Posts made by Lotherio

No one has said it, so I'll throw it out there.

Shadowrun was cyberpunk with fantasy to me. What made it 'Shadowrun' (trademark) was the connection to Earthdawn.

It was Earth moving into 6th age, while players know the story of 4th age. They knew magic came/went in the ages. They all knew there was this really big story there, something happened in the 4th age, the horrors never truly left, and they thought there may be answers in the 6th age. It left it open for 5th age stories, which could be any modern dark fantasy genre; the horrors were still there.

It had a great history. All the shadow running, bucking the system, sticking it to the man, was great, but it was part of the whole continuity.

Most survival places seem in the staff-lite box too lately (just me), but the voice seems to say if its not a small group of players that gets along, it certainly needs more staff.

I do like the code suggestion. I've seen scavenging code done up here in there, including Mush (I throw that in cause its usually code-lite compared to other places it seems). But I like the situational concept too. Would it get much use?

The last place I've seen situational generator was on a super hero game (mux) and it was done quite well, just not used, more ignored. It had a lot of things factored in from situations to circumstance. Like villain doing something wrong for right reasons (saving a friend), or other heroes doing something wrong for other reasons to simple burglary.

Proactive staff and mature players. I'm still ponderous about the multiple groups idea. A page from Redemption from those that still remember it, it was built up staff-like (4 staff, one just to help with code and wiki), but brought in ye olde OOC/IC Faction Heads (like story telllers in a manner). They recruited to each faction players that tended to have play circles that would follow them. They would be active with their circle, and the interactions between factions would sort of flow out. It was meant to allow for change from players; it fell short by some faction heads not wanting to give up any IC control alas. I think the idea still has merit and could work in the genre of survival by what folks are saying, but like @mietze pointed out, mature players (which includes mature staff).

My whole take on it was always, if something bothers you, go to the source. If they're a dick OOCly, ignore them. The rant seems to be from Wade being caught in the middle of OOC drama between two or more people he may like. More like don't bring it to me, go to the source, make up your own mind, I'm still gonna play with them. Still agree with talking to someone before talking about someone.

@Pyrephox said in Survival/Apocalypse Genre Survivability:

Basically, I think a SF premise can be a lot more sustainable for a large population than the typical post-apoc setting, and it doesn't rely on people periodically doing incredibly stupid and self-destructive things for survival to still be a concern. Because, let's face it, if the zombie apocalypse actually happened? The living win. They may take a lot of hits in the beginning, but we're fucking humanity: exterminating anything that so much as LOOKS at us funny is what we do.

10 billion rounds of ammunition produced ever year, not including gun owners that reload (use their shells to make their own rounds/shot), there is more than enough bullets to take out every zombie that isn't impaled on some stick/fence/wrought iron contraption in the wild.

7 billion people left in the world .... assuming 10 percent survival after initial outbreak (and 90 percent zombies), that's 700 mil folks still kicking it. If 10 percent of survivors were good enough with weapons (if they could kill 1 zombie per day), and had all 10 billion rounds ... it'd take less than a year to knock off all those zombies (100 days). If the number of folks left were close to how they are in most zombie flicks/fiction, they wouldn't be fighting over bullets, they would have stockpiles.

But ... SF survival sounds interesting. I always wonder, every one who likes Dune wants L&L pre Muad'Dib. I'm a God Emperor fan, I think it would be fun to play post/Scattering.

@Ghost

I think I'm leaning the same way - smaller groups.

But pockets of small groups bears some interesting considerations. Sort of couple with the idea of one Mu*/system for multiple games (Gateway'ish). Maybe a survival game that focused on pockets. Either via a storyteller opening a new circle of play where they control the meat (ie crazies attack, rampant nuclear modified wolves prowl the edges, zombies, etc.), or just group staff opens 'area' for app until it has its 10 players or so.

Also, I strongly agree with the concept. Most people seem to come on as an expert trying to get their 'niche' role, the groups doctor, the groups engineer. I'm guilty of it myself, have played a little on a 5th Wave place, was the carpenter.

I like those ideas, @Ganymede, the creation. Said carpenter, that was my best moment, helping loot wood to build up the barn for some animals others had found. Maybe most games I've seen in the genre are just tackling it all wrong, orienting it towards a style of play that favors small group? Such as making an agreement with neighboring hostiles, that's more a select group, not fitting for a larger group - or if the rest of the group worked on the fence while they did that, or scrounged for something new and useful, but had a purpose other than waiting for main group to come back and say what happened and going on to play how they react while doing little else.

Watching The 100 thread as it goes on and on, something said near the end got me curious.

Block Quote ...

@TNP said in The 100: The Mush:

Except, in my opinion, this is not the case at all. And while there certainly was a lot of IC antagonism in the beginning, it's lessened as 1) players have settled into their characters and figured out the nuances of RPing them and 2) external threats are forcing them to work together.

At the beginning of the game, it was just the Delinquents freshly tasting freedom and squaring off over pro and anti-Ark sentiments. And then they find out they're not alone. It's a truism that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (or at least someone I can work with to stay alive).

Keep in mind that it's been less than 5 RL weeks since the Delinquents Landed. Characters grow and change as they get played and are affected by plots.

Its been five weeks and all this mayhem has happened (not the OOC stuff). The landing, dealing with situation, trying to piece meal some semblance of order, etc.

I tried the first 100 Mu that came out a couple years ago and found I couldn’t get into it. For these exact reasons that folks have been pointing out, not simply jerks at all. But so much missed. As the issue in the other thread notes, they all know each other and still act like new jerks to each other rather than indifferent jerks. But also, all that history, its assumed you have to know what has gone on in most of the logs to understand your char even more, making it more difficult to get into the theme. Or be accused of doing something stupid that the character should of known otherwise about.

Or, as other threads have pointed out, how to bring in new players in a believable fashion. Or really, is survival/apocalypse Mu*s really better for smaller groups? I don’t think there was a clear answer in the last thread, but plenty of ways were brought up to address it. The 100 has a new issue, most PCs that are ‘delinquent’ are assumed to have been in jail on the Ark. But learning the entire history of the game isn’t fun, even if a timeline of concluded events is put up, just to set up any back story with another char could take some time for new players.

My question boils down to … while apocalypse style games seem great for a Mu*, is it better suited to smaller group styles of play, even if OTT?

I think any OC can do their own story with any willing to go along and still have fun. That may not be the point.

I think in light of open plots that any can join, the OCs have no point in meta if superman can show up and save the day. Sure they can still go play street level by themselves, but maybe they'd like to feel a part of the game more than sandboxing.

@surreality said in Does size matter? What about duration?:

There's that old saying about how it's not the size or how long you go, it's about 'the motion in the ocean'. And y'all likely know what old saying I mean.

?? ... There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

Its about going all the way, long or short?

Provisional RP isn't new. I do think it comes with the implication that on the players part that they are not approved and what they have could be changed. Its the risk they are taking in provisional RP, not so much on the staff for allowing provisional RP.

Sort of like when you test drive a car, its part of the pitch, doesn't mean your finances will get you approved for that car. You may go in to test the Mercedes and drive off in the Ford Focus.

I'll throw it out here. Nightmare LP Mud. It was up to players to join together to make cities, pool resources to get various things for their city, like a ship builder or a healer or whatever.

The original skill system (at the time, its been copied and improved and expanded) was you don't gain XP at all, you have to use a skill to improve it. From any attack/defense to mining to farming to singing to stealing to trading. You couldn't bolster any skill with XP, you had to use it. It missed balance and everyone made up for it (in the offshoots) by giving XP.

The place I still visit every now and again has an world one can circumnavigate on a ship, its super dangerous at low levels, but one can do it (its Haven MUD, http://haven.havenmud.com/ - its dead other than a small handful of hardcores). It has room for islands and all, just its not growing as its more a hobby these days for the original staff with limited time (they should be MUSHing the MUD is more a chat box for them I think).

I'd play it, the hurdle is how hard is it to get into the game. If its too DIKU, with stats being showing for the prompt and a school to learn to kill things, its too game for me. If its RPI/RPE, I lose interest because I want to grow my own char and explore myself. The Nightmare Muds always had the right mix of social, adventure (quests), exploring (endless ocean), and killing.

@Apos said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I think this really captures well what @Ganymede was talking about earlier in the simulation vs narration, which is also what I think the key cultural difference between a mush and mud. I don't think most mush players hate coded systems really (look at RfK), but they deeply resent any coded system that removes narration and applies the simulation in a way that yields an absurd result they disagree with. Where a character dies because code say it happens, even if a player can think of a dozen reasons that code doesn't make sense. It's not imo that the MUD attempt at simulation was wrong, but missing variables from a coder not thinking of them is jarring and is no longer immersive. I'm pretty sure most mush players are okay with code that would operate largely the same way a narrative would play out and just automates it, but a lot of MUDs try to take a step way past that, and then ignore mitigating circumstances. That's where I think most of the cultural pushback happens.

I'm okay with the timing done on a MUD. While some are RPI/E, at their heart they are still a game. A simulation of RPGs more akin to the video games of the time they were born from. The one hour was arbitrary because it depends on a lot of factors, such as level of wound, how much of total HP is remaining. Its the equivalent of being poisoned in Final Fantasy I (one), where you walked around with the screen flashing, knowing your death was being timed and you had to do something before reloading from the last save point.

But on other Mu*s, I agree, even when they have internal timing and coded health on sheets, other circumstance, other factors. Sticking to the timer loses so much RP potential.

When the sword was pulled from the stone, and the current generation all learned grammar and spelling instead of thumbing shorthand for smart phones and devices ... a golden age of MU'ing was ushered in. Kids realized they didn't need graphics to be entertained and had more control over their role-play and stories in a more free-form setting. They were entertained and MU'ng as we know it was changed. OOC drama was at an all time low, everyone got along, no one argued over rules and interpretations, we all said please and thank you, everyone had awesome plots and no one dropped on each other in the middle of plots and scenes in favor of their favorite video game of the week.

@faraday said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@Lotherio Actually tangent wanted a stat-less system. So, in a fit of great irony, it's the thing everyone calls the "FS3 codebase" without FS3. Lol. I guess I should have come up with a better name for the softcode platform besides Faraday's Softcode.

You do have a lot of the great globals that seem standard plus a lot of your own that, including some of the new standard globals like tracking PB or porting to wiki. I admit I used it for Realms, but stopped at FS3 to make something towards the Chaosium d20 for the stat code.

And Double Dang, I was curious how they went with the attributes and skills to account for powers too, because I wanted the system this time.

@faraday said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

@Thenomain Yeah when I said the "FS3 codebase" I was talking about the Faraday Code. People started calling it the "FS3 code" even though it's more than just FS3. :helpless shrug:

Anyway, it's a pre-loaded database that has everything already set up just waiting to be configured, including FS3. That's what I used to help @tangent set up the Marvel game.

Heh, now I'm oddly curious how that one is set up. I used FS3 for Coral, and its supers. I'm curious how you set it up to handle powers versus how I went about it. It @tangent's place up and running to have a look?

@ThatGuyThere said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel
Since you are so new to mushing to help understand hte openness i will give a thumbnail of what was before the openness.
Back in the day there was an Official OOC Masquerade on most WoD games. Meaning you were not allowed to talk about what you were, and by extension what anyone else was. This was done to promote mystery and IC secrecy. It failed mainly because it provided benefits to those willing to blur IC lines to come up with the answers they already knew through alts and the fact that in general humans are bad secret keepers, the other big effect was it monetized OOC knowledge, since the info about who was what could and was used as a bargaining chip on an OOC level.
So as a result it has been changed. How on a lot of other genres secrets still exist and happen. And keeping a secret is still doable on WoD you just have to actually keep it a secret. Expecting others to keep secrets about themselves however is likely not going to happen.

Just to combine the two posts, @ThatGuyThere and @Thenomain's right before it. PK was a big part of older WoD mu's (as I recall), whether crosssphere or single splat (yes, a lot of the 90s ones were single sphere too as I recall, if crosssphere, it was mild like Vampire and Werewolf). The culture seemed to cater to who was on the longest with the most XP and the bigger builds, and some that enjoyed PK to the point of finding reason to antagonize and get others to start a fight. Barring this, some went a step further, using x vs x sphere (or x vs x clan/etc), the sole grounds for justifiable PK was werewolf meets vamp, or clans were fighting. Instant PK. And a lot of times it was using OOC info to find targets. This really brought OOC Masquerade into popularity. Which as @Thenomain pointed out, just led to folks using alts or pages from friends to find targets.

The openness OOCly has returned to culture more trust amongst players who try to keep the hobby alive. I'm sure the avid PKers who did it for fun have found MMOs with PK grounds to kill noobs at. Also, outside of WoD, openness seems to have come also from the staff/pc trust/mistrust cultivated over the years.

Its just openness amongst the players seems to benefit the sustained culture of MU's outside of MUDs that always seem healthy. They had similar things to what everyone is saying, but it just seems MUSH and MUSE were the most affected negatively by some of the aspects.

Oddly this very conversation also helps demonstrate some of the differences the acronyms, MUSH, MUSE, MUX, MUCK .... I've known the names, but this whole thread has shed some light.

@Groth said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

All of these would be considered 'critical' on the MUD. It's the point of time - not an arbitrary point, but the specific point of time in your injury/malady in which you now have one hour left to live that is considered critical. If this is a vocabulary debate though, sure we can call it arbitrary if we're also calling having 24 hours in a day arbitrary, or 60 seconds in a minute.

Not exactly. Arbitrary is anything chosen by personal preference rather then derived through a system. Hours and minutes are derived values and thus not arbitrary but the choice of using hours and minutes in the first place is. The point here being that there appears to be no reason the time until death should be 1 hour rather then 10 minutes or 10 hours.

The time was a point of reference for a MUD, if you have a wound of a certain severity, you have a limited amount of time to heal that wound. The code sets certain wounds or wound thresholds to automatically start a character bleeding, they can watch their health or HP dwindle. Its based on the Tics the system is using. A tic is the length of time that everyone else would call a Round. It could be once every sec, once every five secs. Its hard set unlike traditional RPG rounds. Its arbitrarily decided on, but its part of the game culture of a MUD, its hard set. As it is a game at its heart, if you take a wound, you need to fix it or die, much like in other graphical games. The hour is set to MUD time because before this, people would log off and come back when they could be healed or the system reset their mortal wounding.

On a MUSH, we prefer other solutions to the RL time constraint. It doesn't mean we don't accept death, we gladly do (most of us), it doesn't mean we don't accept loss or failure either.

Belated response, sorry.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

So I find it kind of sad, and I feel very cheated, if someone messages me OOCly to tell me all about their character's hidden motives. And if they ask for mine, my instinct is to just reply, 'fuck off'. @Lotherio claims that on MUSHes he plays, secrets are very much a part of the culture, but they aren't on the MUSH I'm playing on. And I think that, no matter the MUSH, when you allow for so much OOC communication, it's inevitable that people are going to want to be demanding and expect you to be more open. On most MUDs I've played, where simulationism and IC are king, 'find out IC' is a refrain held to a much higher regard than 'communication is key'. And thus, IC mysteries are much better preserved, and are more fun to unlock.

I don't think this is restricted at all to MUSHes. If people know a secret, they want to share.

I'm good with either, if you want to share a secret and plot from there for RP, let's do it. Just some places enforce secrecy, which is just as fun learning icly.

Even on MUDs, they do like sharing. I. Star Wars, I've had a tendency to play an Ithorian barkeep named Rixt, who just talks and listens and eventually ends up the local infochant.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kanye-Qwest

I believe you missed an important part of @Lotherio's text: He is setting up a game where it doesn't matter. I can't tell if you're telling him that he's wrong to do so, but it sure seems like it.

No dear, I didn't miss anything. I was explaining why I don't feel it's right to view game requirements you don't meet as punitive. I think it's great to make a game with no activity requirements. I want everyone to have fun and be chill. Everyone in the world, except anyone involved in Duck Dynasty.

Damnit, the new place was a Duck Dynasty Mu*, I was making code for slacking off while making duck calls and everything.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

2 points over...10 points over... whether your arm is severed at the elbow or shoulder - you're bleeding. A critical injury is one that, whatever the means of application, has shortened your lifespan to 1 RL hour without intervention. It's not arbitrary, it's the length of time at which you are considered in mortal peril, no matter your injury. you could have an injury that requires treatment within 12 hours, or 62. That's not considered a dire emergency by the game.

For the record, if this was anywhere outside of a MUD, I wouldn't play there. Not that it contributes to cultural differences. I'd play on a MUD, take injuries, know my options. If I planned to adventure and get hurt, I'd know where the healer was, or know my options if I got hurt or suck up the death. I'd play the game that way.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Lotherio That's great, but is not appropriate or acceptable for all game formats, right

I never said it was, I'm pointing out my preference for MUSHes. I have played on games requiring my time to be spent on-line, I've played MUDs (still do), I've played the RPI MUDs mentioned. I'm saying my preference is where everyone can find their fun.

Even on places where there is meta and time constraints, I usually find a group that I get along with OOCly. We run our stories, folks call it sandboxing. Playing in private areas on anothers game and just running your own RP stories because you do like the code (and abide by it, just in your own bubble).

Take @Pandora's example of the one hour. My friends may all just agree to a time bubble to continue the fun when they can all get back on together.

If I want to play a game, I go play a game. I'm into MU's for shared RP and story telling these days.