Best posts made by Sammi

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.

@Eerie With this, you can keep track of him because he'll always have his cell phone attached to his wrist.

What's the proper form of alcohol to pour out to commemorate the death of a MySQL database?

@Thenomain said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Now I just need to use it.

Stop using a car to go places. Let your car insurance lapse, stop paying for gas, get a better bike, and some good saddle bags so that you can carry groceries and a laptop and stuff.

That's what I do, anyway. Some people aren't so good at dealing civilly with things that embarrass them. They need to make it not their fault, so they try to be aggressive enough to put the other person on the defensive.

I think you should lay out a list of things that you need instead of keeping your hand close to your chest. You're asking for people to volunteer for an often thankless job without so much as a word about what's needed. What's your codebase? What commands do you want to integrate from other games? Do you have someone willing to do all the data-entry that would be needed for a Beast game if nobody's done it already? Do you want coded Shadow for the werewolves? These are things that people need to know, and if you aren't willing to share, you might not find many nibbles.

@Derp said:

@Ganymede said:

@Derp said:

That's just begging for everyone playing Changeling: The Trauma Victim to drive every Ogre around them into a dark spiral.

I thought that was the point of it, actually. I can see how being around the abused only feeds into the cycle of abuse further, or causes the victims to lose a sense of how the world is supposed to work.

Maybe. But to the levels that it's usually taken on MU's? The poor orphaned battered sex slave that was kidnapped by the fae and then came out to find that all the things she loved and held on to are gone and everyone hates her and she lives on the streets, etc, etc, etc. There could be a new sob story every ten minutes, and there are tons of people around that love to talk about how they've got it worse than everyone else.

That would make ogres impossible to play, in an online environment. TT, sure, you're around a limited group that isn't bellyaching all the time, but on a MU?

I think you're misunderstanding the curse. Ogres insist that they don't feel pain and they don't show it off much. Iron Stamina is probably super-common. They have Clarity breaking points when their own pain is presented to them (or to their friends) in a way that they can't deny. They're the abuse victims who keep themselves safe by showing no weakness, because they have learned that any crack in their armor is just ammunition for those who want to hurt them. Like the ex-boyfriend in the example, who probably just means that the Ogre should come to terms with his parents' deaths before trying out relationships with living people. From the Ogre's perspective, it's a personal failing to be that hung up on someone who has died, and having that weakness brought up in conversation is terrifying.

@Kanye-Qwest said:

You think it is necessary for people to ask your permission to rp around/at you in public, and I'm uncompromising?

Coin put it lightly. I'd say "entitled and insensitive". If you walk into a public place and start posing at people without so much as a by-your-leave, you have no idea what's going on with their scene. You pose walking in from a long day of work, except that in the scene it's morning. You pose a crowd, when the people in the scene have agreed on the place being empty. You walk in and expect to be accommodated no matter what the people who were already there had going on. They are absolutely within their rights to just GTFO, but most people are nice enough that they're going to try to explain to you that you're being a boor.

@Derp There are multiple angles from which to approach this.

1. Changelings are messed up. If there's a changeling and an unidentified person in a scene, and only one of them has emotional issues, it's almost certainly the confirmed changeling.
2. Examining the grammar. In this case, the male pronoun has been used to refer to the Ogre previously in the same paragraph. We have the introduction of an ex-boyfriend, then a reference to the Ogre, then more pronouns. When there are two individuals with the same pronoun in a narration, you refer back to the previous direct reference. In this case, the "he" follows "an Ogre".
3. Look at the sentences following that. "Bringing up those dead parents again won’t do it. However, pointing out that he’s broken his fist in a fight about the honor of his dead mother, that’s a new break." First, it would be absurdly crippling, not to mention unthemely, for the fightingest of the Seemings to get broken up about other people being physically injured. It does make sense if the curse is about needing to remain stoic, because breaking your hand is a point of weakness. Second, how does this sentence make sense if it's the ex-boyfriend whose parents died? That would be going into pretty deep characterization for a character who is essentially a throwaway (used here to indicate that the Ogre's emotional issues are getting in the way of his love life). The "he" is still coming after "an Ogre" as the most recent direct reference.

@Kanye-Qwest said:

Darn. Well, sort of darn. I can't re-use the character template I made the last time I struggled my simple ass through WoD cg.

This is one of the occasions where, if you ask nicely, other people might be willing to give you what you need, but if you don't ask and just complain about not being given everything, they'll probably help you out anyway while resenting you, because people are just bitches like that.