Posts made by faraday

@Ninjakitten said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@krmbm I know you can do it with a temproom, I guess I didn't make that clear. Or you missed it, but I missed that you meant making it an option in the sense of /announce (didn't spot that after the =), as opposed to an option like 'to be enabled or not by a game', so you know, fair enough!

Yeah, so both of these things kind of tie into the "I didn't want to make the scene/start syntax too crazy" category.

The more options you start packing into a single command, the less intuitive it is. There's already a fair bit of overloading on scene/start as it is, for open vs private, and temproom vs grid room, and location and whatnot. I prefer to keep it simple.

If you want to have a private scene in your grid room, or announce your scene so everyone knows about it, the capability is there. It's just two commands instead of one. If there's a lot of feedback that folks would prefer it a different way, I would consider changing it. But for now it's that way intentionally.

@Lotherio said in Incentives for RP:

My question is more, must everything be XP oriented incentive wise or are there other incentives that could work that are less, well, gamey to me. @Tinuviel made a great comment, it takes more work and XP is easier to hand out.

I dislike handing out XP for this kind of thing, because it creates a power imbalance between characters for OOC reasons that I don't really think should exist. FS3 games have Luck Points for a reward system. It gives folks a slight edge without making them overpowered.

I think it's a fine line to tread, though, between making these super-enticing rewards that people will jump to get but then throw game balance out of whack, or more modest rewards that might not provide the motivation you desire.

@A-Meowley said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Lotherio said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Ares is meant to be full web portal, client is for holdouts and older players.

Wait. It's supposed to be full web portal? How can we idly chat on channels on the web portal and stuff? Asking for a friend, because obviously I'm not so old that I can't immediately figure out a new system, that'd be absurd...

It is expressly not supposed to be full web portal. Some commands still exist only in-game, and there are no gameplay features that are web-only. (Just the game wiki aspects, like scene log archive, wiki pages, etc.)

I would say that the ultimate goal is to have everything on the web, but that's still a long ways off, and it will never compromise your ability to play with an old-school MUSH client.

@Ninjakitten said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The one thing that leaps to mind here is that you don't seem to be able to scene/start privately in the room you're actually in, which makes sense in a Cafe but is a little weird in your apartment.

You should be able to start the scene and then set it private. It's true that you can't do it in one command, but that's more an issue of syntax complexity on the scene/start options than a technical limitation.

I'm also not sure what the concern is about ending up with an abandoned scene in your unshared list. If it bugs you, you can delete it. Or re-use it for the next day and change the description. They'll get auto cleaned up eventually if not shared.

Summary is supposed to show up on public scenes. If it isn't, that's a bug and I'll look into it.

To @Lisse24 -- I agree to some extent that if the tools are failing people then we need better tools. At this point, though, I'm not convinced that the tools are actually failing. I think it's more that people are still discovering how best to leverage these tools. (And there might be some kinks, like if Ninjakitten is right about the summary not showing. It is still in beta.)

On an Ares game, you can still go down to the cafe and camp there, and hope somebody sees you on +where just as you have on MUSHes for 30 years. That hasn't changed.

But you can also do these other things - like start an open scene in the cafe to effectively say "RP HERE!", set a summary, start a temproom scene in a flexible location, etc. These are new options that didn't exist before, and it's going to take some time for people to get used to them. Change doesn't happen overnight.

ETA: Oh, the not announcing scenes thing was intentional. The feedback I got from BSGU was that people preferred the announcing to be by choice rather than automatic. You can use either the RP Requests channel or the announce command (available to all players by default) for this purpose.

I've had +wantrp or +rpok tools on prior games and, in my experience, almost nobody ever used them. The RP Requests channel worked the best for connecting people. With Ares, I think it works even better because you can see prior requests easily on the web chat (or channel recall if you're using the client) so you can see that @Lisse24 was looking for RP twenty minutes ago and might still be.

I'm not opposed to adding a "looking for RP" flag/list if a bunch of folks want it, I just haven't done it because past experience tells me it's not a good solution to this problem.

ETA: However, I did envision the scene system being used for this end.

scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=open
scene/summary Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible

That shows up both on the web scenes list, the in-game +where, and the in-game scenes list. I don't really know how to advertise any better than that, but I'm all ears if somebody comes up with something.

@juke said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

For me, 'what if...our characters, two people with conflicting agendas who don't know each other at all, randomly met on a riverboat that had a poker tournament on it and tried to work those angles?' -- isn't work, that's like 'holy shit yes, let's go do that right now.' (Spoilers: the riverboat broke in half and sank, on fire. True story.)

This exactly. That scenario would be like: "Heck yeah!" Versus, "Anybody wanna RP on the riverboat?", which strikes me as something most likely to end up with a bunch of folks just sitting around posing poker hands or chilling at the bar doing nothing of consequence. The scene doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be) scripted, but it at least needs an interesting launching-off point.

If that's what floats your boat (pun intended) - more power to you! I'm not trying to call WrongFun here. It just doesn't do it for me any more.

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The lack of play.... having to work to play is exactly why I made this post

I think part of the disconnect is right here. Your definition of play is different than mine, and I'd venture to say a good number of MU players these days. As @Tinuviel said - that's not good or bad, it's just a thing.

I don't RP just for the sake of RPing. RP for me isn't just about putting words on the screen, it's about telling an interesting, meaningful story with my character. There are lots of ways to do this, but in my experience "hey, random person, let's meet up in random place and just see what happens" rarely gets you there. Those scenes aren't bad for building relationships (and I don't just mean romantic relationships), but they are a means to an end; not the real meat of the story.

It didn't used to be that way. When I was MUSHing in college and had all the time in the world, putzing around with hours and hours of Random Meetup RP was fun. Not any more. My free time is precious, and I want to "spend" it on something more than "Hi, how's the weather, let's share backstories or chat aimlessly about the latest IC event." Which is what 90% of Random Meetup RP ends up being.

@Ganymede I feel your pain. In fact, me and another mom were ranting about this just this weekend when someone was unreasonably late to her son's party and someone else hadn't even bothered to rsvp one way or the other. My daughter once had a party where only one kid showed up, and she was crushed.

That said, I think a lot of families are seriously overscheduled, to the point where even one more thing is stressful. I know one family with a bunch of kids who are all "we just don't do parties" because they get invited to a gazillion of them and it just gets to be a burden. I also know a family who doesn't want to be the one arriving empty-handed or with a cheap gift because of financial burdens.

So I get that there are unique situations that may preclude someone from coming. But I totally agree -- Just freaking let us know one way or the other so we can set the kid's expectations and plan appropriately. Common courtesy isn't so common these days.

@Derp said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Always have an actual plan when it comes to RP, and don't make others pick the venue/purpose. Offer concrete examples. Be flexible to negotiation. You'll find that this isn't nearly as hard as it seems.

One thing I haven't seen much of, but wonder how it would fly, is something like... "Anybody want to RP? If you're interested I'll pitch something specific to our chars and we can figure something out." That at least shows that you're willing to meet them halfway on doing the pitch work, but allows you to do something more targeted than "random scene in random public place."

@Tinuviel said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The former is easier to work with, given that sometimes we don't really get to decide when we're available, the latter is saner but not as malleable as sometimes we need.

I am always reluctant to be pinned down to a specific time, because I'm generally spacey about time and meetings (see the ADHD thread) and because my RL is kind of chaotically unpredictable. But I'm always happy to maintain a "dance card" of people I owe scenes to, and will ping them when we're both on next to see if they're up for it.

That's also partly why I made the Ares scene system work the way it did. Not everyone can multi-scene effectively, but for those who can it's nice to not have to make fake clone alts or whatever just to do it.

@egg Of course there are no guarantees (which is why a lot of Mu players stick to folks who are known quantities). I’m not saying you’re wrong to be bummed about it, but I do disagree that it’s an unreasonable amount of work to find RP. Pitch a scene on channel and take your chances. If nobody’s biting on a repeated basis during “prime time” hours, that could be a sign of an unhealthy game, or perhaps something for you to work on with your play style or character to make it easier to hook in others.

@egg said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I would have to dangle something enticing on an RP Requests channel to even get RP is some of my problem with the state of the games...

I think that the way of getting RP has simply changed through the years. What you describe as "extra work" is literally the way most people get RP outside their friends circle on the games I play.

It doesn't even have to be anything super-enticing, it just has to be something. "Anybody want to RP? I was thinking about heading down to the gym but I'm flexible."

Even setting aside the people who only do appointment-RP with their friends, most folks don't wander around the grid with their "RPOK" hat on. Even odds you'll get nobody (because they're a) worried you're AFK, b) afraid they might not be welcome, c) afraid that you won't have anything in common to RP about, or d) find something off-putting about your character or you the player) or get a ton of people sprawling into a giant slogging scene where poses take ten years.

Most of us just don't have the time or patience for that any more.

@Arkandel But random "hey have some fun" web apps and game apps don't. I think "huge barrier" is excessive for most folks, but it's added friction that I can see turning somebody off.

That is peculiar. You can try it in your browser's incognito mode and see if it's some weird caching issue. Otherwise I'm kind of at a loss, since it's working for so many other folks.

@Cupcake Just a quick google suggests it might be security software on the computer blocking it (rather than a typical network firewall). It seems to come up more often with MS Edge browser, so I don't know if it's some security thing in Edge or if that's just a coincidence.

@Cupcake You can also get the Sad Picard error if you're behind an extremely aggressive firewall. Try a force-refresh in your browser. If you're still getting the error and care to troubleshoot, you can post or PM me the console error (visible in the browser developer tools. In Chrome it's View->Developer->Developer Tools, then click on the Console tab in the developer window).

@Cupcake Seems to be working for me.

@Jaded said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

I had more fun on that character than on my other Reach characters precisely because people could not be 100% certain whom or what they were dealing with. I think in this case the whole keeping up with wikis and adding PBs was more harmful to creating RP than facilitating it.

That's totally legit, and I'm not trying to downplay your fun in that instance. Everybody's playstyle is different.

But just to offer the counter-example... on BSG:U I had a character whose backstory included being from a moon with an ongoing insurrection, and being a part of this dramatic siege/evacuation incident earlier in the war. While I'm sure I could have milked some drama doling this out as a surprise, I had at least a half-dozen deep character relationships sparked because other players had read that info in my character wiki and hooked into it somehow. Both in terms of "Oh we should have these guys butt heads - it'll be awesome" and in terms of "Let's make up a shared backstory since we were both part of The Incident/both from Insurrection Moon." That was awesome, and couldn't have happened on a closed-OOC-info game.

@Ghost said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

Sometimes it's a fight that isn't worth it, but it's a fight I think is important to keep things fair for everyone. For someone to win, someone else may have to fail.

Also absolutely. Even as much of a metagaming proponent as I am, I recognize that there are times when staff needs to step in to keep things fair.

If your character has been established in several scenes making a habit of sweeping the room for bugs prior to starting a meeting, or it's mentioned in their bio or whatever, that's one thing. But if you suddenly out of the blue decide to sweep for bugs because you read a log in which Joe was talking about bugging your office? I call BS, as a player and as a game admin.

I don't think that it's uniquely a WoD problem, though, or even a MUSH problem. In Storium for instance, all scenes are essentially public, so scheming happens out in the open and you have to trust the narrator to call people out if they're unfairly using OOC information ICly.

@Ghost said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

This has been a problem in mushing since the first WoD mush/online RPG ever. It's never going to be solved. The only fix is to target fair players who don't metagame as your core players.

Or you accept that metagaming is not a problem but a natural part of the gaming experience, and as long as it's not being used unfairly (which is in the eye of the beholder of course) does no harm at all. Again, it comes down to what kind of game you're trying to run.

For a corollary - look at video games. There are those who would cry foul that anybody utilizing internet resources to look up Minecraft strategies is a cheating metagamer and should just play the game with blinders on and get-off-my-lawn already. But I would argue that view is in the decided minority these days. As long as everyone has access to the same information, using that info to enhance your playing experience isn't inherently bad. It is a game, after all.

It depends on what type of game you're trying to run.

If you're going for OOC Competition or a MUD-like feel where it's more about immersion and putting blinders on to seeing only what your character sees, then I can understand wanting to limit the share of OOC information. Some MUDs as I understand take this to extremes of not even allowing OOC communication at all.

But I much prefer a community storytelling game, and the transparency of logs, wikis, profiles, etc. is invaluable there in making RP happen, keeping up with things your character would logically know (which you, the player, might otherwise not know), telling better stories and just generally sharing the experience as a community.

Sure, there are occasionally abuses - but anyone who thinks that the OOC Masq back in the day wasn't abused is deluding themselves. For every wiki-stalker coloring their RP in a shady fashion, I've seen literally dozens of good cases of transparency. Even if it's something as simple as "Wow that char has a cool hook; I need to go play with them" or "Oh that's a neat story; I want to get in on that" or "What can we RP about? Oh I see our chars are both into surfing. Let's meet on the beach."

I would never play on a secretive game. I also love PBs, but Ghost and I have argued about that before so there's no need to rehash it for the umpteenth time