People don't make character choices on MUSHes because of optimal mathematics. They make character choices because of perceived coolness. Having a lot of dice to throw at a certain task is a factor here, but it's not the only one. Other factors include story elements and prominence in the setting. A sometimes-problem* with many settings, including The Witcher, Dragon Age, Star Wars without the Extended Universe, Shannara, the Dresden Files, the X-Men, the World of Darkness, Exalted, etc. is that you have most of the canon story wrapped around a small group of elevated individuals. In Exalted, there are exactly 200 Solar Exaltations in Creation, and not all of them are incarnated at any point in time. So, because the well-meaning game runner wants diversity and a rich game world, they allow and maybe even encourage people to play "mechanically disadvantaged" characters, who can't possibly be on the same level as the characters who take center stage in canon. A number of people (like me) take up that offer, and you end up with a small cadre of "normal folks" hanging out with a bunch of superheroes (which is actually canon-appropriate for some of these settings). Maybe the normal folks have access to their own resources, but you know, because they're lower in number and don't have as much canon plot support, they might not get quite as much attention from staff as the supers. They certainly can't participate in all the plots, whereas the supers can easily participate in "normal folks" plots (and sometimes can make those plots feel anticlimactic). Over time, many of the "normal folks" players lose interest, focusing on their supers alts. The ones who are committed have to do more and more stuff with their supers-playing friends, but they're still locked out of a lot, either because of canon or because they can't keep up mechanically.

So no, you can't blithely say, "Oh, people can choose to play mechanically disadvantaged characters," because that doesn't work. Some people will have some fun with it, and then that part of the game will wither and die because everybody's playing Witchers and Sorceresses and occasionally you'll have someone playing Vernon Roche and min-max their stats to a point where they can compete. If you want a setting where people with magic and people without magic can play together as equals, the magic has to have costs and you have to make a concerted effort to have prominent setting elements that have nothing to do with magic. Then a greater number of people will participate with the "normal folks" side and it will retain more momentum and interest.

* "Sometimes-problem": it's a feature, and it's not always a problem, but sometimes it is. The problematic element is usually amplified with the changes necessary to translate an existing fictional world or a tabletop system to a MUSH.

@Bobotron Yeah, easily. It looks atrocious in the code, and it gets worse the more conditions you want to add, but if you have a good text editor with bracket matching, it's easy enough to write. You just need the ParserFunctions extension (see your Special:Version page). You set up your template as normal, but you wrap your include statement in an #if tag.

If you have people writing content directly into their template:

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} |  {{{contacts}}} }}

That will check the contacts parameter for text. If it finds no such parameter, it will sub in a blank space (the default behavior is to print "{{{contacts}}}"). The #if statement checks the parameter for content, and if it finds anything other than a blank space, it will print the parameter.

If you have people making subpages and want to exclude subpages that don't exist:

{{#ifexist: Stacy/Contacts | {{:Stacy/Contacts}} | Stacy doesn't know anybody!}}

This will check for the existence of Stacy/Contacts, and print it if it exists. (I left the string in the "else" section for the sake of readability. It is by no means required, but it's harder to read a bunch of consecutive brackets and pipes.)

It sounds like you want to have pages able to be displayed or hidden. That's also doable.

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} | {{#ifexist: Stacy/Contacts | {{:Stacy/Contacts}} | Stacy doesn't know anybody!}} | Contacts hidden!}}

This will check to see if the contacts field is set to display. If so, it will then check for Stacy/Contacts, and display it if it's there. (I left the strings in for the sake of readability. They are by no means required, but it's harder to read a bunch of consecutive brackets and pipes.)

You'll want to finish it by making it so that it automatically subs in the character name for the page.

{{#if: {{{contacts | }}} | {{#ifexist: {{{PAGENAME}}}/Contacts | {{:{{{PAGENAME}}}/Contacts}} | {{{PAGENAME}}} doesn't know anybody!}} | Contacts hidden!}}

The {{{PAGENAME}}} magic word returns the name of the page the template is on. However, it will return the full path for the name if it's on a subpage, so you might want to use {{{BASEPAGENAME}}} or {{{ROOTPAGENAME}}} for extra specificity.

If you want to make a table that changes based on which fields are filled out, that's another level of complexity. It's not hard, but it requires that you first build your skeleton and then go through and replace everything with code, because nobody who isn't a savant can just write that shit out. You can see an example of a table that morphs based on parameters here (the subtitle section disappears completely if it doesn't exist).

"Web design" is about as well-defined a field as "visual art". The well of frameworks and tools and CMSes goes deep, deep, deep, and besides the low-paying scutwork that you might get from people who don't know what they want, you can't build a career in this day and age on just having familiarity with CSS/HTML/JQuery. If that's your focus, then get in line, because everybody can do that. Now, you do have an option that works well with what you're passionate about: Django. It's a solid CMS that's somewhere in difficulty between Drupal and rolling your own Wordpress plugins, and Python is broadly used in fields where storage and manipulation of data is valuable, like data journalism and academic research. If you go balls to the wall on customizing your game's Django site, build all of the bells and whistles yourself, you will have a basis for saying that you are confident with this tool. You will have a personal project (that you can diagram and explain) and a GitHub history to show potential employers, and those things are some of the most valuable assets for someone entering the software development space.

In this day and age, you need a tool that you're good with. Preferably more than one, because these things change all the time, but the broad CMS platforms like Django don't usually go away. The ulterior motive here is deciding whether this sort of work makes you happy. If throwing yourself at customizing your game's site doesn't inspire you, then you probably don't actually want to do it as a job.

@FiranSurvivor said:

Now its starting to sound like Harry Potter but with tits, swords, and monsters.... Hm.

10/10 would play.

@Roz I can tell. It would definitely save the effort of having to (occasionally, but repeatedly) explain why the fact that line 32 looks different from every other line has told the computer to display things differently. I enjoy helping people, but when the non-techie has a "what is this sorcery" response to something that I see as a simple and abundantly obvious pattern, it causes unnecessary stress.

@nyctophiliac
Like @Thenomain said, convincing a stranger to help you do everything would require finding someone who has a clean plate and is invested in your vision. There are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself and make yourself more likely to get and retain help. Your best bet is to get a list of exactly what you need and then hope that multiple people would be willing to help you. If you have a host with shell access, someone could get the game started pretty easily and load basic, tested code packages. That would allow you to start building (until then, you should work on making a map).

Ideally, you'll have a dedicated coder eventually, but you don't need one now. Not if you have self-contained packages of code that don't interfere with one another and are familiar to the various coders of the community from other games. If you find one coder who has the time to start up the server and do basic config setting, one who can drop in and test a sheet and chargen system, and maybe one or two others for miscellaneous things (like the wiki), you'll be pretty well off and none of those people would have to invest terribly large amounts of time. So you need to break up your requirements into manageable chunks and maybe some of us can help you.

If you have someone willing to do all the data entry for Beast and write out any of the unique rules, Theno might be willing to add it to his system. He likes clean, well-cited, precise descriptions where the only thing he needs to figure out is how to translate them to language the MUSH can understand.

P.S. I'm taking the time to explain this because I'm not opposed to helping. The game sounds vaguely cool, but like you're trying to roll in too many things at once. If it were open now, I'd check it out. If you came with a specific set of needs, I'd be fine with hopping on in an evening I don't work and shoving some code together. Coders aren't magical wizards conjuring forth digital playgrounds from inchoate kilobytes. A MUSH is just a building project, like any other, and most of the work has already been done. The great thing about digital building projects is that you can copy and paste large amounts of previous projects and you just have to run a few tests to make sure that you didn't forget anything. That doesn't take much time. What does take time is walking into a project where the person running the project has no idea what they want and doesn't appear to care how it gets done, just as long as the person doing the building makes it happen. This is fine if you're getting paid for your time, but it's a big ask for hobbyists who might only be vaguely interested. If you want to make this happen, you have to be the project manager (or someone on your staff does) and say, "This is what we need. These are the colors and design elements we want. This is what our grid is going to look like. These are the game systems we want to support. We like this event system and that game's AJobs customizations. These are the customizations that we want to implement." If you had that all ready in the first post in the thread, I suspect that you would have found help almost immediately.

@Chime
Oh baby, talk bash to me.

Having the option doesn't necessarily mean that the game will be supportive of people who choose paths other than the primary one.

@mietze said:

It shocked me, because I'd always come from a culture that if someone doesn't want people wandering into a public gridspace then it's on them to leave to a private room; but obviously other people come from the opposite!

Sometimes people get into very personal scenes in public places. When this happens, I try to remember to go to a +temproom, but it's not always something you think of until someone else shows up and you have to give an awkward explanation of why the people already in the scene wouldn't be happy with a random addition.

I would petition you to add +watch to this framework, for two reasons: 1) +watch is effectively +who, but constrained to a specific list; 2) when using +who and +where, it can be very useful to see people you're watching for be highlighted.

@Thenomain Softcode command help files are going to be more legible than the hardcoded helpfiles by nature of sensible dividers, better wayfinding (the ToC and "see also"s), and the fact that they're talking about finished commands and not digital building blocks. As long as the documentation is clear and unambiguous and not too long, I'm going to let people make their own decisions about what to do. The stakes for a user mistake here are really low, so I can't see the argument for needing guard rails around an alternative way of putting in an instruction.

By contrast, a situation where stakes are high enough to warrant guard rails would be a reset command in chargen. There, you could lose hours or days of work. In this scenario, the worst possible outcome is momentary distress for the user and an unintended XP spend.

@Derp Yes, and for me, personally, it would be a more comfortable way to enter instructions for things like Mage spellcasting. A long formula string is less readable and writable for my brain than a REPL-like banter of prompt and response.

@Thenomain said in Straw Poll: XP Spending in nWoD/CoD:

The "inadvertent" part is that people probably don't know what they're locked out of when they start it.

If the helpfile says that it locks you out of everything, and the syntax is such that nobody's going to enter the lockout through a typo, the remainder is analogous to someone who sees "hot surface" and decides to touch it to verify if the sign is accurate.

I'm not wedded to the idea, I just wanted to be contradictory because I felt like previous mentions of a lockout in this thread were unnecessarily correlated with the idea that some people would enter it without knowing what was up and then feel distressed when no other commands worked. I think it's possible to include simple and intuitive syntax where the chance of someone's cat stumbling into it is rather improbable.

@Thenomain said in Straw Poll: XP Spending in nWoD/CoD:

Maybe I have no imagination when it comes to input, but inadvertently locking someone out of responding to any other input but not stopping the other input doesn't feel like a good idea.

Yes, and I'm talking about doing it very advertently by tying it to a special syntax that isn't similar to the normal syntax. Backtick as the shortcut for the dev console is a terrible idea because video games use the 1 key all the time and people are usually hitting their keyboards pretty quickly and without looking when they're trying to shoot and avoid being shot. There's no reason why someone who wanted to use xp/spend Gnosis=4, 8 Arcane would get within two characters of typing ... and the probability of it happening by chance is tiny.

Just to be different: I could see a world in which some people prefer to use a syntax that explicitly drops them into a prompt that captures all of their input. For example, this would be faster than typing it all out:

> xp/spend Gnosis=4...
How much Arcane XP do you want to spend? (0/32)
> 12
Gnosis 4 bought for 20 XP and 12 Arcane XP

@RnMissionRun said in Separating UX from Functionality (Design Patterns!):

I just started a project to create a Myrddin's style BBS for Evennia but I do not have the expertise to integrate it with a web forum.

The great thing about what @Sparks is doing is that it avoids this entirely. It just passes data up from Evennia and sends new messages back to it. The forum is handled entirely by the game.

Like Westworld, but with everything being virtual.

What are you studying? If it's CSS, go design a Bootstrap theme for your game, use Sass, and upload a boilerplate form of it to a separate GitHub repo so that you can show what you've done. If it's JavaScript, take a look at Dragula and then write a web-based chargen system with bits that the player can move around with their cursor or fingers. One of the great things about web technologies is that they're all working with the same set of tools, so they're basically all intercompatible (though sometimes it's not worthwhile to try). Most things could apply to your game, and once you've learned how to do that with your hands, the curriculum will seem obvious.

"Web design" is about as well-defined a field as "visual art". The well of frameworks and tools and CMSes goes deep, deep, deep, and besides the low-paying scutwork that you might get from people who don't know what they want, you can't build a career in this day and age on just having familiarity with CSS/HTML/JQuery. If that's your focus, then get in line, because everybody can do that. Now, you do have an option that works well with what you're passionate about: Django. It's a solid CMS that's somewhere in difficulty between Drupal and rolling your own Wordpress plugins, and Python is broadly used in fields where storage and manipulation of data is valuable, like data journalism and academic research. If you go balls to the wall on customizing your game's Django site, build all of the bells and whistles yourself, you will have a basis for saying that you are confident with this tool. You will have a personal project (that you can diagram and explain) and a GitHub history to show potential employers, and those things are some of the most valuable assets for someone entering the software development space.

In this day and age, you need a tool that you're good with. Preferably more than one, because these things change all the time, but the broad CMS platforms like Django don't usually go away. The ulterior motive here is deciding whether this sort of work makes you happy. If throwing yourself at customizing your game's site doesn't inspire you, then you probably don't actually want to do it as a job.

@Runescryer said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Planescape: Plenty of possibilities here, lots of political/faction play

Sigil would make an excellent setting for a MUSH, for a wide variety of reasons. I just wouldn't want to do it with any version of D&D (Pathfinder maybe, but it doesn't have to be tied to a system, especially not a system that's just a glorified miniatures wargame).

@Misadventure said in Game System (RPG) development:

I agree, but only when the given FATE product has a kit to make sure your Aspects do have valuable benefits and drawbacks.

And the gaming group or online game where it's being used has given thought to how to do this in that specific environment.

I also love being able to draw upon passions, convictions, values, motivations or what have you, but it can become really rote and flat if you are supposed to do it often.

I agree and I disagree. There are some versions of this where the passions, convictions, values, or motivations are represented as high, character-defining aspects: CoD aspirations, or the High Concept in Fate. There are some versions where the traits are presented as general - they may be broad, but the character isn't the only one with that trait: CoD Virtue/Vice, Unknown Armies' madness meters and passions. There are some versions where the trait reflects a basic way of approaching the world: in both Apocalypse World and Fate Accelerated Edition, your stats are your personality traits. There's no separation between the character's stats and identity and there's no way to get away from it.

The prescribed frequency of drawing directly on personality to affect the game system will scale with where those personality-reflecting system elements sit on this scale.

My ideal system would sit between points 2 and 3. Like if Unknown Armies and Apocalypse World had a baby.

...you know what would be a fun thing to design? Unknown Armies powered by the Apocalypse. UAPA. Yes, City of Mist is a thing (I backed the Kickstarter), but that's almost more changeling/Scion.

I feel like @Thenomain may have had thoughts of what would happen if Apocalypse World met a MU* environment.