Best posts made by Nemesis

@mr-johnson said in Comic Noir Game:

In sad news the Metropolis grid will need to be reworked as the person who had graciously donated the majority of said grid has revoked our right to actually use the grid they provided and asked that it be removed. Out of respect for their wishes I'm removing the work they did, and am going to do my best to rebuild it in a manner unique from the way they had crafted the city.

I'm seriously appalled that anyone did this, and a little amazed/surprised that anyone would take them seriously. In the past year I've quit coding for 4 games with absolutely no intention of going back. The first was a game I was hosting too, where the GM just up and disappeared (and started melodrama for me with a group of staffers on a whole different/unrelated MU about the game I was building). I left that game up and running for several months to give the clown the chance to come back and find himself another coder/host. The next was the same kind of deal: When I quit I not only offered to leave my code but continue hosting free of charge for the guy. He said, "Keep your rotten server." He was obviously not serious anyway. The 3rd was just weird-ass passive aggressive melodrama for no apparent reason other than its own sake. I chowned all my code objects to that dumb fuck's Wizbit (ensuring flags/locks/powers/etc wouldn't get reset) and then @nuked my own Wizbit from #1.

So since I was 15 or so, I've been seeing morons quit MUs even as players and bitch around after staff continued to NPC their former PC(s) in the interest of providing closure for other PCs. When I was 18, Cajun Nights actually had gone as far as to make a policy stating that any material you supply to the MUSH as a staff or player contributor was the same as handing over copyrights under something like the MIT License (which actually existed then but wasn't mentioned by name). When I left Cajun Nights over staff melodrama (I coded there as well as staffed for a couple of spheres), I found out they had actually kept NPCing my primary PC there not just for closure but because they thought he was a great atmosphere piece in his Sphere and an excellent foil for cross-sphere interactions. I was fucking floored and no less than thrilled by the flattery.

Only 1 single time, when I was about 28 or 29, did I ever encounter some clown demanding that I not "steal his ideas" and that was from what started out as a pretty normalized medieval/Low Fantasy setting and then rapidly descended into his weird Anime Steampunk wetdreams. When I told the guy (who wasn't really a partner or cofounder so much as a contributor from the start) that I wasn't going to do that for any goddamn reason at all, the fucktard pitched a fit and demanded that I @nuke all the grid sections he'd built and furthermore that I'd better not go and use his ideas when I realized how fucking great they really were. Ell. Oh-(MFG). Ell.

In a case like this, where you clearly had some kind of falling out with a volunteer contributor, I really don't see any reason at all to rebuild your grid just because somebody left with a stick up their ass and a pack of petulant demands. This person clearly has the maturity of a poodle and the brains to match - I don't really care how good the descs are and I don't even remotely recognize them as original work even if they were actually invented out of raw ether - Metropolis sure as shit isn't their "intellectual property" any more than any single pose they transmit to the MUSH during IC sessions and I'd dare say far, far less.

Even though I'm not a user of this forum, I've had 3 different people outside this forum come to me asking me to help come up with a new Fallout MU. 1 of those was even clear back before this thread ever started. Whenever I check the ads listing on this forum all I see in this thread is people sticking their heads in periodically and saying "Any progress?" and no evidence of any real project or team actually working to create one.

I'm willing to host and code and my experience in both areas in MUSHing goes back to the 1990s. If anyone here is actually serious about seeing a Fallout game happen, I expect somebody else to step up to the plate as Administrators, Human Resources, Public Relations, Theme, and Building. I'm also not going to register or maintain domain names for the site so somebody else is going to need to handle that. I'll just take care of the server, the lamp stack, the MUSH, and the softcode and that's it.

I have no intention of playing "game god" and I'm not going to deal with any other assclown who wants to either so anyone who wants to become part of the staff team is going to become part of the Administration team. I have problems making decisions, like deciding between PennMUSH (which offers great features like simplified coding features, advanced coding features, and MXP support but has godawful bugs in search() outputs and other areas that have to be worked around) and TinyMUX (which offers great features like asynchronous SQL queries, a simplified hardcode modding interface, the best online documentation of any MU, advanced coding features but nothing like letq() or attribute trees, high security and high performance) but which is shit for MXP (so far as I can tell you can really only do MXP by emit, so you can't customize your @exitformat with your own MXP styles, or inject custom MXP tags into your room descs, which you can do with Penn via built-in functions for that express purpose). Left to my own devices on a project like this, I would literally waffle back and forth week to week, getting nothing done on either platform, working with Penn for a little while and then working with TMUX for a little while. So what I need most in development is people to help me make decisions.

I had previously posted to this forum as tekmunkey, while having an episode, and completely ruined an ad thread created by a friend by posting random bullshit into it. The diagnoses are PTSD and temporal lobe seizure disorder so "episodes" are something like a cross between a seizure and a psychotic break, where a seizure entails weird behavior brought on by hallucinating anger and fear and a psychotic break is pretty self-explanatory. At the time I was on half the medication I'm on now, and I was self-medicating with alcohol when I started experiencing intense seizure auras (about 80-90% of the time, in those days, I was able to successfully knock myself out before an episode actually occurred, the other 10%, an episode would happen anyway and this forum saw what happened). This information is offered in the spirit of full disclosure.

What happens now that I'm on medications and off alcohol is that while talking to people, both verbally or in text chat, I ramble. I just go off on a tangent, or I start giving lots of extra unnecessary detail, or I get really angry (at the subject matter) and say a couple of things, and then I'm back on track. In most cases I'm not aware I've done it until I look back at it later. It comes off as really weird. People need to not be judgmental asscrackers with me if we're on the same chat channel. It's just that simple.

falloutmu@tekmunkey.com

@wizz said in Coordinates-based Grid:

I am currently bashing my head through a Python primer with a goal of eventually coding an Evennia game some time in the murky mists of the future and one thing I really, really wanna do is build a roomless, coordinates-based grid similar to KaVir's in God Wars 2. It's such a cool idea and while I'm not surprised it hasn't been used more often for MU*s, I really want to be able to implement it.

Can anyone maybe tell me if it's realistic to code it in Python, or even if anyone has done something similar?

It's ridiculously easy. I had done it with TinyMUX softcode around 2003-4. You just take your one room, decide how wide/long/tall you want it, and that's your X,Y,Z extents. 20x50x20 goes from -10 to 10 on the X, -25 to 25 on the Y, -10 to 10 on the Z. You still have to desc all those rooms individually by using some convention such as &desc-X-Y-Z (where the X-Y-Z are actually coordinate values). At that point voice volume vs stats like Acute Hearing can be a real thing - not just a 2D 'shout' heard in all rooms adjacent with exits.

It doesn't get difficult or complicated (even the math is simple 3-value, not even vector, addition/subtraction in 99% of cases) until you decide you want to plot a straight-line trajectory from 0,-4,-6 (4 meters south of room center, 6 meters down) to 4,3,9 (4 east, 3 north, 9 up) and try to determine if there are objects in the path (for example if you want a building/wall to dampen sound).

If you're working with Evennia you have to rewrite say/pose/emit commands to play nice and add a custom object default with a positional coordinates attribute. In TMUX I did it with the fairly new (at that time) @hooks.

@fatefan said in Comic Noir Game:

appears to be incredibly similar to the logo image from the United Heroes wiki

Is this game being run by the same set of people?

A guy who played a few characters at UH once claimed that the UH logo was almost identical to the logo from a game he'd run/shut down years earlier. The one in your links looks identical to the one he linked me to (I almost think his was even Two Tone Tales for some reason). He was annoyed because he paid somebody to build his logo, so it looks like they all just use the same graphic artist.

@mietze said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

I’m just saying I do not understand why loss of agency is not decried in the case of combat—but any attempt to use social skills to mitigate things (not reverse or dictate per de) is treated as if that means someone’s character is being puppetted.

Because you're confusing social skills with social powers. Strength, agility, stamina, these aren't skills - they are powers or if you prefer forces which affect the real world through physics. Charisma, manipulation, wits, these aren't powers - they are skills which affect nothing but the perceptions of others based on your employment of tactics, whether you learned them from reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" or just lying to parents and teachers your whole life.

Firearms and melee, again, relate to the handling of physical objects that affect the real world through the application of forces. Intimidation and subterfuge, on the other hand, relate to particular forms of social maneuvering.

Your argument is literally identical to the argument that you should be able to mathematically win a gun or a knife fight by rolling Intelligence or Wits and some appropriate science or math skill, or that you should be able to punch a hole in a brick wall by succeeding on a Small Unit Tactics check.

Social skills are designed for use in situations where your target is unwitting or undecided. Charisma helps people like you better, which is fine if they just met you but if they're a cold-blooded assassin sent to kill you by a religious cult then why should they spare your life when the cult probably prepared them for this by making them kill their own family as an introductory task? Manipulation helps you lie better or convince somebody that your way of doing things is right, but using the example of the religious cult they have a whole mountain of indoctrination on one side of the scale and no matter how well you can possibly roll you can't amount to more than a few pebbles or maybe a rock on the other side without a months-long dedicated de-programming session first. Even intimidation, if somebody has you on your knees and a loaded gun to your head and some kind of payday waiting after they pull the trigger, isn't going to make any difference - they're already risking life in prison or the death penalty, and if that isn't incentive enough not to start out in the first place what on earth is begging for your life going to accomplish?

You see these things happen in movies because it's in the script. There's always some backstory explaining how or why the assassin was already willing to turn their back on their government or cult or occupation, and the begging is just the straw that broke the camel's back. Trying to replicate that effect in an RPG, with no backstory against the opposing character at all, is insane. It's an MMO or a MUD mentality.

If the assassin was your best friend since childhood sent to kill you by your mutual mob boss? Totally different conversation. Social roll it up.

http://drivethrurpg.com/product/210728/Slasher-Flick-8th-Anniversary-Bundle-BUNDLE

@the-sands said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Not true. You want a social combat system where I am 'intimidated' and the rules say 'this is how it is handled' then I'm all for it (assuming I feel the rules for how it is handled are reasonable. After all, I would certainly object if the rules say I keel over from a heart attack because you got 1 success on your Presence + Intimidate roll and I have no chance to resist).

But it has to be a system that I feel takes into account the complexity of a character. Suzie Social fluttering her eyelids might be able to make Billy Badboy knock over a coffee shop for her but she should have no hope in Hell of making Gary Gayguy (and I hope no one takes offense at that name) kill his partner because Suzie Social isn't offering anything Gary is interested in.

OK so, yeah, common sense is actually neither of those things because Seduction isn't necessarily sexual in nature and getting Billy Badboy to knock over a coffee shop is something he's likely to do anyway, so good job identifying that as a good and reasonable use of social skills, but there's absolutely no reason that a female with high seduction can't charm a gay guy by some means toward any goal at all unless he actually literally has a stat that allows him to ignore Seduction.

If the Seductor scores high rolls across several meetings, drawing the Seductee into a close personal relationship or making them lust after money or power or sex or whatever, it's perfectly reasonable for a priest who's never killed anyone and truly believes he'd go to hell if he did to promise the Seductor that he will do anything they ask and then simply not follow through when they aren't standing there goading him into it later on.

That's the big problem I see in this whole conversation: Everyone who's pro-social wants social successes to affect a person like a bullet or a knife wound that needs treatment and active reversal to be undone. I say again: Unless it's a power, it's not meant to work that way. I don't even need to look into the Fate system to know from the jump that it's not meant to work that way by the developers of Fate who aren't delusional - although it could certainly work that way if someone wanted to make their own custom RPG using Fate and say so.

Can social successes accumulated across a dozen or a hundred scenes amount to cult-level "indoctrination" that needs treatment and active reversal? Absolutely, yes. Fluttering eyelashes? Flash of cleavage? That might get you out of a speeding ticket if you weren't doing something like weaving in and out of traffic or doubling the speed limit (which may be treated as attempted vehicular manslaughter whether the speed limit is 10 or 60 m/kph), or to make it clearer: If the cop you're flashing your tits at isn't so pissed off at your irresponsible behavior in the first place that he'd rather shoot you than cite you.

Thinking that a 1-off social win should be as psychologically damaging as a bullet is physically, or that anyone should be completely immune to someone else based on gender or social tactic type, is completely insane.

@surreality said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

WoD is the example I know we're discussing here, but... damn, it's such a bad example in some ways.

This is a company that basically went, "Game balance? ...is that like, weighing the book on a scale? How do you do that with pixels?" years ago, and I'm not talking about 'decided to switch primarily to pdf'.

I don't think that's really fair.

The oWoD (not nWoD 1.0 but the really really old thing with V:tM and WW:tA etc) started out in the late 80s, before public internet was even a thing. The V:tM core book(s) always had "sample NPCs" for werewolf/lycanthrope types and in that game system the lycanthrope always had Potence and Celerity and anything else a GM deemed fitting, if in "werewolf" form which WW:tA would call Crinos, and some other set in "wolf" form which WW:tA would call Lupus, and should be treated as a normal/average mortal during daylight. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure V:tM also only allowed for lycanthropes to shapeshift during the full moon, without any trace of "auspices." V:tM never allowed for lycanthropes to have a Glabro or Hispo form. WW:tA and M:tA were exactly the same - their Vampire/Werewolf/Mage samples used stats such as Rage and Gnosis or Arete and Paradox, always drawing powers from the same core book that the template/sample appeared in.

Nobody ever expected tabletop troupes to run a V:tM chronicle crossing over with a WW:tA or M:tA story (because Mage and Werewolf goals such as the use of areas suitable for a Node/Caern would pit those PCs against each other in PvP pretty constantly), so "game balance" was never relevant. The oWoD also had a Rule Zero printed in every corebook, reprinted in every Player's Guide and Storyteller's Handbook, so if you want to blame somebody for bad game balance in MU crossover environments, you have to blame the game God/Sphere staff at any individual MU.

The oWoD's definition of Rule Zero was literally the same as Faraday's last post in this thread: Everything presented in canon was intended as a rough outline for GMs to build on or expand, not as gospel.

@Arkandel There are a huge number of TOR proxy addresses available for download specifically for people who want to block proxy users. There are probably a huge number of TOR proxies that aren't registered, too. Running a TOR proxy and registering that proxy with the reporting service are two different things, and both are optional.

Game admins need to remember to be cautious but not paranoid/stupid about this.

Awhile back I was playing on that Shadowrun RP MUD while a friend was in Austin (on AT&T fiber optic, with IPv6 addressing only) and when he was unable to connect to the game and I reported it the assclown who hosts that MUD on his home Comcast internet service, the assclown accused me and my friend both of TOR Proxying... I didn't fully understand his point in a lot of what he said but it seemed pretty clear to me that this moron thought I was me and the guy in Austin and a 3rd completely unrelated party in Amsterdam who had connected to his forums at around the same time that my friend was unable to connect. He used some ridiculous term "BOGONs" which was apparently in his cheap-o router's documentation, with a wikipedia article posted by the same fucktard who made up that bogus word, to describe IP Addresses which aren't in any RIR database. Because even if that was a legit tech term, a spoofed IP Address would totally work to get you connected up to a game. Pure brainless boob: Paranoid with delusions of grandeur toward his skillset and dumb enough to think anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't recognize his nonsense on the spot.

In reality, that fucktard lost 2 players because he's an idiot (who masquerades as a techie) and his router's too outdated to handle IPv6 addresses. In fact he's probably lost a lot more than 2 with the proliferation of IPv6 in major metropolitan areas (which is pretty much the entire US Eastern seaboard)... unless he sprang for the $120 router upgrade that he argued with me about after I told him that's all he needed.