Posts made by il-volpe

@surreality

• Are they people asking to play an LOTR elf on a Game of Thrones game? (Heard about it, didn't see it personally. Have seen someone come to a WoD game and ask to play a Strix, though, that was... special.)

It was not exactly an LOTR elf. It was desc'd like an elf, and had a background of a player-invented-House (not allowed on GoB) with very elf-y characteristics, and wanted to use of some stats that reflect Game of Thronesy magic powers to represent different, elf-y powers. This player was indeed irate at the rejection, and at my remarking that the core of the problem was not the invented House, but the fact that the character was an elf. Though I imagine I might have enduced him to waste more of his time if I hadn't said it. He just wanted to play an elf, and also wanted to play with friends who were there and probably would have stretched for elfishness in some other way if I hadn't accidentally pissed him off and caused him to leave the game cursing my assholery.

There was also a princess of Normandy at one point, but that player didn't seem to take it amiss to be told that this was not a viable concept.

I think the normal chain of events for this is when someone comes along with 'Former Olympic Gold Medalist, Leader of Underground Crime Syndicate, World Explorer and Treasure Hunter, and also a Wizard,' type concepts and you're trying to explain that yeah, okay, you kinda-sorta-maybe CAN spread the points that way and have it conceivable that a person with that sheet could pull that off if they stayed lucky, but this just isn't Buckaroo Banzai MUSH so it just won't do.

Of course it's art.

Probably it's crappy folk-art, but it's art.

@rebekahse Yes, it's alive. It's small. A couple of nights ago it had a connect list of 30. Right now it's four.

Bugger London and go for a small, creepy village in Cornwall.

I hate it when they are a novel, and I curse whoever started the idea that the BG is a test to see if you are a good enough writer to play the game.

The GoB wiki actually has this list of suggested points that a BG might cover. Once somebody actually did it as a questionnaire, and that was fine by me, though few, if any, other BGs actually cover every point because it's not meant to be a questionnaire, just a source for a mental prod.

@Creepy said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

I'm still not sold that a background, even in short form, is necessary to anyone except possibly a player who likes to have their char's story all mapped out before they hit the grid.

I need it. It's 'Game of Thrones' and a great many PCs are related to one another in various ways and I can't approve two eldest daughters, or other such conflicts. I also have had to reject an elf and a princess of Normandy.

I hate bgs, but can't think of another way to cover this that wouldn't suck.

@monkey said in Kinds of Mu*s Wanted:

Was thinking about doing a MUSH set in The Magicians world-s but I was pretty doubtful there'd be enough interest.

I'd play. Depending on what you decided to do with it, anyway. As you said, there's lots of room in the canon. And also in how one interprets its world into gamey-ness frameworks.

I like it. Builders would have to control the length of the short-descs, not a problem.

@secretfire said in Input on a new mush idea:

Personally, I'd just make a "north America" grid, make it big but not detailed (focus on highways, a city could just be a single room or two), and then just specify what state the main convoy was in right now.

If you had a few people who like to build like crazy, it'd be rather fun to drop new parts of the grid in front of the PCs as they travel along, and leave their ruins behind. The players declare that they're gonna travel along Interstate 23, heading west, they hang about on the highway grid and RP getting attacked by zombie dogs while having to move cars out of the way of their caravan, you drop Deadsville, TN, in front of them and GM their entry into the town a few days later. After the terrible battle that ensues when Bob the PC rips a zombie-attracting fart, and the PCs get separated fleeing the area, you put a 'HORDE HERE' there. Which maybe somebody will clear out, or maybe you remove it at random eventually.

What fires the imagination about 'The Walking Dead' is imagining ways to solve the problem, which is why everybody likes to criticize how those dumb characters handle stuff. I think you'd really want it to be open-world -- not 'you are trapped in the city with zombies MUSH' but 'Zombies! What are ya gonna do about it?! MUSH.' 'Cause just trying to hold your city territory would get boring, but 'Well, living in this walled subdivision didn't work out, let's build a giant tree-house chicken farm!' type shit would be pretty great.

This game is still alive.

It remains small, easy-going, player-driven, probably a wee bit too goofy for the theme. Same.

@Arkandel But we love the vitriol.

It's all very shocking.

@Griatch Yep. Mudportal is less than halfway there, though.

@Griatch Unless I am completely missing what this does (and since you say it's not a single button, I doubt it) it is not relevant. Really, nor is writing plug-ins for MUSHclient.

See, "You can do that," isn't the point. Newbies can't/won't do it. What's wanted is a situation where I can say, "Try playing a MUSH, you'll enjoy wasting your time in this way, here, install this," and My Friend Who Has Never MUed installs the software, and starts up the software, and it opens up 'find a game' and MFWHNM can browse a list, then click 'join this game' or 'visit this game as a guest' and connect, with a bunch of buttons that let MFWHNM know, by poking buttons, the basics of MU communication and even (if it's a no-approvals game) just start to play right away. Finding a game, figuring out how to connect, and learning basic command-lines to interact with the game should all be melted together into a dicking-around-clicking-buttons experience. If the user has to already know what she's doing to achieve this effect, she doesn't need this effect anyway.

@faraday I am sure you, and many others, know much better how this ought to work. I just think it should exist, and come like that outta the box. It also should have some sort of connection to a MUDlist such that you can essentially click 'add this game' and away you go.

@faraday said:

• Doing something more interactive with auto-populated buttons and such requires not only a new server, but also a new client

Does it really? I was imagining maybe that the MU server had a text file, settable by the owner, which the client grabs and reads -- the content tells it what buttons to auto-populate. New client, yes, but that file would be something one could add to any game.

Buttons should all be closable, re-open 'em from a drop down if you want them again, like Photoshop toolbars and menus.

Yeah, 'twas Ghostwheel. It had previously had lag problems. I don't know what it was running on before. Probably some small part of a Sun, and having this 486 box that did nothing but the MOO was way awesome.

Hosted-on-a-phone MUSH would be cool. I remember Hosted On A Cray MOO, which was, well, just that. I don't think it was anything special, you just socialized and fucked around with MOO code, but it was HOSTED ON A CRAY 2 THAT SUPERCOMPUTER WITH THE COOLANT WATERFALL. I understand that plenty of phones have more computational power than the Cray-2?

@surreality said:

@Autumn said:

I'd be a little surprised if it's even particularly laggy. Very large games have run perfectly well on 66MHz 80486s with 128mb of memory and 10 megabit ethernet.

I'm pretty sure the MOO I started on was running on something like that, and MOO has a lot more demand on the server than MUX from what I recall.

Less than that. It was a big deal when it got upgraded to be running on a 486 box, eh?

@Derp said:

Some of the suggestions made just seem like adding features simply for the sake of adding features, even if they don't actually improve upon anything. Sort of like this idea of buttons for all the commands. What does that accomplish that your welcome screen on a mush can't? 'Hi player, we assume you're new, here's what you need to get started.'

Huh? It accomplishes the difference between this:

And this:

The top one is better software, the bottom one the largely preferred software. No doubt this is in part because the instructions on the top one, like the welcome screen of a MUSH, are soon scrolled away and you've got to memorize instead of just sort of peer around the window and poke things until you find the command you want. Or the one you used last time and forgot, dammit.

And indeed, I'd have buttons for the to-room RP stuff. Or, well, an input box that that let you toggle between say, pose, emit, or raw-to-MU. Other stuff in drop-downs that you can bring up or turn off. Everything ought to tell you what the actual command is, same way a lot of software will display the hotkeys for commands next to the command's dropdown.

I've been playing these games, across a pretty good variety of codebases, for some twenty years. Yet I still can find ones where I simply cannot be arsed to check out the game because I don't know the command lines for simple shit, like reading their damn bb. I already know what a MU is, and I already know that I like them, yet I cannot be arsed. This is probably why new users are dragged in by existing users; they can only be arsed when a personal friend hypes the games to them. It's simply too much work to just check it out for the heck of it. Bunch of buttons to poke? Less work.

I am pretty sure that users, mostly, sort of like exploring by clicking buttons to see what can be done, but they don't like reading documentation, taking tutorials, or memorizing command lines.

@Derp -- @Griatch answered your question about how it would work.

I would suppose it would, when you connected to the MU the first time, send a bunch of commands until it found the right ones, so it could give you a button for everything you need, poses and pages and all.

It would not be a better way to handle commands at all. It would be slow to use. But right there, on your screen, would be this set of buttons giving you a visual idea of what you can do. As it is now, to play a MU, you need to actually memorize some commands to put into a command prompt, and my guess is, people would rather learn them as if the commands were nifty shortcuts than need to learn them before they can do anything.

@Griatch -- I am sure you're right about the collaboration, skin, etc. I know fuck-all for coding when it really comes down to it.