Posts made by faraday

As others have already mentioned, AresMUSH (still in beta) is intended to be a 'next-gen' platform for MUSHes specifically. It addresses some of the common issues by streamlining the command interface, offering a web interface for a lot of things, restructuring help files by topic instead of by command, and offering built-in game advertising through a central database. While there is not currently an active game using Ares, BSGU is still up in sandbox mode to check out the interface, and there are several new games in development.

Evennia does some of these things too, but it is intended to be more of a generic MU-building toolkit that applies to all text-based gaming platforms, MUDs included.

Aside from Roll20 (which offers more of a tabletop-ish experience), there are a number of online forum-RP sites. You can find many through directories like http://rpg-directory.com/. There's also Storium, which has a more "gamified" play-by-forum feel. The trouble with forum games is that they're sloooooooooow. A scene that might get resolved in one evening on a MUSH will stretch on for a month. It's an entirely different feel.

Like @Three-Eyed-Crow said, there's nothing really out there that mirrors the MUSH experience IMHO.

@zombiegenesis “It’s an open forum where you can run whatever kind of game you want!

... Unless of course somebody else is running something similar, then you’re out of luck.”

That’s the part I find a little weirdly, probably unnecessarily restrictive.

@botulism said in Short-Term MU*s:

@faraday Hmm. True. I guess if I kept it tightly focused like that it could work. They'd lack the allies/enemies and goals being built-in, but get more freedom.

You could always offer both. Creating a whole 'stable' of pre-built chars every time the theme changes sounds like a ton of work though.

I agree with @Three-Eyed-Crow that TGG proved that short-term games are possible in the MU community - especially if you can center it around a theme (like TGG's war theme, or a Twilight Zone kind of thing) or develop a core group of players who become friends (like an extended tabletop gaming group) and are willing to try new themes.

I would caution against roster chars, since I think even folks interested in short-term games mostly like to make up their own characters. You can avoid the "everyone make whatever they wanted" by providing guidelines. To use the TGG example again: "You can be a British pilot or a nurse." or "You can be a British or French infantryman." or whatever. Limited and focused, but still allow people the creativity of having their own characters.

@thenomain said in Respecs.:

I want the world the character exsists in to be consistent and natural for its internal rules.

Yeah that's a good way to put it. It's not that I want to make things un-fun for people, I just want to have a sense of verisimilitude in the IC world. I'm not saying it has to be a documentary because duh. But if you throw in too much implausibility then I just don't know how my character's supposed to react to it, and that's not fun for me.

It's kind of like when people on a historical game ask for historical accuracy. There has to be a balance. Too much and everybody's dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Too little and it's like you're not playing a Western any more you're just doing "Hollywood dress-up". Finding the right balance is tricky, and finding a balance that everyone will agree on is impossible.

@arkandel said in Respecs.:

There are also so many factors which if we take under consideration wouldn't hold up. Sure, you've been training like hell on your surgical skills but did you also learn how to be a great hacker in that time while going on adventures with the rest of your group? I guess you did!

There's no universal yardstick for suspension of disbelief. You can pick any popular TV show, which obviously is beloved by millions, and still find a ton of people who look at it like: "OMG this is so ludicrous I can't watch this drivel."

And people have different suspension of disbelief levels for different things. Somebody might be put off by ludicrous wound-recovery times but not by learning times (or vice versa). Everybody has their own individual hot buttons, and people are all-too-quick to dismiss somebody else's hot button with "it's just a game" while getting all bent out of shape when somebody else does something they don't like.

@arkandel said in Respecs.:

I personally consider skills (or powers, where applicable) to be organic parts of a character's growth and arc, so I don't like systems which place artificial limits on that growth by essentially capping it universally to a snapshot taken after CGen.

I don't even disagree with that basic premise. Where I think the philosophical difference comes in is about how much and how fast they can grow after chargen. But that's really a topic for a different thread. I agree with @Coin that if you can go from 0-to-surgeon quickly with XP, then it's less of a huge deal if somebody goes from 0-to-surgeon with a respec. But personally I find both equally jarring for my suspension of disbelief.

@arkandel said in Respecs.:

It holds zero water. If that was the case no character in nearly any game should pick up new skills at a high level after CGen; it takes going to medical school for years to become a surgeon after all, so if you started with Medicine 1 you should never raise it past, say, 2 - if even that. The same thing applies to melee; you don't become a kung fu master or gain a BJJ elite belt quickly 'realistically'.

But... that's exactly the path that some systems take. I wouldn't allow somebody to go from First Aid 1 to "expert surgeon" in the game for precisely the reasons you describe. You may not like it, and that's fine, but to claim the argument holds no water seems uncharitable. Managing IC plausibility is a thing for some people.

@misadventure said in Respecs.:

@killer-klown said in Respecs.:

Flat costs for everything removes much of the urge to min-max stats at chargen, and makes respecs a legitimate use for changing the direction of the character proper rather than trying to maximise spends.

Is this actually true? To me if you wanted a maxed out stat, getting it through at cgen seems easiest. You may not be saving xp, but you have your focal ability, you are good with it, and you can still pick up little 1s and 2s along the way to fill in empty spots.

Yeah, that hasn't been my experience. No matter what your XP costs are, it still takes time to save them up. Maxing out the stats at chargen will always be the most efficient.

It's true, though, that tiered costs (either in chargen or after chargen) encourage people to min-max more, because it becomes more of a numbers game. But flat XP costs have pros and cons; it's not a cure-all.

@surreality said in Respecs.:

@faraday Most games I've been on consider any change like that a respec -- so that may be where we're running into the difference.

Yeah maybe. I've only seen "respec" used in the context of a significant do-over of stats.

@wretched said in Respecs.:

Sure I'm a Stage Manager on Broadway now, and all my xp is into this but i have high survival because at one point in my life i used to be a park ranger' That shit should be kept, not washed away to minmax better.

This. Skill atrophy is totally a thing, but it mostly strikes really low skills (yeah technically I took a sign language class ages ago, but I'd be hard-pressed to remember much now) or really high ones (it's easy to slip down from Olympic levels if you slack off). In the middle, humans are actually pretty amazing at retaining old skills and knowledge. Not always, mind you, but in general. I don't really see that as a compelling reason for allowing respecs.

But at the same time... if somebody came in as an elite sniper but wanted to do a story where over the next few months they stopped their hard-core marksmanship training and instead focused on working out, I'd have no problem letting them shift a point from firearms to athletics. Those sorts of minor, story-driven changes aren't jarring and I definitely think they should be considered on a case-by-case basis. They're just not "respecs" in my mind.

@surreality Ok? I never said they couldn’t be reshaped.. that’s what new XP is for. Just that you shouldn’t get an XP refund just because something bad happened to your char.

Like... if you were a top notch fighter pilot and lost your wings, that sounds like a really interesting story to me about adaptation and growth. But I can also see how somebody might be really really keen on playing that particular concept and just want to reroll. To each their own.

@surreality said in Respecs.:

Losing the XP spent on it is punishing the player by forcing them to keep something that is no longer valid on their sheet, not inflicting consequences on a character.

I don't see it as a punishment though. This ties into my general view of viewing XP as a part of the character not an OOC reward. YMMV. For me it's no different than taking points in "Demolitions" but never actually getting into a scene where you get to blow stuff up. Your character still knows the thing, and who knows - your ballroom dancing knowledge may come up in some way even though you can't shake it like you used to.

@surreality said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

I'd never complain about it to the players personally, bear them any ill will, or stomp my feet like a huffy princess to staff about it, but that really did feel pretty shitty in that, "Aw, jeez, come on... " bad luck sense.

Yeah, I mean, on my games it's just coded into the system. Once a PB is taken it just ... can't be taken again. I can get folks being disappointed because someone else beat them to the punch, but I really haven't seen any drama resulting from it. Frankly there's enough of "OMG Chris Pratt again?" going on that I'm happier not having duplicates of them.

@bananerz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

Who is in the right here?

Why does it have to be a matter of right and wrong and not just "first come first served"? MUSHes deal with things as limited resources all the time - comic book characters, special roles, whatever. What's the big deal? I mean, I understand the argument from @ThatGuyThere and @WildBaboons that people can share PBs in the "we just look alike" vein but you seem to be taking a pretty adversarial approach about it.

Not directed at anyone in particular...

I really wish folks would chill with the "remember it's just a game, let everyone have fun" stuff because it's basically saying "if you disagree with this you're against people having fun".

Yes, games are about having fun. But if fun were the only consideration then we wouldn't have stats, we wouldn't have game systems, and we wouldn't have non-consent policies. We'd just let players do whatever they want and have unfettered pretendy-fun-time fun.

But we don't. Because there's more at play here. What one group of folks views as "fun" might cause another group a decided amount of "un-fun". Even if you come down hard on one group's side or another, there should at least be a recognition that there are, actually, two (or more) equally-legitimate sides.

@thatguythere said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

@bananerz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

people getting very precious about said PB (but it'll wreck immersion if we have 2!).

This gets me, how small of a world to people live in to not run into folks that look like each other...

It bugs me in the same way that it would bug me if you had the same actor playing two different roles in a TV series. It's not: "Wow, character A looks a lot like character B... what a coincidence" it's "WTF is wrong with this casting agent that they put Chris Pratt in two different roles in the same movie?" (Unless of course that's the whole point of the movie.)

I won't claim that it's rational, because of course two people can coincidentally look alike. It just bugs me. :helpless shrug:

@bananerz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

Just because someone is in the public doesn't mean you have a right.

I never said I had a 'right' to do it - I said it was a pretty commonly-accepted practice. Nobody has a 'right' to do fanfic either. Some authors are pissed off by it, but others see it as a flattering homage. YMMV. If you think it's skeevy, that's your prerogative. I respectfully disagree.

To be clear, I don't see this as a right-or-wrong issue. But my personal preference is to maintain continuity. Everybody has their own personal pet peeves, and continuity is mine. If something was true in RP yesterday, then I expect it to be true tomorrow - otherwise I feel adrift in terms of how to play my character. That's why I could never play on a game that allowed significant retcon to occur when a new character took over a role.

Respecs are like retcon to me. If you have RPed that your character is a virtuoso violinist in some significant way, then you can't just one day decide to take those points and put them into firearms instead. That breaks immersion for me.

Little things? Sure. If you realize a couple months in that you really should have a skill you forgot to buy in chargen, or want to swap your never-RPed hobby for some other never-RPed hooby? I'm happy to consider those on a case-by-case basis as long as they don't cause big ripples in what's already been RPed.

@bananerz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:

Very skeevy when you think about strangers using your photo/name for some undead werewolf slash game.

For a random person, sure. But for an actor? That doesn't strike me as skeevy at all. "Dream casts" are a pretty commonly-accepted thing - even so far as to be officially supported on IMDB. To say nothing of all the celebrity memes. Yes, technically it's a copyright violation - but most MUSHes are a walking copyright violation of rules and/or setting anyway, so this seems like a weird place to draw a hard line in the sand. I view it as free publicity for the actor so I don't feel too guilty about it. (There have actually been times where I've been all: "Who's that?" and looked somebody up that I otherwise wouldn't have.)