@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
Unfortunately, I don't think it'll happen either way. It seems to me another of those scenarios of 'without a perfect description that covers even edge cases, we cannot have a consensus and thus must quibble over minutiae.'
Yeah true. And I think it's okay to have something that's like... "This is a MUSH except we're doing this one thing differently."
@surreality said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
Timescale isn't necessarily it, either; some consent games don't bother tracking it at all, others change it up from time to time, like HorrorMUX, which has different stories at 1:2, 4:1, etc.
Even 1:2 games are tracking compared to real time though. There can be skips (BSGP jumped forward a year) or chapters/campaigns (like in HorrorMU or TGG), but generally speaking time is passing in the game as it passes in real life. Contrast that with PbF or TTRPG where a single IC day could span a month of real time.
I've never been on a MUSH - even a consent MU like Maddock - where there wasn't some kind of time ratio.
If I'm wrong about that, then I'm at a loss to even define any common characteristic of all MUSHes, lol 
@Ifrit said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
THAT SAID. I play both on Gray Harbor and Spirit Lake, both on Ares, with similarity in themes and shared players and I find the cultures completely different.
And both are wildly different from the old TGG (heavy code war game focus) and Maddock (pure consent Western sandbox), which were also MUSHes.
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
@faraday may have hit it on the head: a MUSH is a game that emphasizes RP over code.
It's more than just that though. Storium and forum games and Discord also emphasize RP over code. What is the common thread that defines MUSHes?
One could argue it's the grid room concept + text-based command interfaces. But then does that mean someone playing Gray Harbor solely from the Ares web portal isn't MUSHing? What about a game on PennMUSH where everything was done in temprooms via some custom scene code and had no real "grid" to speak of?
I still think it's the persistent 24/7 world with mostly-live scenes that is the principal defining quality of MUSHes compared to other online RP, but that's just me.
@Thenomain said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
I was having this very interesting discussion with a bunch of Mudders on the Evennia Discord about if Mush is a culture or a codebase.
It's an interesting question.
From a technical perspective, there is obviously a set of codebases - Penn, Tiny, Rhost and Ares - that call themselves MUSHes, and share a base set of commands (more or less) to navigate a grid and communicate.
But the codebase definition alone feels insufficient.
If I code up an escape room simulator or informal chatroom, I don't think most people would say I've "opened a MUSH" just because I used PennMUSH to do it.
And what about games coded in other servers that don't call themselves MUSH servers? Is Arx not a MUSH because it's using Evennia?
I disputed the earlier assertion that MUSHes share a culture, but I guess it comes down to what you define as "culture". Certainly MUSHes share a general philosophy of emphasizing roleplay over code (which differentiates them from MUDs) and having a 24/7 persistent IC world that tracks with RL time at some set ratio (which differentiates them from forum games). Beyond that, though, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any universal MU constants.
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
We need to stop calling everything to a halt to go 'No! That's not the term I use!'
I'm less concerned with the word than the behavior itself. (Shared terminology is nice and all, but that's not what defines a culture.)
Take one of the examples @Ghost used: metagaming.
I don't think our clashes are over the definition of the word, but the behaviors surrounding it. One game X, it's perfectly legit (even encouraged) to look at someone's sheet/wiki, pick something out, and use that as a hook to generate RP. "Hey our chars both surf - let's do a surfing scene." On game Y, that exact same behavior would be scandalous. On game Z it's not even a concept because they don't have public sheets/wikis/etc.
You could say the same about scene organization, pose order, background writing, consent... pretty much every aspect of roleplaying I can think of. That's what I'm talking about when I say that the culture is wildly variable across games.
@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
For example, everyone understands what "3PR" means or the concept of "ICA=ICC."
That's kind of my point though... there are consent-based MUs where "ICA=ICC" is just not a thing. And I had gone much of my MU career without ever encountering "3PR" pose style. (When I did I was so so happy.) There are games where people are all like: "Pose order? What's that? Lol what a weird concept."
Absolutely there are some behaviors that are common to some clusters of MUs. If you want to call the conglomeration of stuff "MU Culture" I can accept that, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many things that are universal.
@Ganymede said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
So I think it has its own culture, however nebulous or myriad it may seem.
So what is it then? I don't say that to nitpick, but seriously I don't see a lot of common elements in the culture across different styles of MUs. Comic games seem very different from WoD games which are very different from BSG games which are very different from historical games, which are very different from Arx, etc. etc. etc.
Obviously we're all here for "online roleplay" in the broadest sense.
We can distinguish the playstyle from MUDs and play-by-forum, but is that really "culture"?
I dunno.
There is no single "MU Culture". There are individual games with individual cultures based on the person running them and the people playing there.
No game is perfect, and you're bound to encounter jerks at some point any time you play with strangers on the internet. But there's no way I'd still be doing this after twenty years if I had to routinely encounter some of the straught-up bonkers insanity that some folks on these boards describe happening on other games.
Doomsaying about how awful "MU Culture" is doesn't help anybody. Setting aside games run by abusive psychos (because really why would you even want to play there), how can we improve? @ghost gave some ideas, there must be others.
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
This amuses me because I remember you being resistant to those in-game logging options and I was a big proponent when we discussed the idea back on BSU.
Well I wasn't resistant to the idea, I was resistant to coding it into Ares because I worried that the "OMG you mean staff can dig into the database and read my pages!?!?!" hysteria would drive people away from playing on Ares games. In the end the demand for accessing pages via the portal reached critical mass, and I decided "eh, screw it, if you're gonna play on games where the staff is so untrustworthy you're worried that they're gonna go digging through your pages... the code is really the least of your problems."
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
But these solutions are still geared towards 'people already here.' (aka someone brand new who has never heard of MUing is highly unlikely to grab Evennia and build a game)
Like I said: a lot of times tech comes up, it's for 'what bells and whistles can we add to appeal to the Kids Of Today?' ...
IMO, culture and game options are the big deal. Yes, tech HELPS but it is not the answer (which, as @Ghost pointed out, it's often touted to be).
We can argue all day long about the chicken and egg problem.
If there are 100 cool games, but the young kids are all: "Eeewww" by the technology, then we get no new players.
If there is wiz-bang new technology, but only 5 games all run by psychos / populated by creepers and jerks / etc., then we get no new players.
Solving BOTH problems is important.
I wholeheartedly agree with @Thenomain that you have to be careful when trying to solve social problems with code. Often you can't, but sometimes you can. "I don't know if this log has been doctored" is a common reason for staff to be suspicious in they-said situations. Ares provides anti-harassment tools that makes it easy for players to submit verified logs of abuse. But all the abuse-reporting tools in the world won't help if the staff is the one doing the abusing or turning a blind eye to it.
@The-Sands theme by Auspice’s definition doesn’t require a common goal. Westerns are a good example. Little House and Deadwood both have similar settings with wildly different themes yet no common goal for characters to pursue.
@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
This could be done in a number of ways, absolutely. And many of them already exist.
Ares and its MU-in-a-box.
Arx providing its code open-source so people can use it as a structure for their own game (Ithir!).
Theno and his WoD code.
Except that two out of those three things would not exist if folks like @Griatch and I accepted the basic premise that tech doesn't help get new blood and that building better tech is "a waste of time". So I do reject that premise.
Tech is not the only answer, but I wholeheartedly believe it is an important part of the solution.
@Ghost said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
I know the social problems will likely be harder to fix (and for some of these people you're talking DECADES of ingrained responses to behaviors), but it's like they say about work: People don't quit a job, they quit the boss/team. I think the same applies to mushing, and approaching this as a matter of "advertising, monetizing the hobby, or purely technology" is a waste of your time.
I actually agree with most of your facts, just not with your conclusion.
Part of the reason people put up with crappy games/staff/etc. is because there are so few games out there. While that's not solely a tech issue by any stretch, it is an issue that tech can absolutely help with. There are good people with creative ideas out there if we can enable them to put those ideas into practice.
And while it's certainly true - in part - that many people who do dip their toes into MUs leave because of personal drama and not the tech, the tech is what keeps some people from even trying it in the first place.
Is tech a cure-all? Absolutely not. But with more games and more approachable user experience, I believe we can get some new players and new ideas and make things better.
@Auspice said in Star vs Ensemble Cast - Why Theme is Vital:
I can have two Battlestar games. One is about the beginning of the war, the rise of the Cylons, and humanity's fumble. The other is about the end stages of the war when humanity has to find a place to rebuild. Both are BSG. But both have very different atmospheres (IC). One is about failure the other is about hope. One can become the other, yes, but the driving theme at the start is still different.
I have to disagree a little bit.
"BSG in the beginning of the Cylon War" is a setting too. Within that setting you could do all kinds of themes. Inter-colonial politics. Post-apocalyptic trapped-in-a-ruined-city. Space family soap opera (ala Caprica) centered around Cylon research. Or the one I chose for BSGU, aka "WWII in space shoot-em-up".
I prefer the terms setting and hook.
Setting is just the time/place/environment that the game is set.
Hook is more about what you're going to do within that environment.
Without a hook, it's just a city sandbox.
@Arkandel said in How important is it to be 'needed'?:
does it lead to oversaturation of certain popular archetypes, and does that matter
It all depends on how you structure your game.
On BSGU for instance, it wouldn't have mattered if every player through the door wanted to be a Viper pilot. The setting, the theme, the game structure, the plots, etc. all accommodated that.
In that type of environment, steering people toward "under-represented" roles may be detrimental if now the poor newbie has nobody to RP with or no plots to participate in.
Also some people can be really over-protective about their perceived uniqueness. "Ugh, I was the chef but now there's this other guy butting in on my 'territory'." So emphasizing/rewarding that is not necessarily ideal either.
@Lotherio said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
No matter how clear I try to be in the type of Mu I'm after, something is lost in translation.
Dude, I once went for "Battlestar-themed space rescue/firefighters" and ended up with "Sopranos in Space." There are all kinds of things that cause clashes of expectations. Doesn't make you a bad game-runner.
@surreality said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
I'm talking about the how, which is a different animal. It's an important critter in the ecosystem, though, and it's one that deserves a file of its own. This is more the territory of a mission statement, from where I sit -- something along the lines of:
Yes, this. Even within MUSHes, there is a wide range from "Even more RP-ish RPI" (closer to the MUD side of things, ala Arx, Firan, TGG) to "Really Big Tabletop-ish Group" (Shadowrun, WoD) to "Fast-paced collaborative storytelling" (a lot of the historical games, closer to the PbPost side of things).
All of these are MUSHes.
All of these are valid playstyles.
You could take any setting (WoD, Star Wars, Battlestar, Lords and Ladies) and chuck a game anywhere along that scale. Setting and server alone don't describe the playstyle. Games need to define where they fall on that third axis, and it would help to have a common vocabulary so that expectations can be more clear.
@Seraphim73 wrote
do also think that this discourages interaction between PCs during combat -- because everyone reads the combat results
I think that has more to do with the sheer SIZE of most automated combat scenes than the code. You see more interaction when the groups are smaller. With ten people’s poses and combat results to react to it can just be overwhelming sometimes.
@Alamias said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Edited to add: One way I deal with it is set an alarm to go off the time the meeting is supposed to start, so when it goes off I know I have to get up and leave.
I always have two alarms for anything important:
@Ganymede Yeah. I do it a lot too, and it’s a great tool in general. I just haven’t found it as effective in plot scenes. YMMV of course.