I'm Jaunt, from Optional Realities -- DonathinFrye from TMS, TMC, and various other sites in the community. An admin and/or creator from Atonement. And Shadows of Isildur. And Elendor MUSH. Clandestine. Legends of the Jedi. Godwars: Utopia. Countless other projects over the years. I've administrated a huge variety of MU* over the past twenty years, from entirely pk-focused games, to hack and slash, to co-operative writing focused MUSHes, to permadeath/survival horror focused RPIs. I've explored the design of, and playing of a huge variety of games in our text-based rpg genre. I'm a professional stage actor and writer beyond the internet; I have a profound love for compelling narrative, immersive experiences, and killing the hell out of people in online games. And so, for different reasons, I've come to really respect work that I've done and work that I've seen from others across the board in MU*-land.
I've never been a huge fan of the predecessors of this site in the past, so I was very surprised to check in on this thread and notice how refined its hyper-aggressive vitriol has become in its newest incarnation. It's rather hard to respond point-to-point to the nearly 400 posts on this thread, but I'll respond to the point at the top of this reply, and then more generally:
@Thenomain said:
You are entitled to define your site as you see fit. You are not entitled to define the hobby without input from all parts of the hobby, even if you disagree with them. You have taken great pains on your site to present it as a gateway to the hobby, as a place for intelligent conversation.
And yet, you refuse reasonable conversation here.
You are handily ignoring pretty much every other post I've made here, where I have answered your question at least twice. This is why I stopped responding to your posts, or even reading your site, and I'll encourage others to do the same.
@Thenomain - I find your assertion of what passes for reasonable conversation to be pretty limp.
How is Crayon trying to define the hobby? I've literally just read every single one of your points. I don't know you from Adam. You're intelligent, which I appreciate. However, I truly believe that Crayon and Jeshin have wasted effort on trying to argue with you in a logical manner; you're just trolling here.
Optional Realities is upfront about the types of games it's built to support. Some MUSHes fall into the umbrella that we've created for it, and some don't. Period. The reason for the differentiating is simple:
We're not trying to be a community for every single type of MU* out there. We're a community of designers and players from a specific community that's lacked a central place to communicate over the past 20+ years.
MUSHes are all about co-operative writing. They are derived from TinyMUSH, which focused largely on social interactions. Because of their nature, very specific design choices are often used in their creation. Within those boundaries, MUSHes have a huuuuge (and sometimes, fantastic) amount of variation.
RPIs are all about creating an immersive role playing experience. They are derived from Harshlands' RPI Engine (with a few exceptions, most notably Armageddon which uses a similar but unique codebase), and focus largely on a combination of social interactions and dangerous adventure. Instead of character names, you see descriptions. There are no OOC chat channels. Roleplay commands support things like dream journals, thoughts, feelings, and inward focused character development to increase immersion (whereas MUSHes approach roleplay with less of a barrier between players to promote a more co-operative narrative). The threat of (permanent) character death is a design choice meant to encourage players to act more believably as their character and consider the consequences for their actions (whether or not it actually works as intended is not the point here). Automated combat, crafting, and other features are included to allow for the creation of an RPG sandbox that appeals to the gamer in many roleplayers, and acts as moderator for combat (or other conflict-oriented) situations. Within these boundaries, there are huuuuuge (and often, fantastic) variations in the genre.
Like the center of a venn diagram, some games can be claimed by both genres. Many RPI devs have been, historically, too exclusive towards the rest of the community in the past, in our opinion. If you look at the old TMS debate threads mentioned in this article, you'll see some folks list 30+ different requirements to be an "RPI". Back then, I had a simple requirement: an RPI can be defined as derived from the RPI codebase, whether directly or as a spiritual successor.
But, when we created Optional Realities, we didn't want to be as exclusive. So, we've created just a few very light rules for inclusion as a sub-forum (though anyone's allowed to post about their games in our General sub-folder, it's not like we're excluding anyone here from doing so).
Why have those rules at all? Because we took a look at our long-time RPI community and the games that they were playing (a number of which were MUSHes that are more "RPI-like" than others), what those games had in common, and decided to build a community that would allow similar games to share ideas and promote their product to one another.
That dialogue and common ground that we've built would be weakened without our rules-for-entry, because different types of games have to approach solving design issues very differently than the games in the OR community do. For instance, my article on designing immersive automated combat means absolutely nothing to games that lack automated combat.
The separation isn't us judging you because of the type of game you prefer to play. It's practical, and rather loose by the standards that devs in our community have tried to set in the past. To note is that about about half of the games with sub-forums on OR are MUSHes.
This is the advertisement thread. If you're coming here and getting up in arms about advertisements that you can simply ignore, then I question your intentions in regards to us. You can try to mask your attacks behind the idea of trying to create meaningful dialogue, but you and I both know that that's a load of shit.
From the repeat trollers in this thread, after having just read it in its entirety, I've seen no effort to try to understand the purpose of OR.
To be fair, some of the points made by Jeshin, particularly early on, were unclear. I think he was pandering a bit in response to being pushed around, because he's a nice guy and may not have realized this site's long-time history of being a hotbed for vitriol and picking on people with differing opinions. I remember it quite well, which is why I've generally stayed away for many years now.
Don't like what OR's trying to do? Cool. I don't really care, because you're not the person that I want to engage in conversation with.
Trying to hide your antagonism behind a thin layer of "logic and reason" so that you can bait a nice guy like Jeshin into getting knocked around for your personal amusement?
Engage me, instead.