Posts made by faraday

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I wonder though if treating the plugin system in a way that's similar to Nodes NPM or Python's PIP, where dependencies are installed with the plugin, might help alleviate some of that pain.

Not really. Because it's not just a matter of "X plugin depends on Y" but "X plugin depends on Y in this particular way." In other words, it's not just a dependency but an API with dynamic qualities.

Just for example - Ares supports plugins for several different RPG skills systems (FS3, Cortex, Fate, FFG). You can easily install the base code for the plugin, but what if you want to:

• Display the character sheet on the character's web portal profile.
• Incorporate tabs for assigning abilities into the web portal chargen.
• Warn them about any errors in the chargen app review?

There are tons of these kinds of dependencies throughout a MU system, and making all of that "100% plug and play" was a level of complexity far and above what I was willing to do for Ares.

@tat said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

It can also be highly customized, if you want to code it.

Yeah, the philosophy was to work out of the box and be highly configurable for folks who have no coder, but also be extensible for games who want to do their own thing.

If you want something radically different, though, it's probably better to start with a blank slate like Evennia rather than try to work within the confines of a system with set assumptions.

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I think a premade integrations 'gallery' is a great idea!

It is a nice idea, but I think you'll find that easier said than done. Many MU systems interact with each other. You can make a system that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but if you try to take out a piece it leaves a hole you have to deal with. It's not like, say, Wordpress plugins where the Events calendar plugin doesn't really need to interact with the SEO plugin or the slider plugin.

@skew said in Coming Soon: Chontio, a Star Wars Stand Alone MUSH:

As such, I'll be standing up my own server today, and copying everything from Chontio onto that server. @faraday has agreed to help, so I think it'll all go smoothly.

In the interests of transparency, I just wanted to confirm that I'm on board with this. Alex hasn't posted on MSB in almost a month, hasn't posted on the Ares Discord in several weeks, and hasn't been reachable via any other means. Alex had given skew access to the server shell, which is basically the "keys to the kingdom" as far as I'm concerned. This demonstrates a great deal of trust, and skew has done a ton of work building and setting up the game/wiki.

Having been on the receiving end of a headwiz suddenly going AWOL right before opening (on Battlestar Pacifica), I am sympathetic to skew's situation. Given skew's pledge to work things out with Alex if he does return, I think it's in the best interests of the MU community for this game to open on a stable server.

(To be clear - I have no involvement in the game itself other than helping with this transfer and some Ares setup questions/bugfixes.)

Once I used the wrong syntax for the parent() function, and instead of querying to find out which objects in the database were parented to the comlink object, I accidentally re-parented every single object in the database to the comlink object.

Thank goodness for backups.

@mietze said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

I think people can truly adore unlikable characters based on how they're written (or like in the case of a TV show, how they are portrayed), in a love to hate way. For me an example would be John Smith in the latest TV series of Man in the High Castle. Do I like him as someone who I'd love to hang out with? NO.

I think this is the rub when it comes to MU characters... a crap-ton of RP is just, basically, people hanging out. So if you have a character that you wouldn't love to hang out with, that really makes it hard to work them into a lot of scenes.

So I think characters like that on a MU are best left as alts who show up occasionally, stir up some trouble, and then go away for awhile. That also helps to create a buffer for the players of both the antagonist and antagonized.

@mietze First person accounts ARE evidence, but it has to be balanced with what the other person has to say about it and their credibility too. I’m not weighing in on this specific instance because I don’t know enough about it. I’m just saying that in general it’s not easy to sort messes like these out.

@botulism Agree with the sentiment, but in practice it’s not that simple. I’ve no doubt that @arkandel wants to do the right thing, but if wrongdoing isn’t happening in front of you and there’s no actual evidence beyond someone saying “so and so did this bad thing somewhere else” — it’s often not clear what the right thing actually is. It’s a fine line between holding someone accountable and guilt-by-accusation alone.

@tinuviel Technically what I was responding to was:

@tinuviel said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

If a game can't survive without you, you're doing it wrong.

I think we just had different views about what "survive without you" meant. It's all good.

@tinuviel said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

And that is literally what I'm talking about.

Yeah I think it was just a misunderstanding.

What I (and I think others) read: "Having a game that can't run without you if you decide you don't want to do it any more is doing it wrong."

What I think you were actually saying is more like: "Having all everyday decisions on a game funneling through a single person to the point where nobody can do anything meaningful without that person is a terrible idea." Which I agree with.

@tinuviel said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

If a game can't survive without you, you're doing it wrong.

I think it's more about whether you've made yourself a bottleneck to reasonable RP. I've run almost all of my games by myself, but they all gave players a lot of freedom to run things on their own (i.e. "just don't burn the place down.") and tools (like +combat and plot hooks) to do so. They were also set up so players weren't constantly at odds with each other (because PvP requires a different level of refereeing.) My games have weathered any number of RL illnesses and vacations through the years without issue.

A game like that could run for ages without staff intervention if players were being proactive about doing their own stuff.

And if they weren't? Well, their loss. My reasons for running a game this way are more important to me than the potential of the game not surviving without me.

@mietze said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

Sometimes if your primary interest is in more personal stories (that are unlikely to be affected by staffers anyway) and you've got a good group going who also don't care too much about absent (or incompetent) staff, then it's worth staying until the environment bugs you too much.

This. Also it depends on the game and how much autonomy they ceded to players and how much the coded systems support you. It's hard to make grand, sweeping generalizations.

@arkandel said in Historical settings:

Even in the most consent-based games I've played someone could say things without requiring consent. So for example if I'm throwing a knife at your PC you can say it didn't hit you; if I'm throwing N-bombs you can't say I never said it. And if you're offended on an OOC level consent won't mean much.

Obviously it depends on the game and it's policies, but there's a difference between consent (which, yes, is more geared towards the knife example) and cooperation (which implies a philosophy of how players are expected to approach each other and work together in game). I would argue that if cooperative storytelling is your game's mission statement, then engaging someone with offensive language is running contrary to that mission.

@three-eyed-crow said in Historical settings:

I also probably wouldn't run a pure historical game at this point in my life.

For me it comes down to respecting your fellow players. This is why I prefer cooperative/consent-ish games. There's a world of difference between someone throwing their character's IC ignorance around obnoxiously and someone leveraging that in a cooperative way to make an interesting story for all involved.

It's the difference between asking someone "Hey, is it going to bother you if my character responds badly to your female doctor? If so, I can bow out or take a different approach..." or - even better - working that into a story of how maybe you guys can learn to work together - versus just getting all up in someone's face under the banner of "But it's IC!"

@kanye-qwest said in Historical settings:

Not even remotely. But I think straight up comparing a work of fiction to interactive fiction where there are multiple people taking part and playing single characters and investing emotion into those singular arcs is a false equivalence. It is absolutely not the same thing.

I respectfully disagree. To use another example - actors engaging in interactive fiction in improv troupes has a lot in common with MUSHing. A given group may create boundaries of what stories they're going to tell for the comfort of the group, and that's totally fine. They may avoid historical settings with particular hot-button types of characters for that very reason. But I think any acting troupe worth its salt who decided to take on a historical setting would acknowledge that they're each playing characters and that their characters' views do not equate to the views of the actors.

ETA: The tone of the story is important too in this discussion. Dr. Quinn, for example, was a very family-friendly show that probably wouldn't have offended a lot of people. But even there they addressed bigotry and the treatment of Native Americans inherent in that historical setting as important parts of the story. It was done with a light touch befitting the audience, but it was still there. Reflecting the historical time period doesn't have to mean people running around yelling slurs left and right.

@kanye-qwest said in Historical settings:

objectively, 100% - discrimination is bad. If you are taking part in it, you are doing a bad thing and deserve the corrective heat that comes your way for it.

Yes, 100%, no question whatsoever, discrimination in real life is bad.

But this is fiction we're talking about. Do you really think that whoever wrote Schindler's List is a terrible human being because they had some historically-appropriate bad guys in it doing bad things?

I 100% support anyone who doesn't want to engage in these themes because it makes them uncomfortable. But I'm not going to judge someone poorly because they react to my 1866 female doctor with historically-appropriate skepticism or disdain. It would actually be a little jarring to me if I were playing on a modestly-thematic historical game and they didn't.

@surreality said in Historical settings:

It is somewhat camouflaged by the fact that it gets classified as 'avoiding hot-button political issues' rather than 'avoiding unpleasant historical realities', but it is ultimately the very same animal in practice

It's definitely similar, for sure. But I do think there's a pretty big difference between, for example, "Women in the military are sometimes mistreated" and "Women can't serve in the military, period." The differences are even starker for the treatment of minorities. The underlying theme, of course, is the same, but skirting around it is far less problematic IMHO on a modern game than a historical one.

@wizz Heh, that's kinda what I've heard, and I presumed why someone used that moniker for the game.

And it's like @bored said -- sometimes you can just say "heck with history" and it works because the history is secondary.

But when it's supposed to be "Hollywood history in a small town Wyoming in 1866" yet you've got the livery being run by an gunslinging female rancher, the hotel run by a white widow having an affair with an ex-slave, one of the town's three doctors being an educated free African American, the seamstress being a transgender woman married on the d/l, a couple of Chinese immigrants running an apothecary down the road....man, I love each and every one of those characters individually, but you put them all together in a population of a few hundred, and, like, how much resemblance does it actually bear to real history any more?

I'm not saying I'd change anything if I had it to do over again, because the only alternatives to "everyone is special" is to either make nobody special, or ration "special-ness". I wasn't prepared to do either one. But there were consequences to that, and a lot of flak from those folks who wanted their historical games a bit more... historical.

@wizz said in Historical settings:

................because both of those sound amazing

LOL. I've never actually seen Twin Peaks, so forgive me if this is a gross mis-characterization, but I think it was more of: "Oh goodness, how did all of these incredibly unusual people end up in this one small town what is going on here?!?!" Twin Peaks 1866

@bored said in Historical settings:

After that, it's probably easier to address the players who is nonetheless continuing to press things too far (IE: excluding the female doctor above from plots vs. 'A lady physician? My word!') as individual problem cases. There are always going to be people who want to press that RP whether or not its supported in your theme (I think I recall mention of hostile sexist players on, say, a BSG game, where the setting is totally fantastic AND does nothing to support it).
This turns back to the old adage that you can't design around bad players.

Definitely. But without those red lines being clearly drawn, then the guy who's all "We don't need any help from a lady with delusions of being a physician, thank-you-very-much" doesn't know they're being a problem player. As far as they're concerned, they're just playing appropriate to the actual historical setting. (As opposed to on a BSG game, where RL -isms are established as not existing in canon, and anybody trying to push them is firmly beyond the bounds of the setting.)

Any RPG system will have its haters. I personally avoid D20 like the plague. Some folks hate FS3. Others hate Fate. I wouldn't really sweat it. If the game is interesting enough and/or their friends are there, most folks will suck it up and play regardless. And if not? Their prerogative.