When I'm in a scene I'm there to play, and personally I can't stand poses that take 15+ minutes to write. I know a lot of people don't play that way because of RL things going on, but it is what it is.
I could see a mu* integrating PbP more formally (it's already kind of there with +jobs/+bboards/@mail) which maybe would satisfy slower RPers. But I suspect those people would protest they're not actually that slow.
I for one didn't realize Ares was so far along. It looks really nice from looking at the dev blog just now.
With all due respect Theno I don't think you can say in good faith that mu*'s have already tried the changes Kestrel is talking about when those changes are locked behind the basic UX of mu*'ing itself. Look at a game like Storium or whatever it was called. It attracted huge interest and was a half-assed attempt at mu*, but with a contemporary UX.
I like big games and I cannot lie.
There was a comment in another thread which said the player was happy when they had the power to OOCly choose who to play with, and others could do the same, and that way everyone could find their own fun on the game. I can't disagree with that preference but I have to admit that for me a large draw of mu*'s is precisely that you're not playing TT with your friends but collaborating with anyone and everyone. Of course if their RP sucks and they have no other redeeming qualities they can piss off.
@faraday said in Better Places Code:
@Arkandel I was less concerned with cutting spam than I was with organizing the spam, to make it easier to pick out the bits that are relevant to you. [....]
I would love to see a client which automatically folded poses from places/clusters you weren't in and you could expand them as needed.
Also on the UI side, an input box that changed depending on what you prefix your text with, like \, tt, ", whatever.
This is sort of doable in mushclient now. Maybe a plugin is in order...
Honestly I think the difference between muds and mushes comes down to the fact that by and large on a mush there is no gameplay without other players. That's not true on 99.9% of muds. You could even say the PvE play on muds influences mud players' perceptions of each other -- when you interact with coded systems like crafting or bashing you develop a set of expectations that extends to your RP.
Uruk-hai07837 doesn't ever OOC does he?
I think Volund has logging code that posts to Mediawiki...here maybe https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode/tree/master/scenesys
I've always felt that mu*'s would benefit from more clear setting of stakes at the start of a conflict (not necessarily a scene, just when the gloves come off). What am I risking here? What is my goal? So often the risk is "as little as possible" and the goal is "pound this person until they cannnot resist". Both of which are rather boring IMO.
Some people handle this informally but there are rules systems that have this baked in and it helps.
It's this Theno, http://pradeepmakone.com/wpsupportplus/, near as I can tell from the page source.
Obviously most tabletop RPGs were never designed to handle 30 people crowded into a few rooms. But that's what a lot of mu*'s have to deal with. Not to mention a more accurate description is 30 people in separate rooms all over the world trying to communicate.
I don't think it's viable to slap a tabletop RPG into a mu* and call it good. On the other hand, you have games like Road to Amber which went IMO totally overboard in the other direction.
What rules, either formal or informal, do you find yourself adding to make mu* games run in a somewhat sane fashion? What would make your ideal mu* RPG?
While the consensus seems strongly in favor of the former, I wonder if you couldn't work in a more systematic way to develop the latter like @Thenomain is talking about. It could make scenes more entertaining. Or it could annoy the heck out of everyone, I dunno.
Seriously? I have no idea who or what the Blackstaff is, but what have they been doing the last two years? Playing cribbage?
I liked the vote review system with a panel of players on Aether as well. I don't remember the specifics -- I think votes were anonymous but with no explanation? @Thenomain I summon thee.
@VulgarKitten I think we could liven up finding RP quite a bit if the characters of players who didn't want to RP might randomly combust?
Question is simpler than it sounds: when you play on a mush, are you there primarily to create and play a character, or would you happily RP as anything (minor characters, one-shot characters, talking trashcans, whatever) just to have some pretendy funtimes in that chosen theme/setting?
Don't Rest Your Head has a theme pretty much like that. The normal world, and Mad City.
I sort of remember someone on here talking about a similar idea they had going, set in Chicago maybe?
Wondering what's current, non-WoD, more on the Neverwhere/Don't Rest Your Head end of the spectrum.
I can't say I'm surprised but I am a little saddened that it seems like these days people pretty much ignore the IC grid for spontaneous RP. Maybe it's nostalgia but I feel like some of the best RP back in the day came about wandering the grid.
edit: I want to clarify that I don't mean hanging out in bars or whatever. Just people finding interesting places on the grid and improvising scenes there playing off the environment.
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...
There's probably at least one person in this crowd who would like a free text adventure space sim with great writing: