Posts made by faraday

@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

Hell I remember back in the day on some WoD games where all the sudden a person would be ambushed, and miraculously people who were all the way across town at the time it happened showed up!

But that's BS even if the person happened to be in the next store over. It's not an issue of travel times, it's an issue of people abusing OOC knowledge in a metagamey way. And it's easily regulated by storytellers/GMs/admins saying "Uh yeah... no."

Either a scene is open or closed. Either it's plausible for your character to be there or it isn't. If the scene is open and it's plausible for you to be there - then there should be no reason to prevent you from joining, even if you happened to log off across the galaxy.

Now "plausible" takes many forms. Is your character's bank account tapped out because you've made three trips to Coruscant already this week? Were you RPing on Yavin IV earlier this morning and couldn't possibly make it back there in time for this scene? Do you have no sensible reason to be in a backwater cantina on Tattoine? These are all valid reasons to keep somebody out of a scene. But "you didn't press the right keystrokes to get to the right place at the right time" is a BS reason for preventing someone from telling stories on a storytelling game IMHO.

@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

In other words geographical separation - or even isolation - in fantasy settings is often too big a factor to just discard... at least for me, others' mileage may vary. Without that regional fragmentation it's arguable events would (should) simply play out differently.

I don't think you're overthinking it at all. How different would Firefly have been if the crew could just zip around the galaxy with hyperdrives? How different would a Wild West setting be if you could take a train and be back in New York City overnight? This isn't just a matter of OOC inconvenience - it's a critical factor of what stories you can tell in that universe. I'm not saying you need to micromanage it, but a sense of scale is vitally important to maintain some degree of plausibility in the game's theme.

But OOC inconvenience is definitely a thing. @RnMissionRun brought up folks who wouldn't tolerate a 40 minute travel time. I would assuredly be in that group myself. I have a limited amount of time to play, and I'm simply not going to burn 40 minutes of it twiddling my thumbs waiting to play. Reminds me of the early MMO days where you'd have to get in the queue and wait 30 minutes before the game would even start. It was intolerable then and it's intolerable now. If it takes 40 minutes ICly, fine. But there's no reason not to assume that my character started their journey 40 IC minutes ago while I was logged off. As long as such a journey is plausible in the setting, don't put up silly barriers to people getting together to tell stories.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I think there are pitfalls if you have travel times more than half a day that are routinely necessary. A few hours can be assumed to take place off-camera without getting in the way of RP, and most folks can suffer through "okay you're going to the boonies for a special one-time plot and you're going to be off-grid for a week" as long as it's once in a blue moon. But nobody wants to do that regularly.

I'm not a fan of hand-waving established travel times because I think it has weird effects. Like - say your Wild West game is set in the middle of nowhere. If you've constantly got people hopping back and forth to the big city like it's no big deal, hand-waving weeks-long travel times, it's really jarring. Same with Firefly, where the lack of FTL and longer travel times is a part of the setting. If you don't want people going on long trips, make a setting where either it's not necessary or there's insta-travel.

@arkandel said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

Guys, please respect the OP's request. Make a different thread for the copyright stuff.

Why not split it off and move the posts so the discussion isn't split up (or, since I think it's pretty talked out, so it isn't buried in a random thread for posterity).

@griatch said in Coordinates-based Grid:

Things like line-of-sight, sound travelling and descriptions changing at-a-distance are completely new concepts though that would require rework of the relevant commands. And many build commands would of course also work differently, and require different options (as for any heavily customized game style).

Yeah that's more what I meant -- conceptually it requires a lot of work to figure out how everything would interact. It's nifty that Evennia has a central search() function (Ares has something similar in its VisibleTargetFinder class) but doesn't CmdPose work off of location and not search in Evennia? It looks like at does anyway, and Ares things work off location as well. And even with a central handler - like you said, the "range" for grabbing would probably be different than the "range" for hearing or seeing. And of course walls or obstacles would probably affect all of those things. Whereas most things in MUSH land conceptually use "in the same room" as the default range for almost everything. So I'm sticking with my guesstimate of "massive" as the scope But it sounds like OP is fine with that and just wants to know if it can be done, which it certainly can.

@griatch I assume for completely room-less you'd also need to write custom code for say/pose/emit/etc., since game communication is normally centered around what room you're in. And any object-interaction commands like 'take/give' (if Evennia has those), describe, look, teleport, etc. Sure with enough work it could be done, but the effort involved strikes me as massive.

Not relevant to OP, but FYI for anyone referencing this thread later - Ares doesn't have a wilderness contrib, but if you were going to attempt such a thing I would suggest doing it in exactly the same way that @Griatch described.

@thenomain said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

The “or I’d lose copyright” excuse was constructed whole cloth from this discussion, not attributed to any author. The statement is just a much supposition as many things said here. If this part is taken out, which I think is a very reasonable thing to do, then it’s about as offensive as saying that you have to clean your room because you’re the mom, not because you want to.

Author Fanfic Policies --

• Martin, George R. R. Believes fanfiction damages copyright and authors should not allow it, even though he wrote amateur comic fic himself when younger...
• Roberson, Jennifer Chronicles of the Cheysuli, Sword-Dancer Saga "If I grant permission, I risk endangering my copyright…. My sincere apologies--hey, I wrote fanfic in high school and college!--and I hope you understand." [146]
• Weber, David Honor Harrington series, War Gods series, others. "[A] writer cannot allow the free use of his universe without risking the loss of his own rights to it." [150]

It's been said, there and elsewhere. And it's just flat-out incorrect.

I understand an author's desire not to deal with headaches resulting from fanfic. I respect their right to have sole control over their work. I don't find the discussion silly. If you do, just... stop reading maybe?

@ixokai said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

You say, "in fact", yet in fact is more nuanced. You can not sue someone for copyright infringement for ideas. Flat, stop. You can't. You can, with a much harder burden of proof, sue someone for plagiarism That's a more complicated case that has nothing at all to do with copyright..

Worth reading on this account: MZB vs Fanction.

Lawyers were involved, hassle was ensued, and yet, notably, there was no actual lawsuit at all - let alone a case where a fanfiction writer actually won a copyright case against an established author. Even more importantly, the situation could have resulted whether the author had a prohibition against fanfic or not. Because, as @ixokai said, this is America and anybody can try to sue anybody about anything. Whether it will actually hold up or not - that's the question.

Also worth noting that even the claims that the publisher refused to publish the author's novel due to the overlap is in question:

“one of the fans [Lamb] wrote a story, using my world and my characters, that overlapped the setting I was using for my next Darkover novel. Since she had sent me a copy of her fanzine, and I had read it, my publisher will not publish my novel set during that time period, and I am now out several years’ work, as well as the cost of inconvenience of having a lawyer deal with this matter.” [1. I’ve heard claims that DAW killed the project. I’ve also spoken to Betsy Wolheim at DAW, who states that this was Bradley’s decision, not DAW’s.]

@thenomain said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

I personally don't see a conflict between "it would be a headache" and "my lawyer told me to", and find the last roughly fifteen posts a good thirty seconds of my life that I won't get back.

It's the "I would really like to, but..." part I find disingenuous. And the "I really can't because it would jeopardize my copyright..." bit leads to the pervasive public misinformation that you have to actively defend copyright or else you lose it. If you don't see a distinction, fine, but there's no need to be derogatory about it.

@roz said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

I imagine there are plenty of lawyers who are like "you should say no just so we can all avoid the potential for a possible headache down the line."

Right. "I don't feel like dealing with any potential headaches, however unlikely" is a completely reasonable position to take. "I really don't mind but my lawyer says I can't/shouldn't" is a cop-out IMHO because the actual risk of losing a court case against a derivative fanfic writer is ludicrously small.

@ixokai said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

I don't actually believe any real lawyers are telling any authors that they must say no, though. Its just a sort of urban legend that floats around and people claim to be true.

As Kanye said, I have also seen reputable authors directly claim this. Now are they lying to avoid looking like the bad guy? Do they have crappy lawyers? Dunno. But it's decidedly not just an urban legend.

@kanye-qwest said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

So if an author said "sure, I don't care, make whatever you want" and then happened to write something that was very similar to a fan work, that fan could not then turn around and sue the author for copyright infringement, right?

If the author gave away their copyright without limitation, then that's a dumb decision that could cause some weird legal situations. I'd still have a hard time imagining a court upholding Joe FanficAuthor trying to sue George RR Martin for using an idea from a story that is itself derivative of his original books, though.

That aside, the author has sole right to authorize derivative works, and can create whatever contract they wish (within reason) to protect themselves in the process. Saying: "Yes, you can make a MUSH with these conditions" is a perfectly valid way to protect one's copyright as far as I'm aware. And one smart condition to include would be a disclaimer that the MUSH couldn't come back after the author for using coincidentally-similar ideas. Like @ixokai, I am not a lawyer but I am well-versed in copyright law as both an author and someone who's dealt with software intellectual property stuff.

@kanye-qwest said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

many creators are obligated to say no, even if they don't care, by their lawyers.

I've never really understood that. If they don't want people using their stuff, that's one thing, but "I really don't mind but my lawyer doesn't want me to" is bizarre. Copyright doesn't have a "dilution" clause like trademarks do. The author retains the sole right to create derivative works, and I don't see how granting permission to one person prevents them from saying no to someone else. Trademarks, of course, are a different matter. I understand why folks feel compelled to strenuously defend their brand if it's trademarked.

@thenomain Dunno. Think that distinction is in the eye of the beholder.

@jennkryst said in Favorite Minigames:

Do we need to have Farmville AND an MMO AND a MUSH if we want to roleplay the results of killing a mob that interfered with our farm sim?

If that's what (generic) you wants, you should make it. I'm just expressing my preference. I think we've seen that a dilution of focus makes for a worse experience because game designers and coders can't reasonably be expected to be great at everything. They could add mob AI to FarmVille, sure, but it probably would be poor compared to the experience in a MMO. People do try to "RP" in WoW, but it's not really what most MUSHers would consider RP. And so on.

ETA: Also I think it becomes a culture issue. How many folks want to do farm sim stuff, AND don't mind if zombies invade their vegetable garden while they're planting potatoes, AND want to roleplay about it? Hey, if you can pull off a game like that, more power to you. But I'm skeptical.

@lithium said in Star Wars?:

If it's a Star Wars game that is set in the same time period, but, /away/ from the big movie plot, with no FC's etc, then maybe you've got something there.

Gotcha. Yeah, being along for the ride during a re-tread of New Hope wouldn't interest me any. I was thinking more of things like SW:Rebels or Rogue One, where the PCs could be adjacent to the movie storyline but still had room to tell their stories and even potentially be heroes in their own right. (Though you still have the problem with the limited number of epic hero moments we discussed in the Spotlight thread.)

@lithium said in Star Wars?:

The big damned heroes are already cast, so what does that make the PC's?

Uh... heroes in different stories? I mean, I get what you're saying but I don't get how that's different from literally every other MU out there. Even if it was a wholly original setting, not every MU character can be the last remaining "chosen one" literally saving the entire galaxy multiple times. It just doesn't scale that way.

Double post because I would be remiss if I didn't clarify... there is another way to do dynamic movement that doesn't require rooms on the fly. But there you not only have to implement your own movement/grid system, you also have to re-invent the way that people interact with each other (since typical pose/look/etc. commands are all room-based). At that point I think you're not really utilizing your MU server as a MU server. But again - whatever strikes your fancy!

@wizz said in Coordinates-based Grid:

I had never played an HSpace/etc game so it felt very fresh and ridiculously immersive to me, as you can literally wander (or run/crawl/etc, you set a coordinate and a speed and then movement is automatic) across plains, up mountains, through forests, etc. without the artificial feel of typing in "west" or whatever and moving block by block. It's really stuck with me.

Well you should do whatever makes you happy! I can't help but wonder, though, if it would lose some of that immersive magic once you actually look under the hood and implement it. Because at the end of the day, you're still going west block by block. It's just instead of typing "west" you have a code timer that does "go west" automatically... and instead of having ten thousand rooms @dug in advance, you have a data file with ten thousand entries about what's where so the code knows what type of room to @dig on the fly.