Posts made by faraday

@Apos @kitteh Thanks. I count it as a success by my yardstick. My only point was that different people have different yardsticks and BSG's model isn't some magic bullet that's going to work for everyone. If your goal is to have a ton of logins, having a narrow focus (Rook's point #1) probably isn't the right way to go. If your goal is a political PvP game, I'm highly skeptical of your ability to divorce yourself from a lot of "I want to do XYZ" admin jobs (Rook's point #2) unless you automate a ton of stuff with code.

@Thenomain Having never played on Pern or WoD it's hard for me to really answer that question. But I can speculate.

The key question is what do the characters do, but you have to answer that in the context of all the characters. Shadowrun answers that question for a runner team, which works great in a tabletop setting but doesn't translate so well when you now have 30 players. The same thing is true for a western setting. Westerns are great stories, but they're great stories that typically involve one or two people. They don't translate well to a larger setting. BSG, on the other hand, can answer that question for an entire Viper squadron in one fell swoop.

I'm going to guess that the clan aspect of WoD and the ... what are they, tribes? ... thing in Pern allow you to extend adventures to larger groups of players.

@Thenomain I don't think I've seen that list in particular, but it's just always been one of those things that strikes me as common sense. I mean most tabletop RPGs are structured that way. Sometimes the game itself is (e.g. "ok so you're Shadowrunners and here's what you do...") and sometimes it's up to the GM to come up with a way to give six characters a reason to be together on an adventure.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

Again, that entirely misrepresents the point.

And again, you seem to have missed my point. But I've said my peace and I'm tired of arguing about it.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

Everyone has a measure of responsibility.

Nope. I'm not taking that responsibility. My game policy is this:

if you are sensitive to a particular kind of content, it is your responsibility to communicate your boundaries to those you scene with. Resolving things off-camera is always an option if something makes you uncomfortable.

And for those who think that makes me some kind of uncaring monster - you're entitled to your opinion. But I shoulder enough responsibility for other peoples' health and well-being as a parent, in my job as a medical device programmer, and as a volunteer paramedic. I don't need that level of stress in my pretendy funtime games as well, thankyouverymuch. Anyone who expects me to take responsibility for their mental health should do us both a favor and play someplace else.

@Rook For me, any new game has to answer the simple question: What do the PCs do. I don't mean who they are (vampires, knights, etc.) - that's the setting. I mean what do they do on a day to day basis. That's the game. Many games don't answer that question, and in absence of an answer people fall back to bar and relationship RP.

BSG has a very laser-focused answer to that question: You fight Cylons. We offer frequent (1-2 per week) action scenes, mostly combat-oriented, interspersed by "slice of life in wartime" inter-personal RP. If you're looking for literally anything else you're not going to find it there. Want to play a civilian in a post-apoc setting? Nope. Political RP? Nope. Gaining power by climbing a ladder? Nope. PVP? Nope. Investigating Cylon tech? Nope. Racking up the XP to become super-awesome? Nope.

Obviously I don't have the capability to do an "exit poll" on everyone who wanders off and doesn't come back. But my impression from chatting with various folks is that they were just looking for something different. Nothing at all wrong with that, and I don't consider it to be a failing of the game on the whole.

@Rook Thanks but don't overestimate its success. There have been a number of people who got bored and quit because they're looking for something the game doesn't offer. And despite being a success by my standards, we can't hold a candle to somewhere like Arx in terms of logins (which many people use as a barometer of success). Narrow focus has both pros and cons.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

There's no obligation to check prefs; I do think there should be one to mark specific common trigger content likely in scene. ... Yeah, I do think excluding that player from the game on the whole because someone simply can't be assed to say 'hey, <thing> is likely in this scene, be advised' is a massively crappy attitude to take toward any potential player.

And I think that any player joining a WWII game who can't be assed to say before a scene: "Hey, I'm leaving my codebreaking cubicle to venture out into the battlefield, there aren't going to be any land mines are there?" is taking a massively crappy attitude by putting responsibility for their hangups on their storytellers. And that is the crux of our disagreement. I don't think there's anything more constructive to be said.

@Rook said in How to Change MUing:

My ideas are these:

What you've described in your three points is essentially BSGU in a nutshell. Narrow focus, there's almost no plot-related jobs, and XP is constant and ploddingly slow. It's not some rare unicorn; it's been done. It's also not a magic bullet. It has pros and cons the same as any other sort of theme. It all comes down to what sort of game you want to make.

@surreality I guess you didn't see my note at the bottom about not making light of the McDs coffee lady, because I'm well familiar with the case. In fact, part of my actual job involves putting warning labels on medical devices, so I'm well familiar with the entire concept of advisories and liability. That's part of why I'm sensitive to it.

By placing the onus on the storytellers to apply warnings to scenes or to check preferences set via the tool before including someone, it's giving players some measure of expectation that they're going to be warned if something comes up. That then opens storytellers up to "liability" (in the MU sense of responsibility, not the legal sense) if they fail to provide appropriate warnings. I reject that responsibility utterly and completely.

If you're playing on a WWII game, it is entirely reasonable to assume that Nazis, concentration camps, gas attacks, death by land mine, etc. are all entirely fair game for the theme. If those things are potential triggers for someone, then they probably shouldn't be playing there.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

At that point, it is on the person who likes those things to show up, or the person who dislikes them to stay away.

But first it was on the person running the scene to label it appropriately - and that's where the 'foisting responsibility' problem I mentioned comes into play.

Also, for better or worse, our society has a very real and well-documented trend where people come to rely on "helpful but unreliable advisories" and then turn around and get pissed off when those advisories are not as reliable or complete as someone thought they should be.

Case in point: we went from "hot coffee is hot, duh" to "maybe we should put a warning message on it just in case" to "OMG you didn't have a warning message on it, you monster, now I'm going to sue you because I burned myself."

(Not saying MU folks are going to sue each other, nor making light of the original McDs coffee lady, who actually had a legit case; I'm just using this as a tangible case in point of the general phenomenon I'm referring to.)

BSG:Unification is still small but active.

@Misadventure That sort of thing can also be avoided with a little common courtesy. If someone needs a tool to tell them not to blindside someone (anyone!) with a sexual assault plotline, I question whether they're the sort of person who would even bother using the tool in the first place.

As someone who has many projects and non-infinite free time, choosing projects wisely is important. Others will obviously have different priorities.

That said, I will never have such a veils/lines/prefs tool on my game because I feel it foists a level of responsibility onto storytellers that I am not comfortable accepting.

If you put "triggered by spiders" in your profile, and I somehow miss it and I put spiders in my scene, I don't want you coming at me all: "I had this in my prefs profile WTF is the matter with you, you monster - you caused me a RL panic attack."

I refuse to accept responsibility for someone else's mental health while playing a game. We're all adults. I will be considerate and accommodating to the best of my ability when someone raises a concern to me directly, but I'm not comfortable with the impartial and potentially unreliable nature of relying on a tool for such important communication.

Again, that's just me. If someone wants to use such a tool on their game and accept responsibility themselves - that's their business.

@Roz As you say, there's no one true way to do things. +prefs or stoplights are tools. If you think it's a valuable tool for your game, make it. Maybe people will use it, maybe you'll have wasted your time. Either way it's your game and your time.

The important thing is to have some sort of expectation - whether that's a tool, or a policy, or whatever. The absence of a tool is emphatically not an indication that your game doesn't give a crap about player comfort. It could just be an indication that you don't feel that tool is a good way to address player comfort.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

@Ganymede A prefs system is a good communication tool. It is not, and should never be considered to be, a communication replacement.

Sure, but tools aren't free. There's a cost to create the tool, a cost for people to read and understand and enter their preferences using the tool, and then a cost for people to actually use the tool to see other peoples' preferences. I remain unconvinced that the cost and the likelihood of people using it effectively makes it worth the effort.

I wouldn't use it, personally. But I'm perfectly capable of saying: "OK guys, you've been captured by Cylons. If you want to be tortured you can be, but you don't have to be. Oh you do want to be tortured? That's fine, but I'm not going to GM it for you. We can either FTB here or you guys can get a RP room and knock yourselves out." It's really not that hard.

If someone wants to go through the trouble of implementing it on their own game - more power to them. I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm just arguing that it's not necessary.

Seems to me there's a wonderful tool already for this.

Thenomian pages Faraday, "Hey this is going to far."

Faraday pages Thenomian, "Oh no! What can we do?"

We're supposed to be adults here, let's try communicating like adults. What in the world am I supposed to do with a vague yellow stoplight indication? Change the entire scene based on some vague guess as to what might be bothering you?

@Ashen-Shugar said in Codebase Pot Pie - Or what I like or wish I could have:

It's 'psudo restful'.

It seems to be a perfectly fine API, but as @ixokai says, it's really "not in any meaningful way RESTful". Using REST when describing it is wildly misleading.

Anyway, @Ghost - ignore the links I shared; they've got nothing whatsoever to do with the RHost API.

@ixokai said in Codebase Pot Pie - Or what I like or wish I could have:

Rhost's API is HTTP based but not RESTful.

I'm confused. Didn't @Ashen-Shugar announce it by saying:

"Rhost's RESTapi is effectively completed and live."

@Ghost Here is a nice tutorial that explains how to utilize a REST API through Ruby. Wondering wtf a REST API is? It's just a reasonably standard way of letting one program talk to another. There's a general overview here.

For example if AresMUSH offered a REST API you could do something like have your ruby script issue a "GET" request to http://mush.aresmush.com:8081/api/chars and get a list of all the characters' data in JSON form. Or you could issue a "POST" request to http://mush.aresmush.com:8081/api/char/1 to update character #1 with some new data.

Side note: Ares currently doesn't offer an API because the website is built in and I haven't come up with any reasonable use cases for an API beyond a website. If I find one, I'll probably build an API for it.

I don't know jack about the specifics of the Rhost API - you'll need to get more info from @Ashen-Shugar for that.