Posts made by Sammi

@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.

@Coin
You have a different definition of "complicated" and you're not explaining it well. In game system terms, complicated systems are ones that require players to go through a lot of steps in order to resolve the action. The MtAw Paradox system is complicated, because you first figure out your dice pool for the spell, then you roll Paradox, then you apply those successes as a penalty to your casting roll unless you choose to eat the Paradox as backlash, which produces a special kind of bashing damage. And then, whether or not the spell succeeds, any remaining successes manifest in various possible forms.

Now, if the only extra consideration for the player is, "I might take damage if I don't spend Willpower," because the code does the counting and applies the damage, that's not very complicated. Especially not with what Mage players are used to.

Whether you can do it with code or not is irrelevant, in my opinion.

Except that, empirically, it's not irrelevant. The ability for the system to be semi-automated in code has a large impact on the amount of work that players and STs have to do to make the system function. How much constitutes "overly complicated" is subjective, but the ability of code to reduce the complexity for the player is not.

So since your opinion is counter to something that can be verified empirically, you might as well be saying that dogs are reptiles and defending that with "in my opinion" as if it makes the statement any less wack.

@nyctophiliac said:

I'm going to be honest here, I nuked the project when support fell through.
But, someone told me... if I build it they will come.

Well, you have to be able to build it and also convince other people that you care about it and have a premise that's broad enough to excite enough people, but not so broad that your game doesn't have any character.

Instead of just trying to noob my way through it, however, this time I want a professional's help.

Okay, but unless you're asking a person you know well, or you're offering money, you need to pull a little bit more weight initially in deciding exactly what you need. The following list is a good start.

1. The whole code base started up from scratch.

Yes, the only thing that really matters is what the coder is familiar with, but here's where you should say what you have experience with. I'm going to talk differently to someone who's used Rhost for years than I will if they've been on MUX the whole time, because they'll be used to different quirks. You should also say whether or not you have hosting already.

2. nwod stat system

Like Thenomain's?

3. obviously basics like mail, jobs, etc.

Mail is built into a codebase. Anomaly jobs is standard, a few people have tweaks in repos and what not.

4. Fallcoast's event system would be awesome.

Which is probably Cobalt's event system.

5. Exalted MU's auto scene logging system with wiki integration would be extra awesome

What codebase is this on? Do you know where to find it?

6. aspirations and beat system. We have something special in mind for this, not only do we have regular beats, but also Political ones specifically for the vampire and mortal venue that concentrate on status in things like mystery cult, city spheres (ie academics, health, law enforcement, etc), covenant, clan, etc. There's also the possibility of gaining "negative beats" for doing bad stuff.

Any post-GMC chargen system is going to have aspirations and beats, so that's redundant. If you have clear rules for how beats can be docked, a simple beat log would be required for tracking fluctuations. Political beats is probably a matter of adding a different number and a secondary purchase command that can only access certain stats, but you need to have all of these rules explicitly laid out in advance of a coder taking the project on. Would characters be able to lose beats even if they had spent them already?

8. I was thinking a smallish district oriented grid to be populated with mostly PC builds, but also a select few House builds, like elysia and territories.

And who is going to build it?

9. As for Shadow and the Hedge, etc I figured people could use anywhere rooms, seems easier

It most certainly is.

12. Is there some kind of territory or domain function out there? Like an ST could give a district to a pack or coterie as their territory easily?

What would be the effects of granting the territory? How would it be displayed in the MUSH. How many districts do you plan to have, and how many packs and coteries do you hope to support?

@Coin
The complexity would be players having to count up the dice and apply damage to themselves, and scene-runners monitoring that. If the code does it automatically, the player only has to think about one thing: spend Willpower, or risk losing some vital energy. Then the roll happens and everything is resolved at once.

It would be much simpler than how Paradox is handled.

@Coin
It may not be so complicated. It could easily be worked into the roll system that rotes get cast with a special command, which would take a switch to indicate that you're spending Willpower, and if you don't spend Willpower, the system gives you damage for each 1.

It's also possible to allow low-level effects to be free and have higher-level effects require energy from the mage in order to make stuff happen. If Willpower is too restrictive, then it's a possibility to allow the caster to take physical damage in order to cast if they don't use the Willpower to control the energies.

@Thenomain
I'm also curious, just because I love digging in to the crunchy bits of new systems. I'm not a backer, no.

@Ganymede
It's closer to the Second Sight stuff. It's not what you're looking for, because each magical discipline is a series of codified effects. I just wanted to know if you were familiar with it.

@Coin said:

This is largely a Storyteller call. If someone is trying to change a "detect life" spell so that it uses Socialize, a Storyteller can (hyperbolically) do one of three things: 1. say No; 2. say Yes; 3. tell them they can do that but now their spell is dependent on actually interacting with the target, so it's only really useful for detecting shit like vampires, who are animated and seem alive, but aren't, and other such creatures.

I prefer 1. Because 2. is against the spirit of the flexibility of the rules, and 3. is being a dick.

Or 4. the Socialize + Life detection spell becomes about precisely identifying physiological cues in people you interact with. You could not only identify vampires, but spot pregnant women from the first subtle changes of their bodies and probably have a pretty easy time of catching someone in a lie.

@Ganymede said:

A friend of mine suggested that it's more pulling out the Supernatural Merits and replacing them with more flexible Merits. Which is not far from the truth.

That said: any suggestions?

Not really a suggestion, but a question: have you read up on gutter magic, from Witch Finders? It's closer to oWoD's sorcerer rules.

In @nyctophiliac's defense, they do have an advertisement thread that is currently getting activity and provides an adequate (not great, but acceptable) idea of what sorts of IC activity they intend to have happen. But then I went and looked there, and they posted none of the information I actually wanted to know regarding the state and needs of their code.

And how many hours I spent going through the nWoD books to make sure that the Merits and powers pages were absolutely perfect.

Ah yes, the time-honored tradition of fixing systemic problems with a fresh coat of paint.

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.

@Chime
Oh baby, talk bash to me.

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

@Ganymede said:

That's kind of what I'm envisioning.

Now I understand, and I approve. The limitations on XP gain and a lack of Gnosis should be sufficiently restrictive for high-end magic.

I would totally rock Ganymede's Unceasing Pedantry. And perhaps a whole slew of MUS-themed incantations, like "Sammi's Literalist Interpretation".

Do you have any ideas about how to encourage players to try to make stuff up instead of using book effects? Some of that will depend on the new Mage material coming out, but the MtAw-playing community is used to having tons of published formulae and picking from those more often than trying to concoct something from scratch. If mystical creativity is an element you're shooting for, you might have to find a way to encourage people who don't think of themselves as designers to say, "I want to do this" and then figure out how to do it, rather than looking at a list of how to do things and deciding what they want based on those options.

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

@Ganymede
My personal fantasy for the past several years has been a Mage game where the top level of each Arcanum (5 and maybe some of 4, or maybe all of 4 if I'm feeling vindictive) was just chopped off and made into effects that anybody could do, but would require either rote buys (rotes with no ability to improvise the same effect would essentially be distributed like mid-to-high magic Macguffins in that everyone could potentially have one or two) or extreme effort on the part of the mage (a la Unknown Armies).

I have a number of gripes and most of them are personal, but I think my concern is reasonable (for any new Mage game) that the people who drop XP into magic will just be better than people who invest into mundane abilities. It's pretty easy for Mage characters to be designed to completely rely on magic, and then if you run a plot where they don't have the ability to solve it with magic, they're dead in the water.

I know. Not a perfect system, by any means. The odd one out, for me, would be Prime. Maybe that's limited by your Highest Arcana.

I can get behind that just looking at the Arcana, but it makes things awkward for Obrimos. Every Path gets a choice of two Arcana to focus on, and having Prime be subordinate to the primary would force all Obrimos to go Forces first. That is, unless you cut out the Paths.

@Ganymede said:

Mage Arcana purchased as Merits, cost wise, but limited to a particular attribute. E.g., Forces is linked to Strength, so you can only buy Forces up to what your Strength is.

You have ten Arcana and nine Attributes, so one of them would have to get two Arcana.

This definitely limits the rate at which a character can get more Arcana, but you'll end up seeing a lot of unbalanced stat categories right out the door. The "problem" with having a power be all or mostly ruled by a single stat is that people don't have much system incentive to buy diverse stats.

Eclipse Phase (or similar Altered Carbon-esque setting) would be superb for this style of play. Then assassination plots could be minor setbacks. "The Game" could be lethal and totally fucked up because all of the people with the influence to play have enough cash to keep backups stashed away and get new bodies on demand.