Best posts made by Roz

@arkandel said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:

@kanye-qwest said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
On a tangentI wonder (some of you such as @Ganymede might be able to answer this) if it's the same for theatrical productions. Do actors root for their characters and try to push for them to win? Do they view directors - which I assume is the closest thing to storytellers - as means to get what they want for those characters, or obstacles to their success?

Are there any parallels between the two activities, since that would be a community with some similarities to ours, but unlike it with centuries worth of history we can tap as opposed to this fledgling little hobby of ours that didn't exist two days ago.

100% no. That's not at all how theatre works. Improv is a better thing to look at, because it's built on collaboration to make the best experience for the audience and is built on the rule of "yes, and." That rule at least is one that I think RPers can learn something from.

@Ganymede said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I'm a bit confused about your point, because my entire argument is "make shit simpler" and "things could be simpler". What is there to disagree with? I'm not saying don't add new features, don't innovate or try new things. I'm saying that if you're gonna do it, don't make it a complete mess that needs 5 help files to explain how to use something.

You're presuming that people want it simpler. This is not always the case. People may want to simplify how things are done, but this doesn't necessarily mean keeping "things simple." As an example, people on Arx seem to want to add complexity to it.

People might want complexity in the system, but that doesn't actually mean people don't want the commands to interact with the system to be as simple and intuitive as possible. The difficulty of figuring out Arx's command syntax is a regular difficulty throughout the playerbase there.

I don't understand. Daario #1 was so off-putting and unenticing.

There's no actual reason why a web-based RP game couldn't have the same pacing as a telnet-based one.

@the-sands If the descriptions in the source material aren't applicable to the game, it's the responsibility of the game runners to document that somewhere easily accessible in their chargen process.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@apos said:

Just wanted to add more cents to the pot. I re-arranged based on easiest to most difficult to address.

1. Technical barriers for entry. Specifically downloading clients, and then figuring out extremely complicated commands in an archaic command line that's not at all intuitive. I think Ares/Evennia and a client that's much closer to what people would expect from other games would be a world of difference. Right click, drag and drop, and the typing is pretty much all for creative writing, not archaic commands.

For creative writing, all the bells and whistles can effectively be ignored; +phones and coded vehicles are clutter in the way of RP.

I don't think that's true, I don't think that's what it looks like to people new to the hobby, I don't think it's how we present it, and it also ignores the fact that there is still plenty of code that is required. We don't have to talk about the bells and whistles: just start with the weirdo process of downloading some weird client, figuring out how host names and port numbers work, connect to a game, understand that it's some weird textual/virtual grid, see people maybe talking to you in different ways, maybe have instructions in the welcome room desc that gets quickly scrolled by and you don't even know how to bring it back up again with the 'look' command.

This, to me, is one of the biggest problems. We think of lots of things as intuitive that are entirely alien to people who have never played a MU. And you kind of just proved my point by dismissing the very idea of a technical barrier to entry with "well people don't have to use these additional code toys to RP."

@faraday People in general can. I've yet to see Nemesis be able to, unfortunately. Everyone who disagrees with him gets the "lying troll" line. It's honestly weird.

@lithium said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

If someone doesn't want to tinker with a modern programming language, they're certainly not going to tinker with the mess that is MUSH code.

I have to point out that this is not entirely true. I learned MUCode for free, at a time when trying to learn Python for free was less possible. The coding boot camps and such were all several hundred dollars, and I did not /have/ several hundred dollars to learn a coding language for what was, in essence, a hobby.

Okay but like -- we're not talking about how things were at whatever time you learned MUSH. Clearly it was a while ago, since you say that trying to learn Python for free was less possible. But now? There are like COUNTLESS times more resources and help for learning languages like Python or Ruby than there are to learn MUSH.

If someone has a brain that is code-capable they don't need much more than the built in help and mushcode.com, at least (and I cannot stress this enough) IN MY OPINION. I learned by looking at code I knew to function and seeing what they did, when I saw a piece of code I didn't recognize? Help in a bare bones server I had up taught me what it did.

And if someone has a code-capable brain, all they need to learn Ruby or Python is free online resources and a sandbox to start tinkering. The difference is that they'll have countless more resources to help learn and answer their questions. And also the languages are just -- easier to learn. Easier to read, easier to parse, easier to use.

It's so hard to find this thread every time, guys.

But: finding out that a person you know on a game is actually someone you've known for like -- ten years. You just didn't realize it was them. And then you laugh about it a lot.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

UI is just UI. It doesn't impact Gameplay in MUSH as much as this thread seems to imply.

Pretty much everyone who is looking into RP online experiences web interfaces and widgets every single day. Very few of them experience a command line interface. This is actually a dramatic difference to learn. One of them can look very familiar. One of them can look entirely alien.

My experience dealing with new players coming from different RP platforms indicates that the UI is, in fact, a big deal in terms of a starting hurdle.

@thatguythere Yeah, that's usually what it comes down to me. I hate the game of "if I take this scene now, I might lock myself out of RP I'd really like later when this other player comes online/becomes available, but if I don't take this scene now, I might end up with no RP at all for the night." IT'S A STUPID GAME. It sucks and I hate it.

@auspice Ares is shiny and new with bells and whistles that weren't there before, and people overall really love the work Faraday has done on it. Any time a MU* client is created or updated, it's generally increasing ease of use. Probably with bells and whistles that you don't strictly need in order to get to the core of RP. But it makes it easier. Why do we do this? Because making it easier for people to RP makes it so that people are more likely to RP.

You keep writing responses that are weirdly aggressive with this idea that a web-based MU* experience is "giving the middle finger to the current product userbase." Everyone on this thread who is talking about making some new things is part of that current userbase. What about the people we see say things like "I was really skeptical of the Ares web portal stuff -- I already do everything on my client! -- but then I started using it and wow it makes X and Y so much easier"?

What's under discussion right now is a new platform. Obviously a platform won't fundamentally change the fact that X game based on X tabletop system has a complicated chargen, or that Y game has long wait times for approval. But this thread is about "alternative formats to MU," not "improving staffing methods on the existing format." Of course the things you're describing are hurdles. I don't disagree! But the idea that any format other than what exists now is just "bells and whistles" and pointless and actually some sort of middle finger to the MU* community is unnecessarily aggressive and naysaying.

@ganymede said in Why did you pick your username?:

Ganymede is the identity Rosalind adopts when living in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It.

So basically you're my alt.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

Or maybe it's just as simple as being uncomfortable knowing there are guns in the house when you're not sure that in a moment of crisis, you wouldn't turn it on yourself, and you would be relieved if the gun was not so readily available to you because you have the self-awareness to recognize that you experience these moments of crisis in your life and want to stay away from things that could make it very easy to make impulsive and irreversible decisions in ways many other things do not allow for with such relative ease. (And you probably don't want those other things around much, either, for the same reason.)

Goddamn, people. That is in no fucking way political.

Maybe have the class and human decency to not take it there, please.

^^^^^^

There have been studies about how easy access to guns increase the risk of suicide. This is a real thing.

@twinprince I'm generally not a fan of epithets in most situation, and this is a good article about good uses and bad uses that I generally agree with. In RP I tend to often find they muddle scenes unless you're literally in a 1:1 because it's really easy to lose who's talking. (Unless you're in a 1:1 or it's literally a situation or a game style where your PC's identity is obscured or whatever, your name should ALWAYS be in your pose.)

@auspice said in Random links:

For the board's lawyers:

stare at @saosmash and @Ganymede

@twinprince I mean, no one expressed that they never want to read a desc. Someone said that they didn't want to have to go through all the descs in the room to figure out who an untagged pose belonged to. You can have read everyone's desc before and still not want to do that.

Anyways, my issues with epithets isn't cultural, it's more generally about writing.

@haven said in RL things I love:

@roz said in RL things I love:

@haven said in RL things I love:

@mr-johnson said in RL things I love:

9/10 straight women agree: Happy boners best boner. Angry boners come in at number two, and way at the bottom of the pack, nobodies favorite: Sad boners. Poor, poor sad boners. No body wins with a sad boner. T-T

A sad boner shouldn't even be in this thread. Monsters.

Better take out that Kylo Ren gif, then.

I can't speak to the disposition of his boner. Sadly. SADLY!

The entire personhood of Kylo Ren is a sad boner.

@sunny said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

How about if you junk a dress, you can make another dress from it, but it becomes junked silk instead of new silk and it can't be used for model clothes, just wearing clothes. Or just take junk out. Like that whole portion of things is why the working parts have to be messed with, soooo.

I think staff stated at one point that their modeling and junking records didn't really indicate this was a real, recurring issue. People mostly bring it up as like "THIS IS A THING THAT YOU COULD DO" but tbh the returns are so low/hard to get that I don't think people are doing this regularly.

@jeshin said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

It would be nice if you allowed commoners to use their patrons to assist their rolls which would remove the 'need' for the protege to be the clout provided. Now high clout patrons of all ranks can be sought out.

I actually agree that it'd be nice for proteges to be able to use their patrons to help with work rolls, especially because work represents going out into the world and getting stuff from people, and part of the thematic point of patronage is to open doors for people with less social power in the world.

BROOKLY NINE-NINE IS CANCELLED AND SO I'M CANCELLING THE WORLD I'M SO MAD