Posts made by faraday

@ganymede said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

@ixokai said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

You want staff to start approving characters based on RP schedules?!

For a comic book game? Yes.

I'd think that would be true for any character in a RP-leader position. It's not really about "how many hours can you put in" but "are you going to be available to drive RP".

(Of course - I'm no longer a fan of having PCs in enforced RP-leader positions for this and other reasons, but I understand I'm in a minority there.)

@thenomain said in A (Mildly Complete) List of Current Games:

Way ahead of you.

I said an automated directory, so no?

@thenomain said in A (Mildly Complete) List of Current Games:

Also, TinyMUX.

I heard TinyMUX was no longer in active development and their website is kinda broken but anyway - yes also TinyMUX.

My point is that it would be a relatively trivial change to have those old servers do a daily check-in and report of directory info to a central server. We already have two such directories - why not put our heads together and make a unified one?

But if folks would rather spend their time on a manually-curated wiki... :shrugs: Their time, their prerogative.

I think the lists driven by the games themselves (like AresCentral Game Directory and the Evennia Game Index are a better way to go than a manually-maintained wiki. The problem we see with places like MudConnector is that nobody can be bothered to register their games there or update them as things change/close/etc.

If somebody could make something like that for Rhost/Penn, or even just work together to make a central directory, that would be ideal IMHO.

@ganymede said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

@faraday said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

Staff letting their friends/siblings/spouses camp characters they never intend to play is not only poor planning, but is going to open them up to cries of staff favoritism to friends.

And yet it happens all the time: the favoritism, and the crying, regardless of whether there is any conscious favoritism.

Sure, but I think the favoritism card gets overplayed. If you’re giving a coveted role to a player you know is awesome and who has a proven track record of being reliable and not crazy and just happens to be your friend then that’s not really favoritism in my book... that’s using common sense and making a decision that’s likely to benefit the game as a whole.

Now if you give that same covered role to a friend who you know is going to just camp it, TS with Batman all day, or flake out like they have on every other game... then you’re not only playing favorites, you’re a fool.

@arkandel said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

Everything about CGen should be automated so the numbers check out and that's it. The rare outlier cases crossing some kind of line can be caught and dealt with later on without causing everyone else having to wait for days to be approved

I used to think that too until I tried it on a couple games with "no apps required" or "I'll check you over after you hit the grid".

Never again. shudders

@ixokai said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

You couldn't give players a three day headstart? You'd think that's asking too much of you?

Yes. Staff are players too. A staff is signing up - on a strictly volunteer basis - for months or even years of taking crap from dozens of strangers while simultaneously working their butt off trying to provide said strangers with a fun place to play.

Letting those people play the characters they want to play is a small price to pay for those services.

@tempest said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

The problem is when all their friends also get first dibs.

Staff letting their friends/siblings/spouses camp characters they never intend to play is not only poor planning, but is going to open them up to cries of staff favoritism to friends. That seems like a dicey proposition, and also a very different thing than allowing staff themselves first dibs.

@ashen-shugar said in Mux Logger Objects:

Makes you wonder wtf it's even useful for.

It was probably designed for the folks like me who code (well --- coded, since I've switched to Ares and never looked back) exclusively in functions over commands. The absence of a trigger function was highly annoying when I just wanted to kick off a separate thing in the midst of another command. It didn't happen a lot, but often enough that somebody probably requested it.

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

If your body of staff is RLing when 10 players are online? Those 10 players are leaving. Bye bye.

That's not universally true. On the places I play, folks are perfectly content when staff is absent. Heck, I've run entire games all by myself; others have been run by two people. As long as things are responded to in a timely fashion it's no big deal. It comes down to how you structure your game and what you let players accomplish on their own.

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

"But muh story! My chardev" isn't really investment. People drop and pick up characters very easily

Really? My experience is the opposite. "My story!" is the most investment you're ever going to get from a lot of players, and they cling to it like it's the one true ring. "My presssccciiiouusssssss."

Maybe it's because there are so many WoD games that you can trade one for another easily, whereas you're not likely to say "Screw this! I'll go find another!" on a Western or Battlestar game since there really aren't any others.

I do agree that running a game is a crap-ton of work and not all playstyles and concepts fit on - or should be allowed on - all games. But there are a variety of possible MUSH experiences, and some of them do more closely resemble the tight-knit connections and focused stories of tabletop. It's not some impossible unicorn.

@sunny said in New Games and Feature Characters...:

if they don't allow them, people will just play on another game.

That's not a universal truth, particularly if the game in question is a 'niche' game with something special about it or the only one in its genre. That said, I agree that 'limiting multitasking' is a pretty thin reason for restricting alts, since they could always find something else to fill their time somewhere - whether it's another MU or watching TV in-between poses. Multi-taskers gonna multi-task.

I confess I don't really play on comic games, but I've never understood the whole letting people play multiple FCs thing. I've never seen that work on any other kind of game genre. Heck, most games have trouble getting people to maintain even one FC, let alone multiples.

@thatguythere said in Plot session duration:

I would argue the main reason players want to play that is because that is what RPG have trained us to expect.

I agree, though I don't think it's just RPGs. Look at the media that we base a lot of our games around: Star Wars. Battlestar. Game of Thrones. Avengers. James Bond. These things are rife with physical conflict. There's other stuff too in those themes, of course, but there's still an awful lot of combat.

I think with MUSHes, a lot of that "other stuff" tends to just get handled by players amongst themselves. And that leaves the combat and other epic conflicts to the storytellers.

@seraphim73 said in Plot session duration:

In most D&D books, there's about 2 pages on social skills, and then 250 on combat, so of course the players (in most games, of course, every group is different) gravitate toward combat. ... It's not a problem, it's just players recognizing what the game designer has put effort/time into.

I don't really buy that though. I think it's the other way around. The reason there are 250 pages on combat/magic is because that's what the players want to play. Most people don't come to D&D expecting politics and con artists. They want dungeon crawls.

But even in more balanced systems, you'll still find a heavy emphasis on combat because most RPGs inherently have an action-adventure slant. Shadowrun may be all about heists and have rules for breaking and entering, bluffing past guards, etc. but I think every pre-made adventure on the market is designed with at least one big combat scene.

In FS3, there's a keen automated combat system because manually resolving combat for 4 players takes all day. You don't have that problem for a 4-player social scene, so there isn't a need for more complex mechanics or automated system. It doesn't mean combat is inherently more important than any other form of RP in a FS3 game. That comes down to what sorts of scenes you run.

And what sort of scenes you run comes down to what sorts of scenes players show up for. Players routinely show up for combat scenes. Others? It's hit or miss.

I needed a name for my first staff alt on B5 MUSH. I'd just done a college book report on scientist Michael Faraday. He was a pretty cool inventor guy who preferred practical experiments over theory, so it seemed fitting for a coder. I'd intended it to be temporary until I thought of something better, but I never did.

@arkandel said in Plot session duration:

As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.

Yes and no. I mean ... system is only a part of the story. Even if your system is slanted one way, you can still roleplay whatever you want within the setting. There are players who are motivated solely by the system and the rewards, but that's their prerogative, not a limitation of the game.

Take BSGU for example. Sure there's combat, that's a big part of the setting/show, but there were plenty of other avenues to explore. Intercolonial tensions, post-apocalyptic drama, general military issues, I even ran a couple left-field campaigns involving tsunami disaster relief and helping a village that was experiencing a virus outbreak. There's no real XP or rewards system to steer you to do one thing over the other. And yet what did people engage with? Combat, combat and more combat.

On BSP there was an entire civilian faction, 'soft' non-combat skills, and staff trying actively to steer things on that front. And again - what were people into? Combat.

I've seen that pattern across all kinds of games, even systemless ones (e.g. old consent games), games that aren't inherently combat oriented (e.g. westerns) and open-ended games with multiple factions (e.g. Star Wars or Babylon 5), so I really don't think it's a system issue.

@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:

A lot of scenes just involve showing up to a +event at the proper time, killing enemy, then everyone fleeing ooc as fast as possible. Sometimes you're lucky if you can get players to even pose out, much less discuss what just happened.

That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody(*) does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody(*) can be bothered to engage.

(*) Grand sweeping generalization. There are always rare exceptions.

Some of that is based on the audience - I'm sure it would be different in a politically-oriented L&L game - but I think a lot of it is universal. MUSHes share a lot in common with tabletop RPGs, after all, and a lot of those emphasize combat. Fighting and gear often represent a huge chunk of most RPG rulebooks. Combat and downtime are all a lot of people are interested in.

@thenomain said in Plot session duration:

Mentioning FS3 explains a lot, though, because FS3 players tend to be a lot more laid back about "winning" (i.e., it's not the goal).

Lololol. I wish.

@ganymede said in Random Oddness or 'Is This Normal?':

Please go see a neurologist.

+1. What you're describing could be many things - some of which are very serious. So now you have free lawyerbot advice and free paramedic advice.

@griatch said in A new platform?:

Well yes, that's why I pointed out a way that has worked very reliably for us. I doubt a solution like that would be impossible to implement in Penn on the server level?

Sorry I might have misread what you said then. I agree.

Also @grapenut @Ashen-Shugar -- I'm not meaning to disparage the custom APIs on Penn/Rhost so apologies if it came across as overly negative. It's a good step forward for the platform and I hope people take advantage of it.

All I was trying to say is that from a purely technical perspective, I think a JSON-based API over pure HTTP is more robust, well-structured and extensible than a websocket interface piggybacking on existing softcode commands. I would love to see somebody implement the former sort of API for the old servers.

Until they do, though, I think a statement that "you can do the same sort of web portal" with Penn that you can do with Evennia/Ares is a bit misleading. Yes, you can build a website for Penn but the amount of work involved is orders of magnitude different.

@griatch said in A new platform?:

In the Evennia case we use a two-pronged approach for this - if the web client's websocket connection fails or times out the web client transparently falls back to using old-style COMET long-polling. Haven't found any browsers having issues with that combination so far

That's why you don't see issues - because you've fallen back to not using websockets when they fail and/or are unavailable. A purely websockets-based solution is not reliable.

@ashen-shugar said in A new platform?:

I honestly don't see the difficulty? Am I missing something?

I'm not sure what you're trying to demonstrate with the pipe thing. What @grapenut showed makes sense... if you tack on JSON output to the end of, say, +finger, then you can parse that on the webclient side:

&cmd-+finger:think pemit(%#,ALL KINDS OF ASCII JUNK)[wsjon(finger: { name: [name(%0)], position: [xget(%q0,position)], etc. })]

But to implement that for every softcode command would be a giant and painful undertaking, and I'm not sure how you'd handle the hardcoded commands like pages and channels. Sending input with { to: [ list, of players ], subject: "Subject", message: "Some message } and trying to convert that to +mail names=subj/message again sounds like a lot of work and kinda messy.

Basing a web API on +-commands or the website trying to send think [wsjson(stuff)] sent over websockets just isn't an approach I'd advocate, that's all. If somebody wants to do it, then yes - of course - it's technically possible.

ETA: On a more positive note though - if you isolated the JSON stuff in a separate set of commands, like website/profile, website/scenes, etc. that JUST did JSON, then I don't think it would be quite so bad. You wouldn't need to have the website send softcode, you wouldn't have to center the web interface around existing MUSH commands, and you wouldn't need to kludge ASCII and JSON together. You still have the websocket/input/hardcoded command issues, but it's better than nothing.

@grapenut I've already seen several people having serious issues playing via websockets because of browser or firewall issues, so it is absolutely not as reliable as telnet even in a low-impact environment like a MUSH.

Anyway, I never said it was impossible to build a web portal in PennMUSH, I said it was not the soundest technical approach and false to equate it with a robust and dedicated JSON API. But best of luck to you regardless.

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

It's as reliable as your telnet connection to the MUSH.

No, it really isn't, and there are a ton of articles on the web like this one explaining why. Websockets require a lot of fallback layers to implement properly across different browsers and versions, and are prone to significant firewall issues.

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

Whatever complex information you would want to format into a JSON object can just as easily be formatted as a +command that=has=multiple=arguments.

Again, no it can't. There's a reason JSON as a structured parsing language has overtaken other homegrown string parsers, because it addresses countless issues like nested quotes and whatnot.

I applaud you/whomever for attempting to retrofit web capabilities onto older MU servers for those who want to use it. That's a positive. But arguing that a cobbled-together "think wsjon()" thing over web sockets is equivalent to a first-class dedicated JSON API flies in the face of every good programming practice I know.

@thatguythere said in Plot session duration:

I know most won't agree with me but I would much rather have the preamble RP in the scene and the fight part quickly summed up or cut than vice versa

I think it comes down to your audience and the type of plot. If it's "Sunday 9pm - Big Battle" then people are kinda coming assuming a fight and skipping the setup would make sense. If it's "Sunday 9pm - Plan the Big Battle" that's different. PCs take freaking forever though to make plans and get organized (and many players aren't into that at all), so I would never try to do both in the same session - that strikes me as a recipe for an all-day event with some very bored players.