Posts made by Groth

You should be able to ask @Ashen-Shugar or Gnome to provide you with the Saga codebase. I've never looked at the backend but in theory it should be easy enough to strip out the Saga specific parts and retool it for 5e.

@Bobotron said:

@faraday
True. It seems pretty trivial to do so though, with how @hook works. Just softcode your say/pose commands, make them trigger if someone has joined a place, if that person is in a place DBREF (or has a place attr on themselves), then prefix with a [Alcove Tables] or something of that nature (actually, I may tweak my places code for TheatreMUSH to do this, as I like the idea...)

What kind of barbarian uses say or pose? Nothing of value would be lost if those commands were removed <.< >.>

Is this limited to games that are currently running or games that have existed in the past?

@Alzie said:

@Groth The only problem I see with limited slots is everyone will just pile on their most experienced players and leave the low level PCs out to dry.

Well, the goal should be to make them spread out. One system I'd like to try out is a system where each additional participant only adds (skill/current number of participants) to the roll and each participant needs to use a different skill.

That provides sharp diminishing returns on piling on and since everyone has to use a different skill it provides incentive to have broad skillsets in your faction.

@AmishRakeFight said:

This also works because MUDs are generally hardcoded for combat. Garbage mobs spawn as part of code and you run at them and your PC dies or the NPC dies and if so, you pick up their drops or their pennies or whatever the reward. Or Arrgh! The Ninjapirate attacks you by typing in 'attack Bob' and you either defend or mash your keyboard as hard as possible as you frantically attempt to flee.

The key thing about making PvP work in a MUSH environment is to make sure that the conflict isn't about stabbing the other characters to death, but rather about trying to get some advantage and while killing your opponents might be helpful, it's also likely not.

On RfK this worked by the fact that killing another vampire was against city law, however murdering all their friends, family and businesses was not and torpor provides a good means to prove you could kill someone but choose not to.

The problem that RfK ran into was that the administration of territories, allies, influence etc didn't scale well at 100+ players, which is something a future conflict centred game can solve during the design stage.

@Alzie said:

So if you do Warhammer 40k, you could just have the game on Fenris. Then every couple of months or whatever time period, have the whole 'Fenris burns to a crisp' thing and reset the territories. Lore friendly and self enforcing way to make sure no faction is ever stronger than the other.

Fenris is an interesting idea. The idea would then be that all the player characters are part of some sort of Space Wolves training exercise?

This is my pitch for an OSS territory system for any upcoming conflict based MUSHes

1. Every territory provides some sort of faction-wide benefit to the controlling faction, either in the form of resources or some sort of stat boost. This benefit might be different depending on which faction controls the territory. Adjacency bonuses for connecting your territories neatly should also be considered.

This ensures that you have reason to care about who controls which territory.

2. The territory only provides the benefit while an in-play character is assigned to that territory, each character can only be assigned to one territory.

This ensures you care which character controls which territory and can make it very significant if a key character is temporarily knocked out.

3. Each territory has a number of slots ranging from 1-5, the number of slots determines how many characters from each faction can fight for that territory each time interval, each character beyond the first add some sort of bonus to the roll. The faction that rolls highest win.

This limits the effects of dog-piling and means even tiny factions can get fair fights for the 1 slot territories. The largest problem RfK ran into towards the end was big dog-piles on the same few territories, I'd rather see more smaller fights going on everywhere.

4. Each territory has a base difficulty that must be overcome to take the territory.

5. Some sort of random event generator will spawn effects in the territories in regular intervals that need to be dealt with in one way or another. These events should be simple enough to be entirely scripted but still feel thematic.

The RfK events required too much time investment from Staff to be sustainable for a larger game, but having things happen really helps make the game feel more alive.

Well, a Dark Heresy based CvC game would certainly be an interesting experiment and I agree that giving each faction a 'safe space' is probably appropriate though you'll need to make a rule that 'prisoners' or other things of importance can't be stored in the safe space.

@Arkandel said:

It's hard to implement any such thing on a MU* unless you're willing to enforce what concepts actual PCs get to play. Power is very often a matter of active hands on deck - no amount of NPCs or coded bonuses can possibly make up for the absence of actively played characters on each side.

Once a faction gets going and people see RP happening there that is where they'll go. Some will roll new PCs, others will migrate their existent ones over, but it's a pretty well known phenomenon.

The only other way staff can try to work on it is to split the flagship players around. But that, too, assumes such players are willing to do so and/or they'll be somewhat equally active, neither of which is a given.

Well, if playing for faction A means you get to play with battleships and giant mecha while playing for faction B means you get one AK-47 and your friend gets one bullet, then players might be tempted to play for faction A even if they're not currently the dominating faction.

Though I'm not entirely sure how much it's necessary to fiddle with that. Faction popularity tends to shift around a lot as players/characters come and go into the game. On RfK for instance the game went from Invictus domination to Ordo Dracul domination to Invictus domination to Carthian domination through mostly natural events. All it takes to revitalize any faction is for a passionate player to put in the work.

@Arkandel said:

2. Making sure one side doesn't dominate everything. People have and will roll for the winning team until it's invulnerable.

Planetside has an interesting mechanic to deal with this where the team with the least territory actually becomes more powerful. I think it would be worthwhile to add similar mechanics to a PvP focused MU*

@Misadventure said:

Perhaps if NPCs would get mad that their important goals, properties and NPCs were fucked with, and they could come after PCs.
So having it go through a formal system like the Off Screen System and have the escalation to personal attacks be included in that. Then at least you have some understanding and build up.

That sounds like a logistical nightmare. You want to design the game in such a way it needs only a minimal amount of Staff attention to keep operating smoothly.

Which ruleset would you use for a Warhammer game?

I really like the idea of designing a MU* around mostly non-lethal character conflicts. Territory works fairly well when it comes to something to fight over but you could also have some sort of recurring tournament format or fight by proxy. Either way political backstabbing makes for a lot of fun RP.

Someone on the Exalted WW forum had a link to the Heroes of Creation javachat game in their signature and I didn't have anyone to play TT with so I tried it out.

On a meta level, I don't think anyone should be too surprised about the lack of healthy D/s IC relationships in RP. After all it's my understanding is that healthy D/s relationships are signified by the fact all parties are aware they're playing roles in a kind of game with rules that everyone has agreed to play by.

However when you're part of MU* style RP, all those things are shunted back one level. While your character might not get a safeword or frankly a say in anything and might be enslaved 24/7, the players meanwhile might be communicating with eachother what their likes and dislikes are and most people are really great about respecting the right of anyone to cut a scene whenever they're uncomfortable.

That's the most important part to me, to keep any relationship functional, IC or otherwise, you need to have good communication and as long as you have that, I can't see anything wrong with roleplaying abusive relationships. What worries me a lot more is when I see people engage in abusive OOC relationship stuff as discussed in the Jealousy thread.

@surreality said:

simple lovey-dovey dating fluff. (And yes, I have actually run across a player on a game who wanted nothing more than to find a girlfriend there with which he could have a child -- these things happen.)

Girlfriend and boyfriend creates a family together RP is surprisingly popular. There's almost always one of those couples regardless of which game you're in.

@Lithium said:

@Apos

If you don't understand how the 'It is just roleplay, it is just a game' defense doesn't upset people, then I dunno what to tell you either.

Did you read anything @Sovereign wrote? He isn't part of the MU* community to play the games, he only rarely does actual RP. He's part of the MU* community because he has found it a convenient place to find damaged women that he can practise his favourite mind games with and his defence of that is not 'It's just a game' it's 'They're adults and can make their own decisions'.

@Ganymede said:

As an analogy, think of how a gay man may be concerned with PCs mincing and fellating in public on a game.

It's worth discussing, and even debating.

I learned a new word today thanks to this thread.

@Lithium said:

EDIT: Either way, I apologize for the derail to the tangent subject. I still think it's as was said before by @Ganymede more a passivity than a 'submissive' thing, due to lazyness and an unwillingness to go out and create RP. Reacting instead of acting.

I don't think one should confuse liking to take a more subservient role with being lazy or unwilling to create RP. Most of the Submissive/Subservient/Reactive players I've met are really hard workers when it comes to making sure RP happens, in terms of hosting events, contacting people, setting scenes etc. It's just that they want things to happen /to/ their character rather then necessarily do things themselves.

Meanwhile I'm one of the worst procrastinators in the greater MU* community and I've lately found myself taking the 'active' role merely because I enjoy making other characters react to what I do.

@Lithium said:

@mietze I love how you're trying to defend against this the same way @Sovereign defended himself. It's really telling.

@mietze is defending peoples rights to engage in abusive IC relationships. @Sovereign is defending peoples rights to engage in abusive OOC relationships.

I'd like to think most of us are capable of separate the two, at least most of the time.

@icanbeyourmuse said:

@Lithium said:

I am not certain I agree with that. In my opinion D/S is dependant on the people involved. What you or I might consider D/S might not be the same as what, say, @Groth considers D/S.

I'm more interested in character dynamics then peoples sex lives so my view on what is a D/s relationship in an RP context is very broad. To some extent it matches @Pyrephox descriptions of proactive vs reactive.

I don't think I've even once played what @Lithium would describe as a 'healthy' D/s relationship because I find messed up dynamics more fun to play then healthy dynamics. This doesn't necessarily mean abuse but if you're playing WoD that tends to imply at least one of the characters are clinically insane.

@mietze said:

I think because putting up an ad even for someone looking to play a ghoul will get you some pretty vile responses from would be regnants as well as a lot of derision in general. I cannot imagine what would happen if one were to make plain that they were also seeking D/s TS.

I've been seeking Regnants in the past, it's very hard because most people who are interested are just not going to work.