Posts made by faraday

@kumakun said in How would you format a log for publishing?:

What do you think of the Storium style formatting of collaborative fiction? It reads like a PbP, but it formats so that it's easy to follow PbP, with the art and character portraits and what not. I haven't looked into Ares a whole lot, but you're doing something similar with your scene system? The addition of visuals to break up the walls of text?

Ares does that while the scene is going on, but that's mostly a UX thing since individual poses can be edited/deleted while the scene's still in-progress. After the scene is over, it converts to a regular old narrative, with only system emits called out separately from the regular poses to help those who skim. (example)

My first version used the storium type style for completed logs, too, but people generally hated it. And it made it harder to edit/copy the entire log. So I ditched it.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

It might be perfectly understandable and natural, but that doesn't make it sensible. If people are seriously invested in something it makes more sense, at least to me, for that investment to come with a payoff at the end. A finale rather than a cancellation, if you will.

Well I can't really disagree with the logic of it, but given that even professional TV-show-runners can't be bothered to adopt this sensible model ("I've got a great idea guys! Let's end our low-rated show season on a CLIFFHANGER!"), I hold out no hope for the average MU runner to plan for a limited series run. Everybody wants to be the umpteen-season CSI or Grey's Anatomy. Nobody wants to plan for only getting one season.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

Every other entertainment source has an end. A film ends, a book ends. The only thing I can really relate it to is perhaps a long-running television show that refuses to end in spite of all evidence that it should. Stories end, and so should games. And that's something players should have on their list of things to expect right out of the gate.

Yes, but I think that "long-running TV series" is exactly the mental model that people come to MUSHes with. Many games are literally based on TV shows.
Some games embrace the model outright with "arcs" and "seasons" but when you strip a MU down and look at the basic underpinnings... they're all pretty much exactly like nighttime TV dramas, right down to "OMG what else could possibly happen to this poor guy" (re: lead character) and "jump the shark" story moments when the storytellers start to run out of good ideas.

So the fact that game-runners don't plan for an ending and people invested in characters don't want them to leave the "show" seems perfectly understandable and natural to me. It's exactly how most folks approach their TV shows.

@pyrephox Yeah it's fun to go back and read your own logs, or to keep up with logs on your games because you have a personal connection to the story. But reading random logs from random games is really kind of jarring.

It's been done, most (in?)famously by Otherspace back in the day.

The rights issues are the obvious stumbling block there. Otherspace had an advantage in that the world, at least, was original. Trying to do that with a Game of Thrones or Star Trek MU would be begging for a lawsuit. But a lot of people (including me) were very uncomfortable with the idea that playing on a game meant their characters/stories/writing were fair game for someone else to publish.

As far as formatting goes - I think MU wikis / log formatters take the general approach of making it seem like regular fiction. I.e. no pose breaks or other intrusive formatting. Just the text, ma'am.

Where I think it really breaks down is that MU scenes don't hang together like regular fiction does. There's neither an overarching story arc like you'd find in a novel, nor the stand-alone stories that you'd find in a short story anthology.

ETA: Many MU wikis outlast their MUSHes - often by years and years. (witness BSG Cerb's wiki, circa 2011) So I think there's already ways for the story to live on.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

I've noticed, of late (ie the last... five or so years?), that the demand part of 'on-demand' seems to be more and more at the forefront of considerations for both players and game-runner-designers. Especially in the form of 'this game has to last forever because I want to keep doing this specific thing forever.' Is this sort of open-ended-sandboxy-thing something we should be encouraging, or working away from?

I don't know - I haven't seen that, personally. I think folks expecting their game to go on forever and ever aren't being very realistic. Most games just don't last like that. But at the same time, there's such an investment in building a game that people don't want it to just fizzle out in a couple months. So - a happy middle ground, I guess, is what I think people should shoot for? If I can get 2 years out of a game (either as a player or as a runner) I'm happy.

What I meant by on-demand was that if people can't log in and find RP, they just won't log in. There are too many competing forms of entertainment for the majority of people to sit there twiddling their thumbs looking at an empty who list night after night. If I want to wait days between activity, I can do PBP.

@kumakun said in What drew you to MU*?:

Another problem with the PBEM model, if one important person goes missing the whole story crumbles. I love how MU*s can continue and even thrive as individuals are active or not. The possibilities for storylines are endless!

Yep. The scale works in favor of MUSHes. If one person drops or is on vacation that week it's (generally) not the end of the world. The on-demand access to entertainment 24/7 is part of what sets it apart from other forms of online RPGs. It's also why MUs pretty much need a critical mass of players to function. Without that it becomes more like PBP where you're constantly trying to catch up with a few specific people.

@paris said in What drew you to MU*?:

A lot of us MUSHers are disabled or struggle to get out of the house in general

This. It's a social activity that you can do from home. You can get a similar experience in MMOs with guilds, but MMOs are grindy and guilds are more hit-or-miss than MUSH communities. Also, if I AFK for a few minutes to take care of my kid during a MU scene, people pose around me. If I do that in a WoW raid, everyone dies. (LoL my char was never important enough for that. But the analogy still holds.)

For me it's the intersection of real-time, online, collaborative RP/writing.

Other formats have various combinations of the above, but MUSHing is the only one that hits all the buttons.

The "real-time" thing is, I think, the big one that's unique to MUSHing. I've tried PBP and Storium games and the pacing there is just excruciatingly slow. And I think because of that slow, disjointed pacing you don't seem to have a lot of the same community aspects.

@arkandel Seems to be doing fine on the Tomato-meter, but for a contrasting review see: EW giving it a C-.

@surreality said in Setup ChimeMUX + MediaWiki on Digital Ocean:

@faraday Yes and no. You can save snapshots of a droplet that you can create a new droplet from at any time, and they're pennies a month to store.

Yes, but I've done it for Ares as well and it felt more like a PITA. Creating the cloned snapshot (so you don't lose your original), waiting for them to accept ownership (and you get charged for the snapshot in the meantime), etc. Also sometimes they change plans, and your snapshot gets associated with a different cost tier... it's not as simple as it should be IMHO. YMMV obviously.

@misadventure said in MU Things I Love:

How do the players actually RP through any of this, without any details? How many times can they RP through that kind of thing with that level of abstraction?

Yeah, you can't have an actual RPed-out conversation about an abstract idea. At some point, asking "what are you going to do now" requires somebody understanding what they can do now in enough detail to RP about it.

For example, take a Scotty-type character. If it's a big space battle and your part is fixing the engine before it explodes, it's fine to technobabble your way out of it with a few hand-wavey poses. But if you want to do an entire plot about some tech challenge, you're going to need to get into the gory details a bit.

@skew Unfortunately Digital Ocean doesn't let you just tuck away an image to make clones for people easily like that. It's kinda annoying the way they have it set up, and it costs you $5/mo to keep the base "master clone" server active. (ETA: Apparently they fixed that; you can now keep a snapshot around without the master. It's still kinda a pain to use though IMHO.)

That's snazzy. Nice job.

@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:

There are a lot of things I've just designed a certain way explicitly because that's how FS3 does or does not work, and I think that's a lot better than designing a system you love and then trying to smoosh it in.

Yeah, I think the reason you've been so successful is because you've limited yourself to doing things that work well within the existing framework. FS3 has first aid healing - you've made a magical heal spell. FS3 has explosions - you've made a magical fireball, etc. With an original system you have the flexibility to fit within that framework. When you're trying to model something pre-existing, it gets messy, as seen in this discussion about why FS3 doesn't really model Jedi powers well at all for a Star Wars game.

@il-volpe If you use Ares, you also have a couple other skill system options ready-made. One of them might be better suited to a magic system than FS3. FWIW.

@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

I agree , when expressing discomfort or dissatisfaction is used to try to "win" and get your way. But I think you can have situations where that isnt the case (which is what I assumed Faraday meant) and so if you want to negotiate and are up for that ooc, starting off with "change or leave" may not be the best approach. Because that can and does trigger people who would have perhaps worked with you to find something more agreeable or mutually agreed upon to just say "ok then, bye."
Its like starting off a disagreement or annoyance with your spouse or partner by throwing in a "we can just divorce or break up then!"

Yeah that's what I was trying to get at. Maybe my example wasn't the best.

@pyrephox Oh yes, I agree completely. All I meant was that insisting that somebody change their behavior to suit you is just as bad as insisting that somebody accept your behavior. (Again - unless said behavior is objectively horrible/creepy.) Sometimes the best answer is just for both sides to acknowledge irreconcilable differences.

@arkandel said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:

I can be told I was wrong in insisting you play it out with me.

I don't think it's quite that black and white though:

"Your character is an emotional train wreck and I can't deal with that. I insist on you toning it down if you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with my character."

"My character is an emotional train wreck. If you want to continue RPing out an IC relationship with our characters, you have to take the good with the bad."

Neither of these approaches is really a good way of handling things, even if one is driven by "I'm uncomfortable". They're both insisting / making ultimatums, which is a poor approach to take in any collaborative endeavor.

It's really not about right and wrong (unless someone is being out-and-out creepy/offensive) it's more about communication and negotiation.

Yeah, MOO doesn't really use a mainstream programming language, though it is far closer to one than MUSHCode.

@Sparks Automated encounters isn't really my jam personally (too MUD-like for me) but it sounds like an impressive system. Kudos.

How do you (or do you?) prevent groups from just being completely stymied if they didn't bring along the right magic mix of PCs to address the challenges in a particular shard? "Oh well - none of us have the right skills to get through the magic door. Guess we're done." I would think you'd want it to be challenging but not flat-out impossible. Are the challenges geared towards the group?

@fatefan DO got rid of a lot of their pre-configured droplets and I believe MediaWiki was one of them.