Best posts made by il-volpe

That's sensible, but in this case I get some mood and RP mileage out of the various messages. With your help, this was an easy fix, and it wasn't a necessary one really. And it's given me another bit o' skill, and that's good to have. Thanks, folks!

I've kinda figured I'd make an FS3 Piratey game if I ever make another MU. But I am, among other things, lazy and a really shitty (at best) coder.

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

• Without the "great equalizer" of PC death, player disenfranchisement grows as players will never be able to compete with older characters.

This isn't actually a problem unless plot-runners allow it to be.

A table-top GM may need to find ways to prevent the barbarian from bashing in every locked door before the rogue can have a go at it, and that same GM is doing a poor job of it if it's all straightforward combat all the time and the wizard has naught to do but run away.

And y'know, if it's difficult to come up with in-story complications to achieve this, you do have the option of putting 'This event/plotline is for PCs with n XP or less' on the announcement. I can't possibly count the number of times I've been told some plot that my PC would notice and care about and reasonably be involved in is simply not for me because of 'sphere' distinctions, leaving me to come up with the reason he didn't act. This is fine. I could do the same in keeping my nose out of stuff meant for lower or higher power-levels.

Tedious fuckers who will not answer "I am free all afternoon every day from Wednesday to Sunday, when can I come by and pick up this item you are selling?" with a TIME, but get cheesed off that I don't have my email open all the time and thus don't answer their non-actionable responses immediately.

I wonder if not answering is worse or better than the appropriate answer of "I just gave you the window of 'when is good for me', now you need to stop asking when is good for me and CHOOSE, or at least tell me when is good for you. Jesus fuck, this is like being married and trying to chose a fucking restaurant."

MN's code is buggy yet, but I understand that when it's been tested and cleaned up it'll be available.

Every time I've seen it it's been so soundly ignored that I can't remember how often I've seen it.

@thhppbbbt Not so long ago we called this BAP ("Broader Autism Phenotype") or "cousins."

Yep, this is the place for a laundry-list. To help me fill in the gaps in what I've got in mind, or find out that what I've got in mind isn't what's wanted (so far, not so.)

@aria I will use FS3, 'cause I can't code for crap and it's easy to customize enough to work, or so I believe.

@silentsophia No surprise there. I didn't mean to say that I recommend this or that it's likely to work well for a typical MU or go over well with a lot of players. It's just an idea that I like.

Hehe, clothes all the same. Remember the Jeff Goldblum The Fly (1986)? He's got seven identical suits. I was 11 and said, "I am gonna do that when grow up."

@tat said in MUSHgicians elements:

It's always easier to use a system that is basically interpreting dice according to a set of rules. (Note: I think this is a perfectly fine and even awesome way to run an FS3 game, I've done it with mutations).

I think one must do it this way to have it flexible enough to represent the source material well enough to deserve the name.

You want to be able to wing it, as in the 'Under Pressure' video clip. But magic is heavily academic and takes shitloads of practice and study.

My undeveloped thought is to say that any spell has both a difficulty and a charge requirement -- use FS3's Luck points for this but I'll have to figure out how to tweak it so you can raise your max with XP, if casting as a group everybody contributes some. If you blow all your charge at once and it's more than X points, you become a niffin. If you run out of charge blowing it a little bit at a time, you just pass out. Material components that are destroyed in the process of casting reduce the charge. Somatic/ritual components (usually "Popper" hand-movements in the source material) reduce difficulty, but you have to be able to perform them properly, so you have a Poppers skill that you don't roll to cast, but is a prerequisite. Spell requires you to chant in Scythian, you need that language at the appropriate level. Geometry for yer complex sigils. That sort of thing. So in the video clip, Quentin casts a simple mind effect to make everybody know the lyrics to "Under Pressure" and hear the tune. The group performance makes the spell that follows a group-cast, so nobody has to spend too much charge, and the group performance also serves as a high-value ritual (lots of people, coordinated with a fairly high level of precision) so with the diff lowered and everybody giving charge, they can pull it off without anyone being too badly weakened. Though everybody has to have at least a couple of points in a music skill or they can't carry the tune and it won't work.

@ThoughtBubble I have heard plenty of people say his has happened to them. It seems so common that I actually made an explicit rule against it -- "you don't have to play with anyone you don't want to play with, but don't try to convince other people not to play with them" or something like hat.

You have observed something important and quite relevant -- many, many MUers have the brain cooties. Some types of brain cooties get along well with other types of brain cooties but conflict harshly with still other types, and most of them make people idiosyncratically abrasive and idiosyncratically sensitive, so communities with high levels of endemic brain cooties get weird even without anybody being an actual asshole.

@derp Very true.

@Ganymede Yeah, it'll probably kill me. I like to think that the Glorious Autistic Uprising Autism epidemic will make people more knowledgeable and less crappy. Then I remember how like, every law librarian I've ever met is either a retired lawyer on a second mini-career, or a woman who got her law degree and then learned that wanting or having kids gets you blacklisted. Stuff like Derp mentioned.

What @bear_necessities says.

You've got some enthusiastic responses. Players'll come.

Good heavens, @Ganymede, I thought it was pretty much a given that when I post my opinions they're my opinions, so, yeah, if I say something is part of the fun, I mean it's part of my fun. I'm saying what I like, as a player, not demanding you, or anyone, conform to it.

I can certainly see why one might want to simply play the character you want to play, and not have character advancement at all. Not ideal from my POV, but for the right game I wouldn't complain.

Nothing renders XP more meaningless than having it doled out so freely that everyone can, across the board, destroy any reasonable opposition. In my opinion, The Reach makes XP gain meaningless because there's so damned much of it.

Yes. Really, as a general rule, MUSHes give out too much XP, and characters advance too fast. Even when XP spends are limited.

That's fine. That's your preference. It's not everyone's preference.

Is it actually anyone's preference to be awarded tonnes of XP but find that somehow rules have been set up that prevent them from spending it?

@macha I keep wanting a .gif of Peter Weller in Dexter saying, "They can go fuck the dog." For your boss.

MUs without walk-in RP are failed MUs, or OTTs.

@Derp said:

How do you get players to keep to the feel of the game you are wanting to create without telling them that their fun is WrongFun?

I don't think you can, really. With WoD especially, you're going to get a lot of players showing up who have expectations about what a WoD MUSH will be like, which will lead them to think that playing Superheroes with Splat is wot's goin' down, and they'll be angry when it isn't.

Besides the PC-lack-of-control thing, or part of it: In a horror plot, one tends to take things away from the PCs. Someone they love is lost to them somehow, their house is haunted and you can't use the bad-ass billiards room in the basement because of all the ghostly viscera hanging from the ceiling, their fifty retainers are dying of rabies, the office building they own was blown up by Project Mayhem and their wealth stat has been dropped hugely, whatever. It's not just the 'we can't create tension when players know characters prolly won't die' trip, either. For a horror plot to be horrifying, something bad has to happen. But when something bad happens more or less out of the blue to a PC, they often feel that the GMs are punishing them. The in-game culture of a good horror MU has to accept IC loss as part of the fun.

@ganymede said in Autism and The MU* Community:

Here’s the flip side.

Yeah, I know. It's kinda hard to stomach, since from my PoV it boils down to, 'trying to avoid being harmed frustrates and annoys people who can harm me, including those who don't want to.'

You're a rational and ethical person of good will. And to me, you're also Schrödinger's Bigot.

There's kinda a lot of shit like that, on every scale. I'm supposed to know if somebody's genuinely over busy or doesn't want to see me, but the behaviors are the same.

Seen it tried, never seen it work.

The ombudsman has always been part of a hierarchical staff, and the one with the least authority.

This tends to send the message that 'real' staff don't have time for players. It appears to saddle the player with an advocate who has no actual power but is even more invested in ass-kissing than the player is, having a staff position and its perks to lose as well as a PC.

To me it seems to violate "more product, less process" principles -- are you sittin' around thinking up steps and 'proper channels' to deal with a problem and makin' flow-charts when you could just deal with the problem?