Posts made by Sammi

@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.

I know some people on here hate it, but I really like Fate's Aspects. I like narrative-form stats that can affect the game, and I like things on character sheets that have advantages and disadvantages bundled together. Aspects and the compel/invoke system are the simplest incarnation of those two elements combined that I've found.

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.

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

Witcheresque styled game (without witchers, but definitely focused on the murderous shitsack world and monsters)

This. Gritty, nasty high fantasy is the only good high fantasy.

@Rook said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I work at my office desk as a job. But, I also regularly need my truck to run to Lowes, Menards, etc. I wouldn't say that I'm slim, as I am overweight, myself. I dunno. I know a lot of people who do physical work outside all day and are still carrying a spare tire around their waist?

People have different body types. There are some super-unhealthy skinny people, and some very fit people who don't fit the popular image of fitness because of genetics. But body type weight for some people is excessive weight for other people, and the way to know what "healthy" means for any given individual is to attempt physical improvement. For anyone who doesn't need to travel more than five miles to get to work or school, biking literally everywhere is a great way to do this without having to wrestle with how bad humans often are at forming habits.

@Rook said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Sammi said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

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 might work great for people that live in the city, in an apartment, who just go to the grocery, entertainment venues and then work/home... but some of us actually NEED vehicles to get things done. I can't imagine hauling lumber, electrical supplies, etc on a bike.

I don't imagine that people who routinely need to haul lumber have much overlap with people who live excessively sedentary lifestyles and have difficulty getting exercise in. Even if I had a car, I'd still have to borrow somebody's truck or van if I needed lumber.

@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.

The theme is about as interesting as an anime game can be, but I'm a bit leery about the fully coded combat system.

It would be excellent to automate that, and have players submit their actions with +action commands that automatically deduct their Speed ratings from the initiative (or +speed/spend 4 for novel actions), with a countdown that does automatic rerolls. It would be very painful to code that in MUSHCode, but very easy to write it in Python.

@Reason said in Deep Shadows - Shadowrun 5th Edition MUSH - Help Wanted:

When you do add more logic in, just be mindful that some decisions will require a prior state to be reached that, when done out of order, will hose up the character build -- this is fairly straight forwardly enforced when you move a player through a series of rooms, but (forgive me, stating the obvious) you'll need to build some logic gates that key off state if you want to completely decouple the system from CG Rooms.

Yes. There aren't many in this system, but I'm keeping aware of them. Each priority category is fairly self-contained with the exception of Magic/Resonance touching the others, and a few qualities (like Exceptional Attribute and Lucky). If the numbers are all kept in a hygienic separate storage, it also wouldn't be hard to run validity checks. A priority A magician needs to have two rank five magical skills, and you can easily look for those (I generated a skill group listing), remove them, and then see if the rest of skills.values() adds up to the number of points available. There are some step-dependent things, but they're in individual categories, and I have cg metatype set up to show the list of metatypes at each priority, then how much you have to spend on special attributes. Each step/room will guide the user through the whole process of that step.

I've been lurking and not making much noise since I'm a rank noob and didn't know when I started how far I would get, but I got interested in Evennia and set about learning Python and as a starter project I decided to use SR5, since it was being talked about. Well, now I'm into it and I understand a lot more about Python and I'm about halfway through coding a chargen from scratch (code at my GitHub). The way I have it structured (and why I think I can safely say "halfway" when I haven't done the most logic-intensive parts) is as a set of helpfile-like pages that can also be set as room descs (to support people who like CG rooms and people who like to do it from anywhere, as well as staffers who want to whip up a statted NPC in a private room) and the code is in its own package, designed to be dropped into a game with just a few tweaks to the game's files to point at the package (maybe one day, we'll have enough packages to start an Evennia Package Manager and people can start up a game with NPM-like instructions). The code has decent separation of concerns, not super-rigorous, but I always have a tough time reading hardcore MVC aficionados' code. I like having my view function and my logic function be next to each other, even if they're separate so that Django can call the logic function whenever I get done with this and my masochism decides that a web-based chargen looks like a fun thing to write.

And there's a stats system with a script that can automatically populate the stat store with data from a Google Sheet. Because I've done RPG system data entry for MUSHes before, and it was painful, and this is a far superior way to work. And you can see the stats on the web site, because I'm easily distracted and go off to learn Django when I could be writing code so that people can decide how magical they want to be.

I still can't decide if magical freebie skills should be stored with the normal skills in chargen and reset with the rest of the skills, or if they should be a separate thing in chargen and only join the rest of the skills when the sheet is locked at approval. I'm leaning towards the separation, but I keep going back and forth.

At this point, part of the reason I'm continuing is to get a finished product that I can then gut and have a nice clean skeleton with which to add other game systems. I started a Fate chargen back in the day, but faltered when the limited nature of TinyMUX wasn't amenable to the logic required. I didn't have that kind of stamina. But with Python, the logic is the easiest part.