Posts made by faraday

@Wretched So true. So very very true. I can't do podcasts either. Or anything where I'm expected to learn simply by listening.

@chibichibi It doesn't have line numbers so I can't refer you to a specific line, but the muscode file does have a CMD_+BBREAD (without the 2). http://www.mushcode.com/File/Myrddins-BBS-v4-0-6 You should be able to copy and paste it fairly easily, but I'd be more concerned about what else might be missing. It might be better just to start over.

@chibichibi said in anomaly jobs and myrrdin bboard not working:

Looking at the object, only THIS appears. There is NO &CMD_+BBREAD command >.< DAFUQ?

The standard install comes with a CMD_+BBREAD, and the one you're looking at (CMD_+BBREAD2) is for reading a specific board's posts with +bbread <name/#>.

Seems that your installation went awry somehow.

@Ganymede said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

Unsurprisingly, I enjoy playing both bridge and poker.

There's nothing wrong either game, and certainly nothing wrong with liking both.

What happens too often in MUSH land, though, is that you have people who are:

a) Showing up to a bridge tournament expecting to play poker and then getting disappointed.
b) Trying to play both bridge and poker simultaneously with the same deck of cards and acting shocked when that doesn't work out.
c) Badmouthing those who prefer a different type of card game than they do.
or some variation of the above.

MUSH games are not very good about setting expectations of what kind of game they are, and players are not very good about respecting those boundaries even when they are established.

@Warma-Sheen said in What MU/RPG opinions have you changed or maintained?:

I never believed (and still don't) that MUing was a "collaborative writing experience". I'm not sure where that concept came from but I've rarely seen it apply to any MU*.

One of my earliest MUs was Maddock MUX, a sandbox, consent-based western with almost no mechanics or code to speak of. There weren't even background approvals. I've played on numerous other pure-consent or mostly-consent games since. So to me - MUs as a collaborative writing experience has been a thing since 1996.

Which ties into the thing that it took me entirely too long to learn about MUSHing: I used to think we were a single hobby, but I've come to realize that we're really a collection of different game styles loosely unified by the technology we use to play them. I hear stories from @Thenomain about WoD games, or some other friends about comic games, and they may as well be as different from my experience as playing Bridge vs. playing Poker.

@Groth I understand the concept; I’ve been in story bubbles before. I just don’t like the experience of RP that has a higher likelihood of retcon, and I have a harder time keeping continuities straight. Like @Tinuviel I would not want it to become the norm. But async RP has always happened in MUs, and I’m glad that Ares gives folks more tools to do it.

@Auspice It's been a bigger deal on many of the combat games I've been on, but injuries are just a simple example. The same can apply to literally any piece of a scene. A conversation that was had, a piece of knowledge that was gained... basically anything that can have an impact on the character's state of mind or behavior.

It's not just a hypothetical for me; I've been in backscenes and forwardscenes and had a devil of a time dealing with stuff that occurred outside of the linear chronology in my head. But again, that's just one perspective, not meant to discourage you from doing what works for you and other like-minded folks.

@Auspice Yeah I hear you. To me that doesn't really solve the continuity issues, it just shifts them. If I get shot in the scene that's live on-game tonight it disrupts the plot RP that's "pending".

But I'm finnicky about continuity so I know my feelings are not universal. I know there are entire games run without much regard to continuity. And I'm glad to see folks trying new things. So don't mind me

Couple misc thoughts:

• I don't feel the need to ask for permission to roll their skills for them. Sure, you can sometimes lose the nuance of the back-and-forth negotiation of what modifiers apply, etc., but I just don't care Keeping things moving in a scene is more important to me. Doubly so when there are lengthy delays between each query/response.

• I've done a bunch of async RP through storium and have found that scene/move deadlines definitely help set expectations and keep things from stalling. It's just like stating the 15-minute pose rules in combat scenes, only on a longer timeframe.

• I really don't think I'd be comfortable doing significant async RP in a mush environment unless it was a backscene where the bare sketches of the outcome were already pre-determined. Otherwise it's almost like being in a really weird time stop. How can you RP a scene on Tuesday evening with your buddies when you don't know if you died/got seriously injured/lost a friend/got captured/whatever in that adventure that ICly took place Monday night? I just have trouble wrapping my brain around how that would work, practically speaking.

@Ghost said in Cyberrun:

Cyberpunk is currently well within their right to bootstomp Shadowrun right now. If they play their cards right, Cyberpunk will be the name in the same way that Kleenex is synonymous with tissue and Kool-Aid is synonymous with powdered fruit drinks (despite their being dozens of competitors, people dont ask 'do you have any tissue?', ask where the Kleenex is)

It's kind of hard not to be the more recognized name when your product is literally named the same as the entire genre

That said, Shadowrun was always more slanted towards the fantasy side than the cyberpunk side IMHO. So I don't think it is or ever will be a head-to-head race because they have fundamentally different priorities.

A SR MMO would be fun, though.

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

There's a reason for this.
They expect their developers to document as they go.

I think the reason is even more insidious than that.

Technical people don't like reading instructions. (Ironic, right?)

So there's this pervasive philosophy that documentation is worthless.

So nobody writes documentation. Or if they do, they half-ass it.

So then the documentation IS worthless or non-existent.

So then nobody will even consider hiring a tech writer or becoming better at documentation or whatever because they feel that documentation is useless.

And you get this vicious self-fulfilling cycle.

I've written MOUNTAINS of documentation that nobody has ever read. It makes me sad.

@Ghost said in Why no Mortal Kombat MU?:

I will note that an IP foKusing on death matches may not go over well in a hobby many that are averse to Karacter death and/or failure. However HorrorMux has shown that players are less averse to PC death when they know their Karacter will be able to wake up post-death to RP the horror of it.

Since TGG was able to find players willing to do the meat-grinder of WWI trench warfare, I'm sure you could find SOME players willing to do it. Might not be the most populated game out there, but who cares?

@krmbm said in Interest in a Discworld game?:

I think FS3 is fucking awesome, which is why I used it even though I shouldn't have. Most of my "learn to code ruby" time is now spent making workarounds for the hackiness that I could have avoided by going a different route from the outset.

That's been what I've heard quite often when folks try to extend FS3. They either end up with something that kinda sorta works, but isn't great at modeling what they were trying to model (Stormtroopers of death with fullauto blasters). Or it kinda works, but it throws something else completely out of balance (deleting background skills and ending up with a bloated action list and exacerbated min/max issues). Or it kinda works, but they end up with a hacky jenga castle of code that they're constantly wrestling with, particularly when it's time to upgrade.

Ares is designed to be extended and customized. FS3 just really isn't. It's a carefully-balanced instrument designed for a specific task. That's why Ares supports multiple skill systems, and even has a tutorial specifically to teach you how to make your own.

ETA: If I sound like a broken record on this thread after thread, it's because I just want to see games succeed with the vision they want, and not a painful compromise they later regret.

@saturna said in Interest in a Discworld game?:

Spirit Lake is on Ares/FS3 and has magic. @faraday is super helpful, too, and might be willing/happy to help you sort that front out.

Of course I'm always glad to help folks with Ares games.

FS3 isn't well-suited for magical settings, though. Spirit Lake is an exception because @Tat wasn't bound by an established fiction, and was able to design a magic system from scratch that fit within the FS3 framework. Magic armor works like regular armor, spells mirror existing combat actions, etc. It's very constrained. (Even with those constraints, it was still a crap-ton of work.) You can't really do that easily (if at all) when adapting an existing magic system.

But Ares is independent of FS3, so there are many options.

@Kanye-Qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

IDK. Feels a lot like a disorder to me.

I get where the guy is coming from, but I think he's downplaying the negatives too much. I tell my kids (both of whom have ADHD, one mixed with OCD) that their challenge is also their superpower. Multi-tasking, trying new things, boundless energy, hyper-focus... there are aspects of ADHD that are definitely advantages in some situations. But much of our society (work/school/etc.) is centered around situations where those things are liabilities. That's why it's recognized as a disorder.

Just a side note, the Ares Fate system is just a bare-bones implementation of chargen for setting skills/stunts and die roller. There are some Fate point tracking commands for spending/awarding points, but no real mechanics to speak of.

@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:

So you're telling me that Ares says that functionality is being withheld unless you engage with a system? Because this does not sound like a neutral informative.

Oh for goodness sake, it's not withholding functionality. You make it sound like a punishment. You can't do functionality like "reviewing prior poses" unless you first LOG those prior poses. Similarly you can't have the game save the log to disk for you at the end of the scene, if you don't let the game keep the log in the first place. That's just... obvious. If you enable a scene log, you enable additional functionality that is not possible without one.

Starting a scene (aka log) is completely independent and orthogonal from whether you then share that scene when it's over, which is what was originally the topic under discussion (sharing OOC information, like logs).

@Thenomain said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:

Ares encourages me to save a scene because it’s expected behavior when RPing on Ares.

Except... it isn't?

Ares encourages you to log a scene because logging enables a variety of useful features that would otherwise be unavailable to you (and everyone else in the scene) if you didn't. Such as:

• Pose order.
• Pose recall, if you get disconnected or arrive mid-scene or something.
• The pose "undo" feature.
• Allowing people to play in your scene via the web portal.
• Saving the "clean" finished log to disk when the scene is over, so you don't have to rely on your MU client logger and a log cleaner.

But even so, logging is entirely optional.

Once the scene has ended, Ares does not care what you do with the log. The log is automatically kept around for a period of days to give people who want to a chance to share it before it gets deleted. Then as a courtesy, it warns people before it auto-deletes the log, in case they thought that they could just keep it around forever. This gives them a chance to save it to disk before it gets lost.

I acknowledge that there can be social pressure to post logs if everyone else is doing it, but I wish people would stop putting that onus on the game server.

@Sparks said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:

And since I think a log gets deleted if not shared after a certain point, I read that sort of like "share it or lose it", or encouragement to share the scenes.

I guess it depends on your point of view. On Penn for instance, your options are a) save it to disk w/ your MU client logger, b) post it to the wiki, if the game has one, or c) lose it.

It's exactly the same in Ares, Ares just makes a) and b) easier by building those tools into the game itself. Does that encourage log-sharing? I guess kinda? If something's easier, it stands to reason that more people might do it. But it's certainly not baked in as something you're required or even expressly encouraged to do.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:

@faraday
Yeah def feels like it needs to be emphasized you can just stop a scene in Ares and not share it. Even gives you the option to download it for your record-keeping later it you've used the scenes system to play it out.

For sure. And also - Ares defaults to transparency and many games just go with it, but it does have configuration options that let you make sheets private, demographics private, etc. The one thing it doesn't do currently is let you make groups private (e.g. factions) which I can see as something a more secretive game might want, but it just hasn't been something somebody's asked for yet.