Posts made by Ninjakitten

@Bobotron

If you're aiming in the general vicinity of rivethead, check around for military surplus stores, for starters. If you've got a good one you can probably put together just about the whole thing there.

Minos Cluster! THAT'S one of the ones I forgot! Sorry I don't remember anything else except that I was there for a bit, though. And was probably called Lilith.

@surreality said:

I dunno... STG? (Story-Telling-Game)

...STM*? (Story-Telling-M-whichever-the-fuck)?

...STRP?

...hell, just call them STRIPEs, for Story-Telling-Intensive-Role-Playing-Experience and call it a day.

...ahahaha. I actually kind of like that.

@Thenomain
To me it's a university. That whole OR thread has been somewhat odd to read.

@Derp said:

@Ninjakitten said:

@surreality said:

These terms are for the codebases, they are the names of the codebases, not 'philosophies of game design'.

This is why I would like there to be a good, preferably not codebase-synonymous name for the general philosophy-of-game-design I favour.

So, like, player-driven storytelling community?

It's a start. I wouldn't call a game a community though, even though it'd be one. But player-driven storytelling is a start. MUD people might not like it, but then they already took roleplay-intensive for some of their kind.

@surreality said:

These terms are for the codebases, they are the names of the codebases, not 'philosophies of game design'.

This is why I would like there to be a good, preferably not codebase-synonymous name for the general philosophy-of-game-design I favour.

Awesome.

@Bobotron Have you tried yanking the little black circle with a white caret in it (above the title, aligned with the bold button) upward already? It should pull the whole posting area to where you can see the bottom bit of the input box, unless I misunderstand your problem.

@Thenomain
...who were you playing at the time?

@Jeshin said:

Our website since the 1st week has had the request to contribute an article on our contact us page.

That is sort of... actively not the point.

@Sunny
Her interactions with Aine were so much fun. Fighting included. I reread the Denver stuff and got sad about how it ended all over again. Alas...

@il-volpe
I know several of my friends have been having an awful lot of fun there for quite a while, now.

@surreality
I can only apologise! Seriously, that's really weird. Clearly that character is somehow inherently coincidence-attracting, given the whole not-twin thing...

Someday I'll probably have to give in and start playing nWoD. I've just been too stubborn and/or lazy so far. ...but I miss people.

@surreality
Whoa, really? That IS trippy. What do you think -- really weird coincidence, or subconscious memory or something? Was he similar at all otherwise?

I reread all my old logs recently, and I'd forgotten just how much I liked our characters' conversations there. *^_^*

@Glitch

Unfortunately, this topic was made after already doing that. I've got it pulled up as far as it goes, but the actual preview box is still only half-wide and only about... what, 300px tall? It doesn't give me the kind of preview that makes me feel comfortable that I've got what I wanted.

I'd really love if I could see a bigger preview of a post -- like, if under the submit button's down arrow there were a 'preview' option which would show me what the post would look like as if I'd submitted it. That is to say, full-sized, not half the screen wide and in a short box. It works fine for a post this size, but I just don't feel like I get a good view of anything that needs scrolling.

I noticed this too. It makes looking things up rather annoying, especially since the actual results don't always seem to show the part that it thinks was found. Also, it finds search terms within other words (and there doesn't seem to be a clear way to tell it you only want the term you typed, but I could be being obtuse) and the "in topic" thing so far seems to return other topics for me as much as the one I tried to search...

There's a cat curled up like a danish snoring next to me.

Oh hey, nice bandwagon you got here! ::climbs on::

1990s, in approximate order:
TNG TrekMUSE:
Random
ATS TrekMUSH:
Random
SW: Brak Sector:
...Lilith, I think?
SW: Minos Cluster
Probably also Lilith
Pacifica:
Tyche (Bagheera Bastet)
Hel (Walker[?] Kinfolk)

I know I'm forgetting several games entirely, mostly Star Trek and Star Wars ones. Probably not that big a loss.

2000 onward, alphabetically:
Ashes to Ashes:
Ivy (Walker Ragabash, 2000-2001)
Bright Future:
Serendipity (Nuwisha kin, 2003-2004)
Cajun Nights:
Fiona (Mortal, I think? 2000)
Dark Dominion/Downward:
Liz (Gnawer kinfolk, 2000)
Tuesday (Walker Galliard Metis, 2000)
Denver:
Eve/Scott (Mortal, 2004-2005)
Dragonlance:
Baub (Gnome, 2002)
Iason (Human, 2002)
Due Rewards:
Willow (Giovanni ghoul, 2000-2001)
Emerald City:
Zephyr (Mortal, 2002-2003)
Fear and Loathing:
Jeremy (Euthanatos Mage, 2001-2002)
GarouMUSH:
Bernie (Gnawer Ragabash, 2000-2002)
Raphael (Fang kinfolk, 2003)
Izzy (Strider Philodox, 2012)
Felix (Gnawer Galliard, 2015-current)
Haight-Ashbury:
David (Satyr kinain, 2002)
Ineffable Game:
Legato (2004)
Mariner's Tale:
Zenobia (Nuwisha, 2000-2001)
Masquerade:
Adrian (Fianna Galliard, 2002)
Jai (2010-current)
Nightscape:
Cordelia (Some kind of psychic? 2000)
Northern Lights:
Ivy (Walker Ragabash, 2000)
Northern Rage:
Zoe (Corax, 2001)
Paris LFDM:
Etienne (Mortal, 2002-2003)
Santo Domini:
Ivy (Mortal, 2000)
Shadowed Isles:
Aidan (Psychic, 2005)
Star Trek: Darkness Within:
...I can't remember. Probably Random again. (Vulcan, sometime between 2010 and 2014. No logs, see what happens?)
The Dreaming:
Hegemony (Coyote Pooka, 2006)
Trinity:
Jeremy (Euthanatos Mage, 2006-2010)
Hegemony (Coyote Pooka, 2007-2009)
Drew (Mortal, 2009-2010)
Matt (Mortal, 2010)

I'm pretty sure that's all of them (not counting a few games so small I already know where all the other players are) since 2001, anyway. Before that I wasn't logging obsessively and therefore have almost no idea anymore what was going on. Which may be for the best...

I can't seem to remember half my staff positions anymore (see: not logged), so eh, screw that part.

@crayon

#1: You may be right that the bridging is basically @Jeshin's thing/remark, and I might only be interpreting the text on the site about having "more in common than what separates us" in light of his comments on that and that all text-based RPGs are involved.

#2: Yes, quite possibly what's been written reads differently to people who are involved with RPI-like games and people who aren't.

So, to explain how it reads to me, here's that blurb:

"Optional Realities is a community and design blog for text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature. While many call this genre of game an RPI (Roleplaying-Intensive Game), Optional Realities is dedicated to all games of this nature, whether they be MUDs, or MOOS, or MUXs, or MUSHes, or RPIs, or any of the other sub-genres that we've divided ourselves into over the years."

Okay. The way it's written, "this nature" refers to two separate though potentially overlapping types of games: "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character" and "story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". Neither of these descriptions covers the idea of automation in any way.

ALL the games in question -- RPI-style, low-automation non-consent, consent -- are "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character" and most are "story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". The ones that are not are still story-driven, just lacking "permanent character death as a feature".

The text then says that many call that sort of game -- text-based, online, character-focused, story-driven, includes possibility of permanent death -- an RPI. That's fine. But as it then goes on to say, RPIs are only one example of that type, so that doesn't suggest that a reader ought to assume you only mean games which closely resemble actual RPIs.

"This nature", as described in the apparent mission statement, is not RPI codebase and specifically says it isn't, but it doesn't mention the qualifications that narrow down "this nature" to where it doesn't cover low-automation MU*s. Because of that, when you say they don't qualify, you may mean that they don't fit what you consider the requirements for the RPI-like genre, but what you're actually saying is that they don't fit the requirements that have been stated: that they are not character- and story-driven text-based online rpgs (with permanent character deaths).

So, ways to make it more clear. First, I'm not certain if you really mean to have two types there -- if you only mean the sentence to be one joint type, "text-based, story-driven online role-playing games which focus on character and include the potential for permanent character death" might be closer. I would add 'highly-automated' in there, personally, if I wanted to narrow things down to RPI-like games, since otherwise it still includes the type most popular here (...which apparently need a name). There might be a better term, and it still leaves the question of "well, what's 'highly'?" but you already have that problem anyway, and so far I can't think of a better term for what the true divider seems to be. You also might define this type as "RPI-like" or "RPI-style" or something similar to that, because it's much shorter to write, seems likely (to me) to give the right sort of impression of your meaning to people involved with games of that type, and seems less likely to leave people involved with other types feeling alienated.

Obviously this doesn't cover any remarks made or impressions given in posts early in this thread, but for the outside view of the mission statement itself, there's my thoughts.

@Jaunt said:

Ad hominem doesn't need to be fallacious to be ad hominem.

Ad hominem is, by definition, a particular kind of logical fallacy. If Bob is arguing that all people collecting for charity should be shot on sight because they're wasting his time, and I say that's ridiculous because he's a complete asshole, that's an ad hominem attack even if he IS, in fact, a complete asshole, since his assholishness has nothing to do with why the argument is ridiculous. However, if Bob makes that argument and I say he's a complete asshole, but don't suggest that his complete-assholeness itself means his argument is ridiculous (invalid), that's not ad hominem. It's just abuse. In both cases, whether it's an accurate label or not is irrelevant to whether or not the argument is ad hominem.

But, we're not going to change our target audience to include all MUSHes, just because of some chest thumping. What about H+S MUDs? What about PK MUDs? What about "RPEs" with a very low standard for roleplay? No. We're not trying to be a community for every text-based game out there. Those communities already exist, and we're not attempting to compete with them.

You keep saying this, and as far as I saw no one has asked you to change your target audience. As I see it:

• Verbiage on your site implies it is for/about text-based RPGs.
• The actual requirements for 'counting' as a text-based RPG and not merely an 'other game', as later laid out, are not fulfilled by the majority of our kind of MU*.
• Your site appears to speak of wanting to bridge the divide between various sorts of text-based RPGs.

Y'all are basically saying our games aren't "text-based RPGs".

• Roleplay is our games' SOLE reason for existing -- the only kind of "play" there IS on our games.
• In over 20 years I've been on exactly one game where death wasn't permanent (because of the story-world itself, and it didn't harm the RP), and only a handful where there was no risk of dying unless you agreed you would. Even then, many characters died -- permanently -- because the story or another character made that the most logical or beautiful option.
• Now, particularly given that in OUR culture, entirely automated systems are frequently felt to be things that replace RP, not count as it, using that to exclude us from the category of "text-based RPGs" is pretty damn offensive, and not exactly conducive to bridging any divides there might already have been.

As has been said more than once: You can claim to represent text-based RPGs. You can actually represent one particular branch of them. If you claim the former and do the latter, you will annoy people, particularly the people who belong to the former group and not the latter one. If I started a site "about text-based RPGs" and made "players in a scene are logged in at the same time" a criterion for what that means, forum RPers would be well within reason to be annoyed, whether they actually wanted me to talk about them or not. Why not simply claim to represent/focus on highly-automated MU* RPGs and then continue to do so? I don't think any of us object to the actual focus of your site. We object to the representation of said focus, and the way it's been discussed here.

I don't give three-sevenths of a damn whether you guys talk about or list our kind of games; I don't need another place to go. But don't claim you represent our overarching genre and then define us out of it, and if you insist on doing so, don't come do it in our house and get upset when we tell you where to stick it.

@Thenomain said:

This community has been around for, what, 10 years? The earliest Mush in, I believe, 1998.

Depending when we want to say this community started... well, I've found evidence of SWOFA back to January 2003, and there are references to WORA in my logs going back to September 2001; I don't remember when exactly it got spun off from the bad mush page, but I'm fairly certain it was before then. Tasteless Descs got killed mid-2002. Man, I should have been documenting the WORA/Snark/SWOFA/etc. history as we went... Anyway, I'd give this community at least 14 years of being around, probably getting into 15.

According to the ol' MUSH Manual, "The [original Tiny]MUSH code dates back to spring of 1990, or so." and "In January of 1991, PernMUSH [which as a codebase rather than game became PennMUSH] was started."

We could probably use a good, updated history somewhere. It's a lot harder to find things out than it ought to be.