Posts made by faraday

@thenomain It wasn't mixing tenses.

@auspice Sorry for double post. Editing tough on my phone

That hasn't been my experience, FWIW. Every game I've made up a character for has started with a full "cast". But more than half don't get more than a scene or two for the reasons I described.

Storium is very narrator-centric, so like a tabletop RPG your experience will vary wildly depending on the GM and the players.

@thenomain You can do separate scenes and separate challenges (and that tends to help games go more smoothly) but most games don’t. The gameplay is geared towards modeling a tabletop setting (everyone generally together tackling common challenges) rather than a more distributed MU style of people going their own ways.

@ganymede said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Have you tried Role? It's an app.

No. It bills itself more as a 'party game' version of a RPG, so not really my thing.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

I've yet to play a Storium game to get much further than introduction and setup.

@auspice said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Not one single Storium game I've been in has ever gotten past the initial setup / "scene."

This is a common complaint, but I do think people (not necessarily you - but in general) are quick to blame the technology for what is really a social problem.

I've been part of several ongoing Storium games, and the one thing they all have in common is a narrator that keeps things moving. The better narrators (and they're the exception rather than the rule, I admit) know how to structure the challenges in a way that doesn't require everyone's participation, and then skip over people when they drop out. This is really not so different from successful MUSH storytelling.

I mean, imagine what would happen if you set up a MUSH but then told people: "You can only pose in this one scene this week, and it involves everyone on the game, and you have to wait for the storyteller in-between rounds, and 1/3rd of the players are going to drop out before the first scene even finishes." It wouldn't work very well! But that's not a problem with the technology, it's a problem with the way the game is structured.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Plus I can't think of another language where creating a plugin architecture is as easy as Python. Not that I've used in recent memory anyways

Actually the reason I chose Ruby of Python for Ares was because the dynamic language features of Ruby were better-suited (IMHO) to a plugin-based architecture.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

I've noticed a trend in Discord discord since returning. ... Or if it's the accessibility of the platform.

Chat client RP has been around almost as long as MUSHes have. Once upon a time it was AOL chatrooms, later IRC, now Discord. For simple, freeform RP it's hard to beat "create an account on Discord and go!" - both in terms of game setup and game playing. MUSHes are way more involved. The learning curve is steeper, the culture is in many ways off-putting, and setting up a game is prohibitively difficult.

I'm not aware of anyone doing a game in node.js. Part of what you need to consider is how people are going to extend your code with their own custom code, and I think a more approachable language like Python/Ruby helps a lot there.

@kumakun said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

Are we moving in a direction where we're going to have to figure out how to ditch the classic terminal and adopt something more accessible? What keeps us from becoming another PbP community, or Storium, or is that where we're headed?

I think the "live" nature of MUSHing is a key ingredient that sets it apart from those other kinds of communities. I don't see it going full PbP, but I do see it shifting more towards chat clients like Slack and Discord in the way we interact with it. Especially on mobile.

@zombiegenesis said in MU* Server Technology/Features. What do you WANT, what do you SEE?:

can't have 2 word names, it capitalizes every word, can't have lower case aliases, and a few others

Side note - some of these have already or could be addressed, if you'd like to discuss more in a separate thread.

@skew said in Useful code on player bit:

So, yes. Please let Ares let me have sound. Please.

I added a beep command (coming in the next patch) so you can trigger that from your client for whatever events you wish. Though, interestingly, none of the Mac clients I tried seem to even respect the beep at all. (Not even the beep on PennMUSH.) But it's there, at least, for clients that support it.

@jonah42175 said in How to start?:

I know I should throw out a "Scene anyone?" line, but most of those seem to get frowned upon and considered needy.

It's not considered needy at all on the games I've been on - in fact it's the principal way for people to get together outside of events.

Bar/coffee RP is still a staple of MUSHing but I think it's better if you can come up with a more creative way/place to meet new people. Games should have multiple hangouts for such purpose.

@ganymede said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

Shouldn't two humans of equal skill prevail against each other 5 out of 10 times?

No, because of ties. You can see that reflected in the "Chance of a Draw" data table in that article I linked to before.

@skew Understandable, though you could also set up a trigger in the client to beep at you when the code says "It's your turn to pose." pose/fixed is a neat idea though.

@skew said in Useful code on player bit:

a poseorder that makes noise when it's your turn to pose

You mean, like, literally noise using the ANSI beep?

@melpomene said in Useful code on player bit:

I'm sort of surprised no one else has a stack of useful stuff they stick on their player bits by default. I can't be the only one who does this and I've been doing it for years - custom descers (basically a thing to list descs and swap between them), note-to-self type code... heck, I even threw an entire dice roller onto myself on one game that didn't have one. (It was dirt-simple but worked for what I needed it for.)

Not really, no. I tend to build that kind of stuff in as globals on my games, so I've never needed to have player-specific utilities. Ares has most (if not all) of this stuff built in - afk indications, friends lists, dice roller, outfits system. I'm curious to know what other little utilities people have, though, to see if there are any gaps. Because like Arx (as @skew mentioned), Ares doesn't allow player utility code.

@thenomain said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

Your optimism is overwhelming. Thanks.

The math doesn't really care about one's optimism. Numbers don't lie. Assuming you use the system Gany outlined:

Expert human (11) beats Expert human (11) -- 4 out of 10 times.
Expert vampire (15) beats Expert human (11) -- 6 out of 10 times.

If you think a 20% boost is an appropriate model for a vampire with an expert Presence or Dominate - hey, go for it. But that doesn't really sound like what @Ganymede wanted when she said "bend the odds in favor of a vampire expert against a mortal expert substantially."

I'm just trying to help Gany get the kind of system she wants. Why are you giving me such grief about it?

ETA: I plugged in slightly wrong numbers above because I missed the fact that Gany was suggesting changing the entire rating scale from 1-4/1-8 to 1-5/1-5 (which has other issues I won't go into here) but my basic point still stands.

@thenomain said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

"Because Ganymede Wants It To Work" is a reason to make it work, and makes me think it can be done because she thinks it can be done. There are few people I would say that about.

I have no doubt that a determined enough coder could cobble something together, but I remain unconvinced it will work in the way she wants it to work because of the mathematics of the system (which is probably not obvious to anyone who hasn't poured over the mechanics documents).

Obviously nothing I say can (or even should) stop someone from pursuing something they believe in. But when the math doesn't appear to support their desired outcome, I feel obliged to point that out and at least try to save them what I believe will be frustration and disappointment.

It hasn't worked out too well in the past, but hey - first time for everything.

@thenomain said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

There is a "WoD Lite" system, the ones that introduced the nWoD v1 games in the quickstart guides. It might not be the "lite" that Ganymede wants (and almost certainly isn't), but it exists and is light.

All the more reason not to use FS3 (ducks)

@apos said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

It's hard to think of a game system I actually get excited over that isn't implicitly tied to a setting that I'd find interesting. oWoD Demon single sphere, Ars Magica, Earthdawn as examples that come to mind

Earthdawn is a neat system but it's pretty tied to the lore of the game. And it has some interesting min-maxy quirks (step 7 is my nemesis). But I still enjoy it.

@ganymede wrote:

and, in turn, bend the odds in favor of a vampire expert against a mortal expert substantially.

But that’s what I’m saying: mortal 10 vs Vamp 15 just doesn’t give the Vamp a substantial advantage, mathematically.

Anyway, probably fodder for a different topic. Just meant it as a FYI.

@ganymede said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

And, if that's the case, all that you really have to do is describe what a certain level in Dominate or Presence can allow a character to do and create a mechanical roll for it. Faraday's code does the second part very well, so all that matters is how well one does the first part.

I applaud the concept of making a "WoD Lite" for MUSHing, but FS3 is really probably not the right vehicle for it. It is scaled for mortal conflict, and once you go beyond the "best of human ability" level, the dice just get silly and your rating 20 vampire is really not much better than your rating 13 vampire. Plus it has zero concept of "powers" built in. Even if you went to the considerable trouble to add that, using powers to augment abilities (as many WoD powers work) again runs into the same dice issue as the 20/13 example. So I really just don't think the math works.

Genesys' traits system or Cortex's assets system both would probably model super powers better - and both are provided (in minimal form, at least) as AresMUSH plugins.

I don't know if it counts as a "RPG System", but I find Storium's mechanic to be pretty interesting: You have a fixed number of Strength and Weakness cards that you can play on challenges.

What I like:

• Each card propels the challenge towards a conclusion that furthers the story in some (hopefully interesting) way. It's not just "Oh, you failed? You die."
• You're compelled to spend your Weakness cards eventually because you have a limited number of cards in your "hand" and they don't refresh until almost all of them are gone.

What I don't like, though:

• The challenge outcomes are railroaded into "weak", "neutral" or "strong" outcomes, so it's not as freeform as most MU situations.
• Cards are not rated, so you can't have two people with a "Strong" card and still have one of them be stronger than another.
• When your hand runs low, sometimes you're arbitrarily limited in how you can respond to situations. Like, you think this would be the perfect chance to show off your "Stubborn" weakness, but crap - you already played that card.

So it's not a perfect system, but I think aspects of it would be interesting to adopt to a MU game.

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

Even at the height of the BSG craze weren't there a couple drama GOMOs? So I'm curious which are the 'good' ones. It seems like you'll have to engage in the same exercise @Ganymede is, ie picking out particular games not the genres/systems.

All games have some degree of drama. I've had to discipline or boot a handful of people through the years from my various games, but I consider those examples of problem individuals not problem games or genres. By and large, people on games I've been on have gotten along pretty well.

The thing that all of these games have in common, though, is not genre but the way they approach player conflict. They have either been:

• Expressly cooperative, where players are on the same team versus a greater evil (TGG, Babylon 5 for the most part, the various Battlestar games, The Fall).
• Low conflict, where you kinda have to go out of your way to be at direct odds against other PCs (Sweetwater, Martian Dreams), or
• Full consent, where players are forced to cooperate OOCly or end up in a stalemate (Maddock and some other historical games).

I think a lot of this is just basic human nature. When you pit people against each other, you're going to see more inter-personal conflict and need more refereeing than when you make them work together. Especially when they're strangers on the internet - many of whom are entirely too invested in their PCs as their personal avatars.

ETA: And some games just have crazy staff (e.g. that Serenity place). I mean, when the person at the top is toxic, what can you expect. That's not the genre's fault.

@thatonedude said in Do we need staff?:

As for pvp I've not seen a real pvp wod game in a while.

It depends on what you count as PVP though. It doesn't necessarily mean people running around telenuking each other. There are lots of ways to put players into direct conflict with each other. I'm not saying that's bad, but I think history shows that it brings out a lot of competitiveness and drama.