Posts made by Ganymede

@sunny said in Alternative Formats to MU:

How is that related to her point?

Faraday picked up on it.

Of course if you want special, unique features you'll need a coder. That will always be true. But right now you need a coder even if you don't want special unique features, and that's silly.

And Apos did as well, sort of.

Yeah, I don't mean this as a slam on WoD at all, but it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it.

I concur with Apos, and sympathize with Faraday. My comment was, by no intent, a knock on what she's doing on her end. (I'm a Faraday fanboygrl.)

I have ideas. I always have ideas. But I lack the skills to turn those ideas into functional code. Yes, I could learn how to code, but that's a barrier due to time and personal responsibilities. So, for now, I must rely on a coder, or someone with enough proficiency to take Ares out of the box and make it work (chug chug chug). I love BSG:U and will continue to promote it, but what I want to do slightly differs in that I foresee the need for an entire block of other commands that don't exist yet (as far as I know).

That said, I want whatever project I have in mind to work with Ares. I think it, and Evennia, are the way of the future. I want to promote both.

But I still have a problem doing this myself. So the "do I have a coder" flowchart is still stapled to my ass. And I think that successful games need something unique to themselves, so there'll always be a need for a coder, no matter how much Faraday adds to the standard toolbox. If innovation will help the hobby flourish, then games will need coders to push that envelope. And, from a non-coder perspective, I think this is a fact that makes the "do I have a coder" flowchart a truism.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Are they really doing the same things though? Smashing the do you have a coder flowchart that has hindered the creation of games for 25 years. Making it orders of magnitude easier to learn to code, as @Tat mentioned. Creating a seamless web/wiki/game integration. These are things that, to the best of my knowledge, haven't been done before.

All of this may be true, but good games differ from one another. Your package may have all of the great features we've come to know and love, but I don't think, for example, that the developers are interested in coding up special, unique features for each game.

I could be wrong, mind.

@insomnia

Pourquoi-ca, you cheese-eating surrender-monkey?

@Bobotron

Might want to try Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy Tactics, both of which are out for the iPad, but I'm not sure about other tablets.

I've just started this game for PS4, but does anyone have deep experience with Dreadnought?

@sunny said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Both Ares and Evennia (new platforms) have the ability to do this (and the flagship games for both do it), so I'm not sure what you're basing this on.

I think it would be fair to say that, aside from Arx, BSG:U, and 5th Kingdom, games don't allow you to build your own code bits and objects. We used to have those back in the 90s on games, remember?

passes over the sweet tea

Yep, back in the good ol' days.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that, since then, there was a crackdown on @quota. I mean, as a poll, how many other games out there allow their PC objects to start with @quota? On Fallcoast, quotas are disabled, for example. Quite a few new players I've met don't know how to @dig rooms or connect exits, or even do @osuccs accurately, but these were the sorts of skills most players had about 15 years ago.

Anyhow, I'm glad we're moving back to allowing PC objects some amount of @quota to play with.

@thenomain

Start learning Ares. ^.^ I'm abandoning a custom system. I want to steal everything wholecloth from Faraday.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

For creative writing, all the bells and whistles can effectively be ignored; +phones and coded vehicles are clutter in the way of RP.

I want to interject here.

Someone else has said it, but I've had the best RP by +phone or +text. It's all mildly hilarious. My interactions with @RizBunz (with Wes) and @skew (with Ripley) were on the right side of laugh-out-loud.

So, let's not go calling 'em clutter, man.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm for a project against a barrage of criticism. A bug is a bug, but it matters whether you report it as "Grr, this is broken again..." or "FYI I stumbled across this..."

I'm going to try to remember to always connect to BSG:U via the web portal. I want to get to feel it out better.

When I played Arx, I hated the web portal. But that's probably because I'm an old fart.

Gonna try harder, you whippersnappers.

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

A lot of these formats are actually not great for RP, and that's another thing I've discovered from players who try out MU* and manage to hook in: they find it a much better platform for RP than others they were using before. Like, guys, we actually have a lot of potential to bring in a lot of new players, we just need to lower the bar a little where we can.

Okay. I like this.

I'm not a coder. What can I do to help?

Thanks for this, @Meg. I don't get to talk to her much, but say hi to Cobalt for me. She was nice enough to give me the last shot at keeping Dark Water alive.

@jaded said in Do you buy your RPG books?:

...except for books that are out of print or very very hard to find hardcopies of. From con networking I can get almost anything that anyone would want that falls under those categories. In PDF of course.

I have a lot of old World of Darkness and new World of Darkness books lying around that I'll never get any mileage out of. Anyone who is willing to make a .PDF of them for me may have the hard copies.

Goddamned Scorchers.

HZD: The Frozen Wilds remains fun as shit.

But fuck you, Scorchers.

@jaded

I don't know or recall.

If he ain't going to do it, then he'd better start making new Flight of the Conchords stuff. We're due.

@sockmonkey said in Good or New Movies Review:

When can we start speculating and talking about Last Jedi? I mean, yeah sure, I guess all the cool people are like Star Wars, whatever, pfft but I can't waaaaaaaiiiiiiitttttt....

I want to know if Kathleen Kennedy's going to put Taika Waititi in charge of the last episode, or another part of the franchise.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

It's sucking up descs from actual rooms. They just made unlinked rooms for that purpose. But at that point, you could think of a "room" as just a pre-defined "location" - which is in fact how the Ares web portal locations directory refers to them.

It's a really cool feature. You could basically have a whole swath of unlinked rooms, all parented to the appropriate rooms that have things like the weather, the time, the date, and so on, and so on. I think this system is really revolutionizing the way I see MU*s and what can be done with them.

I mean, I've crowed about your stuff before, but this is incredible.

I have an idea for another feature that might be very popular, but, like, that's not for this thread.

@arkandel

I buy my World of Darkness stuff from DriveThruRPG. I stopped using sharing systems a while back. I don't mind sharing my .PDFs, though.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The idea of a grid? Even in the telnet version, I'm moving away from that with my scene system. By refocusing our RP around the idea of scenes, the grid becomes unnecessary. Give folks a map and some pre-defined locations/descs and they can go to to town.

True story: Victorian Reverie was the first game I played on which didn't have a Grid, but, instead, places of public interests to RP in. This was almost ten years ago. We didn't have the scene system, but it really would have helped a lot.

The 8th Sea has utilized what you're describing very well. As an added feature, opening up a scene by titling it a certain way sucks up a pre-made description from somewhere in the ether and drops it into your description for the scene. Beautiful.

@derp said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I wish my bosses were cool enough to let me use Spotify while researching. I would be so much more enthusiastic about reading words dead people wrote. Jealous.

My bosses like me using YouTube for my music that I've actually shown them how to pull up Billboard Top 20 Playlists on their own computers, so they can rock and roll to classics from the 60s.

That said, and more on point, I like what @faraday's done with Ares. I don't use her web interface out of habit. If I were forced to use Ares' web portal, I would probably do so if everyone else in my cadre of player-friends did the same. If they all left because of the mandate, I might as well.

I'm not a Luddite, but I am someone who'll follow a trend, whether it's backwards or not, if the people I'm playing with are doing the same.

@jaded said in General Video Game Thread:

I expect TLoU 2 will be as emotional as the first game was. And it was one of only two games ever that made me feel like my heart was ripped out of my chest.

The first 15 minutes the game made the first 5 minutes of Up look like sunshine and rainbows.

@derp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

We all do this from time to time, and time can change those opinions.

Changing opinions because of the passage of time is fine. Everyone can have a change of heart.

That's not what I'm talking about.

In the case of Allegiance, one of the repeated points of criticism is that the music was sometimes too light and frivolous for the subject matter. For example, in one spot, you see a family dealing with the death of a child at the camp, and then, in the next scene, they are all singing about playing baseball and dancing and making the best of things. It's a corny-as-hell song, and critics, by and large, found tone-change jarring.

I read this and I kind of eye-rolled.

Of course it's jarring. It's supposed to be jarring. It's as jarring as being woken up in the bright hours of the morning to be hauled by armed men into trucks, driven to train stations, and shipped off to concentration camps. It's as jarring as knowing that you are an American citizen, but locked up in your own country for looking like the enemy. It's as jarring as expecting any American to just lie down and take confinement "for the good of the country" when there was an entire Revolutionary War fought because Americans don't really "lie down and take" any sort of bullshittery (at least, back in the 40s).

In retrospect, this is why I hated Rent for a while. I thought that it was vaguely disrespectful to have joyful pieces like "Cover You" and "One Song Glory" when you know damn well that the characters are dealing with HIV. And then a nice, gay friend of mine calmly asked: well, what the fuck else are you supposed to do, lie down and take it?

And, like, not for a moment, apparently, did the critics think: hey, maybe people do seemingly absurd things to make the best of a situation when they have no other choice. Apparently.

So, music? Sure, it wasn't going to win a Tony. Plot? Perhaps over the head of a lot of the audience. But the critics? Some of them seemed to just ignore context or culture when writing their pieces. And that's what I take exception to.

I would like to think that what crippled Allegiance was its seriousness. It lacks levity, even when it tries to be. It's not a show you want to take in when you're being reminded of the loss of a loved one, for example. And maybe it turned off a lot of the older Broadway crowd because no one likes being reminded that the United States forced its own loyal people into concentration camps. Or, perhaps, the producers simply did not think enough of it to keep it going for at least a full season.

It's sad.

But, then, these sorts of things get forgotten over time.