Posts made by faraday

@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.

Like @Coin said - what makes a show special is different to different people. The characters, the snappy writing, the campiness, the teenage coming-of-age drama, the smallish-town setting, the idea of the Slayers, the Scooby Gang stuff... these things and more are components of Buffy, but everyone values some of them more than others.

Battlestar Galactica, for instance, obviously puts a great deal of emphasis on the Top Gun fighter pilot aspect. But you could do a completely non-military BSG game and it would still, IMHO, be "A BSG Game". It may not be what you or anyone else sees as "what defines BSG to me", but that doesn't make it illegitimate or anything.

@bobotron Yeah I've done a fair bit.

@pondscum said in How To Strip Comtitles in PennMush:

It does seem to be admin level, and whilst I staff on the game in question, I'm clueless with code.

charformat, alas, is also a code-y thing. It's just one you can set on yourself instead of channel-wide.

If you're admin and just want to turn off comtitles completely without fussing with code, just set the channel "notitle" as @Bobotron said above.

@pondscum I thought the mogrifier thingy was an admin level control for a channel, and 'chatformat' was for individual players?

Mogrifiers let you tweak every aspect of a channel's output, before it goes to individual players' @chatformats.

I think if you want to customize just your own output, you need chatformat, as mentioned above.

I think you can use CHATFORMAT to do this?

Here's the example from help chatformat:

@chatformat me=<%1> [switch(%0,@,%2,edit(wrap(speak(&[if(%4,%4%b)]%3,%0[stripansi(%2)],%6\,),sub(width(%!),add(4,strlen(%1)))),%r,%r<%1>%b))]

If it's a specific one that's bothering you, you ought to be able to create a filter in your client to trim it out. Of course, that depends on your client. I don't know of a way to do it in Penn. (ETA: There is - see comments below about chatformat.) I'll create a way to turn them off in Ares, though, that's a good idea.

I played the Amber DRPG in college and the premise was that everyone was a child of the original FCs. It allowed for people to be original and influential while also not being involved at the highest level. The FCs were occasional guest star NPCs. (Quest givers,basically.)

With long lived royal family members and including Shadow-born illegitimate heirs and stuff there was plenty of opportunity for PCs to slot themselves into the story. And it was interesting when everyone was cousins. Food for thought.

@ganymede said in Potential Buffy Game:

@faraday
I think that there’s a lot of diversity if you look hard enough.
I mean, in Dayton, there are substantial pockets of Turks, South Koreans, Vietnamese, and Ukrainians. There’s even a group of habesha Ethiopians, due to the influence of one fella who helped bring them here. Also, Indians and Afghans. It’s odd, but it’s true.

Yeah there really isn't any of that here. We've got "Polish Hill" and "Germantown" though Not that this is necessarily a compelling reason to set - or not set - a game there. The other places just sounded more interesting, that's all. To each their own.

@ixokai said in Potential Buffy Game:

Yeah I looked long and hard in picking it, its a great city.

Much as it would tickle me to see a Pittsburgh game, I'm not sure it has the same degree of built-in drama as some of the other places mentioned. You don't have the cultural diversity of Evanston (as @hedgehog mentioned), nor the political shenanigans of Austin (as @AeriaNyx mentioned), nor the breadth of plot hooks that Dayton offers (as @Ganymede mentioned). It's got bridges and a gaggle of universities and... not a lot else worth talking about.

@sunny said in Amber: Why Can't I Quit You:

@brunocerous

The problem with going at it that way is that it loses the whole point of what #1 is supposed to represent: you are the best at the thing in all of existence. Everyone Knows Who The Best Is, so to speak. Not that this is necessarily a terrible thing to just ditch. It's an iconic Amber thing, but maybe it's not one of the most iconic things.

That idea only works in a fixed group though, which is why it’s well suited to the tabletop auction. If someone can join the game tomorrow, then suddenly the person “everyone knows is the best” might have never been the best at all (ICly).

I've seen people use a wiki for sharing TTRPG data, including characters and session notes and whatnot. Usually wikidot because it's free and simple to set up.

@lithium Right, it's totally subjective. And it can vary even for the same person. I had oodles of fun playing Wasteland (despite the frustration) when I was a kid, but if a game did that to me now? I'd quit because I have better things to do with my time than run around slaying mutant bunnies or whatever to save up cash to buy bullets.

@thenomain Wasteland is actually a great example of how scarcity can be realistic but (for some people anyway) not fun. They did a great job of showing how dire things were, making you count every bullet, etc. But at the same time, it was freaking annoying and frustrating to be running around attacking the killer robots with crowbars just because you'd run out of ammo again.

@mr-johnson said in Fallout: Montreal:

I mean for me personally it was NEVER about scarcity. Scarcity aint fun.

Yeah, I think it's important to realize that the post-apocalyptic genre means different things to different people. For some it's about the adventure - the wild west-ish atmosphere fighting bandits in the desert. For some it's about scarcity - making do without modern-day conveniences. For some it's about rebuilding society from the ashes and bringing order to the chaos. And for some it's just a backdrop for the everyday soap opera drama.

I don't know that you can really limit people to just one view of the world. And I'm not sure you should even try. Though to @Thenomain's point - if you establish that the vault has limited supplies and that's an important part of the game, people should respect that and not constantly fight you trying to discover hidden mother lodes of gear.

@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:

All three are John Wayne movies but none would really mix well in theme or tone.

Yeah. Staffers may have a very clear idea in their head of what they mean by "gritty post-apocalyptic" or "John Wayne Western", but ask six players what that means precisely and you'll probably get six different answers.

And it's not unique to westerns or post-apoc either. Pick any setting and you're likely to get different takes on it. With WoD you get different prefs about how 'dark' the world of darkness should be. Military themes have a tension between folks wanting a Hollywood military versus those wanting more realistic consequences when you do things like decking the XO. Even something as universally recognized as Star Wars can veer sharply in tone between A New Hope and Rogue One.

It's hard, and it borders on impossible when a LOT of players really don't care what kind of theme you're pushing, and view it merely as an obstacle to get around to do whatever THEY wanted to do.

@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:

Post-Apocalyptic can mean a lot of things.

I think this is a lot of the problem right here.

On a Western game, you can end up with people expecting everything from "Into the West" to "Little House on the Prairie" to "Pick a Spaghetti Western" to "Deadwood". These people will each have vastly different expectations on how the game "should" be.

They're all playing westerns, but they're essentially playing completely different games. How do you decide who's right and who's wrong? Or more aptly - who's contributing to the game and who's disrupting it? It's not always black and white.

I think most MUs default to "heroic soap opera" where the plots have holes like swiss cheese, the good guys save the day, and impossibly beautiful people hook up while doing it. If you're building anything else, you're pretty much going to have to be a tyrant about stamping out any RP that doesn't fit your vision. Otherwise people will do what they've been doing on game after game after game.

@ganymede Y'know Ares also has Fate, Cortex and FFG/Genesys, so... you're not stuck with FS3. (Unless you want fully-automated combat, in which case you are.)

But I dig your giant robots idea so I'm happy either way.

Mass Effect is cool and all (as Jar Jar is if you're a little kid) but could we maybe take that tangent over to the Video Games thread?

@auspice said in AresMUSH Updates:

those of us who help with hosting begin setting up Ares installs for others.

Random side note. The standard server setup script installs a single redis database instance as a global system service. If you're going to be running multiple ares installs on a single server with different usernames, each user will need their own redis instance. This article may help.

@auspice Maybe I'm just being dense and not understanding where the hangup is...

The script does stuff like:

echo -e "${ARES_INSTALL_TEXT} Create an ares user"
adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" ares

I assumed that as you walked through the script to see what needed to be installed for a custom environment, you'd just remove/change those bits, just as you would for any other custom server environment quirk.

Is it just because the /home/ares path shows up in a couple of places? If that's the issue then I could probably make that a variable in the shell script so you only have to change it in a single place, at least.

What I really don't want to do, though, is add all kinds of "Do you want to do this? What username do you want?" type of if/else questions to the super-simple automatic installer, because that kinda goes away from the goal of making it super-simple A system admin is going to know the answers to those questions easily enough, but Ares is intended to be installable by folks without admin experience. Extra questions make the installation more intimidating.