Posts made by ixokai

@faraday What's FFG? I know Fate: my problem with Fate is almost its too lightweight. I feel I'd spend more time writing the help files explaining what aspects are, what compels and invokes are, then doing any actual coding. Someone could do Fate with their eyes closed. I might do it anyways, though.

Okay, I want to learn me some ruby, and when I learn new languages, I do projects in them.

Oh, look, AresMUSH just went beta.

What RPG setting/system out there is good/interesting yet we doesn't have a game occupying its niche? I'm not looking for collaborators right now, not for staff to fill out other parts of the stuff, the setting, rules, policy, etc. Right now I want to do all the coding needed for a project just to learn a) Ares in general and b) Ruby in specific.

But I don't want to go through the effort for a pet project that no one ever sees, so after I'm done (if I'm successful), I want people to want to play there, so I'm wondering.

What's missing in our games? What would you play if only it were there?

Current thoughts are Stars Without Number has a Revised Edition. I'd go do Eclipse Phase except @The-Sands is doing that. I seek ideas.

@faraday Whyyy is this setup script installing emacs? Installing it ended up pulling in X11 and allll kinds of stuff I don't want on a server >.>

Also, I got this error on install:

<INSTALL> Give ares user access to www and redis directory
chgrp: cannot access '/var/lib/redis/dump.rdb': No such file or directory
chmod: cannot access '/var/lib/redis/dump.rdb': No such file or directory

Redis seemed to install without error, is it possible the script needs to start redis?

-- And I just realized this is a better discussion on AresMUSH's forums. Ahem.

@tinuviel Loot boxes. When building specific decks, kegs are largely just scrap factories and you craft the cards you want. There's no cards in the game you can't make through crafting via scraps. You don't have to wait for a random drop to get a card.

@tinuviel said in Gwent!:

@jaded said in Gwent!:

microtransactions

Pay-to-be-better style? Or can one git gud without paying actual money?

You can get anything without paying actual money. You play the solo "adventures" to learn the game and get enough cards/leaders to play an 'okay' deck (personally, I'd put at least $10 in at this point to get some 'kegs' -- packs of 5 cards -- to fill out before you start playing competitively, but you don't have to. It'll just slow down your start if you don't).

Then you play casual or ranked matches, and as you win rounds-- and even if you have a bad deck you'll win some-- you'll get rewards. Ore, scraps, and at certain milestones, kegs. Ore is the in-game currency to buy kegs (for 100 ore), or to buy into the Arena mode (for 150 kegs) which guarantees at least, even if you lose all matches, 1 keg as a reward.

You can also get ore for doing your daily quests (win X matches with Y faction is common). Right now there's an event going on, Monsters vs Idont'rememberwho, so every win I get as my monster deck for this month is added up and I'll get rewards from that too. Every 'season' (month) there's such an event.

I'm rank 17 now in ranked play, where I'm winning about 1/3 to 1/2my matches, but more then enough to get at least 2 kegs a day without any money. I alternate based on mood putting my ore into kegs or into arena tickets-- arena mode* can be fun but frustratingly random.

Scraps are rewards for winning rounds and milestones, but also there's a mill button which will reduce 'extra' cards to scraps. You can craft any card in the game from scraps. Most gold/silver cost 800, whereas most bronzes are 80. You get 20 scraps for milling a bronze card, 50 for milling silver, 200 for milling gold.

Why mill? Because the rules of gwent say you can only, in any given deck, have one copy of a gold or silver card, and no more then 3 bronze copies. And you can use your cards in as many decks as you want, so as you get cards via RNG on the kegs, eventually you will get some that are just to waste. Or you may hate one faction (I'll never play a blue deck so I don't mind milling my blue golds to get my new consume deck going).

And even if you're really bad at it, from second-round-passing you'll likely win enough to get your daily first tier rewards until you get a better deck.

The other currency is meteorite dust, which is scarcer, which is used to upgrade standard cards to premium cards. The only difference between standard and premium is premium are animated. I find dust rewards are much more rare then ore/scrap rewards, which I expect is them monetizing the look-and-feel over gameplay, which I like.

EDIT TO ADD: *I forgot to add my footnote

Arena mode is where you buy in for $1.99 or 150 ore, and you build a deck. You're presented with 4 cards at a time, drawn from the entire collection (not the cards you own), and you pick a card at a time. You can't really make a planned deck this way because there's no telling what the cards are, but you can sorta adapt if you pay attention. There's no timelimit here. Once you have your full deck-- which does not follow the normal rules of max 4 golds/max 6 silvers and no duplicates of golds or silvers-- you get to play it against other people. You play max 9 matches, or until 3 losses. No matter what you will earn at least a keg, but if you win even one you'll get a keg plus some of the other currency.

I'll go play ranked until I get 150 ore, then go play arena until I get what I get, open a keg, go play ranked again, in an endless cycle of kegs-and-ore-and-cards with no real money.

@auspice Its not the "it" that is the problem, but that you said above:

(set: $operations to operations - 1)

Ie, 'operations' not '$operations', which Nemesis pointed out is an error. And per the wiki @Nemesis linked, 'it' (without a $) is syntactical sugar

@faraday said in AresMUSH Updates:

@ixokai - I wrapped up my earlier response into a Replacing FS3 tutorial in the coding section. Hope that helps.

I did see this stuff, but like, your example other-system is a traits thing, and that's not really useful. When I suggested a blog post for a simple skill/stat/rpg system I mean like, a basic FUDGE system maybe, or even just a pretendy funtime system you make up on the spot.

Like, if I was making a WOD game, there's attributes, which are str/dex/con/etc, there's skills, there's merits, there's some other points. I get from your example how I can store the eventual values by extending the Character class (I assume ruby calls it something besides extending since it seems Ruby's classes are open), but I'm not sure how to approach making a database of available merits, for example. Or skills, for that matter: should they be hardcoded in a plugin? My instinct says not. Looking over the fs3skills plugin, I find things like:

https://github.com/AresMUSH/aresmush/blob/master/plugins/fs3skills/public/fs3_action_skill.rb

which seem to support my instinct, it looks like you have a data model for action skills. But for the life of me I can't find where they're defined to mimic such a setup for a different RPG entirely.

At least one person was confused-- I'm not speaking of Gwent the game in the Witcher 3, but instead this:

https://www.playgwent.com/en

Its an entirely standalone free to play CCG. (And it not on Steam)

@the-sands I know how EP works

IIRC, Evennia's database is driven by its Django component. If you're expecting to do direct SQL in it, there may be more of a pain then you're expecting. Django's ORM is... opinionated.

Isn't that like two steps forward, go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200? It sounds like, 'Okay, I am starting over from scratch', I mean. I don't have anything against Evennia or anything.

Gwent is a collectible card game CD Project Red invented for the Witcher 3, but its also being developed as a standalone game for the PC, Playstation 4 and XBone.

Now this game isn't quite exactly like Gwent in the Witcher, as it takes advantage of being a digital game and cards can do some stuff that the in-game Gwent couldn't. (In particular, the lanes are no longer mandatory melee-here, ranged-here, artillery-here; they're marked as that but lanes matter for organizational purposes only-- some powers affect cards in the same lane, some one on each lane, etc).

Its free to play, and you can get many basic cards for some basic decks by playing the solo campaigns which are sorta like elaborate tutorials. Beyond that, you can get cards, kegs (packs of 5 cards with one rare+ guaranteed), ore (the online currency for buying kegs), and scraps (the online currency for 'crafting' cards) by playing either casual or ranked play, both. I put a good $20 in to start with to buy a big pack of kegs to make a deck I liked, but since then haven't put any money in at all. I make my new cards for a new deck I'm working on through crafting mostly.

In fact that crafting part is what sold me on playing: I've played some other digital CCG's which were all RNG based and uuuugh. Not being able to get the cards I want sucked. If you have any duplicate silver/gold, or more then 3 of any bronze, you can 'mill' them down into scraps. So even if you get a keg that has no new cards, its not a waste. You just go press the Mill button and it kills off any dupes you have.

An example:

Every deck has a faction: there's five factions (Monsters, uhh, blue, purple, black/gold, Scoia'tael -- dwarves/elves/dryads). Each deck has a 'Leader', which is a special card face-up which has an ability which is usually game-changing.

My main deck is a monster, my leader Whispering Hillock. Its a 6 power card that looks like a horse drinking from corrupted water and being corrupted. Its power is 'Create a Bronze or Silver Organic card.' Organic is a 'tag' that is on some abilities that represent special powers that are... physical. One is Parasite, which either -12's an enemy or +12's an enemy. My favorite one is Monster Nest (which I also have in my deck), which is an Organic Special (spell) that Spawns a Bronze Insectoid or Necrophage and gives it +1.

The 'Create' mechanic will take the categories/tags indicated, and select at random 3 cards that match and you pick one, and it makes it right then, it doesn't have to be in your deck. There's a bit of RNG into that, so very rarely I'll get 3 options and not find any particularly good, but that's rather rare. Other examples are a poison that does 6 damage to the Highest card in each enemy lane, a card that does -2 to every card in a lane and removes a Boon (a positive buff on a lane; there's only like a couple in the game, though Full Moon for a werewolf/vampire deck getting those boons gone is a godsend).

My deck revolves around three things: Its packed full of Relicts, a monster sub-type that are like... weird witches. The Crones are a triplet of witches, Weavess, Brewess, Whispiss, power 6/8/6, which if you play any one of them, will summon all three. They work basically as a single card (unless I'm unlucky and draw more then one and don't/can't mulligan it; summon pulls from deck, not hand), so that's 20 points right there, and in a deck of 25, to have 3 in there makes it a really good chance that I'll draw one of them. Nothing else can really reliably toss out a 20 point advantage with one card.

But there's more! I have a gold card, Weavess: Incantation, which is the cornerstone of the deck. In fact, if I play through and don't get it my chance of winning drops a lot. Incantation strengthens every Relict in hand, deck or board, by +2. So the Crones now become 8/10/8. If I don't get Incantation, I have another gold card, Ge'els, which will show me 'a gold and a silver' from my deck; I pick one to play immediately, and silver goes on top of the deck for next hand. So if I don't have Incantation, that has a solid chance of fishing it up, since worst-case that's the only gold I drew there's only three others.

The other relicts in my deck are primarily Fiends, which start at 11 power behemoths, and become 13 power. I play my fiends early, except for one, which I save to power my Spears.... Spears are bronze cards that do damage equal to the power of a card in your hand to an enemy. 13 kills almost anything, so I save that last Fiend until I run out of spears.

And the reason to play Fiends early is my other staple is Ghouls. These aren't relicts, but they will happily feed on the bodies of my dead fiends in my graveyard to add their power to the Ghouls (it a 4 power), thus last turn (since most second turns are passed by one party or the other), my ghouls become 17 power behemoths.

(Worse, I have Renew which lets me resurrect a dead gold and replay it... in ideal hands, if I get Renew and Incantation in my first hand, I play Incantation, pass, let the other side win, next turn, Renew Incantation, play it again, and then fight like the devil with 10/12/10 Crones and 15 power Ghouls).

Anyways!

There's lots and lots of other deck options. The black/gold human faction has Spying as a mechanic, where they put a card on the enemy side-- and the enemy gets the points-- but it does things like, 'draw two cards and play one' to make speed decks which chew through their deck. It gives the enemy 2 points each time you do it, but then they have other cards which do things like do damage everytime a spy shows up or boost itself by how many spies there are. The black/gold also has a lot of 'reveal' / 'conceal' mechanics, where they can reveal cards in your hand-- and even target them, which suuucks. The conceal/reveal decks here are a problem for me.

The purple humans have a lot of interesting reincarnation mechanics. The scoia'tael (elves and dwarves mostly) tend to be about buffing, though it varies a bit in how they do it. Elf cards tend to buff cards unplayed.

Purple faction tends to have some masochists. One card does one damage to the card to the right, and buffs self by two. Meanwhile, the card you wanna play to the right, every two turns if its damaged, heal itself (completely), then strengthen its base strength by 2. That combo is a priority to remove. (this is what spears are for).

Blue have a lot of machines, but they also tend to come in two flavors: either they're going the Armor route, where they have lots of synergies to boost armor for cards around, or they're zerging. The zerg ends up with a LOT of relatively low powered cards but with half/most of them summoning up and growing to medium-power cards quick. I can beat it with a good draw, but there's just soo many.

So. I thought I'd ramble to see if anyone was interested.

The event was fun. It wasn't a kill scene but it was creepy and interesting. Its apparently meant to kickstart the first seasonal plot, so!

I look forward to running some stuff in this system; I'm almost more interested in that aspect then playing, not that I'm not interested in playing.

@aria said in Pineapple on Pizza:

I present, from their website:

"Cream & Crimson - Alfredo sauce and cheese are blanketed with a layer of oven-roasted red potato seasoned with fresh garlic and dill. Topped off with bacon, cheddar and creamy gorgonzola cheese."

http://averspizza.com/

If you are ever in the Bloomington, IN area? I highly recommend ordering from them. Highly. I haven't lived there in almost 13 years and I still miss their food.

Oh dear lord I hate you, @aria. I hate you deeply. I want you to know that I seethe in fury and rage and hate for you and wish you only the worst in life at all.

By which I mean, dear god that sounds utterly delicious and I don't see myself going near Bloomington ever

I live in Los Angeles, and there's tons of pizza options around me.

And non-chains are all complete and utter crap.

They are just bad.

The best pizza near me is Round Table. Out of like 20 within three miles. These mom and pop non-chain places are just crap. More often then not, greasy as hell. The ingredients poorly flavored. No interesting options for sauces.

I've had some really good pizza elsewhere, but man.

On topic: anyone who likes pineapple on pizza is a monster.

@arkandel I disagree. The 'I wont give you an email' crowd is nothing at all like a silent minority, from what I've seen/remembered. They'll vocally and viciously not give you their email more often then not.

@arkandel I know a certain subset are rabidly against the idea that the game owner can ask to know 'who they are'. Most make noises on way or the other; privacy, history, etc. They are offended by the very presumption one would ask for an email address, not hindered by some lack of technical ability to use a throw-away address.

They're nuts, in short.

1. I don't really care. I've been "ixokai" since I was 14, which was more then two decades ago, and anyone with even a little skill knows my address. They don't know which apartment I am in or my actual phone number, because fuck you WHOIS, I'm not THAT stupid.

2. I deeply do not care.

3. I don't like my photo being taken; there's a few out there but they are rare. I will almost never voice chat with anyone; this comes down to a slightly odd issue I have with sound. I find I don't process sound like everyone else. There's no background sound: there's either sound I completely focus on, or sound that is all a blur. I can't do audiobooks, for example, because you know like, needing to drive. I can't be on a conference call and do anything on the computer. The moment I have to listen is when I can't do anything but listen. So: I don't voice chat or anything like that. But its not identity related.

4. I care only insofar as I want to kill spam. Thus, for people, I'm me@ixokai.io. For a shady porn site, I'm yoursitename@junk.ixokai.io, and *@junk.ixokai.io auto-forwards into a junk folder. I can still get the shady porn site's activation mail but it doesn't bother my inbox.

5. I am so completely incapable of hiding 'myself' on games the whole 'alt secrecy' stuff just vooshes over my head. I used to care about this because when I was very young I got into some shady stuff so not being me from one game to another was something important to me, but that shady shit happened when I was a teenager and now that I am 10 days past my 37th birthday, I don't have time for shady. Now I maintain a quasi-updated (haven't checked lately) Playlist here and at some point when I'm on a game I do all ': = ixokai!' to everyone, just in case I know someone. If anyone has any peeves with me these days I'd rather they know who I am we can happily coexist by just not fucking with eachother.

Suggestion:

While I really like FS3, I admit looking at Ares for anything that is not FS3 was fairly overwhelming. I'm a programmer by trade, but don't know Ruby or Rails, and looking at the Ares codebase without fully understanding it,... I wasn't quite sure where to start with such a thought.

A blog post or doc now that its in public beta that explains how to implement a very simple skill/stat/rpg system that isn't FS3 would be very welcome. As it is, I sorta get this feeling that Ares is not exactly another MUSH implementation, but the next edition of FS3. I don't think that's intended, as I do get Ares is all plugin based and the FS3 stuff are plugins.

I also don't mean any offense.

@botulism said in Welcome to Lovecraft Looking for Directors and Stage Hands:

@ixokai There's a Central Casting character (NPC) that's gay, and his uncle is the priest at the local Catholic Church and accepts him, which isn't really troubles? Beyond that, not sure!

Yeah, I apparently had a very vivid dream which went weird. Ignore that part!

Right, so.

The system is easy. Chargen is fast. Staff have not shown any sign of current insanity. Staff have provided fodder for both player-run plots and what the plot of the 'season' will be, which is good.

The setting is very well defined, though there's something about a NPC being The Gay Guy and his troubles that informs other possibly gay people in a way I didn't entirely understand when I heard it, and still don't really get what's up.

There's less room for older characters then younger; think of this as Buffy or every other horror flick where college kids do crazy crap and disaster happens. That's not to say older characters don't fit, but the game seems to be 'about' the high school/college folk and the crap you can do to them.

The RPG mechanics are sorta odd, but in an interesting way. None of us are super duper, super special, or just super: our thing is surviving. That's.. novel. Most of us are the kids in the horror movies: the goal? Survival.

The mechanics are not designed around the idea of you competing against the Enemy, but that's okay. That's the theme and that's what makes this interesting. Sure, down the road, I expect to try to kill a monster.

But I expect that'll happen after I run into it a time or two and figure out its weakness and then a lot of praying. The assumption isn't superhero: its not YOU WIN AGAINST THE DARKNESS. Its.... more like... OH SHIT. You survive (or not).

It's interesting.