Best posts made by il-volpe

@Sponge said:

I haven't figured out a reliable way to detect fraud and I'm pretty confident it's not feasible to do casually.

To do it casually -- well, eventually, the alt-fraudulent player is going to fuck it up. Just watch.

There's a critter out there who likes to create many alts. When she gets bored of RP with one, she'll disconnect without warning and connect as another one. Other players noticed this. The proof of the pudding was in the fact that most of these alts connected from the same IP, and others had their wiki pages made from the same wikidot account as some in the first set. Said wikidot account was associated with some character pages for another MUSH, and when I contacted the headwiz there, she discovered that the two IPs I associated with that player were associated with over twenty characters on her game.

Later, she reappeared, and registered alts as two sets. When the same random-disconnect behavior and writing style induced suspicion, I happened to observe one evening that one of those PCs connected from Germany, and ten minutes later, from the United States. The player claimed to be sisters, connecting from the same household, but that the 'German' sister was ever so paranoid. Since the 'German' alts couldn't be connected at the same time as the US ones, I said to register them all anyway, and they all stopped connecting.

Another time I had a pair of them in chargen. The second appeared very shortly after I had rejected the first one's app and explained to her that she needed to understand the theme better before being able to play. These two also claimed to be sisters. I asked both their ages, both said 18, and then were confused when I remarked that they were twins.

I don't have XP transfer. There is a rule that alts can't benefit one another, and thus ought not play together in the same scene, but I'm not really invested in the latter -- honestly, if you want to RP with yourself, I don't care, and you can't really fuck over another player doing that on a game with the semi-consent rules we use. Really, I only became stern about the requirement to register your alts because of that player rudely disconnecting on people. I think the players have a right to be able to avoid assholes.

@Pyrephox said:

This is, honestly, why I feel like more MUs should focus on higher quantities of smaller, more personal plots, rather than the sprawling metaplot end-of-the-city stuff that draws in, in my experience, /far more/ PCs than are ever going to have a chance to contribute meaningfully. Which inevitably ends up with people feeling pushed out because they couldn't attend X Plot Important Event, or (sometimes accurately and sometimes not) that some people are 'hoarding' plot or favored by the GMs.

Yeah. The 'metaplot' is, in my experience, boring, annoying, unfair, and ends up focused on the headstaff's friends and staff-alts. It interrupts other, player-driven RP, fucks up the world, generally makes things unstable, creates jealousy, and is railroady as all hell.

So, when I got GoB, a number of people were going, "So where's the metaplot?" and saying how any game that didn't have one was just not worth playing, and so forth. I, embarrassed at having never considered this (because, see above, I kinda hate metaplots), said, "Oh, there is one," and immediately wrote one up. The player who was most vocal about the 'need' for one had a baby shortly after, and stopped connecting. Another PC who was firmly entrenched in it stopped connecting too (though by then I was feeling disappointed with eir, for she'd seemed a good mark for a person who'd share plot, but wasn't) and another one's personal, player-driven RP drove the character to abandon the connections to the plot, so instead of it involvement growing wider and more diffuse as I'd hoped, it ended up largely abandoned, with my own staff-alt PC being the only person remaining who had much of a clue. Having observed it turn, with such grace and ease (when getting it going was much work) into exactly what I hate about metaplots, I rewrote. I've essentially rewritten the thing three times with similar results, and okay, I'll just keep doin' that. It's adaptable enough, but damn if I don't understand why they are usually just the thing I hate.

@Auspice

If you have a clever codebeast, perhaps:

You have a set of things you are 'Learning.' In theory most of these correspond to classes you are taking, but you can have a few more than that. You can only spend XP on shit you have been learning for x number of days.

The amount of XP you earn in a semester is the amount it takes to advance enough to get As in a full load of classes.

It's setting what's in your learning list that requires a justification, not spending XP.

@faraday Oh, you've helped me with custom code. Not written it for me, but answered questions so I could cope with it.

And you win, 'cause I am a sucky coder at best, and run a game. Not the greatest game ever or anything, but I think it's been a success.

@Auspice Ares looks soooooo like MOO to me. We started out in the same place.

Also, I totally want to play a non-wizard special. They do have some as staff at Brakebills in the source...

If I were doing it, 'circumstances, adjusting for' would be a skill, and each square (and indeed, every situation in the world) would have a circumstances related difficulty modifier for casting, which the circumstances skill allows you to reduce. So to claim a square in welters you must be good enough at affecting whatever the square is made of to make something happen, know a spell to do something to that sort of thing, and be good enough at circumstances to overcome whatever odd difficulty mod has been set in place on that square.

@Pandora said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

A game is 'doing it right' when it doesn't wind up on WORA/MSB.

Considering how mention here draws new players, that may not be the case.

@surreality said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Nightbreed. ALL THE FUCK YES. (The weirdass homebrew system I've been working on was originally to make a game along these lines.)

Haha! I made a clumsy homebrew table-top to play Nightbreed, when I was in HS. We had fun. Want. I wonder if anybody cares about it enough to get players now.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

. Where the world is fucking weird and the people from the city treat it as normal, but have to deal with weird crap all the time. (Also kind of like Haven).

Magical realism!

I have long enjoyed imagining One Hundred Years of Solitude MUSH where it's pretty much like the real world except every character can have one stupid, useless, magical power, like butterflies keep crawling out of his hair and flying away, or a bag containing her parents' bones follows her around wherever she goes, clattering annoyingly, and everyone acts like this shit is totally normal. In the meantime, there are random wars over things that nobody understands or gives a fuck about, the mayor sometimes orders everyone to paint their house blue or some other meaningless fuckery, and there is an evil banana plantation.

I don't know that Mage could really reflect that, or Nightvale's take on it, very well, but I'd totally be into a game with that sort of theme.

@kk The Canonical List of Banjo Jokes

@derp said in Something Completely Different:

To steal a quote from someone else: "MSB follows WORA's spirit still. It is a safe place where MUSHers can post criticism of games without fear of reprisal from the game owners. It was a place to call out the bullshit of games and players under the anonymity of another identity."

It wasn't very anonymous.

It wasn't very serious either. It was for hyperbole and ranting and picking fights for no reason except that you felt like telling somebody off. It was roughhousing.

It wasn't so much anonymity that protected posters from reprisals, it was that WORA would roast you for a PHB if you backflowed the vitriol.

When you're talking about WoD it's not magic vs no-magic, it's freeform magic (Mage) vs spell-based magic (everybody else.)

Freeform magic systems are not inherently more powerful than spell-based ones. There are a couple things going on:

1: They require more creative effort from players, so they're harder.

2: They are more vague. So they're more open to GM interpretation. It's quite possible to love Mage in general but hate it on FooMU because, goddamnit, every fucking time you try to do magic, FooMU staff tells you it doesn't work that way. Getting the strong impression that your staffer 'trusts' Abelard to cast 'correctly' and hand-waves it while carefully examining your attempts for flaws (and of course, finding them) is a common occurrence.

The oft-mentioned overpoweredness of Mage probably has to do with point 2, not the game system itself.

PLUS, when you're talking about a MU, "balance" and "overpowered" mean something different than a tabletop game, and/or what the game designers anticipated.

Unless you don't let characters advance, or you give everybody an XP when anybody earns one, a MU can't be balanced like a table-top game (such as the system was designed for). The way to achieve balance on a MU is not to have all PCs equally capable. It's to provide plotlines/adventures/events that cater to Camille's strengths and interests, and to contrive ways to keep Abelard out of them if he happens to share Camille's strengths +2.

@faraday Ares is so darn good. I like line graphs better, but hey.

Yeah, people staying logged in skew it. Ideally activity charts would start to ignore you after 20 minutes inactivity, would record OOC activity separately, and would allow you to view them both separately and overlapping.

It's not really that big a deal, though, because the game's prime time is at least in part set by gamerunners. Just overtly stating something like, "We schedule all open GMed events for between 5 and 11 pm EST Sunday-Thursday and between 3 and 11 Saturdays, and we post them at least 3 days before," seems to help both reduce FOMO-anxiety for players and bump the prime time activity numbers up.

I do kinda fancy the idea of at least seeing how it goes to run a MU that you literally turn off except for its normal running hours, but this also seems likely to be contrary to the building-a-happy-community goal.

No game is really 24/7. Some of these problems are fixed if you just lean in to that fact.

MUs have a prime time. Or two. Often it corresponds to tee-vee prime times.

It's really a pity about MUDstats no longer adding new games, because its charts showed you when a game's prime time was.

Schedule stuff. During prime time. Don't do major events without scheduling, it drives people to wonder if they're missing out. Do not piss people about with scheduling; if you scheduled it, do it. If you do random events and cancel scheduled ones last minute you are probably going to give the impression that you think players are or should just be hanging about the game all the time. Make it possible to participate without having to hang out waiting for opportunities. Make it clear that odds are enormously against anything world-shaking happening at 9:45 am on a Wednesday, and that checking up at that time is not necessary.