be swimming upstream against expectations and confusing everyone. There's nothing particularly magical about the FS3 skills code. It's just a roll&count success system, same as SR4 and nWOD. You could steal the basic building blocks of the code and adapt it easily enough to whatever skill system actually fit your game.

@Arkandel I don't suppose for poor @Tirit's sake (and, um, ours too?) you could just move the last couple days of rage-ranting vendetta posts against Evennia over into the hog pit or something?

@Thenomain said in Eliminating social stats:

This is where positive or informative metaposing comes in. Those who hate metaposing often don't realize that offering up insight to your character's brain, their intent and thoughts and foibles, is mostly a good thing.

Uh... I don't disagree, but isn't that kinda the same thing I said in my prior post that Seraphim was offering a counter-example to? Or am I missing your point?

@Seraphim73 said in Eliminating social stats:

Certainly, you can type things like @faraday suggested, and I have, frequently. But there's something of an art (in my opinion) to showing the little cues like avoiding eye contact, a faint stutter or hesitation, that sort of thing, that suggest that a character is lying without blatantly saying so.

Those make better poses, admittedly. But also... then you're actually relying on the player to pick up on those subtle cues, instead of giving the player information that you think their character would realize.

@Sunny said in Eliminating social stats:

Yeah, except I'm not sure how you expect anyone to be able to pick up on whether your character is lying or not when you don't actually pose the cues that would suggest they were doing so.

Well I can't speak for anyone else, but stuff like this has always worked just fine for me:

"It doesn't worry me," Cate says. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Ahem. "I just resent the implication."

Not my best pose ever but it proves a point: You don't need social stats to work these things out. Consent and lightly-non-consent games have been doing it successfully for decades.

If that's not your preferred style - that's cool. I'm not knocking anyone else's right to play games differently. But this pervasive assumption that everyone who dislikes social stats is some kind of powerposing a-hole who never wants to fail is just freaking exhausting.

@skew I'm not really clear on what you're trying to do with strcat there. But in general, if you do:

[ u( x ) ] [ u( y ) ]

Then x will run and finish before y.

You can use a setq to save the results if you need to (but that gets into the need to localize and other goofiness):

[ setq( 0 , u( x ) ) ] [ strcat( %q0 , y ) ]

There is no equivalent to wait() in function programming.

Forcing people into metaplot goes both ways I think.

I mean, on the one hand you've got @WTFE's horror story about Marrach, where you're trying to browbeat players with a completely superfluous metaplot that they don't care about and can't impact even if they did. That's just idiotic.

But on the other hand, you've got something like @Arkandel's example about a post-apoc game. If your metaplot is "grimdark survival" and you've got people playing happy house and rebuilding society, I think it's fine to smack them down with zombies or raiders or coded illness or whatever till they are playing more in theme. Sure, you might lose players over it. But the alternative is to lose the players who actually want to play the original theme.

I prefer a happy middle ground, which I strive for on BSGU. The metaplot is there. It's pretty pervasive. But you're never forced to participate in a mission or give a crap about what's going on around you. You could do 100% of your scenes as the BSG equivalent of BarRP in the rec room and I really don't care.

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

Hmm.. has me wondering how hard it'd be to convert DFRPG style wizardry to FS3

No clue, but I can say with confidence that it'd be easier to implement DFRPG on Evennia or Ares than on MU softcode.

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

@faraday I did look at Ares but hadn't included its work in progress state. If FS3 is the system I end up going with it'll be a contender, though its in Ruby if I recall correctly. Evennia had the scales tipped its way largely because python would be of more use to my day to day RL work than Ruby at the moment. And thank you for reminding me to include timeline above

Sure, that's cool. Also there's much to be said about not having to wait.

One FYI about Evennia: last time I checked - it lacked a basic set of MUSH commands with the standard stuff everyone expects - finger, where, bbs, jobs, census, etc. Someone (@volund?) was working on something but I have no idea what the state of it is. Maybe it's done now - cool - but if not, you should factor that into your development time when considering Evennia. Evennia is a MU* building framework; Ares is a MUSH in a box. You can remove FS3 easily enough and add your own skills system while still leveraging the rest of the platform.

@WildBaboons I don't know what your timeframe is for this, but I'm hoping AresMUSH will have its first public release by Christmas. That's my goal anyway - no promises! But it'll have FS3 and all the common MUSH commands. Actually several folks have been surprised to learn it wasn't PennMUSH underneath. So if you're considering using FS3 but are also interested in the newness of Evennia, Ares might be your thing.

@Seraphim73 said in Star Wars: Insurgency:

@Jennkryst Heck, Dahan already did that.

@Jennkryst Yeah I did it too as a silly challenge on one of the coding threads. The code is here. I like the idea of a more involved die mechanic ("you succeeded, but..." is a neat idea) but it seems like the execution leaves much to be desired. And people already complain about "fuzzy" success levels on dice systems; this seems like it would be even worse.

@Thenomain said in Idle timer? (Tiny):

@faraday said in Idle timer? (Tiny):

most random idle timeouts are the client's router

Which means there's no solution from the game. Finding out what is causing these people to be disconnected becomes an exercise for someone who knows networking tools.

Yes. Or talk to whomever implemented the web client and see if they can do some kind of client-side keepalive feature.

@Thenomain I think you missed my point.

@wait triggered from MUSH execution queue (server side) --> trig.anti-idle (server side) --> @force (server side) --> player executes @@ (server side) --> nothing sent to client because @@ has no output (??)

This entire sequence has absolutely no client-side involvement whatsoever. Presuming that it's an issue with the client-side router, what does this accomplish?

If your presumption is that it's some wacky bug in TinyMUX, by all means give it a try, but I call Occam's Razor here: most random idle timeouts are the client's router.

@Thenomain @@ doesn't send any output to the client, does it? I'm failing to see how a server-side-only execution is going to help anything.

@skew said in Idle timer? (Tiny):

Yeah, that was my question. If I @force someone to do something, does it actually hit them client side, or is it all server side.

A force would be handled server side.

KEEPALIVE works by sending null bytes to the client. This helps keep the connection alive with some routers.

Other routers will disconnect you unless you send bytes from the client. If you can't change the router config, the only way I know to fix that is for the player to set up an auto-timer in their MU client to periodically send a command to the server. The IDLE command is best for this because it doesn't actually update your idle timer (so it doesn't look like you're active if you're not), or you could just send a dummy command like @@. Way back when, I used to have it send think <IDLE> [time()] and then had my client filter out text starting with <IDLE>.