@Admiral said in Good or New Movies Review:
JJ Abrams continues to be an overrated nostalgia machine. He did Rian Johnson dirty.
I think JJ Abrams is best viewed akin to Michael Bay. He is very talented at putting a few hours of sound and video together to make an enjoyable summer blockbuster. It just wont be memorable or interesting enough to be a fan of.
@Rinel
I have a hard time ranking the prequel movies because if you just delete most scenes involving jar jar and most padme/anakin scenes, the remaining story is genuinely pretty good. I have no idea how Lucas managed to make that romance so unbelievably cringe.
@GreenFlashlight
All of your suggestions seem to involve the third movie having to do all the heavy lifting of the middle and last part of the trilogy either way. If the second movie isn't doing any of the setup work for the third movie, you're not making a trilogy, you're just making three movies that follow each-other chronologically.
I think this 'trilogy' is going to be remembered as three individually ok star wars movies where no part of the plot survived outside its own movie and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they're all declared non-canon in the near future.
@ZombieGenesis said in Good or New Movies Review:
@Jaded I agree. Like it or not TLJ happened. By ignoring it you're not going to appease the people who did not like TLJ because of how you're going to have to drag out your new story with exposition and you're also going to ostracize the people who did like TLJ. It's a lose/lose. I think it would have been best to just springboard off of TLJ and tell the best story you can from there.
What is there even in TLJ to springboard off? TLJ basically neutered/killed all the villains and all the plot threads from The Force Awakens.
The Witcher is so much better then I ever expected it to be. When I first read that Henry Cavill would play Geralt I didn't think he'd be able to sell it but the finished product...
He's basically perfect. He must have spent an ungodly amount of time perfecting the voice and the combat movements.
My only real complaints about the series would be that it involves a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time and they never explain when a particular scene takes place. To spare the rest of you the same confusion, Cirilla's storyline takes place in the 'present' while Geralt and Yennifer start their stories about 30 years in the past and eventually over the course of the season Geralt and Yennifer catch up with the present.
@wahoo said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
It can't be the job of liege houses to make sure their vassal houses don't get too big. That fucking sucks. It punishes the liege house by making them stomp on RP and they become the bad guys to everyone.
There is also NO incentive NOT to start to jump up the chain, so you're just blindly punishing the liege house by taking away their vassals + income because they DIDN'T jump all over someone's RP fun times. Again, that sucks.
So like, what do we do?
What does a Liege house actually lose when one of their vassals get elevated?
The vassal will no longer be part of the liege chat channel
They no longer get the mostly trivial 10% tax
They can no longer call the banners of that vassal
Normally the largest damage would be the third point but in Arx its practically impossible to tell how much smaller that makes your army since you have no way of seeing how large of an army you can call upon. Also if you have a good relation with the vassal you should be able to secure an alliance that allows you to call their banners even when they're no longer your vassal.
@Selerik
It's because the way Arx is set up, it distinguishes between Account and Character and the caller for commands is the Account. There's also some confusing subclasses that I no longer remember how they're laid out because I havn't touched that code in 6 months.
You can look in the Clue command for how Tehom did it for another command:
https://github.com/Arx-Game/arxcode/blob/6c60b99a0843f4f27ad6dd102afa1bc55846d6bb/web/character/investigation.py#L1339
def get_help(self, caller, cmdset):
"""Custom helpfile that lists clue sharing costs"""
caller = caller.player_ob
doc = self.__doc__
doc += "\n\nYour cost of sharing clues is %s." % caller.clue_cost
return doc
I think your example will get a syntax error since there's no action_point_cost defined inside that function.
@Ganymede said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
For a MUSH, I don’t really mind if the Aspiration system were pulled, but you really have to have Conditions for CoD to work properly.
I think having Aspirations in some form is helpful if only because it's a reminder that your character should be wanting to achieve something with regularity.
@Livia
The way RFK handled those beats was pretty manageable.
https://requiemforkingsmouth.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Advancement
I will always advocate towards tuning the system to work better for a MUSH then copying the TT rules straight.
One advantage discussing the system has over 'PRP' is that the system is something you can easily look at and evaluate while the PRP support of a hypothetical game, not so much. Everyone is always going to say their game is going to have amazing plot and plenty of support for PRPs but that doesn't usually shake out in practice for a host of reasons.
@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
Do not underestimate the effect regularly having 60+ active players around has on being able to find stuff to do.
That's not the case for most nWoD games which peak in... the 40s range? And usually have 20-30 players on.
See the issue isn't whether there's a ST explicitly tossing plot around. It's the idea that players know in advance plot is available and, more importantly, when it will happen. There's a time and a place involved, so if they show up they are going to participate in... something.
In my opinion that kind of pre-scheduled 'plot scene' is almost universally horrible for everyone involved because it's just too many players in the same place at the same time. Unless the game is extremely small, I think it makes more sense to handle the plot like Arx does it where it by and large happens discreetly through bluebooking, private scenes and story emits.
Many nWoD games are caught in a perpetuating trap of mutually assured inactivity when you log on, look around, find nothing to do and go idle (or log off) then I log on, look around... and so on.
Limiting XP doesn't do anything positive and it might even damage their potential by placing the upper half of cool powers out of reach for the first few months on MU* which effectively won't last for that long anyway.
Aspirations don't fix it either because although they are organic they require interesting RP to be happening in the first place whereas PrPs both generate and reward RP at the same time.
While it sounds attractive to have all the 'cool powers' I think that it isn't really great for the game for everyone to run around with enormous powers. It makes it much harder to create engaging plotlines and ensure that the local setting makes some amount of sense. World of Darkness works a lot better as a MU* when players are on the lower end of the power scale imho.
I think that rather then 1e vs 2e, I would like to see a nWoD project that implements their own entirely custom ruleset that's designed for MU* from the ground up rather then a hacky implementation of a tabletop system.
You're going to have to come up with countless house rules for XP progression, mental powers on PCs, power economy etc anyhow so why not do it thoroughly?
When it comes to XP progression, what I do like about beats is that because each beat is justified, it means you can look at your own beat history and it provides a nice little timeline of what your character has been doing.
@Arkandel said in What game system would you prefer for a big-tent nWoD project?:
XP is not the problem. It's a paper tiger. It's idleness that kills game after game. This cannot be fixed via systemic changes, it requires active recruitment of STs and promoting those plots aggressively.
I don't think ST run plots are quite that required. As RfK showed while it was around and Arx is demonstrating right now, you can really drive a lot of RP by giving players the feeling they're controlling some aspect of the game world and get to engage in some amount of meaningful politics with eachother over it. It does require you to have people willing to set up a large amount of code for you however.
@Kestrel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
On a MUSH, this would be solved with a nice clean ban.
So I don't know the law where you live, but since you said this is an association owned house, that means the possibility exists of her being evicted if she is sufficiently disruptive.
Where I live it takes quite a lot to reach that point as long as theyre paying their fees on time, but breaking and entering into your neighbors sounds up there.
You might want to talk with the association board, maybe this isnt her first time doing this kind of thing.
@Tinuviel said in Armageddon MUD:
@Pandora Discord is just a Chromium tab.
ETA: It can be a Chromium/other browser tab.
Using the desktop version of Discord, press ctrl+shift+i and see what happens.
@Pandora said in Armageddon MUD:
I'm looking at the IP match to another player. Sure, it's a small world or whatever, but not that damn small.
Also, has anyone cared enough to check if between the two Shalooonsh names on Discord, one of them is spelled shalooonsh and the other is spelled shaiooonsh? Because I've definitely seen people in Discord groups make duplicates of someone's name using the capital-i-looks-like-lowercase-l trick for 'funny hijinks' like sending dick pics.
There's no need to do that since Discord doesn't enforce names being unique. It's also super easy to spoof Discord conversations because Discord is literally just a chromium tab and you can straight up enter the Chrome dev mode and start editing the text.
@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
Yes, I know well these techniques, and as said all of them are available as stateful commands or even as ready infrastructures like EvMenu in Evennia. These have no problem with REST, they are saved to the database. If necessarily wanting to go the room-based chargen route you can of course have commands on rooms in Evennia too (but personally I find it ugly to use rooms to mimic what can be handled by a proper multi-option menu ... but I digress).
The point about rooms is that they're the simple way to do things. I think it's unhelpful to someone who wants to develop a game to give them shortcuts that they'll regret later. I think Evennia Attributes are an example of this because they might look really tempting and easy to use when someone is starting out, but later when they come further trying to design their game systems and maybe want to migrate their database they'll come to the realization they need to rewrite everything because attributes are kind of awful when you actually try to do anything with them.
I think it's better in cases like that to simply give people an entirely non-code way to handle things. Already in the 1980's we made a distinction between coders and builders and I think that's the right way to go.
Instead of giving people shortcuts to code menus and text adventures, why not straight up give them tools to generate menus and text adventures? If you look at various game dev toolkits, they're usually some kind of simplified scripting interface available designed to make it easy for people who don't know how to code to make things happen. You could argue that the first 'code' I ever did was messing around with the Starcraft map editor.
It shouldn't be that hard to make a web interface for Evennia to allow people to make Zork style adventures without ever having to touch python.
@Griatch
If you have a deep abiding love for interactive functions and you want to achieve REST compatibility, what you can do is split the function into two parts. The prompt part and the answer handler.
If you want people to step through a 'cinematic' sequence of texts. Why not just use rooms? Rooms do that amazingly. It's why basically every MU * chargen ever is done through rooms. Especially since in MUSH you can attach commands directly to rooms and make them fully interactive.
For confirmation dialogs, the easiest way without prompts is to just have the user enter the command twice.
@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
They are exceptionally useful for a game designer though. Evennia has dynamic systems for making building command question/answer pairs (the EvMenu for example). But for ease of coding, this function:
I think it's bad game design. If you ask someone to yield and they disconnect, did they yield or not? Maintaining REST forces you to do things properly and ensure that the character is always in some sort of meaningful state.
If our prospective game designer wants to code anything meaningful ever, they're going to have to learn REST principles either way and I don't think you're doing them any actual favors by trying to give them a dodge.
