Posts made by faraday

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

I don't buy that at all. Where are the magical positive, happy games where no one is a dick? Which genres are those? What systems attract that unicorn of a playerbase, rather than the eeeevil terrible one WoD draws in?

I've never played on WoD games, but I have to say that the degree of toxicity attributed to them, described on these boards on a regular basis, simply has not existed on the range of games I've played on (not just my own, but any I've played).

Does that mean that the other games have been magical bastions of unicorn players singing kumbaya? Of course not. People are jerks sometimes, no matter the game. But I do think that "light Hollywoodized historical fiction" or "PvE combat vs evil robots" attracts a different playstyle than "PvP dark supernatural horror". It just does. That doesn't mean the players are inherently better or worse - it just means that type of environment comes with a different set of issues.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

I am of the opinion that every game needs not a PHB but a Hammer: the person that will come down and without hesitation intervene when a player comes off the rails. Too often, there's no such staff member; everyone believes that if we all just play nice, everyone will play nice.

Sometimes you need a Hammer, but in my experience what's even more important is for staff to play Mediator.

The number of times where someone's being a rampant, unrepentant a-hole are rare. Far more common are the times when players disagree, feelings get hurt, tempers flare, or misunderstandings are had. In those situations, a cool-headed authority figure can often (but not always) help sort out the mess.

@kumakun Yes, Ares is in Ruby and EmberJS. Evennia is cool too, though, and if you're inclined toward Python that's probably more your thing.

@kumakun said in Potential Supernatural Game:

I'm a long time MUX coder, but I've been looking to learn other platforms.

FWIW, Ares has a bare-bones Cortex plugin available. You'd probably end up expanding it for your own needs, but it's a start at least.

@derp said in I want to code for a V5 MU*:

Even for professionals it can be kind of a nightmare.

Yeah, the usual response from professional devs who see MUSH code is either hysterical laughter or a disbelieving “WTF?!!?”. It was a wonderful solution for a particular tech problem in the 1980's but today? Not so much.

I'm sure folks would love a vampire plugin for Evennia or Ares though.

If you're interested in learning Ares code, check out the coding tutorials and feel free to ask questions on the Ares forum.

Evennia, likewise, has many tutorials and an IRC support channel.

@ganymede -- Telltale Games Studio

ETA: Related and interesting article about how the company fell apart and why it kinda sucks to work in the video game industry.

@shincashay said in WoD - Storytellers Playground in Evennia:

There are folks out there who enjoy story telling for a small group of friends or their circle.

Storytelling for a small group in a MU environment is extraordinarily difficult. Given the synchronous nature of communication, you need to have a critical mass of people online at the same time - and that's tough to sustain on a small game. That's why forum games, platforms like Storium, and even Discord tend to do better for the "small group" mini-games than MU sandboxes. They all allow for asynchronous communication.

And once you get to talking about a large group... you're still going to have most of the headaches involved with running a game. Is not needing to install the code really enough of a draw for folks to want to share a server with other games? Dunno.

Not to say it's futile or anything - just some things to consider.

@kanye-qwest said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

But thanks for the permission to play out what works for me.

C'mon, it's a common figure of speech like "we can agree to disagree". No need to be snarky about it.

@kanye-qwest said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

@faraday Mage casts identify on a smartphone....

Not buying, but everyone’s suspension of disbelief tolerance is different. Whatever works for you.

@wildbaboons said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

The tommy guns are more obvious. They're a tool laying around to use.. but the fashion and society? If all those people are gone why would the goblins, giants and orcs emulate it?

I think the answer is "because it's fun".

I mean... logically-speaking there's really zero chance, IMHO, of a transplanted fantasy orc even guessing what a car or radio might be, let alone figuring out how to use one. And that's not even starting on something as befuddlingly complex as a computer or telephone.

But what if they did? If you can get past that central suspension of disbelief issue then you can still have fun with it.

@thenomain said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

Fedoras and tommy guns, hill giants in vests, flapper goblins.

So... that all just sounds like fashion and tech. I still don't see what makes it "noir".

Downton Abbey is set in the 1920's, fedoras abound, but there's nothing remotely noir about it. Jessica Jones is noir-ish and set in modern day.

But hey - if you want orcs in fedoras then you could have orcs in fedoras! Sounds amusing.

@coin said in Poll: Fantasy Earth 2.0:

Noir is a style and a theme.

Yeah but how do you do "noir" with medieval-fantasy people transplanted to 1920's earth? Not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to picture what that would even look like.

If it's purely a question of tech level, I think the 20s are kind of a weird dead zone of popular culture compared to the more popular late-1800's (Wild West), 30s (gangsters) and 40s (WWII).

@seraphim73 said in Do we need staff?:

My opinion is that you can run a game with minimal staff (1-2 Staffers) so long as it's under about 40 regular players. ... but for an open-invite game, it's just asking for bad actors to come in and effectively take over.

I think it's more about game setup than size. Multiple factions going in different directions, players expecting to be spoon-fed individualized plots, a work-intensive plot or clue system, PvP... those sorts of things require more bandwidth than a minimal staff can sustain.

But for a game like TGG or BSGU, where you can toss out a single self-contained mission once or twice a week and entertain a dozen players at once? Or a Wild West game where it's pretty much "do your own thing" apart from the occasional bank robbery or blizzard? A single staffer can support a much larger population, and there are ways for the players themselves to mitigate the bad apples.

@ashen-shugar said in Do we need staff?:

maybe more than 1-2 staff so when the 1-2 staff have family emergencies...people who think their online personas and players are special little snowflakes don't feel enraged that someone dared think real life had a higher priority than a game.

That's never been an issue for me. Those people are just being unreasonable. If you build a game that requires minimal staff intervention, you can miss a couple days and generally nobody's going to notice or care. As long as you're responsive the rest of the time, most players understand.

Sure, there's the possibility that something horrible explodes the one weekend you went to the beach or whatever, but on the flip side - I've had plenty of cases where a game had a half-dozen staffers and it still took a week to get an answer back on something. It's all relative.

@thatonedude said in Do we need staff?:

Allowing PCs to spend XP, gain XP, and to automate tasks that don't REALLY need someone to manually process means players don't have to wait for manual review/setting by a person and means staff doesn't have to do /busy work/.

I think that's something a lot of folks don't get about FS3 -- The system is designed to enable games with a solo staffer. Most apps take 5-10 minutes (depending mostly on how long their background is). XP spending is automated. Combats can be run by anyone without the "but wait, how does this power work?" stuff. Sheets are public to enable PC storytellers and there are commands to roll for other people and whatnot. It's not a perfect system by any stretch, but it's really good at letting staff be hands-off about apps/skills/combat.

@ganymede said in Do we need staff?:

...and a tight, easily-understood theme.

This helps a ton too. "Here's a city - go wild!" opens up a lot more potential for player craziness than "You're all pilots fighting Cylons on a space carrier and here are the kinds of missions that you're doing right now." TGG was the same way with a laser-focused theme and tight-knit group of characters. There are tradeoffs to this in terms of pigeonholing players, so it's not for every game. But it does make it a lot easier to keep things from going off the rails.

@arkandel said in Do we need staff?:

Can a roleplaying game be designed with little or even no staff necessary to run it?

Demonstrably so. I've been doing it for years.

@arkandel said in Do we need staff?:

For example what (if anything) prevented me from doing completely irrelevant things, going after other players just to be a dick, cause OOC drama or any of the other issues staff typically take care of in 'traditional' MU*?

This is why I think having a minimal staff is prudent. Players inevitably disagree or do dumb things (even good players sometimes) and somebody needs to keep the ship on course.

But there are ways around even that if you're bound and determined:

• Various games have explored having no apps at all, or community-approved apps, eliminating the need for an apps staff.
• Full-consent games put more onus on the players to work out their issues, so they generally require little-to-no staff oversight.
• MUDs/RPIs let the code do most/all of the arbitration, so you don't need as many humans to sort out the messes.

Each of these has pros/cons, of course. But the point is - it can be done.

So what is the actual drama? Are there any plots or just hanging out?

@thenomain I'm not saying there are no similarities, I'm saying I don't think the genre has a name because people generally don't recognize them as being similar enough to constitute a "genre" unto itself.

@thenomain Castle Falkenstein is more steampunk-themed fantasy, and Shadowrun is cyberpunk-themed fantasy. I don't really see them as co-existing in the same genre at all.

@thenomain said in RL things I love:

One of them was the 7th Sea Kickstarter. Over a year ago. And I'm still getting new stuff from it. This is by far the absolute best Kickstarter I've ever been a part of.

I know, right? Part of me wants to be all...."Guys? I think you've met your quota here for free swag by now."

@bobotron Eh, there's some help on Wikidot's Community Site but it's not great.

I've gotten further looking at the CSS for existing sites. The ones made by @GirlCalledBlu are pretty cool - for example The 100. You can examine elements and copy their styling.

You can also use my MUSH wiki template for examples of how to set up logs and things, or the CSS from BSGU's old wikidot site for some style examples.

Hope that helps? If you're stuck on something in particular I can take a quick look.

@Arkandel You said:

@arkandel said in Potential Buffy Game:

That's the thing though. What makes Buffy Buffy is a very specific blend of themes without which it is just a generic urban fantasy game.

That's a pretty strong statement that without some special blend of themes it somehow isn't a Buffy game, it's just generic urban fantasy.

I disagree. As long as there's some tie to Buffy it's a Buffy game. Whether it's a Buffy game that would interest you is of course entirely for you to say.