Posts made by faraday

@Sparks said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

That said, despite all these hassles, it's an interesting project to tackle! If you choose to go forward with it, I wish you luck; it'd be an interesting result to see, and might well be useful to folks out there!

Yeah I have concerns about it being feasible from a technical and UX perspective, but I think it's a worthwhile goal to try out.

@Sparks Yeah that does sound feasible, but it's still not something that your off-the-shelf Penn/Tiny/Rhost game is going to support. You'd have to have that intermediate server to manage the connections to the various games. That's a bit more involved than just making an Alexa skill to talk to games directly, and it invokes privacy concerns and so forth.

And I share your concern about the skill UX too. Having to say "get me new activity from <game>" over and over is not great UX.

@Sparks Can Alexa hold onto a connection like a MUSH client or a web browser websocket does? I didn't really think it worked that way and would need a completely asynchronous API. But I confess I haven't really looked into it much so I could be completely wrong.

@GamerNGeek

Coding the FFG system is a real PITA -- not only because the dice are weird, but chargen is full of special cases and rules that are not very machine-friendly.

But here's some MUSHCode for the most basic FFG roll stuff. I did it as a demo for someone way back. It's incomplete and unsupported, but it might get you started: GitHub

It uses a syntax of +ffgroll <proficiency>+<ability>+<boost> vs <challenge>+<difficulty>+<setback>.

AresMUSH has a more comprehensive FFG plugin that lets you set your skills in chargen and just do roll Firearms+2C or whatever, but the code is a lot more complicated: GitHub

The Ares FFG plugin was used on Chontio. It's not a pure representation of the Star Wars FFG system, taking cues from FFG's generic Genesys system, but it's something.

Both of those implementations operate on the same basic idea: You program in a fixed set of possible results for each type of die. For instance, the Ability die can come up as either nothing, 1/2 successes, 1/2 advantages, or one of each. So to roll an Ability die in code, you just roll 1d8 and map it to one of those eight possible outcomes.

Nice job. And thanks for the shout-out.

@Arkandel said in City of Shadows:

Do we check if years have passed between raising Medicine from 3 (medical school graduate level) and 4 (experienced doctor level)? No, although it'd take that long.

Well umm... some of us in some of our systems do? Staff just has to decide what level of realism they want in their game and then stick to it. But I agree with you in general that if you don't want a player to have something, just say no. Don't make the obstacles silly.

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

@Auspice — something I have learned roommates are excellent for is periodically asking "have you actually eaten?"

(My answer has historically been "oops" more often than it should be. Hopefully the meds change that!)

Kids are good for that too. "Mom, when are you gonna start dinner?" Ooops.

The days when they're at their dad's house are the ones when I tend to get wickedly off-schedule and eat dinner at 9pm or something stupid.

@Auspice Substitute times and dinner instead of lunch, and that was me yesterday.

I have a special playlist on my ipod for falling asleep to when my brain won't turn off. It has somber instrumental sountracks mainly.

@friarzen Yeah I think that's the same effect you see on a Trek or Battlestar game. Everyone's together, but you can still venture out for missions to get the "space is big" feel. It works really well in a MUSH environment.

@Cura said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

I've thought recently that experimenting with extending that window might be interesting. What if one RL week is one IC week, but a player gets to RP those days however they like in each window, like the proverbial stretchy rubber sheet of time? It would put characters on different days within their given weeks, but that may not actually be any more problematic than leaving them to fudge things a bit in the name of getting RP in, and it would make people think about how they wanted to spend their time.

It's an interesting idea. I've actually been on a couple of games that did this. It... kinda works?

The issue you get into is sequencing scenes. If there's no general agreement on which day it is ICly, you can get things like: "Well, Bob thinks this happens on Tuesday in his timeline but Suzy was in Paris on Tuesday and Liam got shot on Monday so..."

With traditional IC time systems we have that problem with backscenes. When you have a hazy IC time system, you have to do that dance no every scene.

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

if you're on a Mage game set in Maine but you and your buddies spend most of the time living in Manhattan then why are you even on that game?

But if staff has gone out of their way to build Manhattan and tout it as an active faction, then it's hardly your fault for making a character who's based there.

That has happened to me so many times on multi-planet sci-fi games it's not even funny.

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Travel in most novels and all TV shows and movies happens at exactly the speed of plot. Which is to say that if the writers need it to take a while it does and if they don't, it doesn't.

That's not entirely true though. TV shows have a sense of continuity. If in one episode the writers establish that it takes 7 days to get from Persephone to Ariel, then good writer teams will stick to that moving forward.

Nobody's perfect of course, and they might change things. When you're doing a TV show, you can own your plot holes, retcon whatever you like, and it doesn't really affect anybody else. But changing the continuity for a community-driven game like a MUSH has ripples that affect everybody.

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either. (Weirdly corrupt favoritism aside.) You see the same thing in MMOs with coded economies too. People with more time on their hands end up with a decided advantage over casual players pretty quickly. That's what I remember from my brief excursions into sim-based MUs early on -- feeling the grind. Nothing against folks who like that style of game (or want to run that kind of game), but if I want a grind, I'll go play a video game. (Or not, since I don't much like grindy video games either.) I do MUSHes to tell stories.

@Lotherio said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Taking onto feeling of big versus actual grid big. Most of those follow one group/crew, there is lots of new planets, but the central focus is a space port or ship or some such.

I think this is an important point. Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars (within a particular set of movies), etc. - they had the whole galaxy as their playground, sure, but the story being told focused on a group of characters who were together in that playground. (Occasional side quests and away team missions aside.)

There are TV shows that can make disjointed storytelling work - GoT for instance, where characters are quite often in completely different parts of the world doing their own thing. But on a MUSH, that physical separation limits the population of players you can RP with at any moment, and imposes additional burden on the storytelling staff, who now have to manage multiple parallel storylines/casts.

@Ghost said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

So if I'm right, this has less to do about the desire for coded space flight, but the desire to move away from light systems in favor of something crunchier and more technical.

I think this is at the heart of the issue, yeah. I was talking to someone about that demo Firefly site I set up, and we got to talking about the fact that it doesn't have a gear system. But the thing is - a gear system can't exist in isolation. What does the gear do? How do you acquire the gear? You go down that rabbit hole and pretty soon you're talking a fully integrated economy/space/weapons system. There's nothing wrong with that, but these systems need to be in balance somehow.

@Jennkryst I'm not disagreeing with you that AoA feels more like Star Wars than Chontio. I'm just arguing that code (or lack thereof) is not the principal driving factor in that disparity.

ETA: I meant for folks in general. Obviously you feel how you feel about it. If flying a coded ship makes it feel more real than +shuttle Tatooine, more power to you.

@Jennkryst Comparing Chontio to AoA and attributing the difference to crunchy code is a false equivalence. As you pointed out, Chontio used to have a lot more activity before staff got steamrolled by RL. And it lacked a lot of the traditional thematic trappings of a Star Wars game, focusing on regional politics instead of jedi and smugglers and rebels and such. This is not meant as a criticism of them; I'm just saying that Chontio wasn't traditional Star Wars irrespective of what coded systems they have, so any activity comparisons to other SW games are apples vs. oranges.

Also, narrative-centric games are in no way unique to WoD. "Just handwave gear" isn't inherently a bad thing for techies if there are other ways for them to get involved in the narrative. Story requires conflict. If the code isn't creating conflict, then the players/staff must create it. Our techies on BSP (back in the day) had a fair amount to do even without a lick of code.

That said, I do agree that simulation-heavy games have the advantage of letting players entertain themselves even when story is not readily available, and there are a lot of players who enjoy them. (Case in point: the popularity of Arx, Firan and every RPI/MUD). Simulation can also support the story on narrative-centric games by offloading some of the work. (e.g. FS3 combat on all the BSG games). So I'm not saying that all simulation is bad. It just comes down to what kind of game you want to run and your players want to play.

My main issue with space travel is games is when people are zipping around the galaxy just to find RP even if the theme says they shouldn't (either because of travel times or resource constraints). That just breaks immersion for me. If you want a spread-out game, make it so the characters have reasons to move around. Your bartender on Persephone just isn't going to be space-hopping willy-nilly.

@Sunny said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

It's not a fair request to make of somebody.

It's a fair thing to discuss the pros/cons of a fresh start with somebody who's professed goal is "we want people to come play on our Firefly game". Nobody has a right to demand anything of them, sure, but I don't see anyone doing that.

They can't escape the fact that SerenityMUSH has a lot of red flags that others have already pointed out (lack of control over the server and database, lurking dinos who could come back and upend things at any moment, fragile code, etc.). To say nothing of just the horrible reputation the game has acquired over the years. They have to decide whether the nostalgia factor is balanced out by that baggage.

@SerenityMush said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

If it were only a question of digging a few rooms and handing out a few weapons and ships, sure, I'd be happy to do it, but it will require so much more.

That entirely depends on what kind of game you want. If you think that the coded H-Space/DSS/Com/Medpack/Econ code is an essential selling point of the game you want to run - then yeah, absolutely, starting from scratch makes no sense.

In contrast though - here's a game I set up this morning using the Cortex skills system (which is what the Serenity RPG uses) just to prove a point that it can be just a question of digging a few rooms (with ships represented as rooms) and telling stories if you want it to be.

And if you don't? That's cool. Best of luck to you.

@Cupcake said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

An Ares/FS3 version would set my heart pitter-patter.

Yeah, what brings me to the Firefly setting are the stories. Coded space? Gear? Money? Cargo runs? No thank you.

All that stuff gets in the way for me. Just give me a grid and a simple skills system (FS3, Fate, whatever) and let me tell stories. I could set up an Ares game like that for someone in an hour. I just don't want to run it, or write a ton of custom code for systems I have a philosophical objection to

***=I'm not sure this is a spoiler (for Endgame, that is), but just in case...***