Posts made by Pandora

My experience with rosters is that the less-crunchy characters, or characters that are specifically not beautiful, or powerful, or special - they don't leave the roster. Every now and then you'll get one of them taken by someone new - who then laments not taking that uber-looking guy that had been available, back when they had the chance.

If the goal is to give people a feel for the RP of a place without having to CG a character, I don't know how useful throwaway characters would be. Current active chars (not players, mind you, but their characters) wouldn't have some specific reason to draw them in. What impression do you want to give new people?

A suggestion I might have is to gild these wilting flowers. If someone takes Footsoldier #356 off the roster, have it notify people in the military that So-n-So's reenlistment date is upcoming, and they should all be making their best effort to keep him within the ranks. It's a reason to RP. If someone takes Petty Criminal #837 off the roster, have it notify other criminals that he recently got out of jail and that they should find out if he snitched on someone/throw him a welcome home party, etc. Basically little plot hooks that would make sense even if they happened every single day.

TLDR; there's nothing quite like a character with no plot hooks or ties to other characters or organizations to cause a new player to never log back in again. There are obviously going to be exceptions to this rule because people are individuals, but by and large, you want to draw new people in, not set them adrift on an open sea and hope they wash up on the shore of an uncharted island of exciting RP.

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Shame Game:

It wasn't bad, actually! I'm just furious no one even commented on the flat earth movement gaining support all over the globe.

I see what you did there.

I've never been into outer space, but based on things I've read, shadows and horizons I've observed, and spoken testimony of specific scientific figures, it is my opinion that the Earth is round.

If a five year old tells me it is their personal opinion, based on nothing more than liking pizza and birthday cakes, that the world is flat - I'm going to have to respectfully decline to give their argument equal weight to someone that's read a book, any book.

TLDR; Everyone's right to have an opinion is equal. (Unless you think Beyonce didn't have one of the greatest albums of all time.) All opinions are not equally valid.

Re: the daunting size of London

I don't play WoD, MUSHes aren't my thing. But with regards to setting your game in a RL-city that is bigger than anyone might want to build a grid for all at once, an idea I had would be to set the game after some supernatural cataclysm of sorts, which constrains the game to a specific area of London. Over time, through either metaplot or player exploration or ingenuity or what have you, open up another area once you have it built, and you can go on in that vein for as long or as briefly as you'd like, expanding the grid at your own pace.

@surreality said in The Shame Game:

There are basically three kinds of downvotes.

1. "I disagree with this but don't actually care enough to articulate the reasons why."
2. "OMG MY FRIENDS ARE BEING DISAGREED WITH AND THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED."
3. "I hate your face and everything you say turns me an increasingly vivid shade of puce."

4. I disagree with something in your post, and I'll articulate why as soon as I finish this sandwich and type up my response - I just didn't want you to have to wait in suspense to see that I think you're an idiot. But it's coming, bb. Have a downvote while you wait.

Most shameless jerks, I have found, are pretty self-aware. Shameless jerk generally being a label applied to people that don't have much regard for wording things politely, regardless of whatever their message/intent may be. Show me an asshole that honestly doesn't know they're an asshole and I'll show you someone that probably has a few indicators of a personality disorder. The problem is, when someone acknowledges that they're a jerk/asshole/rude person and then asks that their opinion be taken with a grain of salt but still be taken because it's valid outside of the less-than-polite delivery method, someone invariably slaps up an 'EDGY, HUH?' meme because it's easier than thinking.

@Thenomain
Well I never played Portal, so I'll take that penalty.

@Groth
No, that was a drunken rant I'd forgotten about. Shame on me. Except I don't remember it, so the shame is cake for all intents and purposes.

@ixokai said in The Shame Game:

I really don't get why people care that this internet number goes up or down, or it their post's number goes up or down, but evidentially this internet number matters to people.

I don't think anyone actually cares about the upvote/downvote number as a whole, but if you get downvoted too far below 0, you stop being able to post as often, which can be a hindrance if you're say on a quick break at work and looking to respond in two different threads you're active in. Downvotes are punitive, not just indicative.

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Shame Game:

@Pandora I mean I think you were also telling people to kill themselves in that thread. Which, yes, could count as a differing opinion but let's not be DISINGENUOUS now.

I told someone to kill herself about a year or so ago outside of MSB and then stopped speaking to her entirely. She sent a half-assed apology note a year ago, I didn't accept her apology & then suddenly she was on here bitching about me like I'd done something to her in recent history. Yeah, telling her to kill herself was mean and bad and whatnot, but dredging up ancient history because you want pity from internet strangers is BS.

@deadculture said in The Shame Game:

It's funny she mentioned that, though, most of my reputation points are either from making puns at someone else's expense but more substantially from constructive statements I may have made about a topic or another.

Obviously constructive statements/comments are going to be upvoted for the most part, my point is that MSB in no way requires one to be constructive or meaningful, all it takes is being willing and able to say 'I agree!' a lot if you decide you care about upvotes.

Saying one doesn't care about upvotes/downvotes is disingenuous if you actually bother giving them, or if you happen to know offhand where yours have come from. That indicates some level of caring, even if somehow on the internet, 'caring' has become some pithy layman's sport that no one in their right mind would dare admit they participate in.

The Shame Game on MSB is pretty amusing as long as you don't take it too seriously. I participated in a thread in the Hog Pit and through nothing but trying to explain my points of view wound up at like -124 reputation. Having a differing opinion on MSB is something to be ashamed of then? YMMV. So I joked with a friend that if I just posted agreeing with people for a few days and offering very little of substance or worth to any conversation, I'd recoup those losses within a week.

It took 4 days.

My conclusion really is that MSB doesn't really care if you reform your wicked ways, it just kind of wants you to shut up unless you agree with its many talking heads, because dissenting opinions are bad and shameful, k?

On a MUSH, you're only obligated to deal with people you care to tolerate. There is less of a need for coded systems that put hard limits on things, because you don't really have to deal with something past a timeframe you're relatively comfortable with. If you give someone a wound that is definitely fatal, but allow them time to be 'dying' instead of dead, and they linger for 2+ RL weeks because they need to have one last scene with everyone they've ever met ICly in their life... well, you can't go brood in the Emo Bar (No black trench, no service) about how you killed a man today... because Joe, Bobby, and Sally are all talking about going to visit him in the hospital - tomorrow afternoon. How long is reasonable for someone to linger on? Whatever time you say will be arbitrary.

Same situation on a MUD - the victim has one hour to say their goodbyes to whoever can reach them in time. If your character wasn't logged on, you get that pocketful of angst that you didn't get to speak to Harry one last time before he took that long walk into the sunset. Is the length of the timer arbitrary? Yes. I thought the question was 'Is the length of time allowed for someone's final hour arbitrary?' which made no sense to me, because an hour is an hour. It's not a 'perfect fix' for a MUSH because on a MUSH, telling the story you want to tell is the focus, while on a MUD, telling the story happening around you from your limited perspective is the focus.

MUDs are games. You don't get to timefreeze PvP in in any real-time game. Except Fallout. V.A.T.S. is awesome.

There's no game on which not a single player thinks something is unfair, or hasn't had a single player abuse information. That has nothing to do with code and everything to do with human beings being on the internet.

@ThatGuyThere said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Then how was the time of one hour decided on? Just because something is the same for everyone does not mean it is not arbitrary.

1. If you get stabbed in the abdomen and have one hour to live starting immediately.
2. If your finger gets chopped off, you're already beaten half to death, and you're bleeding, you have one hour to live starting immediately.
3. If you have cancer, you've had it for 2 years intermittently, and now it's spread so badly you're dying, and you now have one hour to live.
4. If you're 102 years old, haven't been ill even once since that hooker in 'Nam, dying of old age, and you now have one hour to live.

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.

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Also - if you need a doctor and one isn't around, you can absolutely go to the hospital and NPC doctors are coded to give you the gift of healing - but you're at the mercy of the person that wounded you actually getting you there on time, and no amount of OOCly paging/calling/seeking someone to save you via OOC means is going to help - you've got to navigate through the streets to the hospital and hope you don't bleed out along the way. (You have 1 rl hour).

Why 1 hour? This seems like an arbitrary number to me, and you were arguing against abitrariness for creating hard feelings. Even set rules can cause hard feelings. "I had only 2 points over lethal, while Bob had 10, and he had the same hour to get help as I did, that's unfair!"

And this is what gets me about Muds: All these systems are, in the end, arbitrary. Like all games, you pick the game you like and you play it, knowing that it's arbitrary. Saying "at least Muds do it differently" is the concession that different games are different. It's not a solution, and the way your particular Mud habit goes isn't better in general. It's better for you, absolutely, but I don't see this as being a solution to any problem than "one of a thousand ways to do it".

So no, I don't think your answer is a great solution. I think it's a concession to the people who like things that way, as opposed to people who like things, well, the Mush way.

2 points over...10 points over... whether your arm is severed at the elbow or shoulder - you're bleeding.

You are reframing the argument until you're right. And you would be right that, in a system where those two instances are being compared, then they probably have about the same time to live. But what about losing your hand vs. off at the shoulder? What if I knew just enough to make a tourniquet? The system doesn't care. The system isn't coded for it. Yet I bet the person with lots of pressure on the wrist-stump has a lot more time to live than the person with the shoulder-stump. If the system can't apply basic first-aid knowledge to it, can't I also call it unfair?

It certainly is equally (un-)fair to everyone, but man is that not going to matter to some people.

As @Lothorio says, and as I said, knowing the system is one of the reasons to play or not play a game. I'm not saying that your system is wrong, I'm saying that it's no better than an RPG-based game. It's just different. Therefore, it isn't a solution.

I wasn't aware we were looking for solutions here. MUSHes have a different player type, a different play style, a different game build. MUD solutions are not MUSH solutions, this thread is about differences, not supremacy. And if you had the skill to tourniquet yourself, you could. This example obviously hinges on the idea of needing to be healed by someone else, you're making it harder and more convoluted than it needs to be. Can't we all just get along and secretly (or not so secretly) think our way is better, without implying that anyone doing anything else is wrong/arbitrary?

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Also - if you need a doctor and one isn't around, you can absolutely go to the hospital and NPC doctors are coded to give you the gift of healing - but you're at the mercy of the person that wounded you actually getting you there on time, and no amount of OOCly paging/calling/seeking someone to save you via OOC means is going to help - you've got to navigate through the streets to the hospital and hope you don't bleed out along the way. (You have 1 rl hour).

Why 1 hour? This seems like an arbitrary number to me, and you were arguing against abitrariness for creating hard feelings. Even set rules can cause hard feelings. "I had only 2 points over lethal, while Bob had 10, and he had the same hour to get help as I did, that's unfair!"

And this is what gets me about Muds: All these systems are, in the end, arbitrary. Like all games, you pick the game you like and you play it, knowing that it's arbitrary. Saying "at least Muds do it differently" is the concession that different games are different. It's not a solution, and the way your particular Mud habit goes isn't better in general. It's better for you, absolutely, but I don't see this as being a solution to any problem than "one of a thousand ways to do it".

So no, I don't think your answer is a great solution. I think it's a concession to the people who like things that way, as opposed to people who like things, well, the Mush way.

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.

@ThatGuyThere said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I like @Wretched's motto:
If someone is OOCLY unavailable, never give them dickish consequences or treat them like an abandoner.

It's a nice motto, but I suppose I just don't see someone not being around for something as a dickish consequence? And at no point did I accuse C of being an abandoner. If B dies and OOCly blames/guilts C for not being around, that's B's inability to separate IC from OOC, aka B's problem.

You might not but considering the number of times I have seen just that when people have been not on for something, excuse my doubt in thinking it wouldn't happen more often then not.

That sounds like something to be taken up with the people abusing players for not being around ICly. I don't believe in bending to the whim of people that I believe are behaving badly. I don't tolerate bad behavior in children, why would I ever tolerate it in allegedly fully-functional adults?

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

MUDs aren't perfect, but if you've got a doctor, you're saved, and if you don't have a doctor, here's hoping you remembered to set your spouse/beneficiaries before you kicked the bucket.

This strikes me as a concession, not a solution, and what if the doctor has to roll the dice, those dice are just part of the 'health system' code that you don't see? See Above.

Can't speak for all MUDs here, the beauty of original code is that it all works differently, right? On the MUD I play though, if you have the skill, you succeed. There is no RNG. You can RP something going wrong in surgery, you can absolutely not-save someone if they rip out their pacemaker and shout Sparta after a critical wound, but if you want to save them, you do. Heil doctors.

Also - if you need a doctor and one isn't around, you can absolutely go to the hospital and NPC doctors are coded to give you the gift of healing - but you're at the mercy of the person that wounded you actually getting you there on time, and no amount of OOCly paging/calling/seeking someone to save you via OOC means is going to help - you've got to navigate through the streets to the hospital and hope you don't bleed out along the way. (You have 1 rl hour).

@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

'Activity' is nothing but a ratio of time spent in-game and time spent off-game and the only way to not hold anyone accountable for their offline time is to have zero expectation of activity whatsoever.

This rubs me the wrong way. If someone can only get on once a week, or once a month, why should they be excluded from having the fun they want? Realms had an idle policy, because of important positions. I still feel bad about @Sunny's friend being reaped. The game I'm doing now, I've removed idle policy. If you are approved, come on any time, RP, have an adventure as much as you like. Sure, your friends may wonder where you were, and you may have to make up an excuse, family emergency, out of town ... or just been to busy to socialize without need for why you were in RL so much. So, yes, I have zero expectation of activity from any given player. The place is still active.

So without an idle policy, if someone is playing the leader of a faction, or whatever counts as an 'important person' in your game, is everyone else's fun suspended until they decide to log on, if they ever do? If I can't diablerize someone without my vampire boss saying it's okay (I'm pulling WoD terms out of my ass, I don't play this stuff but it seems popular with the kids these days) but he hasn't logged on since Christmas, and you don't want me making assumptions about people not being around because they aren't logged in... now what?

@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

As an aside, I'll say this. MUDs, or the ones where you're accountable for offline time, really favors the players who can make time commitment and dampens the fun for those with less time. Which is why those with less time probably seem to favor MUSH that gives them opportunity to have fun without a major time commitment of building up a char slowly over time to be on par with the majority of the player base.

I find this to be a disingenuous statement at best, as if the issue of whether or not someone is 'active enough' doesn't come up fairly regularly on MUSHes - it does, I'm pretty sure it's the basis of a post on this website today in some other thread. Every game will suffer from the 'Need Player 32 for X reason at Y time' situation now and again, whatever acronym the game is predicated upon. 'Activity' is nothing but a ratio of time spent in-game and time spent off-game and the only way to not hold anyone accountable for their offline time is to have zero expectation of activity whatsoever.

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kanye-Qwest said:

There's no point in offering consequences that mean nothing. It's a waste of time and processing power.

This gets back to @Ganymede's simulation vs narration argument
Or to put it another way, game vs story.

If "game" is your angle, you care about rewarding PCs for their XP spends and enforcing consequences that mean something relevant to the game.

If "story" is your thing, all of that means nothing. There's a whole hospital filled with NPC doctors, many of whom are better than your PCs. And the broken bone means something to your character's RP regardless of whether there’s a coded effect.

It's not an either-or though. Each MUSH strikes a different balance, and thats why you get such widely different perspectives.

This would be more relevant if it was possible to decide what percentage of a MU* is game, and what percentage is story. I've never logged into any game, MUD or MUSH, that clarified up front whether the game was 20% game, or 65.3% story. It seems to me that each of these situations and scenarios could vary wildly not game-by-game, but player-by-player within one game. That lack of uniformity in determination seems like it could easily turn into hard feelings about favoritism or what have you. 'Bob got saved by an NPC doctor after he got stabbed in the chest, but I died after a PC doctor botched his roll. I want a do-over.'

MUDs aren't perfect, but if you've got a doctor, you're saved, and if you don't have a doctor, here's hoping you remembered to set your spouse/beneficiaries before you kicked the bucket.

I played on a game where setting a broken bone was a skill that not all doctors had and if one of them wasn't around or willing to set your broken arm, staff wasn't handing out free bone-setting splints from NPC doctors, you just had that broken bone until it healed. This wasn't a MUD, so I feel fairly confident saying YMMV based on what game you're playing with regards to the argument 'You don't get to decide that there's no NPC doctors around.' and that's not just a MUD vs MUSH determination.