@Vorpal said in Comics Stuff:
It's a very rare moment right now. A lot of what DC is doing right now is good. I haven't said those words since, maybe, 2009... maybe even longer. I'd say enjoy it while it lasts- Marvel is currently doing not-so-hot with their Civil War II fiasco, which is bogging down the entire line with its gloom, doom and haven't-we-done-this-already?
Jesus Christ I wish Civil War II would just END. THIS WASN'T GOOD THE FIRST TIME, MARVEL.
@Arkandel I swear to God, any time someone announces how bored they are on channel, I lose a layer of enamel on my teeth from grinding them.
@il-volpe said:
@Roz said:
I believe strongly that the appearance of fairness is just as important as fairness in practice.
Is this even possible? I had someone, very courteously and with the best intention of helping me not to suck, inform me that I shouldn't make policies to benefit my friends. In response to a change that everyone hated short-term, because it spread out stat points and effectively weakened all characters. And which my friend, whom they believed I was benefiting with the change, bitched about more than anyone. (Likely because, being my friend, he felt safe to bitch.)
I had somebody post on WORA about how I refused to ban someone because I 'wanted her to like' me while I was willing to ban others. The actual difference was not that I cared especially if non-banned player liked me, but that she actually corrected her irritating behaviors, and then produced other ones due to an inability to generalize, while those I banned refused to accept and comply with my rulings.
The whole balance of transparency vs privacy seems to lead to people accusing one of unfairness. Either that or one has to make any discussion one has with a player about any unwelcome behavior some sort of ugly free-for-all town-hall-meeting thing, which I am not about to do.
It's never possible to for every player to think you're behaving fairly and ethically, even if you are. Some players just hate you. Some players will insist you are running a 100% railroaded plot even when almost all aspects of the plot were developed in the midst in reaction to player direction.
My point is moreso doing everything to be above the board in a public way. It's not giving people ammunition, while also knowing there will always be players who think you suck. You can't do anything about those players, but there's definitely satisfaction in not giving them anything legitimate to accuse you of.
@faraday My favorite places code -- and the first time I came into contact with it -- was written by Schmitt at the now-closed Second Pass MUSH. It didn't make the groups' poses invisible to each other, but rather players could join an area in the room and then their poses could be started with a colored phrase location, such as "At the bar" or "Near the window" or something like that. Each place would have a different color. So it made it a lot easier for people to keep track of who was in their general vicinity but everyone's poses were still visible to everyone else, which made it easier for people to drift between groups and know what was going on.
Schmitt had several little code tools on Second Pass that I loved. I wish I had access to them!
@bored said in A new platform?:
I think the 'the syntax has to be completely the same or the oldbies will rebel' is... exaggeration by the oldies for the sake of hating change (like most people do). Push come to shove, I do think people will play where they can play, so long as its achieving the functionality they desire.
100%. 1000%. Just offhand, I've seen multiple posts on here from folks who were like "Ugh I really didn't like the idea of XYZ in Ares, but then I got used to it and now I really love it." People just vastly overstate the difficulty of adapting to something new. Or, frankly, the idea that something modernized could actually be an improved experience.
I can't really imagine how you would use a forum for the functionality of a game wiki. Wikis are for information and forums are for discussion. I know games with forums that supplement wikis specifically to offer a discussion space, but they have fundamentally different purposes.
@goldfish said in Paragraphs, large scenes and visibility:
@roz regex highlight? Can I have that in english with a full tutorial? Please?
So you've already added one-word highlights in the client, it sounds like! There's a dropdown when you click on the highlight down in "Highlight Details" and it has the options "Begins With," "Is," "Contains," and "Matches Regexp." All you have to do is flip it to "Matches Regexp" and just copy-paste the code into the box for the thing to highlight.
If there is a character who by logic sees yours on a regular basis -- a SO, a coworker, something like that -- then your character feeling avoided necessitates some change in the usual habits of that other character seeing them. Which means that RPing feeling avoided is still implying that something about the regular relationship has changed ICly.
Didn't the thread start just with someone asking if there were any WoD games using roster systems? Is all the discussion just surrounding -- why the OP should or shouldn't be looking for one?
On games I'm on, when it's needed, we literally just use Google Draw. The GM sets up the map and everyone basically gets a marker for their character to move. It's not always necessary, but especially if you're doing combatty scenes in a place with a number of NPCs and such, it can be super useful. Plus no one needs an account or anything to use it, you can just set it to share with anyone who has the link. (And I can use smileys for baddies and then make them frownies when they die.) 
@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Unless you are actively participating in a development effort (like Griatch and team seem to be), I wouldn't hold my breath.
I mean, there are multiple developers in this thread. I also know of people who have actively worked on what a build like this would look like. So. Yeah I'll feel free to keep talking about it.
I've had players get mortally insulted at the idea that staff is not in the business of making every player happy. Some players have difficulty wrapping their heads around the idea that sometimes what a player wants is actually detrimental to the game as a whole. (Yet these players will generally have no issue identifying when a different player is doing something against the rules or something that messes up their RP.)
I strongly ascribe to the philosophy that it's not staff's job to make every player on their game happy, because that is, in fact, and impossible job. Better to focus on the more achievable goal of making the game as welcoming, fair-handed, and thematically cohesive as you can.
@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.
That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.
So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.
I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.
On TLF, we spent a lot of time trying to go down to the bare basics of everything to write up our guides and welcome rooms on the game. We talked a lot to players we got who were entirely new to MUs and we tried to find out just what things we were taking for granted. We switched up our terminology and tried to refer to MU norms in ways that made more sense for people who had never been on them. (Instead of talking about channels and clients, we tried to frame things as basically a chat/RP program.)
You have to make a serious effort to recruit and retain people who are newcomers to the platform. I mean, sure, you can get people who are more adventurous about picking up weird, complicated stuff. But I feel like a lot of people don't recognize just how high the bar really is. But I know we really did find it worth the effort on TLF, because we managed to snag some really fun players who were entirely new to MU*s.
@GirlCalledBlu said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:
@Roz said in Leadership, Spotlight, and PCs of Staffers:
Also, a good way to find a player enthusiastic about running something for you is to run PRPs for other people.
I think we're now getting into a territory where my experiences don't mesh with the suggestions being given...
I have run plots for people, and rarely ever received a plot in return. So, I come to the point where I'm left with: do I wait around for someone to run something for me (even after I've suggested I could use a GM to help me out) or do I just get it done so I can keep moving forward with my character?
Have you asked? Like, not just suggested generally you could use a GM, have you gone to people whose storytelling you admire that you're on good terms with and said, "Hey, I'm really interested in exploring X about my character's history/secrets/whatever, would you be interested in running something?"
I think the real thing to keep in mind is this: if you invite others to participate in a plot you're running and then they find out that it's really going to be focused on putting your PC through some trauma, that's going to feel like a bait and switch. It's a lot easier for a different GM to take a particular thing you want to do with your character and place it in a larger narrative to include more people in the story. It's simpler a whole lot harder to do that for yourself, because it's hard to pull back from the thing you're excited about doing with your own character so you can plan out something that is also exciting for others to play in.
But like I said earlier, I do think there's a big difference between an ongoing plot and a one-off thing.
@golgoth said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@arkandel said in Alternative Formats to MU:
These are all solved problems with a basic web interface.
You're right, a lot of this is solved with a basic web interface... But now I'm starting to think: Why can't this be solved using a telnet client? It might need to be coded as a 'per client' thing (at least as far as I'm thinking) but I think I might be able to figure something out sometime. If I get time.
Because telnet is ancient and limiting and will always hold back the ability to advance too far. That's kind of the point of moving on from it.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
to the way it means people pose these bloated 3 to 4 paragraph poses, trying to address everything that's been done or said since their last 'turn' to pose.
It's mostly the latter that bugs me the most, as it kills any narrative immersion and also makes it take like twenty minutes for people to pose.
Well, sure, and we all got pet peeves... but I don't see how that is affected by pose order whether it's supported by an in-game system or not.
I can play in perfect order and still respond to everything anyone does trying to take over the scene.
If there's a strict pose order in a big scene and people have to save all of their reactions for one pose, you end up with the giant "I have to respond to everyone" pose. I think KQ is saying that if people were more free to respond to things as they come, it would be easier and read more naturally.
