Posts made by Roz

@Mercutio said:

$alias *:@chat channel=%0

Bless you for this.

We do have shell access so might look at the hardcode patch, but this may have just done what we wanted without having to touch the hardcode at all, so we'll see.

@faraday Lol and we're even running games with your system. I was somewhere aware of you having that tool for setting global channel aliases, I swear. Not quite the same for letting players set their own, but probably will be helpful to look at to fix our own addcom hack. Thanks!

Has anyone built out a softcode channel system to replace to hardcoded one for PennMUSH ever? Looking specifically for stuff like MUX's addcom functionality where you set custom aliases to talk on the channel and also the ability for channel creation to be open to players (but also having the ability to lock specific channels, like a Staff chan). Mostly curious if this is already out there and accessible. I am a VERY LOW-LEVEL CODER and I can kind of see how it would work structurally but it'd be a big project for someone at my level.

Alternatively, a way to make our current hack for channel aliases not swallow up semicolons. Right now we just do:

$alias *:@force me=+Channel %0

Which is fine except that it naturally eats semicolons and any text after them.

From someone who has played and staffed on games running FS3, because I think some points might be helpful clarified: actions skills are set by the staff. They decide what selection of skills are going to be baked-in, and like Faraday has said, they should be skills that are going to be important to the game. This will be different based on your theme, because what's important in one game isn't important on another. We don't have anything related to driving in our Action Skills list on X-Factor, which is about mutants, but we do have Transportation on our list for Transformers: Lost & Found, which is meant to account for particular skill in driving/flying/boating whatever for robots in their alt-modes. I would totally do Driving as an action skill if I were running, say, a Mad Max game.

I took Driving as a Background Skill for a character on X-Factor because he has like advanced training in driving and SOMEDAY I'll totally get to roll it for something and it'll be fun. In the new system as Faraday's described it, this would probably end up as an Expertise skill. Right now, players can set pretty much anything they want for a Background Skill from a code point of view. It's a freeform thing where you're just like "I want to put points in Video Games!" It's probably not going to come up in GMed plot scenes, but you might have fun rolling it in a regular scene with another player.

You could totally have a situation where a staff made poor choices about what to put on the Action Skills list when they were building the game; however, the documentation for installing everything is pretty clear on what kinds of skills are best to mark as Action Skills, and how many total skills is a good number to have on that list.

On X-Factor -- and on the now-defunct Steel & Stone, which is where I first encountered FS3 -- we actually give more chargen points to start for characters who are older on the logic that they have had more time to develop skills. This isn't baked-in to the system, though.

@Alzie I mean, the system lets you roll stuff you don't have statted on your sheet, which is valuable just because sometimes we don't think to stat certain skills that our characters might have because maybe we just didn't think of it or whatever. But what GM is going to let you roll Spaceship Operations without any skill or reason to have skill in it?

I think the great sports movies and shows manage to distill the emotional connection that sports fans find. It's like translating that love and passion into something that people who don't like sports can still understand, because that's the aspect of it that's universal. Passion, loyalty, desperation, etc.

I'm not even active on my RL Twitter (and I work in marketing!) but if several players on my game wanted to do IC twitters dammit I would figure out a good way to stream it somewhere on the game wiki because that's fun.

@tragedyjones I had to block one particular ex on Facebook just to keep myself from doing this.

@dontpanda Oh my fucking god that sounds rage-inducing

@Jaded said:

@Roz said:

@Jaded said:

@Ganymede said:

@Jaded said:

I had a few guests over tonight and each time one showed up the dog would sit at the bottom of the stairs to his apartment and bark at the door. The dog would do this for about 10 minutes. Then each time one went outside onto the patio to smoke, the dog would come back. This guy had the nerve to ask me to not have people over after 8pm because he works 2am to 10am and he's trying to sleep at that time.

People ask me why I don't want to have a dog. This is why.

I like my cat because he leaves me the fuck alone most of the time.

I would have a cat but my roommate isn't fond of pets.

My cat is way better than my roommate.

Sometimes my roommate IS my pet, in a manner of speaking. He gets so wrapped up in World of Warships or his online ship-girl game or something else that I have to remind him to eat.

Pets do not need reminders to eat. Pets remind YOU.

@Jaded said:

@Ganymede said:

@Jaded said:

I had a few guests over tonight and each time one showed up the dog would sit at the bottom of the stairs to his apartment and bark at the door. The dog would do this for about 10 minutes. Then each time one went outside onto the patio to smoke, the dog would come back. This guy had the nerve to ask me to not have people over after 8pm because he works 2am to 10am and he's trying to sleep at that time.

People ask me why I don't want to have a dog. This is why.

I like my cat because he leaves me the fuck alone most of the time.

I would have a cat but my roommate isn't fond of pets.

My cat is way better than my roommate.

Not anger so much as just stress and nerves, but MAN job interviews and then waiting to hear back especially when you really really want it aaaaaaaaaaaaah

Lemme tell you, when @Sparks showed up on one of my games several years ago, the other staffers had to sternly tell me not to fangirl at her. Because I love Atlantis an awful lot.

@Coin I get really sad thinking that someday I'll probably be back in an office with PCs instead of Macs and will have to use something else in the background at work. #fwp

@Glitch Not if I'm moving between spawns with activity. There's a keyboard shortcut that's just "move to the next spawn with activity" that I make use of all the time. My head really prefers having all the conversations organized out separately. I also rarely page and am on games where players can make private channels and whatnot with other players, and we also tend to make channels based on common threads of interest (which is where you get stuff like VideoGames) to try and keep spam in places where it's easy for people to either subscribe or not.

@Glitch said:

@Roz Could you screenshot an example or link one? I'm curious what sort of layout works well enough that you'd only use it under those circumstances.

Sure! It's just the default Atlantis layout. I believe that it has a tab format that's more along the lines of SimpleMU as well, but this works way better for me. But spawning all these channels on SimpleMU wouldn't work for because it's just too many tabs and they aren't easily organized.

I spawn every individual channel as well as pages (and the monitor for connects and disconnects), but I can say that I wouldn't do that if I were on Windows using SimpleMU or Potato. Atlantis's layout makes it feasible for me personally.

@faraday said:

@Roz said:
but also not stuff that I think would be comfortably done on an on-game bbs.

Out of curiosity, why not? If your BBS has the mod that lets people reply inline to a post, what would prevent you from having the same discussion on the in-game board?

Man, it's hard enough getting people to read the game-relevant bbposts. I wouldn't want to drown the important stuff in discussion.

Speaking as one of the staffers on the game 3EC is referencing, we had to think a lot about how mutation would work in FS3's system. For powers that have pretty clear weaponized capabilities, we're able to do what 3EC said and make custom weapons within the system. You have someone with superstrength, for instance, we start with the usual unarmed weapon and start cranking shit up. For mutants with speed-based powers, we've actually added custom stances to the system (which by default are things like normal, banzai which ups your attack and lowers defense, cautious which does the opposite, etc.) that allows for a higher attack without lowering defense to replicate how their speed would make them better attackers. Invulnerable folks get custom armor. That sort of thing.

For other instances of things, we're free with utilizing +rolls and letting GMs kind of mold the scene around the mutation use. We used to run the old X-Men Movieverse MOO, which didn't have any stats or coded combat, so a lot of us are more than used to GMing all of these things freeform anyways.

@faraday said:

@Roz said:

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.

Exactly. They are very different tools with very different purposes. You can certainly set up a wiki poorly, but trying to do the same thing on a forum would be even worse IMHO.

As for having both? Unless the web forums are somehow integrated with the in-game BBS, having two always seemed to be redundant to me. Players always seem to gravitate to the in-game forum.

I've had games where the forum could be popular with some real in-depth discussion. On my old Mass Effect game, we did weekly posts from both staff and players on major RP topics, and the discussions on them were fun -- but also not stuff that I think would be comfortably done on an on-game bbs.

That said, out of the two games I'm on staff on now, only one of them has a wiki forum, and it's used very sparingly.