@Thenomain said in Dragon Age: Smoke & Shadows:
I believe FS3 is FUDGE, not FATE. Correct me if I'm wrong, @faraday.
FS3 is neither. It's a custom system. Edit: I originally said roll+keep but maybe that implies too much like 7th Sea. It's a cousin of WoD and SR4.
@surreality said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
@faraday I've had too many users not really be able to handle that kind of template input, not understand how it works and just delete it, or break it.
Fair enough. I haven't had that problem, across numerous games. Perhaps since it's a different subset of users, they're just inherently more familiar with wikidot.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that text-based forms are superior - or even equivalent - to semantic MW. Not at all. But it's a tradeoff. An easier experience for people editing forms vs. an easier experience for people setting up and hosting the game. If you've already got someone who's effectively a sysadmin and can handle dealing with the hosting requirements and installing MediaWiki and installing the semantic plugin ... groovy. You're already way ahead of the game. But a lot of people don't have that.
@Tat said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
Want to see characters by height? Sure, no problem. How about every plot an NPC's been involved in? Yup, we can do that. What about every log involved in a plot? Also done (for example).
I've done the latter two with tags in Wikdot, FWIW. Never done the height thing, but then again - I've never had a desire to 
Have listed all characters by faction, though, or by school class (junior/senior/etc.).
Edit to add: Someone needs to have some Wikidot code skills to set it up (or at one point I had a template site you could clone; I intend to resurrect that after some revamps). But the average player just needs to fill in the blanks. For instance, when you click the "New RP Log" button on the wiki you're presented with a template like this:
[[include LogInfoBox
|summary=Log Summary
|rldate=Day Month Year
|related=If there are no related logs, put 'None' -- please, don't leave blank!
]]
@Chime The Wikidot API is somewhat limited and requires you to have a Pro account (currently about $50/year). I explored creating an automatic integration for AresMUSH but figured the number of people willing to fork over an extra $4 per month for it was pretty small. Instead I focused my attention on making the aforementioned "copy/paste this into wikidot to make your character page" type commands in the game. (Added bonus - with some configuration tweaks, that'll work just as well for MW.)
For Evennia, making a MediaWiki integration might make more sense, since it's geared more towards advanced users. But since Ares is intended to be a "MUSH In a Box" turnkey installation, MW just isn't suitable. It's too much of a PITA to set up and configure and maintain (in my experience).
I haven't used MediaWiki for a MUSH game since, like, 2007. Wikidot has everything I need, and it's free, and I don't have to screw around with hosting options for it. With creative use of templates, includes and tags, you can do auto-generated RP log lists, faction pages, tutorial navigation, and everything else I've ever wanted to do.
The only place that Mediawiki beats it, IMHO, is MUSH-to-wiki integration. As @Thenomain mentioned in another thread, you can use the SQL output from MUSH to write stuff directly into MW's tables, effectively adding things through a back door. It's kind of a hack, but at least it works. You can't do that with wikidot, but between in-game "here copy/paste this" commands and fill-in-the-blank templates, it's not been a big deal. YMMV.
For an example of the sort of MU site you can set up with Wikidot, check out Marvel 1963 or The 100.
@Seraphim73, @Thenomain - might be interested in this Why Seattle? thread.
Lots of good speculation, but perhaps the most relevant bit is at the end from a guy purporting to have heard it from FASA directly:
I was told that it was due to Settle having a wide variety of terrain available for different adventures as well as being a port city with a large international population.
My personal favorite response, though, is this one:
FASA was saving Chicago so they could nuke themselves.
@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Modern:
c.f. Animism.
Oh, animism, not animalism. Important distinction
You can't tell me that I'm not creating Shadowrun just because I'm not following 30 years of footsteps. There is too much precedent that this is not how it works.
I don't know about WoD but as you said, D&D didn't have a world to toss out, and Shadowrun changed the world in an IC-organic way by explaining it with the Crash of 2064. It didn't chuck out the game world and erase everything that had come before. (And it still managed to piss off a whole lot of long-time fans by doing so, incidentally.)
Anyway, I didn't say you couldn't do it. I just said maybe it wasn't the best idea. Hollywood loves to reboot things to get that brand recognition but it gets a little stale. I'd rather just see something new than keep track of which version of Wolverine I'm watching. It's a personal preference, not an absolute.
@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Modern:
All spirits aren't animalistic in SR, though
News to me? Rock spirits, building spirits, fire hydrant spirits...
Absolutely. "Spirit of Man" covers the building spirit (fire hydrant maybe not so much). "Spirit of Earth" covers rocks and prairie and and stuff. "Spirit of Beast" is the animal ones. Then there are the wacky ones like toxic spirits and blood spirits. I'm using the 5th Ed terms because that's the rulebook I have handy, but I remember using "Spirit of Man" in urban environments in 2nd Ed too so it's not a new concept.
Because Shadowrun needs a facelift, and facelifts kind of suck so why not do full-body reconstructive cyborgization? And while I'm sitting on my pasty white butt, dwelling on a Soapbox thread that's months forgotten, why not prod at it?
Because if you do enough of a reconstructive cyborgization, it no longer bears anything but a passing resemblance to the original. That's how I feel about the new BSG. It's awesome. It's better than the original. But it would have been just as awesome if they hadn't used the BSG name at all. All they gained from copying the original were some people/place names and the general gist of "aircraft carrier in space after robotic annihilation".
@Thenomain -- No it was definitely Chicago. The location where the nuke went off in Burning Bright was at the FASA offices on Cermak. All spirits aren't animalistic in SR, though, and if you buy the basic idea of overpopulation-induced sprawls, Seattle makes as much sense as anywhere to be a metroplex given its proximity with a bunch of other cities.
But eh... I confess to being overly invested in the SR sourcebooks (shameless proud plug) so I'm probably not the best person for an objective opinion.
Back to the original topic though, I can't help but wonder... if there are so many things about SR that you don't like, why do SR at all? Why not make it wholly original? SR has almost 30 years of history behind it so I think you're really going to be fighting upstream with prior expectations. The people most likely to be "woot! SR!" are probably just as likely to be put off by an alternate take.
It reminds me of the reimagined Battlestar series, which I think succeeded in spite of fans of the old series, not because of it. It probably would have done just as well (if not better) had it just been something else.
@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Modern:
I would love it if the Shadowrun Seattle was different than Shadowrun New York different than Shadowrun Paris.
SR already has that to some degree. Denver. Seattle. London. Boston. Berlin. New York. Atlanta. These are cities covered by the existing sourcebooks that are very distinct from each other. To say nothing of the really different places like Chicago (invaded by bug spirits) and Hamburg (flooded like Venice) that have their own very unique settings.
Without the Shadowrun metahumans it wouldn't really be Shadowrun to me. It's one of the core pillars of the game, along with the Matrix and Magic. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be a fun game to play. Just wouldn't be Shadowrun.
@mietze said in Where have all the crunchy games gone?:
I dunno, @faraday . I guess the ability to min/max, and roll for combat and non-combat stuff? I don't understand why WoD is not perceived as crunchy as anything else, in that regard.
Yeah, can't you kinda do that in any game? I mean, I guess all the cyberware stats and stuff make it a little bit of a statistician's paradise, if that's the criteria. I suppose I was just wondering what defines crunchy? The dice system? The number of rules for specific situations?
But to the actual topic at hand... I think there are a number of factors:
Dunno, seems kinda natural that the MUSH community would shift towards the softer side.
I'm curious what about Shadowrun makes it "Crunchy"? It never really struck me that way, but perhaps it was just a playstyle thing with our gaming group or being overly invested in the fiction (which often contradicted the game rules).
@Thenomain said in Telnet is Poop:
Once you know how MediaWiki puts things together, it's not that hard. Easier to read than write, of course, but if they already did the hard work then I want to see their code too.
Using the API? Or chucking stuff directly into their tables? The documentation for the former had be twitching so I eventually gave up. For the latter, I never messed with Penn's SQL stuff enough to know if that's even possible.
@TNP said in Telnet is Poop:
Whoever coded Brave New World managed it with Mediawiki. Logged scenes would transfer to the wiki somehow.
Be curious to know how they did it.
I'm with @surreality that trying to make a custom wiki with all the expected functionality is probably a bridge too far. I use wikidot mainly, but it has a lot of the same functionality with dynamic page lists and auto-updating. But again, that's auto-updating from within the wiki, not updating from game-to-wiki.
Having explored it a little in the past, I think that game-to-wiki is going to be tough. Both mediawiki and wikidot technically expose apis, but they're muddled, incomplete, and - in the case of wikidot - require a paid account.
@Griatch said in Telnet is Poop:
I would suggest that it's at least a higher chance that a new player is a web developer than them being a telnet affectionado ...
Oh absolutely. But I think this is where the goals of Ares and Evennia differ a bit. You're designing a framework that's readily extensible - and that includes extensible via javascript for folks who want a spiffy custom GUI.
I'm going a different direction for more of a "MUSH in a box" where you don't need to find a web developer in order to customize your game effectively. The reliance on coders and sysadmins to get a game up and running is, IMHO, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) obstacle preventing there from being more MUSHes out there.
@Griatch said in Telnet is Poop:
Telnet still has a place I think, for the existing crowd/power users using and expecting the features of their particular third-party client. I believe aiming to offer web clients with features on par or better is the way forward though.
Generally I agree, but the thing is that most of these cool new features would be highly game-specific. Even just that simple example you showed would make no sense on a game without combat, or a game that used a different combat system.
It's cool, I'm just not sure it's sustainable unless the MUSH community had a sudden swell of new players who also happened to be web developers.
@Thenomain said in Telnet is Poop:
Didn't I mention Evennia? I did. I didn't mention Ares because I don't know it's acceptance rate. Tho good on catching me out on the hyperbole. Are you ready for the support needed to change a few dozen games over to Ares? I'm ready to start coding for other games.
Yeah I was just responding to the hyperbole. Ares is still in heavy development and not ready for prime-time. So, no, I'm not ready to support changing a few dozen games over to Ares, like, tomorrow or anything. In fact, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of percentage in switching over games at all if you've got a stable game running on Penn and Tiny. The use case is more for new games. But long-term, yes, the whole idea is to support many games.
Random aside - I see Evennia and Ares on very different paths. One of my primary goals with Ares is to reduce the "Time To Hello MUSH" time that @WTFE mentioned. I want it to be an easily-configurable "MUSH In A Box" for folks who don't have any coding experience or a dedicated coder. Long-term I'd like to make it as easy as setting up a blog, complete with plugins and all. But that's a long way away.
My secondary goal is that I never want to write another line of softcode again. Ever.
The final goal is to make the interface easier for new players. But I rank this a solid third compared to the other two. Partly because baby steps and partly because I think the veterans are the key to making the endeavor successful.
@Thenomain said in Telnet is Poop:
We aren't doing anything about the server problem, and while we can do minimal things about the interface problem we really aren't doing that, either. Yes, this rant was a tangent, but it was a tangent to illustrate that okay maybe "tenet bad" is a problem but if we're not solving it then it's a dead-end issue.
But when you say "we aren't doing anything" -- umm, there are people trying to do things. Evennia. AresMUSH. The reason I decided to make a from-the-ground-up new MUSH server is because I thought that it was better than trying to graft junk onto 30-year-old technology. Folks have talked about web-based clients and client-server interfaces, though I don't know if anybody's actively working on one.
So I'm totally up for discussing different approaches to the problem. I waffle about how far to go with Ares in terms of catering to what's out there already vs making it easier for new players. But I don't think it's fair to say that nobody's doing anything to try to solve it.
