Posts made by Ide

So I got lost in the book The Crystal Cave this afternoon, which is an Arthurian story told from Merlin's point of view (starting before Arthur with Uther). It has a cool mix of British and Roman/Ancient stuff going on. Anyone know if this game has a similar feel?

I think it's a question of which gets better faster, Rousey's boxing or Holm's grappling defense -- assuming Rousey doesn't retire after her next fight.

I'm usually not one to say that rules are better than no rules, but maybe, looking back on mu*'s for the last 25 years, the lack of a culture of consciously improving RP on games hasn't been the best way to go about things.

Isn't it perfect that in a thread about mu* RP we've had a long debate about spelling, and now about how tedious it is to read a lot of text in-game.

@Lisse24 said:

I think this idea of having proactive players who start a bunch of interesting plots for their fellow players is also unrealistic. It's also not something that we see mirrored in literature, which means that players don't have a good model for it. Think about it. Jack Bauer* doesn't wake up, leave his house, and start killing terrorists. Jack Bauer wakes up, hears that terrorists have hijacked a plane, and then he leaves his house and starts killing terrorists.

My personal belief that it is the responsibility of staff to provide players with something that they can react to and then to help them find a proactive way to deal with that circumstance or complication, and that by doing this you can creative a healthy and active game. In my philosophy this doesn't need to be a full-blown plot, but can rather be little things to make the player's life difficult.

I don't think you're alone in believing that, certainly many (most?) mu*ers think of mu* as online TT, and most RPGs people are familiar with use GMs.

However IMO literature actually is a very bad model for mu*. Literature has already happened when you experience it, i.e. the author writes it and you read it. It's a fallacy to think of yourself as the reader and the other player as the author -- you are both authors, and if you want a model for mu* at all theater or improv is much better I think.

I usually like metaposes as well, but I think that's more because I see my character in the third person, and not 'as me' if that makes sense. So I don't mind an overall director/author view of the writing. The 3rd person omniscient style isn't very popular in fiction anymore, but it's been used to good effect IMO (Dune is one example).

However my problem with lists like this is while they say they're about roleplaying, they usually (and this one is no exception) ignore most of the important rules, like setting stakes, agreeing on the social contract, pushing for consequences, saying yes or rolling the dice, and <insert RP jargon here>.

Someone on another mud forum proposed an interesting idea once to make a game that was three different games in one.

As I recall it was a prehistoric setting but you could adapt it to other ones. The three games were something like:

• A PK sabre-toothed tiger game. As a tiger you couldn't use says and so on with other players, you'd have territory that you'd fight other tigers for, etc.

• A PvE wolf game. You'd have a wolf pack with other players, battle the tigers, and then hunt around and stuff. You wouldn't have says per se but you'd have other forms of communication with your wolf pack.

• A RP cave people game. There'd be some game mechanics to fend off the tigers and wolves but it'd primarily be a mush RP style game.

As a character in one of the sub-games it would be like you didn't know there were other sub-games coinciding with yours, but as a player you still would get to interact ICly/OOCly with the other games. So it's a way to bridge different player wants/needs and make a bigger game than would be possible if you opened these three sub-games as separate niche games, which I think is the strength of an idea like this.

@Bobotron said:

Also, do you use a version of D&D that's married to a grid? If so, how do you handle that?

I'd guess tediously, and over a long period of time.

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

Pay to play muds (including mushes) work, period. Anyone who says they'll ruin the game hasn't looked at the state of mushes recently (or at any time in history for that matter).

There are some games not on mudstats, Realms Adventurous comes to mind.

Second the rec for Evennia. It's already integrated with Django so you're halfway to a web app, but the big plus is it's a functional mush-like with both telnet and websockets ready to go.

I know technical folks like to go with their tech of choice but you'd be so far ahead of the game going with Evennia IMO you'd need an excellent reason not to use it.

But to answer the question -- hell yes!

An interesting experiment to check out btw is Ropeclient, https://github.com/voneiden/ropeclient

Whoa you're doing the timeline? I wasn't expecting that.

This game might be interesting for once.

Simultaneous meaning, if there was a rational way to set the scenes so that they're really happening at different IC times, you could be multi-scening in RL with the same PC.

I've been thinking more lately about trying different things in the mush environment. For example:

• running a mush like a writer's workshop, with workshop-style critiques of logs.

• allowing players to play the same PC in different scenes simultaneously (in RL time).

• actively matching players for RP (chat roulette style)

And other maybe silly things like that. I was curious what other serious and not so serious experiments like that you all could think of?

As one of those cheap bastards that exercise at home, I've often wondered how much gyms add to people's motivation (since I struggle with working out regularly). Since that seems like a big part of CF's appeal, what's been people's experiences going from home workout to CF/gym workout and back?

I think your best bet after getting the basics down is to do little projects. Since you're interested in GD starting with OpenGL tutorials isn't a bad idea.

Well, it is Psychology Today after all.

I read an article recently that had an interesting take on procrastination. I can't find it atm but here's a similar view:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination-equation/201012/procrastination-and-the-perfectionism-myth

As best as we can figure, task anxiety will just as likely get you to start early as to start late. That is, worrying about a deadline will make you procrastinate more if you are impulsive, the sort of person to whom avoiding a dreaded task or blocking it from your awareness makes perfect sense from a short-term perspective. If you aren't impulsive, anxiety is a cue that you should get cracking—and, as a result, you actually start earlier. The real culprit is impulsiveness, not anxiety. (But you can't be expected to discern this effect through personal reflection; relying only on your own experiences, you will never know that anxiety decreases procrastination for many others.)

The myth that perfectionism creates procrastination makes even less sense. What traits do you associate with procrastination? A) Being messy and disorganized or B) Being neat and orderly? If you choose option A, good for you; you are right. Perfectionists best fit description B, being neat and orderly, and unsurprisingly, they don't tend to procrastinate. The research—from Robert Slaney, who developed the Almost Perfect Scale to measure perfectionism, to my own meta-analytical research article, The Nature of Procrastination—shows this clearly.

So, the trick to cure procrastination is to identify the cause: impulsiveness. Work on that and you're well on your way to fixing your procrastination issues.

Hmm, I'll get back to you on that.