Posts made by Salty Secrets

You're probably not going to find 10 active players at 2AM pacific on any MUSH except Shang, PenDes and Arx.

If you're willing to lower your standards to maybe 4 or 5, I've had good late-night experiences so far on Dream Chasers MUSH as a Guest. They seem to have a very dedicated and active night/European crowd. I'd also recommend checking out Fallcoast.

If you pursue a MUSH on number of log-ins alone, I'd strongly suggest you consult the Hog Pit threads about United Heroes MUSH and Multiverse MUSH before being drawn to them, unless you're alright with condescending staff members that spy on players and pull down posts pointing out issues like sexual harassment or a member of staff modifying logs for his benefit.

@wizz It can go either way. If there aren't enough games putting an ad here to have to worry about the bottom then it's doubly irrelevant whether a game reaches it or not. My point was, focus more on what locking a thread means for feedback than what it means for its position in the ads section.

@arkandel MSB doesn't have a place for me to TS so I'm leaving.

More on-topic: old ad threads will end up at the bottom of the list regardless unless you allow people to bump their thread once every week. The problem with this is that you end up seeing a thread that's five pages of the owner bumping it in-between which might be nestled one or two reviews.

Bumping then creates a new problem in that there's an obligation to bump every week if you want your ad to remain visible.

Either way a forum-layout for MUSH ads simply isn't efficient in the first place. No matter what way you choose to handle it there'll be some form of disadvantage.

Ads'll reach the bottom by age, or they'll reach the bottom because someone isn't dedicated to bumping it to the top every week. Someone's losing out either way, so don't think about this aspect when making your choice. Instead focus on the pros and cons of locking an ad thread as regards feedback.

I think the proposed changes are pretty good. Keeping ad threads cleaner and making a more obvious divide between constructive reviews and throwing mud seems like the way to go to solve a number of issues that keep coming up.

For the rest, though? I think it's fine as it is.

While some people like @Paris don't seem to want to accept it, the bottom line is this: if this place shut down, someone would make a new one. If that one shut down, someone else would make a new one. If that new place shut down, you get the idea. This isn't up for debate, we've seen it happen already.

People need an outlet to voice their frustrations with the hobby, warranted or not. There'll always be abusive admins, abusive players, and this place existing doesn't change that. If they weren't being disruptive here, they'd be disruptive somewhere else. The behaviors that make this place "undesirable" are behaviors you'd continue seeing even if we closed shop. You'd see it on whatever new forums were made to bitch and on the games themselves. You'd see it in Livejournal communities like Bad_RPers_Suck. Maybe someone'd create /r/WORA.

I'd rather people be assholes here than on the games/at the players they're being assholes about. You can ignore this place, but you can't ignore a MUSH you play on without making the decision not to play on it. In fact I'd say a majority of players in the hobby do a very good job of ignoring - or not knowing - this place even exists. Because we don't advertise. Because the hog pit requires signing up for rather unintuitively, and someone who found this place by accident wouldn't know to look for it.

If you can see the hog pit - the toxic part of this place - you made a conscious choice to see it. If you don't like what you see, you can leave the hog pit group and never have to care again. If someone keeps nagging you, your staff, your players, on public or private channels, to "check out what these jerks are saying about a player/a game" you can tell them to stop bringing it up. Being obsessed about what people say here, if you don't like it, isn't healthy, so here's a novel idea: just stop looking at it.

MSB is the vocal minority in every sense of the word. Better everything that it entails be happening here than elsewhere.

@faraday Social skills are definitely more applicable but another thing to consider is easy access to misportrayals of skills in fiction.

I think it's fair to assume that the average role-player's medical knowledge comes from watching movies, TV and anime, where medical skills may not be presented with utmost accuracy. A medical roll pose that looks off, if not entirely wrong, probably draws from sources like that for inspiration because the player doesn't know better but still wants to pose something other than "I heal you".

Conversely there's no easy access to social rolls in fiction like that because social rolls are so highly context sensitive that they can't be transferred from their source. If you watch Game of Thrones you surely have a lot of knowledge about political ploys, but that knowledge isn't any useful outside the Game of Thrones universe and in most cases, outside of dealing with very specific characters.

@Arkandel This is generally my viewpoint on it as well, and why I cannot stand when people compare "I expect you to play a good liar" with "I expect you to know how to cook meth".

Cooking meth would in most role-play I've ever been a part of be handled by saying, "My character cooks meth." and then rolling. The same goes with hacking, cooking, hunting and sometimes even combat with a simple "I swing my sword" or "I fire my shotgun". You can also google most practical skills like that and make a convincing pose if you had to.

Lying, impressing, manipulating people is on the other hand almost always role-played out fully and responses to it must be role-played out fully as well.

Unless you know of a game where people can say "I lie to you" and then roll without explaining anything, comparing these two things is trying to compare apples and oranges.

@bored I'm not sure your hostility there was totally warranted, even if I agree with some of your points about WoD games in general, having played on well over twenty and story-telling on one right now. It's why I warned that I don't think it's possible to have player versus player social combat that ends in anything but the usual we're already used to.

@Lain I like this idea a lot but having a third party present for every social roll who knows enough about what's going on to make suggestions like that might be a bit harder than just having a third party who can spot and penalize absurd uses of the code. I have to yield to @Arkandel and @Thenomain when they say having a third party at all isn't feasible if social conflict is an every-day thing.

Perhaps the best idea I've seen so far is to make social rolls require consent, and to make both parties arrange both outcomes of the roll before the dice are thrown at all. Surely this won't eliminate player conflict over the rolls but if players must agree beforehand about what happens when the dice land, it would eliminate conflict about that much, and prevent people from springing wild beliefs onto other characters, or for that matter TS.

I think expecting players to cooperate in writing a story in a cooperative story-writing environment isn't the craziest thing that's been pitched.

@Thenomain I think any such system that doesn't take into account whether Player A put any effort into his lie at all is doomed to failure. Failure might be a strong word, actually, let's say doomed to be the same as all other social systems.

If social combat is to exist in a player versus player environment, there needs to be a third party who can impartially judge the situation and say things like "Player A, your lie is poorly constructed so you get -5 to your roll" or something along those lines.

There has to be a line that social stats can't cross. In order for a social roll to succeed what you use it to propose should at the very least be possible and reasonable. No amount of social stats should swerve an astronaut into becoming a Flat Earther.

@Ghost I don't think that's always a bad thing.

If my desire is to tell a tactical espionage story and I know that Nick only plays power-hungry combat monsters, or that he only enjoys fighting role-play, then using that knowledge to prevent my story from going astray the moment it starts is pretty standard story-teller behavior that I would expect from anyone.

There's really no excuse for meta-gaming though! It's one thing to avoid people whose role-play you know you won't be able to work with, it's another to meta-game.

My recommendation is to keep social stats but make them usable only versus NPC as part of moving plots or major events around which handily eliminates their use for TS.

Players need to learn to role-play their social machinations against other players and not rely on dice to tell them how well they lied. If you want to tell a good lie, then tell a good lie, don't tell a bad lie backed by immense social stats which forces everyone else to look quite stupid for falling for you.

@Gilette Introductions in the real world are almost never like that so I don't understand why people role-play them like that.

People tend to meet when their circumstances see them doing the same task together, whether that's working, studying, drinking, playing games or otherwise, and first meetings tend to center entirely around that activity. People get to know each other a little bit as they do something together, and if they enjoy each other's company they seek to meet again either to repeat the experience or try a new one.

"Getting to know someone" doesn't happen in a single meeting like role-players seem to think. It might be an attempt to establish immediate friendships and skip the boring parts, but the resulting role-play tends to be bland and boring.

@Tempest That's not active, that's just populated. MUSH population isn't an indicator of MUSH activity.

Activity is better measured in terms of "if I ask for role-play can I find role-play". That's a lot harder to compile a list for since it needs first-hand accounts from multiple sources to confirm.

If you want a list of games by population there's always the mudstats directory.

If your MUSH has 100 log-ins but only 5 role-play every other day your MUSH is basically a failure. It's pretty frequent that when a MUSH falls into this kind of fate they'll say everything is fine because they still have lots of log-ins.

Log-in count is the least useful of MUSH metrics. A MUSH with 10 players but each can have 8 characters can easily feign looking like it has 80 players when really it's just a big cluster of alts, like Multiverse MUSH.

The best metric I've found is to measure: are people active, and are people having fun.

If a good percentage of your population is active, and people are having fun, you've made a good MUSH. Nothing else matters.

I wondered why I got pinged for a thread I didn't see before.

I wasn't disappointed.

Do I get a free shotgun for being in that faction or do I have to supply my own?

@Misadventure I'm not the one looking for a new sci-fi game, just explaining what a single-planet setting means in terms of limitations within the science fiction genre. I agree you can have exploration and all kinds of diverse role-play on a single planet just fine but I also see why someone might seek a more space-oriented game. Star Trek isn't Star Trek if you can't go out and explore space.

@Misadventure Where the action can take place. A game centering on a single planet won't have spaceship role-play, battles or otherwise, nor will it have planetary exploration like you'd expect from say Star Trek where every episode is a new planet full of mysteries and wonders so as science fiction goes it might not be what everyone is looking for.

@Ominous I guess we can agree to disagree then. To me Star Wars is science fiction with fantasy tropes in some of its works but not all. The original trilogy and Rogue One will always feel more like science fiction to me, where the prequels and most spin-offs are indeed more fantasy or space opera. At the end of the day if I want science fiction role-play I can have it on a Star Wars game, the fantasy tropes don't make science fiction play impossible.

@Ominous Space opera is a sub-genre of science fiction. Star Wars is firmly science fiction. While it might include elements of fantasy such as knighthood, magic by any other name and a grander than life save the world beat, the plot and the universe it happens in couldn't exist without the fictional science on display. I won't disagree with you that Star Wars borrows more from fantasy tropes than science fiction ones but if what you're saying is that it isn't science fiction as a result I'm going to have to stop you there and point out it's widely recognized as not just being science fiction but being where a lot of our science fiction afterwards drew inspiration from.

If you cut the films apart, you also quickly notice that of the original three films, two were about a super-weapon born of science threatening all freedom with a small sub-plot about knights and magic that didn't really change the threat at play and even that sub-plot introduces what would become a staple of science fiction weapons, the light-saber.

It's not until the prequel trilogy and various spin-offs that we would start seeing Star Wars address the fantasy tropes more heavily than it did the science fiction ones.