Posts made by faraday

@Thenomain OK, I get it, but are we maybe getting a little too hung up on wording? "Telnet's bad" vs "Our reliance on archaic clients using an input-driven interface over telnet is bad" ... is it a critical distinction towards solving the problem?

Plus, is anyone actually arguing that telnet is good? I think this article pretty much sums up the general viewpoint on telnet in the tech community these days. In response to the question "Why would you use telnet in 2014" it says (emphasis mine):

Accessing old-school servers that insist on using this protocol for remote connections. We're sure that there are some old-school UNIX servers left in the wild. Someone might be using Telnet to work with them. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

Umm... maybe this should be a different thread? It's only tangentially related to new player onboarding.

@Thenomain said in New Player Onboarding:

But this predicates that the culprit is "telnet". It's not. The culprit is the interface. When you're hitting this level of getting people to use your product, this is a critical distinction.

I agree. But at the same time... the restriction on game servers being driven by people typing into MUSH clients talking over telnet essentially chains you to the interface. Doing fancy things like graphics and interactive stuff becomes difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. So telnet is part of the problem, just not the problem.

@Thenomain said in New Player Onboarding:

What in hell is the difference between typing in a Mu* client and typing in a web client?

The MU Client.

No, seriously - I'm not trying to be a jerk here. But have you put yourself in the shoes of a never-MUSHed-before-in-their-life player and looked at what it takes to find, download, install, configure and connect to a game in a MUSH client? It's wacky, many of them don't have great UIs, and there are hardly a plethora of tutorials out there.

I'm not saying it requires a degree in rocket science or anything, but compared to going to www.mygame.com and clicking 'Play'? It's not an insignificant barrier.

And then once they get past that barrier, and a second barrier of actually finding a game to play on, then there's the third barrier of the command set itself. +finger, @desc, help, +help.... it's bewildering to a new person.

And then there's the barrier of learning how to actually play ... the unspoken rules that vary so widely across games, as the MUD/MUSH culture thread so aptly demonstrated.

Given the state of technology and culture in the hobby, I think the only viable method for new player onboarding is to have a very patient and outgoing mentor.

Edit to add: Oh, but in the "something is better than nothing" category, there's my attempt at explaining "how to MUSH" to my writer classmates for a class project: MUSH 101.

@Ganymede said in The 100: The Mush:

I think this is a dangerous mentality to adhere to.

How is being polite and respectful a dangerous mentality to adhere to? I never said people didn't have a right to complain, or that staff shouldn't consider the complaints objectively and decide if there's truly a problem here. But ultimately staff decides what kind of environment they want to have.

@Coin said in The 100: The Mush:

But there are an infinite number of these courts, and anyone can have one if they have a little money and the motivation and time to put into it. This is not a public court at a park that needs to be shared.

A thousand +1s for this. There are some pretty insane things that staffers do that are abusive, underhanded and craptastic. (A certain thread in the Hog Pit comes to mind.) But playing an active role on your own game, allowing players to play their PCs as they see fit (barring OOC abuse) and expecting people not to splinter off into unmanageable sub-factions that might destroy the game are NOT things that should invite public shaming.

If you don't like it, cool. Mark your disagreement politely and vote with your feet. But respect that staff is devoting their own time and money to running a game for the entertainment of others. That doesn't mean all others. It means others whose vision aligns with theirs.

The amount of OOC hostility and antagonism on a thread complaining about IC antagonism is staggering.

(And for those taking "you're just on the bandwagon" potshots... I will reiterate that I neither play on the game nor know any of the people involved. I judge solely based on what's been said here.)

@ThatGuyThere Really? Being expected to stay within the confines of the defined theme/grid is considered "railroading" these days? @GirlCalledBlu is being far more generous than I would be in this situation if players decided to go off and do their own thing.

Staff is well within their rights to define the bounds of the game. It's like... I'm doing a Star Wars game set on Tattooine and you want to play on Hoth. Or I'm doing a Wild West game set in Tombstone and you want to go off to Deadwood. My answer would range from "No" to "Good luck, here's a TP Room - you're on your own".

@ghost has good points, but I think that you can have micro-level survival and macro-level survival.

Walking Dead (though I've never seen it) is a micro-level survival game. A tiny group where it's like "OMG we don't have a doctor."

Battlestar Galactica is a macro-level survival game. Something like Jericho could be one too. You have a whole fleet, or a whole town, or whatnot but it's been devastated in some way. Then it's the "we have a fistful of doctors but we're running low on morphine" or "I'm a surgeon but the generator's dead so we have no lifesupport" problem.

Both can be interesting. Just depends on what you're going for.

For me it comes down to this: Players are (probably inadvertently) ruining the fun of other players simply by playing their characters a certain way ICly.

I have seen nothing in this thread to indicate that the way those folks are playing is either out of theme (hello, delinquent teenage criminals), or OOCly abusive (again, with the exception of the kill-you-in-your-sleep dude who left).

So it comes down to the age-old entitlement/compromise argument that crops up on these boards every other Tuesday. To what extent is Player1 expected to cater their RP to make Player2 happy? If they feel their character really truly is that way, how much should they be asked to bend just to keep the peace?

To put a different spin on it ... it's no different from someone coming here and complaining about the opposite problem. Like, they try to do something exciting / conflict driven but everybody else on the game just wants to do endless tea parties and TS in private rooms. It's a legitimate complaint in terms of why you don't like the game, but I think attacking the players for doing it, or attacking staff for letting it happen is inappropriate. It's a matter of style and taste and what you want out of the game.

@il-volpe said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

I need it. It's 'Game of Thrones' and a great many PCs are related to one another in various ways and I can't approve two eldest daughters, or other such conflicts. I also have had to reject an elf and a princess of Normandy.

Yep. I've had various historical aberrations and a Vampire on a Wild West game, someone wanting to be, like, a group of six symbiotic Pak'ma'ra on Babylon 5, people who clearly had no bloody clue how the military worked on Battlestar... the list goes on and on. Backgrounds are a pain for some people. I get that. Filling out a personality questionnaire for a PC is equally a pain for me because that's just not how my brain approaches character definition, so I can totally sympathize. But I view BGs as a necessary evil to protect the existing players from insanity. It doesn't have to be a novel, just a little bit to cover the key bits of your character.

@Thenomain Morality and legality are not always in alignment. Corporations make the laws in SR, but what they do is by no means always just - often far from it. And even a corporate or mercenary 'runner team, while not being the SINless criminals that traditional 'runners are, often operate extra-legally.

I just don't think of SR as "noir", though I can certainly see how one could run a noir-themed SR campaign if you made it clear to the players what angle you were going for.

I agree with @deadculture that the magical/fantasy elements probably account for the lighter, more optimistic bent compared to pure Cyberpunk. I also think that this is the most game-breaking piece of the world, and the primary reason why I've never attempted to run a SR MUSH.

@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Modern:

I'm using the following definition of Noir: a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.
What parts of Noir is critical to Shadowrun? Which parts need to be chucked in the fire?

Moral ambiguity: Yes. Very much this.

Cynicism: It fits, but I don't see it as essential. If anything, there's a sort of cheeky edge to SR that lightens it up a little bit, but I think it comes down to the slant of your individual campaign. Our characters through the years were never particularly cynical.

Fatalism: Nope.

Crime film or fiction: I think we hashed this to bits in the other thread. The traditional RPG runner group is a bunch of mercenary criminals, but it doesn't have to be. Shadowrun is an entire world with lots of non-criminal stuff going on in it.

If you talk about Shadowrun the RPG then the defining points for me are:

• The Team. Even when the team is an ad-hoc one thrown together for one mission (common in the GenCon circuit) or a dysfunctional team where they're fighting each other as much as the opposition, it's still a team approach where everyone plays a role.
• The Run. Playing SR for me has always been like acting out your favorite heist movie. That's the best part.
• The Theme. Most SR games are built around the central theme of barely-scraping-by 'runners eeking out a living in the underbelly of polite society. As someone else said - it's being under the bootheel of The Man or, alternately, sticking it to him.

But as I've mentioned on other threads, I'm a huge fan of the fiction. I also helped to write some of the sourcebooks that expanded the game beyond the traditional 'runner tropes. So I see SR as being more than just the RPG... it's about the world.

It's hard to pinpoint a specific thing about the world that makes it SR, because for me it's like... the whole package. The fantasy elements are obviously a big thing that makes it unique. Dragons. Megacorps. (Someone said we have that today, but we really don't - nowhere near on the same scale of power.) Docwagon. Lone Star. Stuffer Shack. The Native American Nations (I realize their approach isn't very PC these days, it's still a defining feature of SR for me). The international scene, with Denver and Aztlan and the Tir.

It's just an extremely colorful world with a lot of great hooks. I tried Cyberpunk at one point and never got hooked on the world in the same way.

I think the hobby could benefit by a terminology shift. "Featured Character" and "Original Character" are not antonyms. You have Original chars and Canon chars and either type can be featured or not. Contrast a sheriff in a Wild West game with "Squirrel Girl" or some other low-powered 2-bit comic character.

I just helped them set up the code, so I have no insight into staff policy, but I saw nothing on Marvel 1963 that would preclude you from making up a powerful original character.

@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:

@faraday There's some truth to your statement. But you're also, I feel, ignoring a very important part of what's being said. Its not that there's AN antagonistic character, or even A FEW antagonistic characters. Its that some people are finding (or have found, for those of us no longer/not playing) that EVERY interaction is antagonistic, often unreasonably so.

I wasn't ignoring it, just presenting a slightly different viewpoint. I mean, as others have said - you can have a white knight domineering every scene just as easily as you can have an antagonist doing so. The problematic behavior isn't "being a white knight" or "being an antagonist", it's the domineering part. I've seen conflicting info about whether or not that's actually the case here.

As a corollary example: Imagine if I posted here complaining about a game, "ZOMG, there's nothing but bar scenes". Sure, that's a legitimate reason to not like a game. It's not my preference on what to play. Doesn't mean the people in the bar are doing anything wrong. I feel an air of WrongFun on this thread that rubs me the wrong way. Dunno, maybe I'm misreading it. I don't play there and have no pony in this race.

@surreality said in The 100: The Mush:

Edit: This really, really goes back to a 'playground rules' thing again. It's been a while for all of us but we learned 'em all a ways back, y'know?

I dunno. To go with your playground analogy - yeah, playing nothing but basketball 24/7/365 can get tiresome. But that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with somebody who only likes playing basketball. They shouldn't feel obliged to go over and join the baseball game, so long as their love of basketball isn't so overpowering that it's preventing everyone else from ever playing baseball.

An antagonistic character isn't going to be in every scene anyway (especially if people start avoiding them ICly/OOCly), so their behavior would have to be pretty egregious to outright prevent people from doing their own things.

So yeah... there are sensible reasons to provide a balance, but that's not gonna fit every character.

@Monogram said in The 100: The Mush:

there are a few people that are so antagonistic that there's just no dealing with them unless you yourself are an conflict-based character. I've had a few times where I had to sit back and wonder about that.

As an outsider who doesn't play there, I wonder though... as long as the behavior is IC, and they're willing to accept the consequences of people avoiding them because of it (IC and OOC)... what's the problem?

I think too many games suffer from an appalling lack of IC conflict. Not overt "I want to kill you" PvP aggression, but just the everyday drama of people not getting along.

@YHWH said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

"Hmm, let's see here. Your concept is 'larcenous saboteur.' So does it make sense for a 'larcenous saboteur' to have a handgun, lockpicks, and the complete Twilight?" The answer is yes to the first two and no to the last one.

But that's the exact sort of example of where I find backgrounds critically important as an apps staffer. Your concept is "Doctor" -- why on Earth do you have Demolitions? -reads bg- Oh, it's because your dad was a terrorist and taught you a few things. OK, carry on then. Wait, you're an artist with Marksmanship 12? WTF? -reads bg- Oh, you were on the Olympics team. Cool.

Now as @Warma-Sheen said, you run the risk of staffers who then get silly about what they require you to justify. Personally I tend to limit folks to 1 "special snowflake" implausibility. It's fine to be a former Olympian. It's fine if your dad was a terrorist. It's not fine if your dad was a terrorist AND you're a former Olympian AND you were top of your class at Viper Pilot school AND single-handedly rescued the princess...etc. etc. YMMV.

Anyway, to the original topic... I like "Defining Moments" as a way to structure your background. I personally have a hard time with those touchy-feely type questions like the Breaking Points.

@surreality Yeah that's what it does. I have the direction on the 'leave' because it's handy for following people around, but on entry it just says "has arrived" because the room they came from is largely irrelevant.

@Gingerlily said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Here was my culture shock. In my first scene ever seeing a line of text that read 'Eve enters from the hallway', greeting Eve in my pose, and having it explained to me that Eve was not there yet because she had not posed. At the time it made very little sense. We ignore the text emitted by the game here? Why? Now of course setting ones entrance into a scene is a crucial storytelling tool I love.

Heh, yeah, that's a pet peeve of mine too. In AresMUSH those exit messages are emitted as OOC notifications, not IC ones. They're a useful tool, but they shouldn't be read into ICly. "Faraday walks in from the Garden..." Actually, no, Faraday just parachuted in; I just happened to have RPed in the garden last time I logged off

@ThatGuyThere We can agree that the potential for ripple effects on unexpected people is greater if the RP is on-grid. My only point was that the potential exists either way and I'd just rather not have to deal with the headaches or the pissed-off fallout from the approved characters who got caught in the splash zone.