Posts made by faraday

@Ganymede said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

It is easier, simpler, and more sensible to require approval before hitting the Grid. As @surreality said, many games allow for "provisional RP" in OOC areas...

I understand what you're saying. Personally I don't see a big difference between provisional RP in OOC areas with consenting folks, and provisional RP in IC areas with consenting folks. Either way, you're risking retcon -- not only for the parties involved, but also for ripple effects if there was anything significant done during those provisional scenes.

And yeah, you can say "don't do anything significant" but it's a slippery slope. Bob and Harry RP a scene while Harry's awaiting approval. Bob tells Suzy about it. Suzy tells Harvey about it. Then it gets retconned and you have to deal with the ripples.

It's fine if that's a risk you're willing to take in order to let Harry RP while he's awaiting approval. That's a tradeoff decision each admin must make for themselves. For myself, I'm content in assuring that apps happen as soon as humanly possible. If I'm online when you submit, chances are you'll get feedback in under half an hour. Otherwise, it'll be the first thing I look at when I do log in.

@surreality Maybe I misunderstood something, but I didn't think anyone was talking about post-approval checking. I thought it was allowing them to start RP before their app had been reviewed and approved. I.e. before anyone on staff has told them "what you have created is OK."

On MDM we made it clear that they were RPing on a provisional basis and that any RP would be subject to retcon if their character had any major issues. They showed up with a special status in +finger and +who so other players would also know they were taking a risk RPing with a provisional character.

Retcons were rare, but messy enough that it was a ginormous hassle. The bigger problem was psychological. It just made the other players uncomfortable, and they got frustrated/upset at having to deal with doofuses who never should've been allowed on grid in the first place.

@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

And of course narrative paradoxes would occur, but it's apparent that they would stand separate. I suppose if a game were to try to cater for all diets, the question would become how this system handles scenes that extend longer than a day - or insert timebox here - ala PbPers.

Yeah, continuity problems crop up now and again, but you can usually just handwave them away or work it out somehow.

You're absolutely allowed to play fast and loose with the timeframe. You can do backscenes, forward scenes, scenes that span a three-day period... whatever. But you always have to keep in mind that the rest of the game is following the day-by-day timescale. If you're doing something weird with your timeline, the onus is on you to figure out how to work that into the global timeline. It can get tricky, but it is possible.

@SkinnyThicket said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

How do MU*s try to handle this disconnect between individual character narratives and the more global.... time-fabric?

On the MUSHes I've been on, time is generally synchronized to the day. So you'll see logs tagged as 2015-05-26 and can keep track of events that way.

Within a given day, time is more flexible and you're just kind of expected to keep your own internal timeline consistent. So if you've already RPed a lunch scene on Tuesday with Jane, you normally wouldn't then go backward and do a breakfast scene with Bob. But you could do dinner with Bob.

There are occasionally times when you break this rule and do a "backscene" that happened in the past. This only works well when the scene is completely inconsequential, or the events have already been agreed-upon in advance. After all, if you backscene a breakfast with Bob on Tuesday and die, it would cause a paradox with your lunch scene with Jane on Tuesday.

Clear as mud, huh?

@Ganymede said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

These sound like good reasons to implement a system that allows you to check over PCs before they hit the Grid.

Yes. While I agree with @Arkandel's general suggestion of reducing human intervention, I tried post-grid approvals on Martian Dreams and it was a mess. Never again. The hassle of dealing with retcon was far greater than the hassle of dealing with apps.

But there's a lot you can do to make apps painless. @Thenomain mentioned his chargen that does all the system checking for you. I did the same with FS3, and could turn around an app in 10 minutes most times. XP spends and plots can be done with audits rather than pre-approvals as long as you don't have a consistent problem with players doing crazy things.

When it comes to scale, I worry more about the people problem. More people = more drama = more things for staff to mediate. Plus the hand-holding that Arkandel mentioned.

@ThatGuyThere said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I will freely admit a new influx could usher in a golden age must neither side has any sort of hard evidence to back up a positive or a negative outlook so I will stick with desiring small growth over large.

Yeah it could go either way really. I mean, nothing says that a game has to accept all 26 apps at once. And if platforms like Evennia or Ares reduced the barrier for running your own game, you'd have more of them. Granted, it doesn't help you staff said games, but one might speculate that's also a problem that would be helped by having more people in your "talent pool" as it were.

It would definitely change the hobby - of that there is no doubt.

@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

You do have a lot of the great globals that seem standard plus a lot of your own that, including some of the new standard globals like tracking PB or porting to wiki. I admit I used it for Realms, but stopped at FS3 to make something towards the Chaosium d20 for the stat code.

Thanks. But yeah - that's what I was referring to about the system being plug and play to an extent. You can ditch or replace FS3 or pretty much any AddOn and it'll work OK. Changing the Core packages can be done, but you have to do some surgery to resolve the dependencies that other Addons have on them. So it's not completely plug-and-play, I get that. My only point was that even having a MUSH-in-a-box softcode package still doesn't help people get over the installation and configuration hurdle, nor are they comfortable managing it without a coder.

@Lotherio Actually tangent wanted a stat-less system. So, in a fit of great irony, it's the thing everyone calls the "FS3 codebase" without FS3. Lol. I guess I should have come up with a better name for the softcode platform besides Faraday's Softcode.

@Caryatid said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

It sounds unfun to me but it isn't inaccurate by RL standards.

Except that the idea of a Golden Hour has been disproved as a myth. Response times matter, but it varies widely. For a cardiac arreat, it's more like a Golden Ten Minutes, with bystander CPR being a huge determining factor.

For a game... yeah, sure, do whatever you like. But there's no real basis in reality here.

(Paramedic and former medic instructor here)

@ixokai Ditto. Though it does sound more MUD-like than MUSH-like (not saying it's a MUD, exactly, but I felt the same about Firan and this sounds like it's in a similar code-heavy vein), so maybe the reference is apt? Dunno.

@Thenomain Yeah when I said the "FS3 codebase" I was talking about the Faraday Code. People started calling it the "FS3 code" even though it's more than just FS3. :helpless shrug:

Anyway, it's a pre-loaded database that has everything already set up just waiting to be configured, including FS3. That's what I used to help @tangent set up the Marvel game.

I mean, yeah, you've still got to configure it but that's no different than your WoD setup right? You don't have to write new code to switch it over to Game of Thrones or Wild West, you just change the weapons and skill list.

And it's modestly plug-and-play-able. For Marvel, I removed maps and groups and a couple other things they didn't need just by running +uninstall. It's not perfect, not by a long, long shot, but I think it's pretty close to what you're describing.

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

(edit to note: This is why I'm trying to get my code together so that people can just go, bloop, new game. Maybe. Some. Year.)

Sure, but that's not enough. The FS3 codebase has come with a starter DB and installer packs for years. While some folks have taken it and run with it, there are many more who are thoroughly intimidated by the idea of installing it, or come to me after it's installed and ask: So how do I (do this thing that requires MUSHCode knowledge). Anything using the current tech still has a really really high entry barrier, even if you give them a full-fledged package.

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Sorry that this isn't Ares, but I don't know enough about it to be excited about it.

Oh, no biggie. Evennia is much further along and much broader in scope and ambition. I'm totally an Evennia supporter, but we have different goals.

@Thenomain said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Wait, are you talking about the code? Oh, momentum mostly. Evennia is the closest thing to a Mush replacement we have these days, and even it has a development barrier too high to just pick it up and run with it.

That's basically the same problem I've had with Ares. Making something nifty and modern imposes a huge barrier to entry when you're dealing with folks who are already intimidated by runningmake install from a Linux shell. Modern code = many moving parts = difficult to manage. That's why DevOps is A Thing in the real software world.

I'm also not convinced that you'd be able to get a critical mass of players for a modern web-based MUSHing app. We talk about these hypothetical masses who might give MUSHing a try, but who's going to build games for them? Who's going to play with them? I talked about this a bit in my most recent Ares blog post:

In a community where people boycott games based on what channel commands they use and fight holy wars over which MUSH client is better, is it reasonable to expect that they’ll welcome a web-based MUSH platform that works very differently? Color me dubious.

Sure you can say "screw the dinosaurs" and build something completely new and different, like Storium. But then it's not really a MUSH any more. And you're potentially losing out on your most enthusiastic and experienced players. It's a big gamble.

@Lithium Yeah, that's a matter of how an individual game is choosing to apply background skills, and I agree it's wacky.

Background skills arent meant to be specializations of action skills. FS3 has no concept of specialization. BG skills are designed to be other skills, not particularly important to gameplay, that round out your char.

I would never approve someone with a BG skill in Tridents because it's already covered by Melee.

So it sounds like some game really wanted to have specializations and tried to graft it onto the system in a way that's kind of weird.

@Kanye-Qwest said:

There's no point in offering consequences that mean nothing. It's a waste of time and processing power.

This gets back to @Ganymede's simulation vs narration argument
Or to put it another way, game vs story.

If "game" is your angle, you care about rewarding PCs for their XP spends and enforcing consequences that mean something relevant to the game.

If "story" is your thing, all of that means nothing. There's a whole hospital filled with NPC doctors, many of whom are better than your PCs. And the broken bone means something to your character's RP regardless of whether there’s a coded effect.

It's not an either-or though. Each MUSH strikes a different balance, and thats why you get such widely different perspectives.

On one extreme you have the situation on the Firefly ship or @Wretched's safe house where it's silly to assume the char is absent just because their player is.

On the other extreme is @Arkandel's Slaughterhouse or the "I'm going to wait to murder you while the police PCs are offline and assume they were taking a siesta" where someone is abusing OOC absence.

The vast majority of scenarios fall somewhere in between and are far from black and white. They require a case by case judgement call. Using the extremes as straw men arguments doesn’t get us anywhere.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

So this got me to thinking - how could A -ever- murder B and make it look like an accident if C is apparently omnipresent?

I wish people would stop taking things to extremes I never said. All I said was that when the people involved were actively seeking C in a life-or-death situation on the ship that there was no logical reason why they wouldn't find her. That's vastly different from saying that C is some kind of all-seeing ever-present beast. Goodness.

@Pandora It's a dickish consequence if I'm forced to concoct some idiotic explanation for why C wasn't able to be found when no plausible reason exists. If you don't think that's a problem - that's fine. I agreed it wasn't black and white. As I said, I was just illustrating where I believe that OOC communication can help with IC continuity.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

At what point is the line between 'reasonable assumption' and 'preferable outcome' crossed? It's not a black and white issue.

It's absolutely not black and white. Where I tend to personally draw the line is where there is no plausible reason.

A single knock from a would-be murderer? Easy. I was asleep. I had my headphones on. I was in the shower.

Being absent for a single night when the ship's in spacedock and there's an accident? Also easy. I was getting take-out. I was at the bar.

Saying multiple ship crew members failed to find you on a tiny ship when there was literally nowhere else for you to be? Saying you abandoned your clan because you didn't log in for a couple days and something big went down? Saying you're ignoring something huge that happened to your IC spouse just because you haven't been able to RP for a week? Saying you don't know how your sick mother (who you live with) is doing just because she hasn't logged in to update you with her status? No. Sorry. Those I draw the line on. (And these are all situations that have actually happened in games I know of.)

I like @Wretched's motto:

If someone is OOCLY unavailable, never give them dickish consequences or treat them like an abandoner.