Posts made by faraday

@Ghost said:

How far do you think other players and staff should go to make a player feel wanted?

I don't think that anyone has an obligation to make anyone else feel wanted. These are games. Games are supposed to be fun. If it's not fun to play with someone, don't do it.

BUT... I also believe that if you want a game to have a long, happy life, then it is in your own best interests to do as much as you can to get other people involved. Activity breeds activity. Cliques get stale. New players mean new opportunities.

@Thenomain said:

If the problem is that we are describing genre and calling it theme, then someone needs to press them on the point.

Yes, I didn't describe that very well in my post but obviously there was more to the theme than "this is a western". Genre is a part of theme, but only a part.

Still, I'm not sure I understand your point, other than to agree that yes - it's silly for folks in a wild west town to be bidding thousand of dollars... to say nothing of the head-scratcher that is a charity auction involving bidding on a prostitute.

At any rate, I don't think it's practical to describe theme exhaustively. Even if you did try, nobody would read it.

Side note: When I say "theme", I'm using the traditional MUSH definition of "setting", rather than the literary definition.

@Ghost said:

Genre references never hurt and might even help spread our favorite nerdsauce to the uninitiated.

Definitely references can help establish the theme, but sometimes a single book/show is tonally inconsistent. Both of the BSG examples were from the same Battlestar show, just different episodes/ships I was shooting for a middle ground between those two extremes, which made it hard to pin down in a way people could relate to.

@Ghost said:

The gotcha really is interpretation of theme. ... This is where the staff/player slapboxing starts every time.

Totally agree. For instance, I ran a Western game. But what constitutes a "Western" theme? Deadwood? Hateful Eight? Little House on the Prairie? A Ken Burns documentary? The true answer is: All of the above.

"Just pick one and be clear about what you expect," you might say. Great idea, but it's hard to pin down a theme with that specificity, especially when every player is coming to it with a different expectation.

I had a similar problem with the Battlestar theme. Some folks came to it expecting Galactica, where Starbuck punches out the XO and gets a wrist slap. Others came expecting something more like Pegasus, where regulations are enforced with a iron fist. Both are part of the established Battlestar canon, so neither is really "right" or "wrong". It just gets messy when these worldviews collide.

Once you get beyond the obvious "don't bring your vampire to a Battlestar game" silliness, setting appropriate theme expectations and then enforcing them gets really tricky.

@ThatGuyThere said:

Actually I think Don't be a Dick is a horrible game policy. No two people have the same idea of what being a dick constitutes. Therefore if you have more then one staffer it will by unevenly applied.

So? All policies have the potential to be unevenly applied. Everything comes down to staff judgement, from approvals to determining whether to nuke an idle player, and people are rarely - if ever - on the exact same page. That doesn't make the policies themselves inherently bad.

And what's the alternative? To try and enumerate all possible ways someone can be a jerk? That's even less practical.

@Thenomain said:

@faraday's code works because it registers itself, so while it does have dependencies, it's going to warn you ahead of time.

Pretty much all of my code depends on the Core systems, but the Addons don't usually have dependencies on each other. They're designed so you can pick and choose. There are a few exceptions, but I've tried to detail those in the documentation.

The 'funky installer checks" that @Bobotron mentions are the way that the code auto-installs itself just by copying/pasting from the installer script. It puts all the objects in the right locations, updates DBrefs as appropriate, sets up player attributes (dark/locked if need be), installs help files, and more. While an @decompile will work for a small multi-descer system or whatnot, the install manager helps a great deal with complex systems. But YMMV.

@Arkandel said:

The idea there is simple. The vast majority plots are fine, staff should only intervene if someone fucked up big time... how would you ensure things which are quite out-there or unwanted don't become part of canon?

I think that the idea of retconning insane f-ed up stuff is kind of tacitly assumed on all MUSHes; you don't need a special policy for it. Putting in an explicit threat of "auditing" just makes me feel like there's some plot staffer reading logs with their finger on the retcon button. And yes, I've seen stuff like that. It makes me uncomfortable.

My plot policy kind of boils down to what you said: "Don't burn down the city, and don't do anything too insane." Occasionally I get people complaining that it's too vague, but for the most part it seems to work okay.

As noted in the initial pitch, trust should go both ways; players are trusted, but so are staff. In a way that's the only way any game can truly function well.

A fine idea, but the key point missing IMHO is that trust has to be earned. You may be a totally awesome staffer, but I don't know you, and I don't know your other staffers. If I stumbled across your game and saw policies like that, I would be on my guard. As @Apos said, many of us have had really horrible experiences. It's not to say they can never under any circumstances work, but there's a healthy degree of not-unwarranted skepticism.

Ammunition is only important if you're in a fight, and you'd only care about it if your intention is to win.

Or you worry about it if you've frequently been on the receiving end of player-initiated gunfire and don't wish to give them any more bullets than you have to.

@Arkandel I think your goals have too much methodology built in, and that's what people are objecting to.

It seems to me that your 8 goals can be distilled down to:

• Increase player agency - allow them to have a lasting impact and steer the game.
• Reduce bottlenecks and obstacles between players and scenes.
• Enable operation with a small staff.

Everything else you've outlined - "yes first", "audit don't approve" - these are methods. Means to and end, not the end themselves.

I fully support the three goals list above. In fact, I've used them on my own games. (I suppose folks can argue how successful they've been but I like to think it worked out okay.)

By clearly separating what you want to accomplish from how you want to accomplish it, I think it will allow you to be more open-minded about some of the other ideas on the thread.

Some other random thoughts:

• "Audit don't approve" is a big turn-off for me. All games have an unspoken rule that totally crazy things will be retconned, but saying it like this makes it sound like "we have limits but we're not going to tell you what they are until after you exceed them." That's going to make me very leery of running plots for fear of retcon.
• Speeding up chargen approvals is good, but I just can't get behind the idea of removing them entirely. As @ghost mentioned, I've structured FS3 to try and make approvals fast and easy. There's a tiny wait - often just a matter of minutes if I happen to be online, but that's a price I'm more than willing to pay to protect the existing players from crazy people hitting the grid and disrupting things. (And yes, you can filter out crazies in chargen. Not all, but some.)
• Having "yes first" as a staff mantra to encourage staff to be open-minded and allow players to steer the game is not so bad. Advertising a game a "yes first" opens yourself up to all kinds of bizarro player expectations and entitlement issues, as others have already said.

I'm not saying my ways are perfect. Every system has pros and cons. I'm just saying that clarifying your actual goals may allow you to consider alternative methods.

@Lithium said:

My current idea re-chargen is to allow pretty much instant approval for 'side kick' level characters... It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

All I can say is I hope it works out better for you than it did for me

It wasn't skill points/powers that were the problem, it was people whose backgrounds were flat-out CRAZY, or who had a seriously deficient understanding of the theme. I don't see how those sorts of problems would be any better for sidekicks vs main chars.

Yes, you can let them hit the grid and expect players to sort the mess out, but my experience is that it seriously irritates the existing players. They didn't sign on for that nonsense and it can be really disruptive to RP. I see it as my job to insulate them from craziness as much as practical, and apps are an important step.

My games these days are pretty permissive. Not quite the yes-first utopia described in the opening, but what I've found through the years is that trying to list a billion rules to govern behavior just doesn't work. The good players feel constricted, and the bad players ignore and/or don't read the rules and have to be dealt with anyway.

That said, I think it's important to set limits on several key points. Others have outlined several already in terms of consent / FTB. Alts is another good example. The utopian view is "let people play what they want and it'll sort itself out". I thought that way myself until I saw how the departure of a once-active player with 4+ alts gutted my small game because so many characters had key relationships with theirs.

Chargen apps is another. I played on / ran a couple games where chars were allowed to hit the grid provisionally and were audited after the fact. Man what a disaster that was. Never again. I keep my chargen/app process VERY lightweight and ultra fast, but I've found that it's an essential gate for filtering out people who can't even clear the smallest thematic bar.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Okay, so.. really nitpicky but... please, PLEASE for the love of God... stop forcing people to have a desc before approval. Its a pointless barrier to RP.

LOL. +1 there. I stopped reading descs ages ago.

@SG said:

If a story is 90% set in stone regardless of the dice, then why have them at all?

For the last 10%?

But seriously - I coded FS3Combat, which will never kill a player. The worst you get is incapacitated. I believe that you can have fun quirky outcomes and randomness and consequences without having death.

Also, between folks idling out and being killed off, and NPCs being killed off, and the handful of PCs who surprise everyone by choosing to be killed off in dramatic fashion... I don't see a lack of death as a big problem on the games I've played on, honestly.

But I'm not saying anyone else is wrong if they like risk and chance. Just saying that's not fun for me - and I know I'm not alone.

@Ghost said:

@Arkandel Respectfully, I disagree. What we are doing on these mushes is more akin to tabletop gaming than MMORPG.

I must respectfully disagree with your disagreement

Actually what you're saying may be 100% true on some games, but the ones I play on are almost nothing like a tabletop RPG. If anything, I would liken them to a serialized TV soap opera. I mean, yeah, TV shows kill people off sometimes, but as @Arkandel said - unless you're watching Game of Thrones or Walking Dead, those deaths are the exception not the rule.

I play MUSHes not to play a game, but to tell a story. While I don't expect to have 100% control over the story (MUSHes are a collaborative environment), I do get miffed if my story gets cut off arbitrarily halfway through the 1st act by some random die roll.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

BS Pacifica managed a proper closer (I actually came back for the finale after taking a hiatus, and it was a great experience), but @faraday puts us all to shame, in a zillion ways.

Aww shucks. You're being overgenerous, but thanks. I am very proud of the Pacifica finale, though.

I wrote down my thoughts about running BSP in two editorials awhile back: Director's Commentary and Lessons Learned. The first article goes into some of the ins and outs of running the campaign, although I'm not sure how much of it would make sense to someone who didn't play there. The second is more about running a MUSH in general - and I'm not sure I agree with all of it now that 8+ years have gone by. But there are some ideas in there anyway.

The Greatest Generation also did an awesome job at campaigns, but it was kind of a unique setting. Each campaign ran for a few months with a different historical setting and a different cast of characters. It wasn't one big gigantic campaign, but each mini-campaign had an arc with a beginning, middle and end.

@Lilli Fixed the referral link - thanks for the heads up. I've been pretty pleased with Digital Ocean so far; been using them for about 6 months or so. GenesisMuds website is indeed kind of laughable, but their service was solid. I used them for many years. The guy who runs it was always very helpful. But things could have changed - it's been a little while.

@Lilli I don't know anything about Rhost, but Digital Ocean offers full Linux VPN accounts with root access to install anything you want. Its prices are competitive with most MU hosts I've seen. I use it for my own MU hosting. Sign up with this referral link and you get a $10 credit to try it out - basically 1 month free. (full disclosure: I get a referral bonus if you sign up and end up sticking around for a few months)

GenesisMuds also supports a wide variety of MU* types, but they don't mention Rhost specifically. They do have gcc at least.

@Griatch FWIW, with AresMUSH I decided to explicitly test with Potato, SimpleMU and MUSHClient on Windows, and Potato and Atlantis on Mac. This was based on informal polls of MU users. I use Atlantis personally.

@Thenomain said:

So in asking how writers come up with this, what I hope is that through example players can be encouraged to think of themselves as writers of the story and not players of a character.

I can't speak to comic book writing specifically, but certainly in general fiction writing, you don't bust out a RPG handbook, make up a protagonist, and roll dice to figure out what happens to them.

But when writing a story (be it a comic book or a novel) you are writing a story. You may have whole team involved (as @Roz described), each with their own ideas and agendas, but (hopefully) you're all marching toward a unified vision. You have lots of meetings to plan things out, review and revise drafts, etc. It's a lengthy, collaborative process.

That is very different from a MU*. For starters, you have a whole bunch of players each wanting to tell a different story - one where their character is the main protagonist. Many players are resistant to planning things out in advance, preferring an experience more like improv acting. So decisions have to be made quickly on-the-spot. There is no revision process (barring the extreme, dreaded retcon).

So sure, in principle I agree that players should put story over stats. I am very happy when players can just work things out amogst themselves without resorting to code or rolls. But when conflicts arise, I think it's beneficial to have a way for them to be resolved speedily and impartially.

Dice systems are neither perfect nor absolutely essential, but I for one find them quite handy.

@Thenomain said:

Has anyone ever asked the comic book writers how they do it?
No, they're not looking a PvP situations, but they are looking to tell a story with characters whose powers are limited not by statistics but by narrative.

Apples and oranges, I think. A comic book writer doesn't have to deal with the 'actors' playing Hulk and Iron Man getting their noses out of joint because they don't like the way the scene turned out. Once you have multiple people involved, everyone has their own agenda for what they think is the best narrative and they don't necessarily agree.

If players can work it out amongst themselves, great. But if it comes down to staff intervention, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and time arguing if you just say: "OK, roll."