Posts made by Groth

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

Though @groth has a very fair point that quite a bit is being developed as we go. I do have strong opinions about where we end up, in terms of having a vision, though I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing to refine mechanics throughout- I worry about laying out something specific and sticking to my guns come hell or high water kind of invites the game developing in an aberrant path away from things I originally envisioned and thought would be fun, which are a lot more abstract.

Though yeah I agree, having a clearer end point rather than more vague general goals would be a lot more efficient.

I agree that it's not necessarily to stick to a design idea come hell or high water. Rather that when you're dealing with a moderately complex system, it's often a lot easier if you design from the goal to the fiddly bits rather then fiddle with things until you reach your goal.

By analogy, if you want to make a box for storing a litre of liquid, you can either keep changing the dimensions of each side until you find something that neatly holds your litre, or you can do a simple volume calculation to find out what lengths you need in one go. If you then decide that a two litre container would be much more convenient, you now also know how to get there quickly.

To talk about more specific things. I quite like how your vote and journal system works. By limiting your votes to 10 votes per week and journal xp to 7 xp per week, you effectively get a system very similar to the +beats system used by Requiem for Kingsmouth that most people that tried it quite enjoyed. The limit on the votes means that the main XP source isn't massive court scenes as can often be the case in +vote systems and journals provide means to flesh out your own personal stories and grant you more control over the rate you earn xp.

I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.

One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.

Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.

My impression so far of Arx is that the staff are very friendly and responsive and by all impressions are working really hard to make Arx into what they want it to be. I've had suggestions implemented minutes after I suggested them.

The game is complete enough that it can be played in a social sense, but the mechanics that are meant to power the political aspect are yet to be implemented fully(Domains, tasks, NPC minions etc). What I've seen of their mechanics so far is interesting and if they manage to implement things in accordance to their vision they might create something really great.

My main concern about Arx is that I'm getting the impression that the staff rather then having a firm idea of what they want and how to achieve it, are kind of winging their game mechanics as they go along.

My suggestion would be for @Apos and the others to take some time to write out exactly how they'd like all their systems to work and interact so that they can more cleanly work towards that goal.

If you have a clear answer to questions like How long should combat last? What kind of armor do we want players to use? How large of an advantage do we want expensive armor to grant? It's a lot easier to figure out how to code the fatigue and armor mechanics for instance.

The playerbase itself seems to skeev somewhat to Firan refugees at this early stage which can sometimes feel awkward when everyone is talking about a game I've never played or know much of anything about. They also seem to skeev somewhat to multi-paragraph posing which is something I have mixed feelings about.

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Shame Game:

@Pandora I mean I think you were also telling people to kill themselves in that thread. Which, yes, could count as a differing opinion but let's not be DISINGENUOUS now.

I told someone to kill herself about a year or so ago outside of MSB and then stopped speaking to her entirely. She sent a half-assed apology note a year ago, I didn't accept her apology & then suddenly she was on here bitching about me like I'd done something to her in recent history. Yeah, telling her to kill herself was mean and bad and whatnot, but dredging up ancient history because you want pity from internet strangers is BS.

So this http://musoapbox.net/topic/737/havenrpg-real-talk/442 was a year ago?

@Ide said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

Less dialog can be good, nonverbal action can be good. But where can I officially register my peeve for poses that attempt to answer to four other people's poses in the same scene. Their character's head will be whipping around smiling, smirking, winking and nodding like an understudy in the cast for the Exorcist.

Sometimes I think mu*'s need more of a formal convention of moving the spotlight to one or two PCs in a big group scene. Of course everyone's got bit in the ass by drama kings and queens hogging the spotlight so the gut instinct is to avoid that at all costs.

It's a somewhat unfortunate side-effect of MUSH turn-based posting conventions. Real conversation usually consists of fairly short sentences that are rapidly exchanged between participants, however when done by text that just leads to everyone talking over eachother (see every chat ever).

So instead everyone says/does something substantial in turn, but now when you're the fourth person to do something, you're now in a position where you can either address one of them(which can be taken as ignoring everyone else), address them as a group(which can be tricky) or do the exorcist impression. Ultimately it's just another reason that small scenes work better then large scenes.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@ThatGuyThere said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Then how was the time of one hour decided on? Just because something is the same for everyone does not mean it is not arbitrary.

1. If you get stabbed in the abdomen and have one hour to live starting immediately.
2. If your finger gets chopped off, you're already beaten half to death, and you're bleeding, you have one hour to live starting immediately.
3. If you have cancer, you've had it for 2 years intermittently, and now it's spread so badly you're dying, and you now have one hour to live.
4. If you're 102 years old, haven't been ill even once since that hooker in 'Nam, dying of old age, and you now have one hour to live.

All of these would be considered 'critical' on the MUD. It's the point of time - not an arbitrary point, but the specific point of time in your injury/malady in which you now have one hour left to live that is considered critical. If this is a vocabulary debate though, sure we can call it arbitrary if we're also calling having 24 hours in a day arbitrary, or 60 seconds in a minute.

Not exactly. Arbitrary is anything chosen by personal preference rather then derived through a system. Hours and minutes are derived values and thus not arbitrary but the choice of using hours and minutes in the first place is. The point here being that there appears to be no reason the time until death should be 1 hour rather then 10 minutes or 10 hours.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Regarding the simulationism though, I actually don't know whether MUDs or MUSHes are worse. Yes, MUDs are simulationist, but I feel like MUSHers tend to have less IC/OOC separation. The ability to control what kind of RP you're involved in to such a high degree allows for a lot more wish-fulfillment and, IMHO, isn't healthy. It is a lot easier to be a Mary-Sue on a MUSH, because if you don't want to, you never have to expose yourself to anyone who would rain on your parade. See also my bafflement on this thread. It weirds me out that people would strictly arrange for and only play out perfect relationships, even perfect friendships, or expect other players to alter their characters' normal behaviour to minimise conflict. But, I intend to follow the advice others have given on this thread about self-selection (ironically), so hopefully I won't have to deal with this too much.

While people arranging perfect relationships/friendships is something you could naively expect people to do with the level of communication present in MUSH, that's actually fairly uncommon.

What most people work hardest to arrange OOCly are abusive relationships and antagonistic relationships. It's been my impression that most MUSH players want IC conflict however they don't want the OOC drama and escalation that often comes hand to hand in it so they end up very shy unless things are OOCly worked out beforehand.

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I was thinking about that statement of yours though, and you may be interested to know that the desire for OOC communication and accommodation is not always based around wish fulfillment or stuff like that. Sometimes it's actually motivated by wanting to put IC first. Here’s an example similar to yours:

The basic principle is that most MUSH players are uncomfortable with the idea of their OOC circumstances having IC consequences for their character. They don't want their character to be considered a bad doctor because they happened to be unavailable when someone got hurt, they don't want their character to be considered anti-social just because events are scheduled when they're asleep etc.

Usually to accommodate this most MUSHes have a flexible concept of time, they'll often pause the scene and wait for the doctor to come online and proceed to pretend the doctor was there all along or if that is logistically inconvenient, they might fade the entire doctor scene and assume the doctor was around to fix B up, picking up afterwards.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Mainly I think the difference is that on a MUD, RP is a lot more dynamic; there is a lot of code in place to make it so. In a MUSH, as clued in by the term 'shared hallucination' (instead of dungeon), it's make-your-own-fun, and unless you make it so, RP is static. Everyone in a room is expected to involve everyone there, and you cannot really move your character around without ending the RP taking place. (Conversely in a MUD, if you leave the room, I can follow you.)

Follow is a command in most MUSHes, it's not that uncommon for RP to move around between rooms. Many MUSH also have places code that work just like you're used to.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I don't understand why it's polite to expect people to ask your permission to pose themselves into a public room. In my opinion, it's not polite to assume that, by virtue of being in a public room, your RP is the dominant and possessive RP in that room.

That's not how politeness works. Politeness is the actions you take, not the actions you expect from others. It's not polite to expect someone to hold open the door, it's not polite to expect others to wait until everyone has food before eating, it's not polite to expect people to give up their seats if you're in more need etc.

It is however polite to hold open the door if you're the first to the door. It is polite to wait to eat until everyone has their food, it is polite to give up your seat if someone needs it more then you.

It's polite to ask to join a scene that's not obviously public (Such as Elysium scenes). It's polite to do your best to integrate anyone that comes by into your scene.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

It's pretty asinine, from an outsider's perspective, because it's totally unnecessary by the admission of everyone on this thread who's explained why it's necessary.

I think the idea that you would ask someone if you can join a scene just to be able to determine that they're an arsehole on the off chance they say 'no' is pretty weird. That seems like a person is begging to get offended. It's a social construct that makes no sense. It's inefficient. It's a waste of time.

Maybe there's a better way of doing things. Just a thought.

By that logic all politeness is a waste of time. It's a way to demonstrate that you care and sometimes it gives you valuable information such as the fact that the scene is about to end or move somewhere else or is actually bubbled (Means the scene isn't taking place at the current time but rather a time to be determined when resolved).

Most people that play on MUSH train themselves to avoid people who are impolite since they've learned by experience that saves them a lot of drama and headache in the long run.

Another common and usually considered acceptable form of meta-posing is the author narrative voices, for instance.

Groth-Golka was sitting on the university lawn splayed out on his picnic blanket with his choice array of liquors stacked neatly into his backpack just like most of his fellow students this time of year, it was after all the 30th of april, the national holiday of getting drunk.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel

I would be okay with that second meta pose but a lot of people would bristle at it. It's entertaining and probably accurate. If you had posed how you thought he was a jerk but would never say so out loud, you are denying the other player retort to an insult. That is not okay.

Is it different if I use my character's silently-held disdain to explain the atmosphere of the scene? e.g.:

When @Thenomain walks up to Kestrel, she just glares. She thinks he's a jerk, but of course she'd never say that out loud. And so biting back her insult, she grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir."

Some people like posing like that, some people don't. There's no real standard.

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@ixokai said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

because its a metapose. That's a powerpose. Metapose inserts "meta" commentary, stuff that can not be inferred from words, body language, etc; its meta. Powerpose takes the power away from the character's player to decide what their character is doing.

Yeah, I think some folks have conflicting definitions. There is no universal dictionary for this sort of thing.

My definitions are in line with yours:

Faraday rushes across the room, engulfing ixokai in a giant hug and spinning them around. "ixokai! Old buddy, old pal!"

Here I'm power-posing because I'm assuming that you let me hug you and spinning you. I wouldn't count that as a metapose. Here's a (silly) metapose:

I usually try to put 'attempts' into my powerposes so that the other person is free to pose dodging or whatever when it's their turn.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

ETA: I realise I'm dealing with generalisations here, so while many have expressed the sentiment that everything is a 'sometimes, some people, everywhere/everyone is different', my reason for raising some of these questions is that on MUDs, a lot of this stuff is practically unheard of (or even strictly forbidden). It's the same token by which not all Scotsmen wear kilts, but you're definitely a lot more likely to see them there than in England. So I ask, 'How widespread is kilt-wearing in Scotland? Will I be looked at funny there if I don't wear a kilt?'

There are people that play MUSH while locking their pages and leaving all OOC channels, that works pretty fine as long as you do mostly social RP but you want to get involved with things the more OOC communication tends to become necessary. That is, you'll probably be fine not wearing a kilt.

Avoid 'lurking' to watch a scene that you are not a part of unless you know the people pretty well. It sometimes creeps folks out.

Unless the MUSH in question has some form of recall command, I always lurk for a few poses to get an understanding of what the scene is about before posing in myself, anything else seems rather tricky and presumptuous.

Ask before joining a scene in progress.
If you really want a private scene, use a TP room.

On most games it should be safe to assume (and in some games explicitly written in the rules) that anything that happens in a public room is a public scene that anyone can join however if people are in the middle of something I do usually ask before posing in. I also think most MUSH are better off without TP rooms.

The lack of spontaneity in stumbling across RP on the grid, partly explained here

It's my experience that as long as you are visible in +where (while possibly saying that you're looking for RP in whatever passes for the RP/General channel of the game) you can attract people to whatever room on the grid you're idling in. It's how I've gotten most of my RP over the years. The key thing is that most players tend to idle in the OOC room so you need to provoke them into coming on grid.

@Sandor said in Play-by-post analog to MUSoapbox:

So, as it turns out, I have a life, and I can't really spend hours every day on a MU* anymore. It's actually the reason I can't tabletop, either.

Is there a place to the effect of MUDConnector or MU Soapbox that covers play-by-post games?

https://www.rpnation.com/ is dedicated mostly to play-by-post rp.

My only question is why people like that are indulged for as long as they are, entertainment value seems low.

I've played a couple of rounds so far, Tracer is damn fun.

If anyone still has a spare key, I'd love to give the game a try.

@Ide said in Universal Basic Income:

I don't see how this works in the USA. We have over 300 million people here. Our annual budget is about 4 trillion dollars. For a family of four to receive $2000 a month (which seems pretty basic to me) that's almost 2 trillion dollars in UBI.

That sounds pretty good since our social services are almost half the budget anyway, but the reality is most households are not families of four, but more between 2 and 2.5. How do two people (especially two elderly people) survive on $1000 a month total? Currently the average SS benefit per person is $1000.

Do we scale benefits for age? Income? Location? Your lifetime earnings? Wow guess what, this system isn't sounding so 'basic' anymore...

Basic is minimum to survive, not minimum to live a comfortable life with all the toys that you want. It would also be in addition to SS, not instead of SS, it also tends to assume that rent and healthcare is covered separately.

@Arkandel said in Universal Basic Income:

@Ganymede Also 'basic' will be a hell of a variable to define.

Basic is well defined in Swedish Law, it's calculated each year based on the expected minimum amount of money to buy food and necessities in a given month(Currently around $300). I think basic income makes sense because noone wants to be unemployed and the bureaucracy involved in welfare is both dehumanizing and a huge waste of money.