Best posts made by krmbm

@skew If you know how to style in Wikidot, you should have no problem styling in Ares. If it helps any, there's also a thread about Ares styling - https://forum.aresmush.com/t/suggestions-while-skinning/128/9 - that @Tat was nice enough to start.

I haven't played with it much, but I can tell you that some things - like scenes - actually look really slick on the Ares web interface. You can use the built-in client, true, but I like the look of the scenes so much.

Sorry for the ugly styling in these; I was just using random colors and fonts to see what things did, but here are a few snaps of the scenesys in use, including one from the MUSH, just so you can get a glimpse how they interface.

Shit or get off the pot.

@wildbaboons Honestly? I picked it 'cause I have lived in Southern California almost my entire life. I live in Los Angeles specifically.

Which is not at all what people think it is.

I imagine that's how Maine is - not at all how I think it is.

But it's my pretendy funtime, and I want to spend it in a cool old city in Maine with a million people and a lighthouse and gremlins. Since that doesn't exist... I just made one up.

@magee101 said in Calaveras MUSH:

Do they do like Burn Notice style of stuff too? Or is it all slice of life drama?

A lot of it is self-started. So, like, @thesuntsar, @bear_necessities, and I decided we wanted to play criminals... so we created some criminals and started doing stuff.

If you wanted to play a Michael Westen type, I'm sure you could, as long as you take ownership for coming up with stuff to do. Jack and Sally have put some things out for the game at large and individual players, but a lot of it is "what do you want to play? cool, play that."

The PrP policy is really flexible. Want to burn down a store? Go for it. Want to burn down the town? Ask first.

@gryphter said in Wheel of Time:

Once we start to meet others, the sense of power really changes -- yes, our principal characters begin to grow stronger, but we're also treated to a view of the world where channeling is increasingly common and the things Moiraine did in the EotW become downright pedestrian in comparison.

It seems to me that, in the beginning, Moiraine fatigued just from doing her little spells, and Lan was all "THIS IS HARD ON HER YOU DUMB BUMPKINS" when she did whatever it was with her staff at the town meeting and then when she stepped over the fence in that town by the river (I can't remember the details now, and am too lazy to check). Cut to the battle at Tear, and she's torching Trollocs like a boss. Same character, same power levels, just later in the books.

It felt less like readers had gotten more taste of the One Power than Jordan as a writer had gotten more taste of the One Power and wanted to step up his game.

To me, anyway.

Edit to add: I definitely agree that either way is playable - high power or lower. But it needs to be documented what power levels we're really looking at. I prefer the "OP is rare and precious and should be used sparingly" vs. "I use magic for all the things," but I'm down for either.

I suppose what it boils down to is I love WoT. If a game exists that isn't a sand box, I will show up, no matter the details. I would love love love to see it in Evennia rather than Ares, though that seems to be a minority view, but I like the Arxcode base for WoT in the way it handles orgs and economies of resource, as well as other things.

From a player perspective? I disagree. Ares is significantly more end-user friendly. My dislike of Arxcode's excess complexity and difficulty to learn for a new player is pretty well-stated, so I'll just leave it at: I would much rather have a simplified system that's fun and easy to use and has a nice web front-end than a bunch of code that makes me growl and jump through hoops instead of actually RPing.

I like roleplay. I really dislike ticking +boxes.

With Ares in beta... any word on how this is shaping up? I'm on book 3 on Audible ATM, and it's got the hankering going.

(P.S. Listening to these on Audible at 1.25x speed is perfect.)

@lotherio THERE ARE NEVER CLOUDS IN CALIFORNIA IMMERSION OVER

@aria said in The Woodward Agency:

In relation to this, what sort of feel are you going for?

I'm gonna be honest and answer this with what's on our front-page: "We also like to warn everyone that we're not profound storytellers looking to reveal deep mysteries. There's a lot of silliness and tongue-in-cheek tucked into the world for a reason: We're here to have fun and tell some stories. Metaplot isn't our strong suit, but if you like boogerfishes, you've come to the right place!"

For reals. If the size of the town kills it for folks? We are not the people they want to play with.

This isn't us saying those folks suck or they're Wrongy McDumbheads. It's us acknowledging that the way we play and tell stories may not jive with what they're looking to get out of roleplay.

List all your skills, even attributes, under skills.

Race:
  Human:
    skills:
      Grit: 3
      Terran Patois: 3
      Alertness: 3
      Athletics: 3

@lithium said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

I always wanted a third age game from a mirror world with no dragon, no big names, there may be people in those same positions but they aren't FC's...
So you wouldn't even need to mention anything about the book chars at all. They just never existed in this turn of the wheel.

Pretty much this is what I'd like to see. Scale back all the power levels (Moiraine and Liandrin are the the tippy-top, not Nynaeve), thereby allowing Warders to be pretty kick-ass, and go from there.

I just got to the battle inside the stone of Tear, and the difference between that battle - FIREBALLS AND SOME INSANE BLACK HOLE AND MYRDRAAL DISINTEGRATING - and the initial peril of the first books - when Moiraine basically had to use her staff as a focus to scare the crap out of some Whitecloaks and a Fade was actually something to run from - is stark.

From the perspective of actually playing in the world, the former seems much more sustainable.

@lotherio said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

why not more fantasy modern settings in real locations but as viewed through the eyes of non-locals (the idealized version)?

This thread doesn't answer that? Do you really want to hear from everyone who wants to tell you how they were born and raised in ANYWHEREINTHEWORLDEVENFAKEPLACES, and it's not at all like you're describing it!

Now Hiring!

The Woodward Agency has immediate openings for skilled contractors! Yeti-intervention will be needed in the near future, and a fairy garden has been found along the shores of Lake Knickerbocker.

Our contractors range from doctors at the local hospital to college kids just trying to pay off tuition. (Both available roster PCs, along with about 20 other pre-made concepts.)

Submit your resume today at our offices:

• https://woodwardagency.com
• woodwardagency.com port 4201

When @bear_necessities and I ran GH, we had scenes time-out after 24 hours... because we think it looked shitty to have a bunch of scenes hanging around that haven't been doing anything for days. Exactly as @Lotherio suggesting: it's not inviting, it doesn't make new people feel like they will get RP, it just makes the game look like everyone is holed up somewhere private. Since we had a kick-ass system that enabled us to tune the game to our liking, we did so.

In fact, we changed it a few times. Over the holidays, when it was slower, we allowed scenes to idle 48 hours. When plots ramped back up, we turned it back to 24 hours to keep the scenes list clutter-free. The flexibility was awesome like that.

Honestly? Now that there's a one-click "restart" button on scenes? I'd probably knock it down to 12 hours on any future games.

I'll be interested to see an AresPern.

Losing/bucking a lot of the Pern conventions when it comes to code (e.g., dragon-objects, firelizard-objects ew, etc.) will be nice.

@WTFE said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

When I finally got something that worked, I was never actually quite certain if I'd done it right or if I'd merely stumbled accidentally over a configuration that would work right up to the point it stops.

This was pretty much how I felt tinkering with Evennia. I eventually turned it off because it felt like I was holding it together with a shoestring and a prayer.

@silverfox said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I've yet to play on an Ares game where when I threw up a general scene set and waited, people didn't show up. Yes, I did make sure there were people "active" on the game within it.

This has totally happened to me. Like three times.

Out of the hundreds of scenes I've played on Ares games.

@caryatid said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

On another forum I visited regularly before it died, they had an advertisement section, with ads locked only to the person who posted the ad, and then a reviews section, where people could throw up posts about their experience on games. It was not a no holds barred section of the forum, there were still civil rules of engagement expected, but you could bring in the positive and the negative there.

It might be a decent option.

If it's the forum I think it was (hi Pern), that review forum pretty much never got used. (Granted, the entire forum never got used for several years, but...)

I don't care much for the idea of locking ads once they're posted. I like seeing bumps, and have bumped ads myself if I play somewhere.

As for the "absolutely no negativity" caveat... I think there maybe ought to be a "then no posts saying how awesome the place is, either." The ads should be just that: ads. No "I LOVE IT HERE, TOO!!" from players. Game-runners can post ads, bump their own threads with updates, etc., and all discussion goes elsewhere.

Otherwise, it's absolutely just an echo chamber.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

This is a very important point. For all the "bridging power" of mushcode, how many can actually use it to the level of, you know, creating a new game from scratch? I am not familiar enough with the MUSH community to know this number, but I suspect that it's not a large number.

You'd be surprised.

I know several people just within my one tiny subset of MUs that could get a game up-and-running themselves quickly. Partially, this is because installing MU (as has been noted) is generally super easy, especially if you go to a MU* host, where they give you a working environment and all you have to do is upload, extract, and start your MUSH.

I think everyone acknowledges that MU is archaic, but it's also got a very low barrier to entry, and that's what Evennia lacks for me.

I wish the project luck. I think it has great potential. But I think, as someone else in the thread said, it might not be the right solution for bringing MUSH into the 21st century.

(I also acknowledge that, as a grown-up with a kid and a job and everything, I don't have the time and energy that I did 20 years ago to sit and learn a whole new system just to support my hobby. Maybe some youngster will figure it out for me.)

@Kumakun Thanks. It's looking super-pretty.

The ability to see what I missed when I was "offline" is clutch. The amount of switching between devices that happens in any given scene nowadays is such that I just can't see myself going back to needing a persistent connection. So was just wondering if that's where you're at or where you're headed.

I mean, I know @faraday is already in this thread, but: https://aresmush.com/mush-101

There may be one or two sections that are Ares-specific, but - if you just wanted to give someone a run-down of what MUSHing is and what we as a community generally agree upon as conventions - this has a ton of great info that could be used for FAQ-building.