Posts made by Jeshin

Just picked up...

Sunless Sea
Not a big fan of the interface, the story elements are strong, if you want a dark and hard-mode experience I'd suggest Darkest Dungeon over this.

LISA
I really like this game so far. It is nicknamed the "painful" RPG because it presents you choices like permanent harm to your main character or the death of party members or loss of all items.

Elder Scrolls Online
I only like this game because some of my friends play it. Paradoxically this game is not really good about keeping "groups" together during the questing/leveling phase of gameplay. PVP is a different story.

Also Mypaint --- http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

One of those I can fix in the next 24 hours and will. Jeshin makes a to-do note

The connections page and sub-forums have no impact on anyone's ability to create an account and begin sharing their ideas or opinions. Even if those opinions is that the connections page and sub-forums are biased and poorly thought out. There's even a thread for that right here.

Now if you have a philosophical or principal reason against participating in a community which has a linkback and sub-forum policy that is divergent from its community policy that anyone can post then I understand. I've even considered removing the listings (which I've stated a couple of times on here) but the potential benefit doesn't outweigh the setback that it'd likely cause us. Thus I have to do what I think is best and accept that I might be wrong and might end up changing my mind in the future or that I simply can't please everyone.

Connections/Sub-forum =/= Ability to participate in the forums , good example of this is @fstltna who has a game which doesn't qualify but openly gets to advertise both her game(s) and listing website without being harassed. They were even nice enough to put one of our banner ads up on their site (which we did not ask for but did accept!).

Hey,

So as to the representation thing @Thenomain we had a chat conversation where I did point out that neither I (or Optional Realities) claim to represent all forms of text-based gaming as if we get to speak for them. We do claim and state that we want to be a community for all text-based games and as a community we currently have a presence from everything except a MUX.

The intent is not to speak for anyone but to give them a forum to speak for themselves. That is the reason we even advertise on existing communities such as this one. We want other outlooks, other opinions, and other ideas to feel comfortable sharing.

@Alzie
Also yes I referred to MUDs as the progenitor to MUSHes because they are. MUDs went down the path of gamey and MUSHes went down the path of tabletop and story focus. This is just a fact it doesn't make MUDs better than MUSHes. You are attributing a stereotype to me and applying your presumptions to my statements and taking them in that manner. Which is fine but please refrain from putting words and meanings to my statements beyond what I write.

EDIT - Or don't do what I asked. That's cool too.

@Alzie

My last 3 posts have been to @thenomain (although only one has had him @ mentioned because I'm not used to that system). So none of them were attributed to respond to you directly.

TLDR for Crayon - Imagine Dark Souls added roleplay and perma-death and didn't update gameplay. You lose all progress (and roleplay character development) on death. That is what would happen to a lot of MUDs even some with RP on them but no perma-death.

Mmm, no I think you still misunderstand.

The fact some games have a respawn thing with no concept of perma-death is because of where MUDs came from. It's not based on respecting or not respecting their own material it's just how far they've moved away from the baseline of what a MUD is/used to be.

It's like having Super Marios Bros 1 and Super Mario Bros 2. One of them is the baseline and the other can progress from the baseline but it still starts at the baseline.

@Thenomain

You have to understand the originator of MUDs and what came after theme. MUDs spawned from text-based adventure "interactive books" like Zork. In adventure games like that and the ones that followed like Monkey Island and Full Throttle. Death wasn't permanent it just set you back. Thus when MUDs were created they treated death like you'd treat death in those games or an arcade game. Momentary annoyance with some kind of penalty to encourage you to not want to die.

When MUDs began to become RP heavy this "gamey" aspect was never fully lost from some of the MUDs that went down this path. They treated the game portion of the MUD and the story portion of the MUD as separate or at least they slept in separate beds at night. An example of this is The Sea of Storms. If you die to an NPC in the sea of storms, outside of an RP, than you just get an XP penalty and respawn. If you die to an NPC in the sea of storms within an RP than you're dead. This is a game that has perma-death but it is also a game where the gameplay and the story do not sit, side by side all the time and it's a pretty good example of a MUD making that transition from gamey to storybased.

Now lets look what came after MUDs... MMOs. Everquest itself was once suspected of having portions of DIKU/Smaug in its code. It never was pursued but some people thought it might. In MMOs you want your players to keep playing (and paying) and so perma-death doesn't exist only death penalties. I point this out because you can clearly see the perma-death / roleplay centric branch of the MUD community is not the main branch/tree of where it ended up. Thus we have some legacy issues which color development of MUD games from time to time.

TLDR MUDs came from a very different mindset than MUSHes and this has influenced some of the gamey respawn instances that exist on them.

Hey,

So this morning a friend of mine was asking me about some graphical stuff. Well he was asking me to ask Hex (my GF) about some graphical stuff as she is a professional designer. In the conversation it was revealed that photoshop would be required to do the task that they wanted. Thus you end up with the age old do you pirate it or buy it problem. That's crappy for adobe and crappy for potential users but Hex had a solution.

https://krita.org/

This is an open-source and free competitor to adobe. It has replaced adobe in one notable art school in Europe and has a vibrant and active community. So if you guys are ever needing something more powerful than MS Paint, this might help you out. Also Griatch from Evennia is featured with an interview over there https://krita.org/item/interview-with-griatch/

So lets take like Kushiel's Debut as an example because they deserve all of the free advertisement.

Let us suppose my Duc Ernest died and some crazy foreigner magic user performed a ritual to bind Ernest's soul to a new body but he was like a slave or something. Well Ernest is alive again, he wasn't permanently killed. There were apparently some very steep and costly consequences for his death as he is now a shadow of his former self, is probably enslaved, and presumably would have lost some of his xp or dice or something.

Now let us suppose that as long as Ernest's soul stone is safe his current body cannot die. Well that's a bit like a Lich and it's also a bit difficult to track that down and kill him but he can still technically die. That would probably qualify as perma-death as long as there was some reasonable method of finding someones soul stone and blowing it up if you put in a concerted effort.

I use this example for a more DnD/Fantasy type game that has some kind of soul binding or rez mechanics. Such things can be prevented and as long as that prevention is in your game than you're fine. For example you cannot rez someone in dnd (normally) without a body/remains unless you're using some max level magic.

The perma-death mechanic is for all MUs I was just giving examples of MUDs. While I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with not having perma-death on a game (especially if it folds it into the setting/theme) just because one game runs a MUSH codebase and the other runs a MUD codebase doesn't mean we're going to introduce double-standards.

As long as a MUSH as the ability for a character to be killed by another character without the dying persons consent you're good. To my knowledge most if not all MUSHes do this. If your game has some kind of bring back to life functionality than as long as there is either a limit or a counter to such an action than you'd still qualify as per the Sindome example where the older and more savvy a player is the harder it is to permanently kill them because of wealth, allies, and general game knowledge.

There was once a MUD which was RPE. On this MUD of whose name I cannot remember there was a kingdom with a king. This kingdom with a king had a mercenary problem and one day they stormed the castle and managed to kidnap the king. The king was killed but the tale isn't over... because you see he appeared once more memories intact and placed a bounty on those mean mean mercenaries.

Now some might say. Well if the mercenaries knew the king would rez then why did they kill him? I have no idea. The point is you can see some of the problems that MUDs specifically have had with lacking perma-death in games and not appropriately working that into their setting/theme.

If you check out that perma-death thread that Crayon linked I believe someone provided an example of how a monetized game called Gemstone III (MUD) handles death. The tldr is that players got a rez from deities and all they had to do was make sure they were in good standing which equated to leaving a donation on a shrine/alter at regular variables.

Thus the only way to die was to basically intentionally piss off a deity that you knew was rezzing you everytime you died. This was a roleplay game, I believe, and is still running. I think they tweaked their death mechanics a bit in the last few years.

Heyo,

Was out getting a drink. Yeah I know what this community is I've likened it to the Armageddon MUD shadowboards which serves a similar albeit much more focused purpose. I watched as that one Game of Thrones MUSH got a bit of a black eye with the whole GRRM intent and yada yada yada.

There are only three RPIs on the list. Armageddon MUD and Shadows of Isildur, and Evolution of Esos. None of the others (to my knowledge) represent themselves as RPIs.

LabMUD isn't released yet (but will be an RPI probably).
Project Redshift isn't released yet and weill be an RPI technically but we're billing it as a text-based RPG.

That group was actually removed prior to Crayon taking community lead. The person who formed it (Leah) admitted she was having a laugh and that all the members save 1 didn't even know they were being volunteered for it. I took the opportunity to disallow groups in the future and remove that one which the community took with a bit of laughter and a point that maybe Jeshin's pure no moderation policy needed to be tweaked. Which Crayon is now doing.

http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=138.0 <--- specific thread which the OP edited to joke and asked me to lock.

As to Brody he's more than just an article guy on OR but he just released Knee Deep and is in the middle of making an overhaul to Otherspace so he doesn't really have time to dive into discussions all over the forum. He is working with us this month on something special though, bless him.

I think that Crayon (and some of the other OR staff) just question my insistence in dedicating time to musoapbox. Compared to every other community we have approached for advertising this one is by far the most "hostile" or at least the most suspicious. As for engagement, as community lead he is supposed to engage with you guys. I'm just kind of hanging around because despite not agreeing with everything posted here it's not like anyone here has compared me to Hitler yet.

As to Kushiel's Debut what Gingerlily said was true. I played with them a couple of times. I personally find their game very intriguing and I all but said if there was a crafting systems, automated combat, or some other singular automated system that I'd love to have them listed. At the time he pointed out they were working on things which may be considered automated systems to which I verified my interest in contacting them again when it was done. Hopefully I made it clear in this thread that I approached them and my intent in referencing them was showing that the barrier of entry to your standard MUSH was likely very low compared to what some people might imagine.

As to hostility, chest-beating, and elitism. I (for some reason) was accused of being snobbish or looking down on the community early in this thread and I clearly cited references both within the thread and on the OR community that I was not only linking this community on the boards as one to check out but also bringing up MUSHes in our other games section. Text conveys tone very poorly but hopefully the -actions- taken are clear. I've engaged in discussion, we've disagreed, I've never once insulted people on this board about it, I've clearly admitted when you guys had a point I agreed with, and I try and keep this thread only active once a week unless a discussion is occurring that justifies repeated posts because I know we are not the most popular people here.

Mmm, no we've posted on quite a few other text-based forums and communities. Like I said I'll have them all nice and defined for you by next week. As to honesty. You can't be more honest than I've been in this thread. I'd laid things out consistently, answered questions, admitted when I was wrong, and even updated an OR article and made an announcement on the community forum with clarifications.

Now I'll define things better. Maximum honesty unlocked.