Posts made by faraday

@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

What's this 'no support thing'? I find people on the games I play are incredibly supportive of new players. I find that when I invite someone to a game, I support them.

I don't know what to tell you other than we've apparently had vastly different experiences.

People on games are incredibly helpful to people who already know MUSHing, yes. Trying out a BSG game but don't really know Battlestar? Sure, there's probably a theme file to give you the gist of it and people helpfully steering you towards YouTube clips or whatnot. First time on FS3? No problem - here's the tutorial about how the system works, and a slew of people on the Questions channel to help you out. Having trouble with the scene system code?
Absolutely someone will chime in to steer you in the right direction.

But going out of their way to actually hand-hold some stranger who wandered in off the street and wants to learn how to MUSH? No, I haven't seen that. What I have seen is a lot of eye-rolling and general impatience/intolerance/avoidance towards people who don't know what they're doing.

Also, looking at the game wiki/help/etc., most games are centered around the assumption that the people coming to it already know how to MUSH and just need to know the specifics of how this particular MUSH operates. Even someplace like Arx, which someone mentioned as being particularly open to other online gaming styles, is still geared this way.

I'm going to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's never played a MUSH before and doesn't have a buddy who invited me and is showing me the ropes. I've googled "Pendragon Online RPG" and somehow stumbled onto Valorous Dominion's website.

OK umm... now what? It says it's an online roleplaying experience, which sounds cool, but I don't see any clue as to how to actually play. There's a cryptic IP address, which I don't know what to do with. There are some policies and world articles and characters pages but how do I play?! ... oh, wait, down at the bottom there's a cryptic link titled "What is MUSH", I wonder what that's all about. Okay that tells me about MU clients and connecting and whatnot, so I manage to find and install Atlantis, connect to the game and get a welcome screen. It says 'create <name> <password>' ... okay, easy enough. Woohoo I have a character. I get spammed with a Great Wall of Text including a room description (but I don't really know what rooms are), a MOTD with a list of BBS posts. It does say (+bbread) after it and I'm smart enough to guess that I'm supposed to type +bbread to read messages. But all that does is give me a list of subjects. Where are the posts? Now I see someone say <Newbie> RandomPerson says, "Hello Guest!" Are they talking to me? How do I talk back?

I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty overwhelmed at that point.

And even if by some miracle I figure out help/+help and start to learn commands, I still really don't know how to play -- the nuts and bolts of how you find RP and how stories are told in this medium. Once I figure that out, I run into the clique issue. Most folks are OOCly chatting or in private rooms doing plotfoo or relationshipfoo. Won't someone please play with me?!

(I hope @Lotherio doesn't mind me using their game as an example... it sounds like it's a great place and this really isn't meant to be a criticism of that game in particular. It's just a commentary on the New MUSHer Experience overall.)

Some of this we can fix with system changes: better help files, built-in web clients, "MUSH 101" tutorials right from the wiki landing page / telnet welcome screen ... that sort of thing. This is the sort of thing I've been working on with Ares and my MUSH 101 tutorial. But a lot of it is cultural, and as others have said it requires a community that's really dedicated to not just tolerating newbies but actually reaching out and welcoming them and integrating them into the community. That takes real work, and people willing to do that work seem to be in short supply.

@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?

As someone who has done exactly that, I can answer yes to every one of those questions with ease.

That's great. I'm genuinely glad it worked out. For me personally - I would only be comfortable inviting a new player to someplace I ran or played on, or where I had friends who could serve as mentors. I think the barrier is just too high if you have someone brand new to MUSHing and you just dump them onto some random MU with no support.

@roz said in Valorous Dominion:

the book says that recommended minimums for a PC who's going to see combat are like - Size 11, Strength 10, and Constitution 8.

That's with an implicit +3 to Con, though. So it's really 10-11 as the minimum recommended value for knightly combat stats. Granted, knights would be assumed to be above the average citizen in beefcakeness so I guess it depends on whether you mean 'average knight' or 'average peasant'.

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem.

That's not been my experience, sadly - or the experience of a few other folks I know who were new to MUSHing. MUSHers often offer help to other MUSHers, sure, in terms of theme or code questions specific to a given game. But I haven't seen that extend to hand-holding brand new players.

I'm not saying people will start screaming in their face or anything, but I've seen a lot of intolerance to little stuff - like you said, the newbie who enters a scene all "Hello friends!", or who forgot to page before entering a private room, or who asked too many MU-101 type questions on the public channel and got snippy responses. These are the things that swiftly turn into active or passive avoidance, which makes it that much harder to actually find RP.

@apos said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I think it might be fair to say that a large percentage of players join a game because they have friends there that also help them get acclimated to a game and provide them a foundation of RP that they can then develop from.

Agreed. The only people who have a prayer of getting over these barriers are the ones who have existing relationships to help them. But I thought Ark was asking about bringing in people who didn't necessarily have that life preserver.

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

How do you bring a person into that fold?

Even setting aside the Technical (black telnet screen with obscure commands and clunky accessory wikis) and Advertising (good luck finding games) issues, there are huge hurdles on several fronts:

Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.

Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.

Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?

If the answer to any of those questions is 'no', then those are the questions we should be addressing before we even think about advertising.

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself?

I don't think you can make meaningful progress on that front without addressing the systemic, technical and cultural issues that would be (rightly) out of scope for this thread. People finding games is seriously the least of our problems.

@ixokai Fair enough. I have more comfort with the 40's and less with the 20's personally (though I know that wasn't an obstacle to a lot of folks RPing on Chicago MU). The 30's though are a hazy "Umm... Indiana Jones I guess?" kind of thing for me.

@arkandel said in Dice Mechanics:

Hey, the question was what we prefer. That's what I prefer!

Heh, fair enough. My preference is slanted by being on the receiving end of the complaints said choice generates

I prefer roll and count successes. I think that adding and subtracting dice for modifiers (as you'd find in nWoD, SR4, FS3 and various other systems) is a more intuitive way of handling stacked modifiers than trying to assess a singular raw difficulty of "easy, hard, etc.". And I like the way it allows for degrees of success - one success is fine for a passing grade, but extra ones get you more stars.

@arkandel said in Dice Mechanics:

Concealed from the player.

LOL - have you actually tried that? Geez, for as much flak as I get from people not liking FS3 mechanics, I got a gazillion times more on an older system when the mechanics were hidden, or even 1st edition FS3 when nobody understood the math. "What skill level should I take?" "Well, pick an adjective - are you average, good, or what?" "F the adjectives, girl -- what do the numbers mean?"

@kay said in Interest check: pure OC superhero game:

So you'd just prefer to play in something where you don't have to research before playing to feel comfortable

I don't think that's really what @ixokai was saying. Any historical setting is going to need some amount of research if you take it seriously. But there's a difference between the occasional need to look something up and lacking a basic comfort level with everyday life in that timeframe. Most folks have a pretty solid foundational understanding for the 20's (gangsters and flappers) and the 40's (WWII), but the 30's aren't very well-represented in popular culture.

If that's your beloved time period, go for it. But just be aware that it's probably going to be an obstacle for some (many?) folks.

Ares has a script to do it. See Reset the Master Admin Password.

@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

I can reach the website, but it doesn't have any info. This is from BGSU right now (and my Ares install looks the same, running on the default ports).

We chatted offline, but for record of anyone else having a similar problem - that seems to be a pretty hardcore firewall. Each one is different and it's hard to troubleshoot without being able to go to the person on the other end all: "So hey why is this not working" There are some tricks you can do with ports and subdomains to make it more firewall-friendly which I'd be happy to discuss with folks outside the thread.

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

And again and again and again, I say that there are several games out there, popular games, where failure is baked in, where sharing story is baked in. Saying that it’s the industry is not all that correct, and more of what we hang onto.

So talk about them, and what you think makes people more willing to accept failure in those games. What makes them into group story as opposed to individual story? I'm going by based on what I've observed across countless games and hundreds of players, even in the face of me trying to steer the game in other directions. Your experience doesn't invalidate mine; it runs parallel to it. So - in all seriousness - let's hear more about it. If there are transferrable lessons here I'm sure folks would like to hear them.

@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

I'd volunteer, but I can't actually get to Ares sites from work. Ports are blocked. I can reach M*s through the Cheesesoftware, but not the actual portal.

Not sure which site you're referring to, but the site admin can potentially fix this by running the web portal on a droplet/linode on port 80. (Or by setting up a sub-domain on an existing website.) Then it looks like just a regular old website. Firewall blockers tend to mostly have an issue when you run it on a weird port. T8S for instance is running on port 8000, which many firewalls will be like : "Yeah, nope."

But yeah, Ares supports a lot of Wikidot syntax for my own sanity.

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@faraday
Isn't this kind of ironic for someone who runs/ran a BSG game? In the five year run did they have one single unmitigated and unconditional success?

I don't see the irony personally. I can think of many victories throughout the course of the series, and only a few "wow sucks to be you" outright botches on the part of the main characters. And even when there were failures, those failures were part of a bigger arc leading to something meaningful, not just "wow, bad day for the Viper pilots I guess" randomness. So for me it's not about having unmitigated successes, it's about having the right level of challenge and meaningful failures that dovetail into a bigger story.

RL has the Olympic failures @WildBaboons mentioned, but we generally don't write novels or movies about those people (unless it's the punchline in a comedy). Nobody wants to tune into American Sniper and have him just randomly miss the critical shot in the movie for no reason whatsoever.

@thenomain said in Heroic Sacrifice:

I think this can be mitigated through the hobby think that we are telling a story and not I am telling my story.

Theoretically yes. In practice, I see that as a bridge too far for people. Because there is no "the story" in the game except insofar as it comprises the sum of the individual parts. And if that's the case, who's to say which individual story is the one that should end at any given moment?

I think it's a game industry problem more than a MU problem. You see it in tabletop, where players are often reluctant to part with their characters. There are rare souls who play all games like they would Paranoia (character death? bring it ON!), but those are the exception rather than the rule in my long experience. You see it in video games. How many have permadeath any more? Almost none right? Because it sucks.

I agree with @Cura that players are complicated, and I'm likewise uncomfortable with incentivizing failure as a form of victory. That just seems like an extremely slippery slope to me.

@surreality said in Search Broken:

perhaps she could offer instruction for a means of setting something like that up?

It's not really that complicated, technically-speaking, it's just a PITA. Any time you have multiple tools working together you have a fragile ecosystem trying to keep them all independently up to date and working happily with each other. And as @Arkandel mentions, that's then multiple "fronts" that you have to police against trolls.

I looked into this issue extensively when exploring solutions for AresMUSH, and ultimately came to the conclusion that having everything under one roof was for the best even if that roof has limitations. But that's just my 2 cents. Either way could be made to work with enough elbow grease.

@arkandel said in Search Broken:

@surreality I'm not sure nodebb is that bad after looking at other options. We even considered thinking-out-of-the-box approaches such as Discord.

The MU community could make use of real-time chat for shooting the breeze, a wiki (as @surreality mentions) for static, updatable information, and of course a forum for in-depth discussions. There doesn't exist a free tool that does it all well, and having multiple signons (or getting SSO to work) for multiple tools would be a pain. I don't really see a huge value in switching. NodeBB at least does two out of the three, even if it's not ideal. It is one of the more reputable and established forum software systems out there.

@arkandel said in Mismatched themes and expectations:

Ultimately where is the line between me trying to play out something I think is cool, and turning the game into something its runners don't?

I think the onus is on the players. Unless the game states otherwise, players shouldn't play out goals that change the game's central conceit. That's akin to being invited to a chess party and trying to strongarm people into playing poker. There's nothing wrong with poker, but that's not why everyone is here.

So if I were running a gritty post-apoc survival game and somebody wanted to make solar panels and turn it into a happy little utopia, or discover a giant cache of medicine or whatever, I would politely take them aside and chat about it. Maybe there can be an interesting plotline about how they're trying to do it but they end up running into insurmountable challenges. Or maybe the game isn't a good fit for what they are interested in RPing about.

I also think that sometimes games set themselves up for clashes of expectations, and that's where I feel this topic belongs in the game design thread. I think we all know that MUSHes are 90% social. BarRP, relationships, chats in the park, etc. When building your game, you've got to not only consider the plots, but what people are going to do between plots. Maybe a highly-relatistic post-apoc setting where it's 100% grimdark isn't a good fit for a MU and you should reconsider. Or make it invite-only for only folks you know share your vision and not the general "good-looking survivors who never die of dysentery and always magically have enough to eat..." Hollywood vision of post-apoc.

@jibberthehut said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@auspice Is potato still broken for Sierra? They tried to figure it out and then they came up with a 'Well download this, to run it with this, and after about the fifth step I just said fuck it and stopped trying. Will Atlantis nest tabs within the single window?

The latest Potato won't even open for me on my latest Mac High Sierra version. Sierra is just: "Yeaaaah.... no, sorry." (Also @Auspice) I use Atlantis though.

@thatguythere said in Heroic Sacrifice:

but after a PC death and doing again...ungh there would be nothing I would want to avoid more.

Yeah especially because you, the player, already know so much about these people from your old character. There isn't even the pleasure of social discovery. It just becomes monotonous. I just can't support forcing that on people just to provide some illusion of "stakes" in the story. When main characters die in a novel or on a TV show, there's a point to it. Their death serves some purpose in the story. It's not because "Oh, you rolled a 1 on save vs death... sucks to be you. Game over."

Not meaning to harp on PC death since that's only a part of the discussion here, but I think you can make the same arguments for failure in general. Characters in (good) stories don't just randomly fail. There's a greater narrative purpose, and the failure feeds into the next part of the story. That just doesn't happen in MUs. So can you really blame people to not want to fall flat on their face for no narrative reason other than a fickle die roll?