Posts made by il-volpe

Possibly violently not the point.

True 'nuff. Though largely, you kinda need to go out of your way to make 'em inaccessible, unless your images are actually important content.

Kitty snores!

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

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.

By the way, @Ninjakitten a handful of your old LJ friends are playing on GoB, I'm sure they'd love to see you.

@Jaunt said:

You suggested that it wasn't fair-minded that only members of games that are part of our "connections" can submit articles. I told you that anyone can submit an article if they want to, including folks from this site.

Not at all. In fact, it took me a couple of re-reads to find the spot that might have given you that idea. Was it this?

@il-volpe said:

OR appears to have this thing going in where it's partners/privileged advertisers write these articles, and that's one reason they're privileged

This says nothing about who is allowed to write articles, only comments on who does write them, and suggests that maybe writing one probably gets you shifted up the docket in terms of getting reviewed to see if you'll be allowed advertising space.

Your reaction, interpreting that to mean that I think I'm not allowed to submit an article and find this interesting enough to cry "unfair!" is the very thing that makes me conclude that you believe I would want to submit an article. I don't want to submit articles to a gaming community that pays only lip-service to the sorts of games I want to play and will deny me the perks of writing articles (if said perks exist) and further, it makes me suspect you of being a bit full of yourself to see you respond as if wanting to write an article is the motivation for my remark.

I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.

Hmm.

@Jaunt said:

This idea that their submission is slave-work, but that your volunteerism towards your game isn't because you're passionate about your work is inconsistent ideology, and that's what I'm getting at. I hope that makes sense to you.

I wasn't talking about them. I was talking about me, and other MUSHers. Your OR community doesn't serve our specific interest as fully as it serves the specific interest of the writers of your articles. See? So while they get the various benefits of volunteerism from writing the articles, the membership here does not. Yet you appear to believe (see above) that we want to write articles for you. When someone attempts to convince you to do work for no or minimal benefit, they are indeed operating a scam. Does this make sense now?

I think that you're being over-sensitive in continually assuming that we're out to look down on you. We're not.

Hmm.

As @Thenomain suggested, there needs to be a consensus about our language re-branding before we implement an improved mission statement. It shouldn't be an arbitrary change, or a knee jerk reaction, or a change that satisfies one administrator's ideas and not others. Once we reach consensus, it'll be changed. Since OR's been doing well for itself for the few months that it's been around, I think it'll be okay to last a few more days until that consensus is reached.

I expect that you will find that until you change it, people will continue to criticize it. This should not surprise you; you have administrated a MU, have you not?

I'm suspicious, because I am a suspicious bastard (or at least, display the persona of one on MUSB, sometimes) and my suspicious bastard persona says that the reason the mission statement reads like it does is that you folks want to grow your community by attracting folks from outside the focused interest in RPI MUDs, but you don't want to do the work of maintaining and moderating a community that serves all MU* types. Yeah, you may attract a few members this way. But really, this is like calling the 'Ladies' Sewing Circle and Anarchist Society' the 'Community Fibre Arts Club', and telling any knitters who come along, oh, sorry, the club's about sewing and anarchy, but you're welcome to hang out. The club may not want to admit it, and hell, it may not even reach the front of their minds, but other people are going to figure, correctly, that really the name is about drawing people in so you can convert them from monarchist crochet to anarchist sewing. This is not cool.

By the way, if/when you get around to changing the OR site, a word of advice: Run about it and add alt text to any important images, including the infographicy things with your mission statement on. They need to be machine readable. MUs are among the few games accessible to blind people, and it's not difficult to make it so all the important shit on your game and site works with their screen-readers. Actually, if you want to do ten minutes of research and write about that, that'd be an article worth having out there.

I was once briefly paid to ts people on a pay-to-play sex MU, but it didn't last.

I think the 'customer service' model is just a common way of looking at it. I've certainly heard it talked about, plenty of times, and recommended. I think it's rubbish and that we've mostly left it behind here, but I dunno, there still might be some games with staff and players here where on game new staff get the customer-service paradigm lecture.

@Jaunt said:

Crayon and I've both admitted that the mission statement doesn't use clear language. We'll be changing it. I'm not sure how many times we can say this.

So do it. The amount of time it takes to replace... oh, never mind. Here:

Optional Realties is a community and design blog for text-based, online RPGs with automated character actions and effects. We focus on character and story-drive games that include permanent character death as a feature. While many call this an RPI MUD, our focus also includes games that use other codebases (MOO, etc) to create a similar player experience.

Optional Realities is a place where we acknowledge that we have a lot more in common than what separates us, but nevertheless our focus is on a narrow style and platform of play, because reasons.

OR's largely dedicated to one specific genre that's lacked a central hub for discussion for a very long time. That's the reason it was created. It's not personal. I don't see why that's so hard to understand.

It isn't. It's hard to understand why you folks find it hard to understand that you're gonna get trounced when you advertise a community that's not inclusive of all MUs, saying you want to bridge the gap between formats, failing to be clear that it's not inclusive or rather, actively claiming it is, and excluding the favoured format of the community where you're advertising

And is being the wageless coder/writer-slave of a volunteer hobbyist MUD is a scam? Maybe it is. Maybe try to be consistent with your valuation of volunteer/hobbyism.

What's inconsistent about it? I have several volunteer positions. I do them because I think the work is important, or I find it fun, or it pertains to my interests, or it offers good perks, or it allows me opportunity for professional development. Writing articles for OR does none of these for me. The earlier response about how we could submit articles, but nobody'd asked, seemed to me to imply that you folks think we ought to be honoured to.

Just like your view is marginalized and wrong. And just one post after you had the balls to tell me that I was the one looking down at you, too.

What view are you even talking about? I never said anything about having dedicated GMs or not having them. I said I don't like a "customer service" model of GMing. That's because the players are not my customers. I don't owe them anything. They're my guests. I treat them with fairness and courtesy because I'm not gonna be a dick to my guests, and I offer them game because that's what I invited them over to do.

@Alzie Yep. I was being sort of nice, or something. Actual thought when I looked was, "Oh, it's a content-mill, 'cause they've promised to post new articles every week, so they do not care if they have anything to say," (Another reason why people here are unlikely to want to submit articles; being the wageless writer-slave of a content mill is what we call a 'scam.')

My other thought was, "For fuck's sake, if I see one more piece of bullshit treating GMing as a 'customer service' activity, I'll spit nails. Into somebody's eyeballs."

@Jaunt said:

And folks here are welcome to submit articles to us, too. They don't need to be an admin from one of OR's core games to do so. We've had several folks submit articles from outside of our own community. Nobody's asked about that, though. Instead, maybe they've just assumed it's a certain way, when it's not.

Why would they want to? The articles are weak by our standards and the site treats our beloved non-automated games as lesser, and in a manner that doesn't make it clear that you're really just a site about RPI MUDs or things that behave like them.

See, people here didn't come to your site. They keep not coming over to it in spite of you asking, it seems. This is very likely because we don't think your site is great, and we don't think your favoured text-RPG platform is superior. (In fact, quite the opposite in my case. Automation was fun for a while, but it just narrows RP in the end)

But, yeah. Obviously most folks on OR (and here) are not professional writers.

Oh, it's not the quality of the writing. Your contributors' mastery or non-mastery of the English language is a separate issue. The articles (or the ones I've read, anyway) just don't have anything to say that this community hasn't already covered, rehashed, picked apart in great detail.

I'd be pleased to advertise on your site, and would be happy to get some MUD players on my MUSH and if some of my MUSH players wanna go play MUDs that's great too, but contributing to OR would not be a feather in my cap, and reading it hasn't done anything for me. Which is fine, but please don't act surprised.

@Jaunt said:

I get the idea that this site is a "pool of sharks and everyone gets bitten". I don't think it makes for the most productive conversations, but it can certainly be entertaining.

Indeed. You don't really need a thick skin so much as to need to understand that biting is fun and getting bitten funny, even when it happens to you.

Actually, it leads to tonnes of productive conversations. OR appears to have this thing going in where it's partners/privileged advertisers write these articles, and that's one reason they're privileged, but I read those and think, "What a trite and redundant way to address this issue," and "You're linking that to MUSB? Go home and teach your grandma to suck eggs." The reason for that is some discussion on this board or one of its previous iterations has covered the topic far more completely and intelligently and probably but maybe not with a rich blue sauce of vitriol.

@Coin I love the timeskip idea, and would like to play that, too. On some other occasion when it was brought up, there was the objection that when you choose to skip is going to end up being good timing for some PCs and not for others. Still, I really don't think this would be that huge a problem, even for a large game. So long as you're clear about it to begin with, why would people bitch except for the sake of bitching? I'd actually set it up so that the last month or two of the RP time would be 'wrap up anything you need to RP out, folks," time. And be sure everyone knew at the start of each cycle when the time-jump would happen and how long it would be.

@surreality said:

At times, though, I'd say the level of code there interfered with the roleplay to some extent.

It rendered GMing quite effort intensive. On a MUSH, I can just invent story and roll with it. GMing on Ghostwheel, I couldn't just make up a story with some NPCs to interact with and emit them. I had to create them, as puppets (the elaborate AHaB type) with complete stat sets, completely equipped with all the weapons and everything else that NPC person would have. The time investment was much more significant, and the majority of the time was spent doing something relatively unfun. I consider heavy automation to be a hinderance to being story-centered; to meld both, anybody creating story must be at the very least, a builder, if not a coder.

@crayon Because I am evil, whenever teenagers would bribe my college-age arse into buying them liquor, but didn't know what they wanted besides "cheap" I would torture the poor critters with Olde E. Ahh, kids. Fuck 'em.

@crayon said:

I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.

Not really -- this board is our space for advertising. It's as big as it gets here, and you get equal space with everybody else. Your site has your 'listed game' advertising space, and then each of those games gets a subforum, and then there's this one 'other games' area on your forum. So you've come along here and used our advertising space to its fullest extent, while denying us the same privilege. If I post an advert for my game on your forum, it's not only more clicks away from the front page for your community, it's in a subforum area that's down at the bottom and named the equivalent of 'miscellaneous afterthoughts' and there's no link to it from the part of the site that people who are looking for new games are most likely going to be looking at. Your poster is up on the wall here, but on OR, most MUSHes are indeed hidden in the bin by the door. The fact that you have a special big-poster-wall doesn't change that; in fact it makes the effect worse by calling attention away from the advertising space we are allowed, and by implying, in no uncertain terms, that our shit is second-best.

it's a MU* Soapbox, in which case while the community might be overwhelmingly of a particular genre the board's intent seems broader.

Since I don't play WoD, a hell of a lot of the content here doesn't relate to me, either. I believe you are correct that the intent is broader than MUSHes/MUXen alone, and it's certainly broader than WoD, but most of the content is about WoD anyway. Nobody minded that you wanted to advertise a MUD here. They minded that you want to use our clubhouse to advertise a site which was put forth as being about text-based RPGs in general, yet enforce policies that class the favoured format of most of the users here as clearly second-best. Possibly if we had a board, hidden down at the bottom, called 'Advertisements for Games That Suck' and the mods moved your ad down there, people would see it as fair and ignore you instead of having all the snarky fun.

Some of the criticism levied towards us has been based in our lack of willingness to really become participants in this community, but part of the obstacle to that has been the general 'outsider' treatment and a lack of explicit focus coupled with a community userbase that is definitely focused.

Heh. As far as I can see, you've not posted anything that isn't advertising your own shit or defending your position. This is indeed bad form; it appears that you're trying to get something out of us (users for your site, players for your game) and not give anything back. I do this on 'Game of Thrones' fansites, but I've got the courtesy not to get into arguments about it if people complain, and in fact sometimes even apologize for treating their communities in a slightly predatory fashion.

If you want to become a participant in the community, well. Participate in the community. It is a rough-and-tumble community, and people will laugh at you and call you names and you'll have to take your licks, have a sense of humour about it, and figure out the culture. If you don't like that, stick to some other place. I think the phrase is, "There's no crying in baseball."

Oh! Thanks for the explanation. The automated systems requirement is definitely a blurry and tricky thing to really hammer down and determine a firm line on.

No; FS3 +combat does apply the damage, it is not set by hand.

It's different from a MUD in that you can more or less ignore it. Okay, you get damaged in +combat, you have minuses on your rolls and if you get hurt bad enough you can't hit shit, but it will never kill you.

More important is just. The culture of how it's used. My first RPG MU* was that Ghostwheel MOO, which was very MUD-like. Actually, that fuckin' thing was like the golden dream of heavily automated. All the exits had sizes, if you were in a mecha or riding a dragon you couldn't fit through small exits. All of your clothes were objects, and would add a line to your desc when you put them on, replacing the line of your desc that reflected that part of your body naked. You could find new clothes or armour and drop the old ones and people would find them and pick them up. You had a lockpicking skill and could find picks and open locks, and maybe find /better/ picks that would make it easier. If you swam under water for too long without a scuba-tank, you would drown and die. Code prevented you from doing anything you ICly could not do, there were McGuffins all over the place, and collecting and interacting with coded shit was a major part of the game. This, to some degree or another, is what I believe @Jeshin wants when talking about wanting automated systems.

On GoB, and the other FS3 games that I have experienced, the +combat system and +heal command are just convenient resolution-generators, no different from the +roll system (FS3 has both), except requiring one to enter fewer commands (and wait for other people to enter fewer). Interacting with it is less part of game play and more just a way to easily decide how game play shall proceed. The relationship between this code and RP is the same as the relationship between dice commands and RP on WoD MUs, but WoD MUs don't meet your criterion, and that is dumb.

@crayon said:

It's likely that most of these MUSHes would meet our criteria, too, which is why we've found the MUSH-exclusion argument to be odd, to say the least. There really haven't been many games that have applied for community partnership and been turned down, so if you want me to understand this perspective it would help if you offered some sort of evidence that leads to this conclusion that we exclude highly-automated RP-centric MUs, so that we could directly remedy the cause of that misunderstanding.

I think you're misunderstanding.

In FS3, one gets a bit of code where players can set themselves to be wielding X weapon and wearing Y armour and fighting with Z person or team, in a gung-ho, or cautious, or just-defensive fashion. The combat coordinator, who can be anyone, then triggers combat rounds, and the code rolls, determines who hit whom, and how much damage was taken, and counts up said damage, etc. There is also a +heal command, which rolls ones healing skill and heals the target appropriately. This, evidently, is enough automation that MUSHes using FS3 will qualify for your game list.

However, I, the administrator of an FS3 MUSH, and probably many other people here, do not see a fundamental difference between doing this and doing it the way one does it on most WoD MUs, where you +roll, and it generates a series of random numbers between one and ten, and displays the result, but does not necessarily even tell you if that's a success, and certainly doesn't adjust your opponent's sheet to reflect the damage done.

FS3's combat is a time-saver, saving the players from having to enter in their rolls for every round of combat, and the GM from having to set damage on sheets. It allows us to use the dice system but fuck around with it less. It is not like the automated systems on MUDs, which control the outcome regardless of player/GM input (apart from triggering one's attack or attempt to pick a lock or whatever).

So allowing FS3 MUSHes but disallowing most WoD ones on the basis of FS3's +combat and +heal systems seems stupid, because it's not really what you're getting at in requiring automated systems.

@crayon said:

do not purport to represent all text-based roleplaying games. If you perceive that our site is doing it, I'd be happy to get to the root of what causes those perceptions so we can fix it

I think the cause of that perception would be @Jeshin saying it.

The rest, well. You have come to this community to advertise a game and an online community. This is allowed. Your upcoming Project Redshift is advertised here as equal to all other games advertised here, even though it's not the sort of game that this community is about.*

However, your community does not reciprocate. Very few of the games that we here enjoy qualify to be advertised on your community in a manner equal to those that are your favoured type. Why is it hard to understand that this is annoying?

Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.

*Actually, since you persist in bumping this thread by posting about the new content on Optional Realities, you're really sort of grabbing more than your fair share of metaphorical airtime and thus creeping into the field of bad manners by local community standards.

@Ninjakitten said:

Why not simply claim to represent/focus on highly-automated MU* RPGs and then continue to do so?

It's all the more offensive that they're not actually representing highly-automated MUs -- as I understand it, any MUSH using Faraday's FS3 qualifies, because of the semi-automated +combat system and the automated +heal.

Yes. I understand what @Jeshin means when he is talking about RPing around automated systems, and the idea of RP-enhancing automation. But this is the opposite of what FS3 is trying to do. FS3 +combat isn't there so you can have fun whacking at things/one another without a GM, and that is not, largely, what people use it for. It's there so that when the story calls for combat, you can get through it faster and things are tonnes less likely to go pear-shaped when somebody falls asleep at the keys. It's there so you spend less time interacting with coded systems than you do if you do the combat with +roll. It's not there to enforce rolled outcomes, either, really, which is why you can take endless damage but it will never say you're dead.

It is hilariously stupid that Game of Bones would qualify for this MU-list but few, if any, WoD games would, when GoB is much more fuzzy about combat than most MUs.

Basically, almost every RP MUSH/MUX that ever there was passes the first two criteria with flying colours, while almost all of them fail the third, and those that pass probably pass by the letter of the law but not the spirit. Even if it wasn't an annoying criterion (especially to hold onto here) the 'arbitrary' spot where it's placed is stoopid.

@Arkandel Yes, that is what the colloquial phrase "I don't see it," means in this case. Though with slightly more emphasis; somewhere between "I don't agree with the reason," and "the reason is incoherent." I am aware of the stated reasons.