IMHO this is all nonsense.
Success is people having fun.
Full stop.
It's a game, if people are playing the game and having fun, then it is a success.
You can try and quantify it as more people having fun on your game but, that doesn't always happen and isn't a useful metric anyways. Are people having fun, are you having fun running the game, maintaining it, etc?
If yes, then it is a success.
I don't want a separation of character object and player object. That seems really unnecessary to me. I also have at least some experience coding in MUX so don't want to try and learn a new language right now.
This might be something as easy as a fix to say Diku or Circle or whatever that is as simple as turning off respawning, where when a character dies they create a mob with their gear and level and the zombie subtype that lives in the room the character died in.
So I had been tossing around the idea of an MUD with a very role play intensive idea that was more realistic in that if your character died, it was dead and you had to make a new one. If the body wasn't burned by survivors then it would come back as a zombie mob using all your old gear and skills so there was potential there.
I know a /bit/ about MUX code, but have never really done much beyond building a few areas and mobs for circle and diku way back in the day.
So my question is, what MUD code base would be the easiest to do this with. Or at least the easiest to learn to code since it might require some serious coding changes (maybe even hardcode, which I have never really messed with).
Maybe this would be an RPI (But I really dislike that term) but it's outside of my comfort zone for coding. So advice help on what code to get started with etc would be grateful.
Tomorrow I will be able to play only a little before I have to go to work. Damn you work. Damn you to hades.
@surreality You're taking what I said to extremes I did not say.
I never said every fight has to be life or death, kill or be killed, and that a player should lose a character every single time there's a fight.
Just that it has to have some weight rather than the zero weight that is so common now.
Does every scene have to be mortality induced adrenaline rush? Gods no.
But... if your goal is to get information from the city council and some idiot goes in guns blazing, then swat should ventilate them, or they get dealt with by their own faction, or whatever.
People often escalate any scene to physical combat because they feel that way they are using their dice and sheets or because it's what they were made for and they don't want to be 'useless'.
If those types of characters are allowed to run willy nilly with /zero/ repurcussion... it's even worse.
@surreality You're missing my point and kind of making it at the same time.
There are already so many people who WILL NOT participate in something if it risks the loss of character. Worse is when they will lose their character and then whine, bitch, moan, and throw such a tizzy it gets retconned or devalues the whole thing by default.
The problem is they aren't not picking their battles, they're /choosing/ to fight in /every/ battle and /not/ accepting the consequences if they should lose their character or the ST's will run something that is uber violent, but lo and behold, nobody is ever at risk.
I also am not saying that EVERY GAME should be a life or death situation, just that in some games, especially 'horror' games such as any version of WoD or Cthulhu or several other horror based games then 'Death' needs to have teeth. Conflict /needs/ to be scary because if it's not, then it loses all meaning and we get super hero Deux ex Machina type of stories that have little to no real reward because there was no risk. It's just: Let us bloat up some sheets, for no good reason at all.
The reason WHY you see so many FPS mentality players now is because of the lack of character loss. This is why having character death /matter/ is so important.
@ThugHeaven said in Tips on Güd TS:
@Lithium See, no. I really meant read erotica in general....no disclaimer. Now you're getting into what's good and what's not; which is for whoever is reading it to decide.
The reason I mentioned Zane is because it's arguably bad yet I enjoy reading it. There's a whole lot of things that count as erotica, from 120 days of Sodom, which I think a lot of people have read to The English patient to The Tropic of Capricorn.
But without reading a variety, how would you know what you like? Reading a variety could actually help your writing.
I don't think reading erotica needs a disclaimer at all.
Well I am glad I am not the only one who feels that it needed a disclaimer, thanks @Cobaltasaurus .
The reason this needed a disclaimer is because a LOT of erotica is pretty much derogatory crap (or worse rape stories) written by people who don't really understand the subject matter (ie: 50 shades) or don't understand what it is that /makes/ something hot, let alone what is good writing. If people just grab random erotica and read it under the impression it's going to help them, well it's probably not.
There's a /lot/ of erotica out there, a crazy amount. Everything from Dinosaur porn to Bigfoot to supernatural romance to office romance to every other kink you can imagine. Not all of these make for good reading or help write anything remotely good when it comes to TS.
If you want the best bang for your buck, so to speak, /TALK ABOUT IT FIRST/. Don't just drop sexy times on your partner and muddle around grasping at straws. Talk about what language is good, what limits and squicks might be had, even what person (When dealing with two individuals of same gender 'you' can go a long ways to differentiate who is doing what rather than she/her he/him/his or whatnot).
Communication is key. No two people are going to like absolutely everything the same to the same amount, and it takes some effort to get things to click as best they can for everyone's sexy times enjoyment.
@Kanye-Qwest Shooting guns at Spider-Man is just a waste of ammo, he is bulletproof because he instinctively dodges, all of the bullets
@TNP yeaaah still popping up every single thread. Oh well. I have a rabid dislike of nodebb now but what can I do? It is what it is. Thanks again tho.
@TNP Well when I checked that, the only one that was marked was topics I create, which make sense that I'd want to follow those and the other was unchecked, but it was following everything even still.
Either way I unchecked both, and we'll see if it worked or if it's along the same lines of not being able to see who downvoted a person's post (I use a darker skin because I don't need 30 inch monitor of bright whiteness glaring in my face) because of possible color scheme issues.
Thanks for trying to help though, lets hope it works.
@ThugHeaven said in Tips on Güd TS:
Mine are:
- Read some erotica. I frickin' love Zane novels, they're my guilty pleasure. Seeing how the pros do it goes a long way.
This needs a BIG exclaimer. Most erotica is absolute shit. Most TS I've run into on cesspools like Shang is better than most the erotica crap I've seen.
Read some /good/ erotica. I was actually a big fan of Jean M. Aul's Clan of the Cave Bear series. The first one isn't really erotica, but by the end of the second and into the rest it most certainly gets there!
@TNP When I click on following, it just shows the people I may or may not be following. It has nothing to do with actual topics.
@Arkandel I wish the sports threads were behind a wall too.
EDIT:
I have yet to figure out how to turn off notifications AND HAVE IT WORK.
I still keep seeing threads pop up that I've turned notifications off on, like Haven or Firan or The Basketball Thread.
So yeah, putting stuff behind walls... maybe /everything/ should be behind walls, then you can pick and choose exactly which topics you want to read and see.
Protagonists who are unwilling to risk character death, aren't fucking protagonists. They're couch warmers.
@Thenomain That kid was perfect. I also loved what they did with 'Aunt' May, because I never understood why a teenagers aunt was a geriatric...
@Thenomain I know about sleeping bags, when I see one I use one, but there are stretches where you don't come across any, and that can be really painful 
Even better than the sleeping bag is the random mattress so you can get a good sleep in cuz using just a sleeping bag for to long comes with it's own negatives.
What I did is I just did help functions and read through all the functions. I still don't know when I'll use a lot of them, if ever, but it helps.
The biggest things I use are generally switches, and iterations. There's a few other things but those are biggies. Until I learned how to make iterations work well I was kind of lost on how to do quite a few things.
MUSHcode repository has some logged 'lessons' that can be helpful too.
Rock paper scissors is inherently flawed as a metric of random outcome because it can be manipulated both by subterfuge and by pattern knowledge.
The basics is that LARP was designed around the fact that dice are a bitch to roll in the park in the middle of the night.
We don't have that problem in a MU*, dice are right there, so why not use them?
The biggest problem honestly comes from typing speed. That's not going to change based on what system you use, people will still have to type out their actions, and reactions, and on table-top we simply roll the dice, do a quick description of how we hit/got hit, and then move on. In LARP we don't take 5 to 10 minutes describing the results of our actions either.
What it comes down to is the medium we're using, so we come up with work arounds that work or don't work based largely on personal opinion.
Unless you're dealing with coded combat, like MUD level coded combat (Some MOO's also reach this level, and possibly other games I do not know about) then combat resolution is going to take a lot longer than it does in table top, or larp.
So in the end: Ruleset doesn't really matter in the long run so long as everyone understands the rules because it's waiting for people to pose that's slowing things down more than anything else.
I've experimented with a few different methods over the decades, and the one I found I liked the most (Just my opinion) was when running a scene I had everyone do their dice actions /without posing/ and then at the end of the round everyone did a pose of their action/reaction. That way people could prep their pose after their turn while waiting for the dice resolutions and it went much quicker.
Not a perfect solution, but by far the best I've discovered for our hobby.
Just my opinion.
Wasn't a fan of the cinematography for the first bits of Civil War, loved what they did with Ant Man and Spider-Man, T'Challa was bad ass, loved the updated costume.
Overall: Will buy ASAP.
I don't like saving the world plots because there's only more saving the world. Oh I suppose you could go up to saving the galaxy, or the universe, or whatever but... it's a scale that would just get redundant.
I believe large arcs should be more than just saving the planet, there should be the chance to fundamentally /alter/ some aspect or aspects of the game world, to have a definite impact and a good meta plot/arc has the ability to end in a variety of fashions. Like, if there was say twenty different major plots in the arc. the players resolved 10 one way, 3 another, 2 another and failed 5, but out of the 5 failed 3 were failed one way and 2 another.
You have to be able to write out the results in a way that make sense as to those individual resolutions in addition to the overall story resolution.
Also: Win or Lose, plot/arc resolutions need to lead to /more/ stories. Don't pain yourself into a corner.