Posts made by faraday

@Sparks said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

I am rarely super-excited about the dice mechanics of a game, though I admit I love my time/advancement system I used elsewhere. There are systems I think 'oh, well, I already have that in my brain so I can use it easily', but I'm not going to go, "Oh, this game with this random setting is using GURPS, so I'm super stoked!"

I'm the same. There are systems that are a turn-off for me (D20 or Dahan's system for instance) but rarely are they a total deal-breaker, and never are they a big reason for excitement.

@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:

@Misadventure said in BSG: Unification:

What do the humanoid Cylons look like?

c.f. BSG: Razor. At the point this game takes place the attempts were very poor quality, as the citizens from the original Earth hadn't encountered the Cylons. End of line.

The flashback first war scenes in BSG: Razor are still about 10 years after the game 's timeframe. I'm not sure what you mean about original Earth people encountering the Cylons... (edit upon realizing) oh, do you mean the Final Five Cylon peeps? Yeah you're right, that hasn't happened yet.

@Misadventure There are no "skinjob" human cylons in this timeframe.

@saosmash said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Thenomain Oh, I thought Arx's system was taken from L5R ... (speaking of tangents)

L5R and 7th sea used the same basic roll+keep system initially.

@Ganymede Several players have come in with no prior BSG knowledge and done just fine. If you've played on Cerberus you shouldn't have any trouble. Since it's set closer to the Blood and Chrome timeframe, the plot doesn't really follow the canon events from the main show anyway.

Just a slight clarification: There's a plot afoot and after this weekend the PCs will be transferred to a smaller ship in Galactica's taskforce and not Galactica itself. The updated summary blurb is:

The MUSH follows the adventures of the Timber Wolves, a special operations unit in the nascent Colonial Forces. This small band tackles the toughest missions across all Twelve Colonies, putting aside old rivalries and prejudices as they band together against a common enemy.

Higher math is not necessary for the vast majority of coding/programming tasks.

For deep computer science stuff, I'd refer you to the answers on an identical question on StackOverflow.

@Derp said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Nobody is preventing people from other games posting? If it'still heavily WoD, that's just because the active people play WoD games. Feel free to start discussions about other active games?

Nobody prevents it, no. But it's sure not fun to do so when so many discussions turn into a holy war about the only 'right' way to do something - a way that is often heavily biased toward the type of game that most of the active people play. Differing viewpoints are frequently ridiculed or "grilled and shredded" (as @surreality pointed out) without stopping to consider that just because it doesn't work well on WoD doesn't mean it doesn't work well on any game ever.

@surreality said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Gingerlily I used to be a mod on the big abortiondebate forum on livejournal. I have seen some shit. <rubs salve on all the scars> So I know precisely what you're saying about it just kinda being how people are on the internets.

Just because it's how people are on 90% of the internet forums out there doesn't mean that's how it should be or how it has to be. It all comes down to what community standards you choose to have and whether you're willing to enforce them.

I think adults should be capable of reining themselves in and providing criticism while still recognizing that the person whose game/system/show/opinion you're bashing is still a person who deserves to be treated with basic respect. It's the difference between saying "I don't like Battlestar games because X, Y Z" instead of "Man, Battlestar games suck. Why would anyone in their right mind want to play that crap?" (I love BSG, for the record.)

It's really not that hard, it just takes effort.

As illustrated by the results of the where you play poll, I think the community here is pretty insular compared to "MU*ing in general". I get a lot of "What's MSB?" when I mention the site to people.

I never participated on WORA because it was too toxic, and I am frequently driven away from MSB by the negativity. Obviously I'm dumb enough to keep coming back, but it's with reluctance not with joy. I cannot recommend it to my friends who aren't already here.

I think it's valuable to have an open forum for discussion, but that cannot be successful when different viewpoints are so frequently attacked as wrong, stupid, or "what's killing this hobby".

@surreality Last I checked, you can't wait in functions in Penn. I assume MUX is the same. The only way I know to do this is to use @dolist with @wait.

 @dolist A B C={@wait [mul(5,#@)]=thing(##)}

That example waits 5 seconds between each item; you can adjust that as desired.

@Seamus Yeah the code is ludicrously simple and already exists in various forms for the taking, so I don't get why staff would be so adamantly against putting in a global hook. But since that's what we're dealing with according to OP I think they're stuck.

Both the @hook and @ahear would have to be global though to work right AFAIK. You can make your own poses have spacing around them with personal soft code, but I'm unaware of any trick for affecting other people's.

@Ganymede said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

@faraday said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

If it's breaking a rule or creating an unfriendly environment, deal with the actual problem.

If people being obnoxious pricks sometimes with others is an offense to be banned, I'd have no players left.

While I don't like or see the need for an OOC Lounge, I know others like to use it to meet others OOCly and chat, so I'd leave it. I'd create a Quiet Room for people that want to idle peacefully, but be available by page to others who may want to specifically RP with them. And if the chatting gets tart or combative or abusive, then just fucking deal with the abusive shits as if they were abusive shits, no matter where.

There's people fucking dying in South Sudan, and this is what we're wasting our times with.

First of all, I never said anything about banning, I said IF it was a problem then deal with the problem.

Second of all, why does every single freaking discussion need to descend into hostility and profanity and insults around here? We're talking about whether to have a dang OOC room or not on a text game. If you want one on your game, have it. If you don't, don't. If you don't like to hang out in them, don't. The OP asked a legitimately constructive question but it only took three pages to descend to levels I'd expect in the Hog Pit not in Mildly Constructive.

Maybe I should start a new thread titled "How to keep MSB threads from becoming flame wars."

@Thenomain said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

I keep having staff ask for a LFRP flag, so someone must be using it.

Or someone thinks its a good idea, as I once did, but then finds once it's implemented that nobody actually uses it. I dunno. If folks use it, more power to them.

How do you keep the OOC Lounge from becoming trash? The same way you keep channels from becoming trash, the bboards, the scenes, and @mail: You stop the trash talk.

Yeah, agreed. I don't see why the OOC Lounge is any different from any other mechanism of OOC communication. If it's breaking a rule or creating an unfriendly environment, deal with the actual problem. If not, and it's just annoying someone, they can talk to the other player like grown-ups or move.

Edit to avoid double-post:
@ThatGuyThere said

First place I saw a quiet room that wasn't also basically a freezer for abandoned characters was Haunted Memories. Though that was right after my working second shift imposed vacation from mushing so it might have become a thing before that.

We had a dedicated Idle Lounge that operated like a quiet room back on B5 in the early 90's. Might have pre-dated that too though, I dunno.

@Meg said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Oh come on, what theme doesn't fit with a 'personal room'? Are your characters literally /never/ alone? It doesn't even have to be a 'room'. You could have a 'barracks' and have a 'bunk' room for each person off it. There are plenty of ways to work in a place where a character can go just to put their bit without having to be around others that would work just the same as a quiet room but also give the player some breathing room to do other things.

Creating an entire MUSH 'room' for a bed seems a bit weird to me. There have been several post-apoc or war themes where you don't have any real privacy. There are RP Rooms for off-grid areas if you want to find a supply closet or something for whatever reason.

But hey, if you want to make bunk "rooms" or places or whatever for everyone just to avoid an OOC lounge - go for it. Someone asked what value OOC rooms might provide and I answered it. I don't really care what other games do.

@Arkandel said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Aw, come on. Anywhere. Give them personal rooms or 'quiet' rooms they can idle in without spamming each other. ... Then let channels do what they're there for, with a history function so they can be monitored by staff for abuse (as opposed to 'X said Y ten minutes ago' and sending logs back and forth after the fact).

Personal rooms don't fit every game theme, and as previously mentioned I already have a quiet room if you want to opt out of chit-chat. Also you're assuming the history function is enabled, which not all games do.

I think there are far better RP-finding tools than the OOC room - in fact that's probably a mediocre one, and its function can be easily substituted by ... well, a channel. RP-seeking flags, grid incentives, public +events, hell the +where command, these are all more effective ways of finding a scene.

In my experience, that's not the case. I've had a Looking for RP flag in my codebase for decades and can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it used. "Does anybody want to RP" type questions on public often go unanswered when people de-spam for RP... I could go on with other examples but the TL;DR version is I think our experiences are different.

If you don't like OOC Rooms, that's groovy. I actually prefer to hang out in the Quiet Room myself personally because the OOC chat gets too spammy. But there's a big difference between "I don't personally like X" and "X is a net down-side to a game". Some people like OOC lounges, some people don't. As long as there's someplace for people to flee to so they're driven to a more quiet place and not driven off the game I don't see the problem.

@Arkandel said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Why have an OOC room and not just the OOC channel? What's the upside?

Some people are going to log in without intent of playing immediately. Where do you want them to be? The upside of providing an OOC room is that it gives a better feel for the true RP activity level in the game and can help find RP easier. You have a reasonable expectation that Bob is on grid because he wants to RP, not because he's waiting for Suzy to log in or just chilling while cooking dinner. A channel doesn't accomplish that.

@il-volpe said in Magicians Game:

Same here. Faraday is also very helpful. But you might want to be careful about Ares, since it seems really different to me and may limit your help, and certainly stop you from using stuff off mushcode etc.

Thanks, I do my best to help people get the initial 'out of the box' setup working, but you're on your own for any custom code.

Re: Ares, you're correct that the coding experience is extremely different and you won't be able to use any existing MUSHCode without rewriting it. But the intent is to make it easier to learn the code or to get help from friends who may know code but not MUSHCode. Also I am working on a comprehensive series of tutorials. So I think on the whole it will be easier to get help... otherwise I've done a very poor job with the project since one of the driving goals is to make it easy for a non-coder to run a game

That said, as @Auspice mentioned, it's still in beta and not ready for public consumption yet.

@surreality said in How do you keep OOC lounges from becoming trash?:

Most games these days already do have a 'quiet room', which is an OOC room where you can't speak or emote. If one you're on doesn't, suggest it; spaces like this are a genuinely good idea for the folks who don't like the chatter spam without treating the people who enjoy chatting with fellow players like they're doing something wrong by socializing at all. (That's a pretty bad message to send.)

Yeah I've always had a designated quiet room. It's the only 'private' OOC place to hang out. There's always one or two people in it, but never a flock. And I've never had a complaint about the chatter in the OOC rooms. But then I run on small games.

TGG had no OOC room, and people then would hang out on the grid. This was good because sometimes you'd get people dragged into RP instead of hanging out when the scene was interesting, but bad because you never knew who was actually RPing and who was just hanging out.