Best posts made by GamerNGeek

The answer to this is something no one wants to admit: Applications are useless. They prove nothing about your ability to RP. The only "application" that you should need for a comic game is basically a link to a wiki article you want to use as the basis for your character, and a bullet point list of any changes from that. If you're an OC, bullet-point all the way, simple, basic comparative. In the day of logging into an MMO, making a character in 2 minutes and being in play in three, you just CANNOT have this "write an essay, then wait a week for us to get back to you" mindset. People move on. And for god sake, for a superhero game, ditch the idea of stats. Superheros have wildly different abilities even from issue to issue, based on the writer's needs. Treat your players like adults, and assume they'll play like that. If they don't, show them the door.

@medela So...you have a Star Wars Mush. Except it isn't set in the Galaxy, doesn't have Sith, Jedi, the Empire, the Alliance/Republic, or any of the familiar races.

So you don't really have a Star Wars Mush. You have an original concept Sci-Fi Mush.

@Rucket Yeah, the problem was the skill inflation. Episode 4 Luke, as in "the farm boy from Tatooine", had skills and stats better than ANY starting character could have. Ever. Hell, he had stats better than characters who had been playing for quite a while.

@auspice Wait, wait. You never told us if the black garlic worked. This is need to know info!

FASERIP is available for free on the web. One could post every bit of relevant information on the news/wiki and not have to worry about copyright.

Marvel Heroic is not only NOT free, but is no longer sold or available since Margaret Weis let the license lapse.

One of these is the clearly superior choice for doing an internet game with people who don't want to spend money.

@botulism You shouldn't be surprised. People flock to your games like you said you were giving away free candy, as a rule.

As well as it handles everything else. Which is to say, narratively, not simulationisty. Ships are essentially characters with different actions, and there are a list of special actions people in any given station can take to support the ship in what it's doing. It works pretty well, unless you're looking for "you took a hit to the third starboard auxiliary shield generator; it's down 27%" crunchiness.

So we had a forum that worked for everyone, and replaced it with one that works for a number less than everyone, and makes everyone go through extra steps, and changed things we were familiar with because....?

Sometimes leaving things that work alone is the better answer.

@the-tree-of-woe said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@ixokai It's not without its bugs. I'm mostly mulling ways you could get away from the traditional model of app-writing. It's ancient, and while it's still serviceable I can't help but feel like there's got to be a better way to handle it.

Honestly, there is. Just that most of the dinosaurs would never consider it. The answer is: get rid of applications. Your application becomes a link to a wiki with data about your character, like Comicvine or Wikipedia. You can write up a "Differences" paragraph, and go "My character is this, but X". Let's face it...we all KNOW these characters. Everyone on the planet knows Batman. And if someone is apping for Cannonball, odds are good that, yeah, they know Cannonball. What good does it do ANYONE to make people retype and regurgitate info we already know and which is easily available online. None. It's like the long apps of old. In a day when Wikipedia didn't exist, they maybe made some sense. Now? None.

@Ganymede The problem would be the "Bad Stuff" Pool. Everything in Modiphius's 2d20 engine revolves around the concept that you by default roll 2d20. But you can choose to roll up to 3 additional by giving the GM points to a "Bad Stuff" pool.

Unlike some systems, this isn't just an optional thing; the engine is balanced around it. If you need to do difficult things, you're going to NEED to do this. The GM then turns around and spends these points to heal bad guys, call in extra bad guy reinforcements in a scene, etc.

Essentially, the heart of the system only works with the idea that the GM and the players are spending these Momentum and Bad Stuff (the name of Bad Stuff varies from system to system) points. Without a GM, the thing falls apart. I don't think it would work on a Mush, without someone coming up with an incredibly clever hack.

It remains the same issue. 2D20 is very Fate-esque in that there is a metacurrency (Fate Points in Fate, and the name varies all over the place in 2d20), that is designed that a GM is designed to get some of these points and spend them "against" you to make the challenges balanced. This requires not just a GM, but a good GM; you can't have someone whose goal is "kill all those $%^& players."

And the difficulty balance is absolutely intended that you NEED to spend these points to succeed at what you want. (Literally. In 2d20, difficulties go up to 5. You only have 2 dice with which to get successes. To get more, you must spend this metacurrency; 1 point gets you 1 dice.)

I don't see any way you could make this happen without a level of staff activity and interaction that most games aren't going to have. I love the games, and they work great...AT the table, with players who understand you are all playing together to tell a good story.

Without those conditions, it falls apart. Like many things, not every RPG ports to a Mush environment well.

@faraday Because I'm one of those weird edge cases you can't plan for. I'm enough of a coder that over the years I've gotten used to throwing functions into normal things that it's not always the player-side commands that I'm directly doing, whether it's logging into a new game and doing a think [version()], or an "ex me", or a @dol Jack Jill Spot=l ##.

Every time I run into one of those things and can't do it, it's just nails on a chalkboard for me. It's like a good veggie burger or a good diet soda. Sure, it can be good, it can be tasty...but it's not the real thing, and my subconscious knows it, and the little details grate at me.

It also doesn't help that my first and main exposure to it has been through Arx (aka Firan: The Second Coming), which puts enough simulation game into my roleplay MU* to ruin it. This is guilt by association, and totally no fault of Ares, but I never claimed any of this was anything but emotional bias.

So, okay. I've been beating my head against this for a while, and now I'm frustrated enough to want to solve this by being able to throw money at it, and I know we have code-savvy people here. Here's my desired outcome:

A) Have a place to host wikis that is something I pay for. I don't want to use free alternatives like wikia or wikidot; they both have disadvantages I don't want to deal with, and I want control over things.

B) Using MediaWiki is a must-have. There are lots of wiki servers out there, but this is the one I know and the one that has the extensions I want, so it's a must-have.

C) (The hard part). What I am looking to do is what seems to be called either a "wiki family" or a "wiki farm". There is a manual page here (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family) but it makes my eyes glaze over. In plain English, I'm looking to have ONE install of the "server" (for lack of better terminology; a single MediaWiki install), but multiple databases, so that I could have a database for game 1, another database for game 2, and some way to use subdomains so that if I go to game1.wikisite.com it takes me to one database, and game2.wikisite.com takes me to another. Using multiple Mediawiki installs has worked in the past, but that's a lot of installs potentially to keep updated, and it's a lot of files.

This is clearly something that's doable based on the documentation there, and people seem to have gotten it working. But it's a little too technical for my brain. Any assistance here would be great, and the more simple and "plain English" it is, the better. The best option, from my perspective, is I throw money at one of you, go "make this happen", and receive a finished working product.

So, anyone with some savvy in this that either wants to lend a hand, or make some coin, let me know.

If you're looking for people, it might be a good idea to put the game's address in your post. Just sayin'.

@Misadventure I think it's not about specific changes. It's about the ability for the setting to grow, change, and adapt. The death of the "Status Quo is God" trope, in other words.

FFG's new Star Wars engine blows Saga and D6 out of the water, in that it actually feels like Star Wars. But then, that would require Mushers to do something new. Which means it will never happen.