Best posts made by Rook

Most MUSHes and MUXes are WoD, that I've seen. And they're all cookie-cutter replicas of how the game before them did it, and the game before them. They use the same systems, the same code, the same OOC grid layout, the same CharGen...

So of course hundreds of them persist the same problems!

They are mostly catering to people who have outlaid sometimes hundreds of dollars in source books to get into the culture, and can talk the talk on the channels. It's a recycled crowd and recycled MUs.

With that said, however, it seems like a decade ago MUs had rooms dedicated to learning how to MUSH. How to page, talk on channels, do the commands and so on. Some time, it became a +help file (but no help in the initial connect room on looking at +help), then it just sort of disappeared.

This was one reason why I didn't like Evennia's lack of cohesive "How do I do" screens.

I don't always code, but when I do, I code in Rhost.

As said above, I agree with @RnMissionRun. I love the challenge of rethinking code and building it myself from scratch, so I loved the Rhost codebase for the power and security of it. Most people do not have the ability to do that, because they want their game up and running as fast as possible, hence SGP and other code packages that are drop-in and go.

@tragedyjones said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I am curious what other similar, but not MU based types of formats exist, or that people may have tried.
I am tinkering with the idea of a multiplayer persistent game using alternative formats, possibly linking multiple resources. One idea I have is to combine a game with a Wiki, a sub-Reddit, and a Discord server, where staff can use Google Drive to track character sheets.

From there, you will recall, the conversation diverged into distraction, split attention on tools/interfaces, and here we are.

Conversations naturally wind their way, as people don't just post "Yeah me too" constantly to threads on ideas. That's what Upvotes and Polls are for. Threads are for asking questions, giving two cents' worth, and propositions.

I asked to see your vision, in order to get an idea of what you foresee. I understand that you don't want to get attacked for it, that's fine. Conversations can be had about innovation outside of this board, but in my experience, most people don't chime in on announced projects here. Not one person has said a word when I mentioned working on a new MU client. When people propose new MU*s, if it is WoD, the conversation invariably shifts to "How are you different", but if you are not WoD, it is invariably "How can you be more mainstream".

There aren't a lot of developers here, and that is honestly the target of my side of the conversation, not the players, not the theme staffers, but the coders. The people who would be critical to this conversation if anything other than "Wow, would be really nice to have" is to be explored.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

That's a long TS file and is the kind that just makes me shake my head. Long TS files tend to do that, because it twigs my, 'If you're spending this much time explaining Tinyfucking, you must really care about Tinyfucking' light in my brain. Which is never a positive for me.

I am one of those that takes the opposite mindset: Clearly they have had some idiots -cause- them to have to have this length of policy, damn.

I don't care what people do on a game, or don't do, but don't artificially limit valid roleplay no matter what your bend is. There's nothing more laughable than the games out there who have policies of "No TS! EVAR!" where banning was the result of such, even in private rooms.

God, @WTFE, I can't agree more, and I want to love it.

Now we know, right? That's been our shortcoming all along!

In the end, I think that a lot of people either vehemently disagree with the proposed changes, or they are on-board with them. What I am trying to do is bridge a gap, through code, and to do that, I'd need to have a much more concrete conversation about proposed changes, features and expected functionality. It would all need to be examined, just like all code does.

Of course, my coder's brain is suddenly envisioning a Squick/Rating system that players can set that can match locks on entries to areas, barring them with a warning... that's a neat idea.

@Derp
+1 because you said booboos in a coding discussion. Well done!

Anyone who works in an environment where the norm is MANY MANY TOOLS GUYZ will recognize the overhead and harassment of flipping from tool to tool to tool to accomplish things. My entire career right now (and indeed, much of the strategic effort of IT nowadays) is consolidation.

I would inject here that the separation of duties into multiple tools and windows defeats the purpose and will not be a positive. If you can build an interface to /source/ all of those different things into one window, and make that window as accessible to as many platforms as possible, you might have traction.

Context-switching is already deadly in MUSHing. We all know that.

I learned a style, influenced heavily by the 'mentors' that I looked up to in RP as I started out my RP 'career' to be something of the following:

On pose pace -
This depends heavily on the complexity and pace of the scene. A lazy, daytime (while people are working) social bar scene doesn't really demand a fast pace. A gunfight with seven players, however, should. In large scenes with more than 3 characters (including NPCs if they are being posed separately), I adopt the 3-pose rule. After three poses by anyone else, it is acceptable for me to jump in with my next. In scenes where there are fragmented mini-scenes (think huge public events with knots of people NOT at Places), I only consider my 'group' within the larger scene for pose pace. To me, this is normally the guiding, deciding factor on how well a scene is going (unless there are RL interruptions). The more interested people are, generally, the more they are engaged with the pace, I have found.

On pose length:
I intentionally try to prioritize pace over length in most scenes, out of courtesy. However, with that said, I generally pose an entire paragraph of several 80-character lines, or sometimes two. Scene sets can be almost a screen full, especially if sandboxed or setting up a new plot, whathaveyou. In faster scenes, with faster action, I will cut this way back to keep the frenetic pace up. Sometimes down to two lines. I will intentionally break poses up if there is a point in my pose that someone should get a decision or action or a chance to pose a response, with the second half of my pose ready to go based on their decision. This is rare, but it has been met with smiles and thank-yous, in the past.

I have found that I can have several lines or just a few. There are times when the latter is more impactful and character-meaningful. It is the mic drop of posing, the silent stare and walking out after a confrontation and saying your piece. Sometimes it works to make your point more fully than a two paragraph pose can.

On content -
I have played with all kinds of personalities. Some that abhor any sort of non-visible/non-detectable elements of the pose transmitting OOC information (such as character thought, intention or whatever). Others actually will embrace that style of posing, as they find (and I admit it swayed me when I loosened up about it) that it can save a lot of misinterpretation (the idea being to 'translate' a bunch of real-world body language, inflection, etc into a text medium in a clear and concise manner). Sometimes this makes great sense, and is done very intentionally. When done right, it changed my RP style to include it. I now feel that this is more 'cooperative' RP to give people hints into motivation, intention and perhaps reactions.

Of course, this is a balance. It can be done wrongly, so very easily. I don't agree that including thoughts is a good example of this. But including things that can be inferred from facial expression, body language, etc, are.

Finally, my thoughts on clarity -
I don't go into huge detail unless I find that it is warranted, that the object or action of detail is the crux of the pose. If I am swinging a punch at someone's jaw, I am not going to go on for two sentences about how my glove is custom-tailored and lined in gold thread. I am going to wax poetic about the swing itself, the power behind it, yada yada yada. I, personally, find that when people expound on several things in a pose, granting heavy detail to multiple points of interest, that I can lose the grip on what they are trying to say.

To me, a pose should have a thesis, not four. It should have a central point that it is trying to make to those in the scene, maybe with a few supporting emotions, quips or minor actions.

Oh, and posing five different comments to five different people in a scene "just to keep up", to me, is scene overload. It happens to me in RL, if multiple people are talking to me directly (versus having a group conversation). I tend to answer in turn, and I do this in my poses. I find that it is much more realistic and manageable for me.

I see two of my character names on a couple of the WoD game listings. Won't say who. Been around far too long.

I had a softcoded +grid system that allowed DMs on a D&D game do all of this. But yes, the same lessons learned. It was overhead. Nice to have, but soon people didn't use it as much. A web-based one would be sooooo much better, and not cluttering the MU screen where the RP is happening.

You're right, but if we're honestly talking about something to replace telnet, I think that our 'core' needs to be broader than 'every game uses this'. It needs to have a full enough list of features that people go 'that looks better', and that's going to include, IMO, logging and conflict resolution.

Point of order... I am confused by the constant usage of the word 'telnet' in this conversation. Telnet is a protocol, like HTTP or SMTP or SSH. This misunderstanding has clogged a lot of this conversation from a technical perspective.

I think the better term to be using here would be 'server codebase', which is the application like PennMUSH or RhostMUSH or TinyMUX or AresMUSH that people are logging into. That is what provides the features that you are discussing.

Not picking on anyone, but please. Unless you are speaking to the specific carrier protocol that people use to log into the server, don't use the word 'telnet'.

What is being discussed here is design for the server, not the protocol.

Also? Please don't just say "Whatever Rook", because it is important when you are engaging people from a technical perspective. God help us if @Ashen-Shugar sees this.

Interested in this answer. When I was working on my game/RPG, I was toying with a system that 'rubber-banded' skills and abilities. In essence, you have a set pool that you distribute. As you trained up something, you put time into doing so, and you could raise that trait a bit. But at a point, it takes an entire-character focus to go from 'Okay' to 'Amazing', just like it does in real life. If you want to be the most amazing gunslinger in the world, it takes hours a day of practice. Thus, it stands to reason that you aren't building skills (maybe even slacking talent) in Cooking or Basketweaving.

Thus, if you wanted a '5' in a trait, you had to voluntarily give up points to get there. It wasn't fast.

I toyed also with 'maintenance cost' of '5' stats. You sacrificed XP every month or so to maintain that amazing edge. When you stop working out 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, you cannot keep the Arnold physique, sorry. When you aren't doing 20 brain surgeries a week, you aren't as fast and good at them, etc.

Advancement was to either lessen (over time) this maintenance cost or allow for more 5's. But, also, my system allowed for dumping of XP into non-stat purchases, such as money, holdings, status/prestige.

@Jaded said:

single player cooperation

@Jaded, I am suing you for mindbreakaging. "single player cooperation," you says. Ow. Ow...

I believe that those are holdouts/leftovers from TinyMUD, which is where MUSH derivatives come from (mostly). @Ashen-Shugar could speak to this much more succinctly.

I'm agreeing with you. I, once, spent a week going through the help.txt file, cleaning up inconsistent formatting, fixing typos, and adding some stuff that I thought should be in there. There is a lot of gap, if you go looking. But now? Softcode is written, egads, tons of it. While you could add aliases to the commands to clean things up, without a fresh install and coding your own... you'd run into issues.

Legacy code stacked on legacy code. Hack after hack. Until a complete rewrite happens, the codebases will have these inconsistencies.

Then of course everyone will bitch that shit got moved/updated on them and their stuff doesn't work.

@thenomain said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I know more than a few games who have at most 3 people on staff. I don't think this is something that WoD games can do anymore.

<off topic>
But, aren't WoD games basically just a bunch of Spheres cobbled into a single setting, several separate groups of characters who generally avoid each other for everything but TS, all playing in their own hidden sanctuary locations?

I mean, a WoD with multiple Spheres is essentially a bunch of games on one grid. So yeah, every one of them has to have those three staffers. And probably oversight staffers to make all the spheres "balance". (( Sorry, I was laughing too much there. ))

This never got off the ground. Too many people didn't seem to like a realistic approach to trait advancement past 'above average', so this was nothing more than an exercise on the how-could-we in RPG building.

I learned that most gamers not only -want- godlike characters, they will not be as interested in your game if they can't have one. I started hearing complaints about "That'd take too long to get 4-5 5s on my character". Mind you, this was the same self-proclaimed haters of so-called supercharacters.

Again, interested in seeing people's answers to @Arkandel, above.