Posts made by faraday

@Arkandel Not all of them support that sort of integration, though. And as a player, do you really want to go hopping around to all these different websites to do things for the game, or do you want it all to be in one place?

@Ghost Jennifer Roberson (of the Cheysuli books) expressly mentioned MU*s and had a very good rationale (now archived) as to why.

There's a handy list of fanfic policies on Wikipedia.

@Arkandel said in Web-based MU poll:

For example you could write your own +jobs code... but why not just skin and hook into an existing simple ticket system? There are a whole lot out there, refined and fully developed.

Well that's actually an interesting point that I've been thinking a lot about. I mean, when you look at the sort of ancillary systems that make up a MU, they all already exist in web form...

• BBS --> forums like this one
• Channels / Pages --> discord or a similar chat program
• Jobs -> any number of existing ticket systems
• Events -> online calendars
• Wiki -> MW or wikidot

But do you really want to go around and create 6 different accounts and visit 6 different links just to manage your game?

@ghost - Yeah licensing is definitely something to consider.

@Ghost said in Web-based MU poll:

What about this project would be different from just running a mush out of Roll20 and tying in discord chat? I think there's some things that could be done to revolutionize the MU format, but I think the only thing Roll20 doesn't have that MU does is a better pose-based environment. Roll20's chat interface is very MiRC.

There are lots of tools out there for online RP. Roll20, Storium, PBP forums with various plugins for dice and/or character sheets, etc. People RP on Twitter and Tumblr for goodness' sake, so I'm sure you could cobble together something vaguely MU-like with the right hodgepodge of tools.

But I haven't seen one that really captures what I feel like is the essence of MU-style RP in a way that would be accessible to veteran MU players. If there's one out there, I'd love to hear about it and save myself a lot of work

@Monogram said in Web-based MU poll:

I dunno. Yeah, tel-net clients might be ancient in terms of stuff, but it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with them.

Like @Arkandel said, it has a lot of limitations. And there are technical reasons why it kind of sucks.

But for me the larger issue is around usability. Plop any modern gamer in front of a web app and they'll figure it out. You can set up a website or blog in minutes. Contrast that with explaining MU commands to someone who's never had to use a command-line interface. Or try to tell them how to install and configure a game using Penn/Tiny. It's a night and day difference.

That said, everyone has their preferences. I was in the "pry my MU client out of my dead fingers" category for a long long time so I'm not judging anyone for liking the old way. Just curious if there's enough interest in something different to justify the effort.

@Glitch figured out the problem with the BB code, so trying this again...

Would you play a MU that was web-only?

I'm not talking about the sort of telnet-lite portal that Evennia, AresMUSH, SR: Denver and various other games have added to their websites. Nor am I talking about straight play-by-post forum game. This would be a MU* style of play, but completely designed and optimized for the web - a sort of Frankenstein mashup of Slack/Discord live chat interface and a MU* game wiki.

@Thenomain said in Hyper Focused Game Setting:

My favorite space setting is "space station". It's certainly small enough that everyone has an excuse to know one another.

Yeah there were a bunch of Babylon 5 games way back when that got good mileage out of being a tightly-focused theme with a revolving door of visitors. Battlestar games have the same narrow focus, but the post-apocalyptic nature of them make it harder to have visitors coming and going all the time. Western games do pretty well with this too, generally being very small towns with people passing through. Apoc games like No Return... I'm sure there are others.

I think the most narrowly-focused theme was The Greatest Generation. Play usually centered around a small 'front' of the war du jour and a field hospital.

Long story short - sure, it can be done. Has been done.

@Thenomain said in Logging your activity:

@faraday

I normally get the same effect by listening to the channel chatter, or usually also reading the boards.

Interesting. I think maybe it's a game culture thing. On games with logs and wikis, people don't tend to post "hey, this happened" on the boards because they just assume you'll read the wiki. And personally I don't see people chatting about IC events on channels, but that doesn't mean it never happens.

So if you've got those other avenues available to know what's going on, groovy. That's just not the experience on games I've played. Logs are essential if you want to know more than what was personally RPed with you.

@Arkandel said in Logging your activity:

For all I know there are people here who read other people's scenes for fun or even IC profit (if roleplay is on public record then by perusing it like that you can nitpick details to use for your PCs, the same way we look over Donald Trump's tweets iRL).

Or maybe they're just a waste, dunno. All I'm saying is, someone out there may find use for these little hoops we get to jump.

I enjoy reading good logs just because they're like reading good stories about familiar characters. I also find them useful.

As a staffer, logs help me to be aware of what's going on in the game and steer plots accordingly. If I know that Bob and Suzy are chatting about X, maybe there's a way to work X into a larger plot (of course, I'd talk to them about it first). Or maybe they don't realize that Harvey is also interested in the same thing, and they might want to coordinate. If Bob and Suzy just did a giant barfight, I might post something on the Rumours bbs so everyone knows, or update the room desc with some battle damage. It also helps to know who your active players are.

As a player, logs help me find people who RP well or have interesting hooks that I might want to talk to them about. "Hey, both our chars are X - let's do something with that." Sometimes it can also be used for assuming what would be common knowledge. Like, if there's a log where Suzy tells Bob she's breaking up with him, you shouldn't assume knowing that. But in the aforementioned giant barfight, I think it's entirely appropriate to RP, "Hey, I heard there was a big dust-up here the other night." Especially if it's a small town. Or if you work with Suzy and you saw a log where she's in the hospital, it's probably safe to assume you know she hasn't showed up for work.

@Monogram The starter database comes with everything you need for the base install. The instructions are here.

Be aware that configuring the game requires you to monkey around with code attributes, and any customizations that aren't supported by the config options will require tinkering with the code itself. So you'll need a coder to help you get started.

@SG said in Logging your activity:

Logging for PrPs to get your xp is cool, or if there's an issue of harassment and you need proof, but the obsessive need to ICly get everything exactly correct is annoying to me.

Like anything, it can be taken to extremes of stupidity. But your character actually experienced this event. I would argue that their ability to remember something that happened to them six months later is infinitely greater than the player's ability. Having logs to jog your memory is helpful.

@Sparks said in Logging your activity:

I log everything, at least for my own use. Because 11 months later I'm like, "Wait, who told me about that thing ICly?" and I go back and look in logs.

This.

@Seraphim73 said:

I log scenes because the games that I play on use wikis with logs, and because I like reading back over the logs even years later.

This squared.

I'll pimp my log cleaner while I'm here. (It's down at the moment like all the other AWS-powered crap on the Internet today, but usually it works.) And yeah, like @Auspice said, it doesn't strip out block data like news/who/etc. It is possible if such data has clear line markers, but it's a PITA and just wasn't worth the effort to implement. I just keep an OOC alt for that stuff personally.

@ThatGuyThere said in Roleplaying writing styles:

@EMDA said in Roleplaying writing styles:

B) Carl approaches Rick, sidling around to stand between the other man and the nearest exit. Crossing his arms, he asks, "Where were you on the night Christy was murdered?"

I'd want to play with the Carl in B way more than the Carl in A.

While I somewhat agree on your point on pose style, in a scene I would have huge issues with pose B. The reason for this is the assumed success that impacts what my character can do, by getting between Rick and the exit.

Really? I didn't read it that way. It said "moving to stand..." which I interpreted as "in the process of moving with the intention to stand...

I see that sort of thing constantly in MU*s and have never regarded it as power-posing. It's not like the classical "Carl punches Rick in the face" example. If there's a problem with it, it's pretty easy to just pose back trying to out-maneuver him to keep an exit route open. Or throw out an OOC comment if it's really an issue.

At some level everything we write is just an attempt.

Jane attempts to sip her tea, providing Rick doesn't knock it out of her hand in mid-sip.

@Wavert said in Posting Ads on Games:

@TNP Yeah, I totally get reciprocal stuff. I was just a bit surprised to find "Nah we don't do ads, period" coming from staff on several reasonably healthy games I visited and was trying to figure out what possible reason there could be for it.

Well when you think about it - it would almost be like a TV network showing a commercial for a show on another network. Why encourage a loss in ratings?

Personally, I welcome ads on my games coming from our own players as a way to help them recruit for other things they enjoy. It's nothing they couldn't do by word of mouth anyway. But it does always feel a bit weird when some Guest logs on to do a drive-by ad.

@surreality said in Roleplaying writing styles:

...someone who has a long-ass pose that is full of ten different things going on at once (often when someone is posing for themselves and NPCs also doing things and the environment needing some kind of response), I will burn out on a scene at record speed.

Yeah this is my biggest pet peeve and the reason I tend to run away from crowd scenes. OK, I've nodded at Joe, asked Pete about his dog, followed up on a question to Sarah, and boggled at the spilled glass on the table. Whew - did I miss anything? It's just insane.

People also do it in 1-1 scenes, which I just find baffling. It ends up with the most bizarre narrative flow - almost like you're ping-ponging between two separate conversations with the same person.

I also get frustrated if the other player doesn't give anything to react to. Give me a hook. "Hi, how are you?" "Fine thanks." "So do you come here often?" "Sometimes." Gah. It's supposed to be a story scene, not an interview.

You-poses are creepy. IC/OOC boundary issues.

I love metaposes as long as they're not passive-aggressive jerk poses. We can read body language in RL a heck of a lot better than we can in text, and I often struggle to describe body language in a way that gets the point across. They can also be a good way to subtly inject things that the other character should know that the player might not. Like "Fara's been moody ever since she got back from Trappist-I last week."

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I think this is partly on Evennia, not just the Arx staff. (Sorry, Griatch.)

Specifically, Evennia generates a lot of the documentation automatically for each command...

In before @Faraday: Her system does this. It's a drawback of the way Mu*s are coded that this hasn't become standardized. One can only hope.

It doesn't exactly generate the documentation, but the docs are included and installed as part of the addon. I've had very poor experiences with documentation auto-generated from comments through the years. When writing code, devs don't generally have their "how do I explain how to use this coherently to a user" hat on ... if they even own such a hat in the first place.

That would just be mean to the players. It's unfortunate in Mush that we need 'help' and '+help', but is the only exception I can think of to these rules.

With Penn/Tiny you can't get away from @desc versus +desc, or WHO vs +who or help vs +help. It's just a legacy suckage you have to deal with. But why is Arx saddled with the same problem? I thought you could just override commands in Evennia like you can in Ares.

@Thenomain said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

What do you use dual-input for? I've never seen the purpose.

Most people I know use it to compose a pose while simultaneously carrying on a page or channel convo. I've always been so accustomed to just using the clipboard as a copy/paste buffer that even when I've used Potato on occasion I haven't found myself utilizing the dual-input window. But maybe it's something you get used to over time.

Love Atlantis, btw. Kudos to @Sparks.

Regarding @ping's report... I've seen that behavior if I leave Atlantis running for a couple days and end up with giant backscroll buffers. Figured it was just a memory issue of some sort related to the backscroll. I usually shut Atlantis down every day so it's not really an issue for me, but I have seen it.

@TwoGunBob Yeah that was the sort of thing I meant when I was talking about having an environment to support this sort of thing. The heroes and villains both need some assurance that defeat does not leave them completely screwed -- that there's a bigger and cooler story hinging on it and their short term loss will be worth it. Everyone needs to be on board with that idea, and that level of trust and cooperation is sadly hard (impossible?) to come by in MU-land.

@Arkandel That template works great for NPCs, but PCs? "Ok, your char can't really hang out and participate in most of the social scenes because you're a wanted criminal mastermind. People are likely to take your IC actions personally and think you're a jerk. We just need you to pop in every now and again with a brilliant plan for the heroes to foil, then disappear again. Sound cool?"

It's not really surprising to me that almost nobody goes for it.