Posts made by Jim Nanban

@Thenomain Nah man, it's the anger thread. I'm not flaming you or @Cupcake , we're just all dancing in napalm.

@Thenomain Fine, I'll stop being coy.

Women who have a fucking problem watching a motherfucking movie with men are imbeciles. End of story.

Men who have a fucking problem with women watching a motherfucking movie without men are imbeciles. End of story.

@Cupcake How awful that 50% of people might be able to watch a movie together without the other 50% around. How awful that 50% might have to endure watching a movie with the other 50%.

I mean really? This is where we're at--the third grade? Fuck's sake, Sweet Meteor of Death can't come fast enough.

@Cupcake If by "interesting" you mean "droll and pointless childish horseshit on all sides," then yes.

@Thenomain Agreed, as well as Amberyl's MUSH Manual (even if it is, like the Hitchhiker's Guide, at times apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate). Make your own +who that displays something a little different. Make your own +finger. Then poke Myrddin's with a stick. First just modify the order of the boards, then try fixing the percent-used display. After that, say, throw the year into the date displayed.

Then go back and burn your custom +who and +finger to the ground and redo them because you're ashamed of the code now.

That should get ya started.

@HelloProject Your question about MUSHcode reminds me of my ex. She's a 3D modeler working on government projects that use software primarily designed for terrain modeling. She makes buildings with it.

Their interns from the local university are flabbergasted at how different it is from the Maya/3DS Max (or whatever they're using now), which is intended more for modeling discrete structures. The ones who last beyond the internship are the ones who have learned 3D modeling, not just 3DS Max.

It's similar with code. If you just approach it as "I use if() to match the results of an attribute, and you pull attributes with get()," then all you're learning is MUSH code. You might be able to occasionally apply that knowledge elsewhere, but it's a crapshoot.

If you approach it by trying to figure out what it is you want to accomplish, and then analyzing the tools at your disposal, you'll get more out of it. Sure, until you get something else to use it will be hard to find out if you're "doing it right." But practicing symbolic logic, making project diagrams, putting comments in your code originals, these things build skills at coding vis-a-vis merely having skill at MUSHcode.

FWIW MUSHes taught me that I so don't want to be a programmer. I'd say I'm 50/50 at coding vs just MUSHcoding. So... grain of salt and all that.

Wow, even TGG didn't model running, pushups, crunches, rifle lifts... oh, wrong PT.

@WTFE said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

@Tinuviel They don't offer those at your university?

They offered them at my High School: VGHS

@Tinuviel said:

@Arkandel If I need to use external resources to "optimise" my character, your game is bad.

This. If there's an optimal build, the game has failed at balance of design. This is different from an orthodox build, this is different from allowing for niche builds. Those are fine.

Let me add something else to this train of thought: In WoW, what I hated most was the constant social pressure to 1.) skip all the "flavour text," and 2.) just do what you're told. Sorry, I play an RPG for that flavour text, and if I have to follow a straightjacket of build rules then I'd better be getting a paycheck.

@Arkandel said in Difficulty of single-player computer games:

How do you guys feel when a game offers both single- and multi-player modes? Are you feeling the urge to compete in ladders?

I'm highly uncompetitive. World of Tanks(/Warships/Warplanes) and Overwatch are the only multiplayer-only games I care to play. The only reason I like to play Competitive in Overwatch is because the competitive matchmaker logic is the thing that really intrigued me, and it works. My "comp" matches are more reliably even, well-fought things right at my skill level than quick-play matches, which are a ROFLstomp for one side or the other 2/3rds of the time or more. It evens out, but the sway, the standard of deviation is greater.

So that's all I use rankings for: To find people who play at my level so I can be evenly challenged and know I won or lost by my own hands.

I start on Normal, and switch to Easy if it's too time-consuming.
See, I have a job, a girlfriend, and other hobbies. I don't have time to keep grinding against high difficulty stuff. Would it be cool to be a 40th level Dancemaster? Sure, I guess. But it would be cooler to be a Gamemaster with 40th level players at my table every Saturday (when I get a house... soon... ish).

It just makes me think of this meme:

Oh, and here's the next few seconds...

OK, I was going through my downloaded pictures folder and found this screencap of one of the most badass moments of TGG. This was from the Pacific campaign, wherein some Japanese planes--a Zero (piloted by the NPC Yoshi) escorting a Betty bomber (piloted by Ichiro NPC) were attacking the PCs ship, the USS McCalla.

This is an example of the code in the MUSH, and how the game so beautifully added amazing code to RP.

@HelloProject said in What does advancement in a MU* mean to you?:

And while I don't claim that my solution will work or even necessarily be considered all that great, I do think that there is value in trying and discussing.

This. This this this this this. This motherfucker, do you speak it.

There is so much social pressure on not being wrong, especially in geek circles, that what passes for "discussion" all to often more closely resembles monkeys throwing poo.

If you want to talk about why something can't work, FFS do yourself a favour and first come up with the same depth of reason as to how it could work.

OK, I'll get off my MU Soapbox now.

I was playing on TGG. It was the Battle of Britain campaign. I remember I was playing a Polish flier. Now, something you have to know is that TGG's aerial combat was a bit like running someone's EVE Online backhaul spreadsheet in your head, in real time. Except it was actually fun flying by text readouts. Fun, but challenging.
I thought I'd learned the flight system.
I thought I was able to fly my plane at 10 feet above the ground after a battle.
In fact, I thought I could fly it at 6 feet. It looked really cool, people were cheering.
And then something happened and I crashed and had to use one of my 3 +revives.

My narrative explanation was that it wasn't a crash... my pilot just landed on a street and hopped into a pub for a pint, and the revive represented military discipline coming down. XD

@SG said in What does advancement in a MU* mean to you?:

To me, if my character is going to advance, I'd like them to actually advance. I've sat at many tables, and played many games where the mooks scale up with the PCs and it gets tiresome to me. Level bosses, for sure make them tough and scale them up, but when the warm ups take three hours of rolling to deal with, why bother advancing?

This, so hard. If everything scales to PC level, then all you're getting each level are new skins. If I wanted that, I'd just play Overwatch. Which I do because it's awesome and I need clothes for my Overwatch dollies, but I digress.

This thread has some digressions, too. We might all do well to keep in mind a key phrase of the actual question, "In an environment that has sheet based advancement". I've got thoughts about "character growth," but they have little to nothing to do with the question.

Some of @HelloProject's thoughts remind me of The Angry GM and his well-worded rants on hacking games, on complexity, on what people like and why... A worthy read, especially once you realize his one-true-wayism is parody.

@skew said in HOW-TO: Reneg on a promise to write an AWS How-To:

What is this thread?
[...]
I'm lost.

Hey, buddy! Welcome to the thread!
This is a followup on my other thread here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/1546/aws-amazon-web-service-as-mu-hosting/
People had expressed interest there, and in PMs, and in chats elsewhere, about what I did to get a MUSH up on AWS Free Tier. I had told them that I would write a how-to... But as said, the guidance I could give was insufficient to mitigate the potential risks of a mistake.

@Cheesegrater above has a good breakdown of how to avoid those problems. It's much less dire, given that info... but given all the other options at comparable cost, it's just not worth the potential trouble to me. If/when I go to Linode or whatever, I'll write that how-to instead.

So that's what this is!

@Seamus said in Course Corrections:

@Ganymede So... what's the PK Stance of the game?

This needs to be a meme.

I done got all wordicatious here, then had some more coffee and realized I was answering the subject line, but not the body.

I need timely advancement to stay invested in the sheet instead of basically just making up shit as I RP. Just like a board game without pieces to fondle feels lacking, a MU sheet that I don't get to +spend on every couple of weeks also feels lacking.

Granted, without a system of stat degradation or triennail pwipes (that idea's growing on me), this leads to Charzilla. Hey, I didn't say I had the answer to the problem it creates. I just like building up a character's sheet!