Posts made by il-volpe

Dammit, can't we show a picture?

That's it!

What did he do under that name?

He caused some annoyance on GoB, quite some time ago, and after he was removed somebody told me he'd played under that name elsewhere, and also this list of other PCs he'd played elsewhere, with similar history of being obnoxious. This came up, but I can't remember, and now it's bugging me.

Fangs!

Yeah. I am behind on Nightvale, I haven't listened to several months of episodes, but I love it.

Part of Nightvale, like OHYS, is that the people, if they are magical at all, are not very magical. They just live in this bizarre world where magic-y things happen all the time. Mages create Glow Clouds, they don't just start hailing them. I'd think it would fit better with something like a CoC system, except make the monsters non-deadly and take away almost all the insanity rules. (Except for, oh, just a little. "If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.")

That I know enough to do myself, it's the +claim code for players to do it (actually, I could do that, too) and the simultaneously getting it on directory object that I want. It's Faraday's PennMUSH (1.8.5 patchlevel 5). You've probably seen it 'round. http://lynnfaraday.github.io/MUSH/addons/

@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.

I'd be most grateful, @Cobaltasaurus.

I want it to do what I said above. My thought was that it would just be a stafferly object that doesn't need commands to read it or anything; I'll just look at the attributes listed on it. I hadn't thought about a +dir for players, 'cause I actually try to maintain a list of available places on the wiki, and will still do so. (IC social-structure shit means you're probably looking for a completely empty house, or you're looking for a room in a very specific house, and a +dir that shows every ownable place on the grid will be a bit to slog through.)

I don't want it to @chown anything, the entire grid belongs to the builder bit and I'm determined that it stay that way. Rooms that can 'belong' to PCs should just have a &ownable=1 (that I must run around and set on everything in the grid I want to be ownable, and if I have to add that to the directory's list by hand when I do it, that's okay) and a &owned_by=Bob. Or 'resideable' and 'resident' or whatever. The directory should tell me every ownable room's &owned_by, even the blank ones, and the room should display the &owned_by somewhere when you look at it.

I'm sure (and have been told I'm right about that) that it's dead simple to someone who's not an incompetent like myself, but I expect I'll have to muddle through modifying something else. @Whirlwind (thanks!) offered something easier for me to grasp than what I've got, which is much more featureful than what I want and doesn't do the simple bits that I do want.

@Whirlwind
Well, I don't want it to dig rooms or chown them, or let people redesc them. I don't really want it for hotels, it's just that similar-ish code is used for 'em. It's for all the IC residences.

The grid is this one area of GoB where I allow myself to be a control freak. The city the grid represents is ancient. So I want it to be stable, and I let myself get all anal about the descs so that if your room is on the northwest side of the building, the line that reflects the view from the window is correct. etc. Sometimes I'll do a new build for someone, but ICly, that house/whatever has probably been there for hundreds of years. When a PC leaves, that build stays and somebody else moves in.

What happens, though, is that I lose track of who lives where, which makes it awkward when new PCs are looking for housing. So I want a directory for myself that's more or less auto-generated, so I know what residential grid-rooms are unclaimed, and I want people who are exploring the grid OOC (an acceptable behavior) to look for empty digs to be able to tell if they're occupied.

@Whirlwind -- Just something where players can type a command to claim an existing room as their own, and something like 'Area belongs to Bob' ends up in the little space of 'special info' that my room-parent has, where it tells you if there are places or +views. And the info about who's claimed what also ends up on a directory object that I keep in my staff office or whatever. And to allow them to unclaim said room. Also, to allow nobody else to claim a claimed room, and to allow staff (and only staff) to set a room as belonging to a non-player-phrase ("Area belongs to House Targaryen"). And rooms have to be set to be claimable, so not every area on the grid does this at all.

I got some code I was going to mod, but it does tonnes more than I want or need and I haven't slogged through it, not feeling confident that I can do it without it taking a great deal of time for me to make a barely functional mess.

Edited to add: By the by, when I asked Faraday if she had this floating around, she said no but that lots of people had asked, so it's possible/likely that several games would be grateful for one that plugs into Faraday's Penn release all tidy-like.

I still can't find a simple frickin' hotel code. I suck.

@icanbeyourmuse said:

Anything can look like a character name, though.

Depends on the game, really. Unless it's a superheroes game, a character will not typically be named 'Spiderman.' Similarly, if it's not a Middle Earth game, 'Elrond' is a funny name.

Actually, themed staff names help with this. Sure, any game is liable to have a player or twelve who comes up with a reason to have a funny name, but if I go for 'marine mammals' as my staff name theme and the staff are called Whale, Dolphin, Seal, Otter and Walrus, people won't likely think that Dolphin is a PC who had hippy parents. If the staff names are Shakespeare, Dolphin, Thing, Olympus and Wuggly-Ump the odd name's power to hint 'this is a staffer!' is less.

It's a tiny issue, though, because, sheesh, +staff. Probably games should have themed staff names if the creators happen to like them, and not have them if they don't.

@icanbeyourmuse said:

I don't think staff theme names are a necessary thing. Otherwise seems to make sense to me.

Necessary, no. Nice, yes. Well, theme, whatever. It's just that staff should have names that don't look like character names.