Posts made by Seraphim73

@sparks said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Moreover, people will not change from their current clients. I see people complain about how SimpleMU doesn't support https links and 256-color, but still refuse to change to Potato.

Hell, I'm still using zMUD. That's because I'm a stick-in-the-mud luddite grognard though. I'm sure that Blu will haul me over to Potato sooner or later. But yes, I'm part of the problem... I like what I like, and I want what I like to work with the new shininess -- even when it can't, because it hasn't been updated in a decade.

As @ThatGuyThere mentioned, I don't particularly want a bunch of images. I also don't really want to have to click on a button to page someone--it's much easier (for me) to keep my fingers on the keyboard. But a new player? Really shouldn't have to learn the 'page' command. It's archaic. It's arcane. It's a barrier to entry. If we want to gain new players, we grognards are going to have to be willing to change. If we don't want to gain new players? That's alright too, but MU*s will start to fade away, replaced by other forms of RP, because we're constantly losing players, and if we aren't gaining them to make up the numbers? Yeah... going away. That doesn't, of course, mean that you can't have a hell of a lot of fun on the way out.

Cancer can eat a bag of goat dicks. My mother, who has lived her life beyond well (started a half dozen local charities, exercised regularly (hell, she did the running leg of a triathalon last year at 70ish), ate healthily) has brain cancer. Like, Stage III or IV glioblastoma brain cancer. The kind where you're lucky if you have a year.

My daughter is 2 this February, and apparently you don't start making concrete memories until you're 3 at the earliest. This means that not only am I going to lose my mother in the next year or so, but my daughter is probably never going to remember her Mimi except from photos and videos. And she loves her Mimi. Like, adores her. Asks to go see Mimi multiple times most days. And it crushes me to think that she's never going to remember that.

Fuck cancer.

@thatguythere Yuuuuuuup. I almost wonder if Matthews was trying to psych Newton out from throwing to McCaffrey, and it just failed miserably. Because yeah, like you said, he was wide open.

@auspice Suck it, Goldilocks. Dirty ass player. Glad to see him clowned.

And the Seahawks imploded! Hurrah... always fun watching your favorite team fall apart. Much credit goes to the Rams though, they took advantage of our injuries, came in really hyped up, and played awesomely.

@faraday I would say that -combat- magic works fine. I would even say that non-combat magic outside of combat works fine too -- it's usually just a skill roll. What doesn't work very well is non-combat magic in combat. We had several hacks in for it on The Fifth World, but they weren't great, and weren't often used because you had to look at a Compendium on the wiki to use them, rather than just setting a combat action. It's definitely possible to do non-attack/defense magic this way in combat, but it's clunky, and gets back toward the WoD/Saga method of doing combat, which involves a good deal more back-and-forth between player and GM, plus more waiting for rolls and for the GM to resolve them.

@alzie said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@arkandel If we're talking about travel specifically, My personal opinion is that no game needs a grid. It's an expected feature of a game, but the reality is that nobody actually RPs in 90% of the rooms most games have. The reality is that you could open a game with a clear theme and maybe 10 important, constantly used locations alongside a coded RP Room creation wing and it would work just as well.

The problem is that if you do this, people will stare at you like you're fucking nuts.

That's actually pretty much what we've done on The Eighth Sea. We have a grid of about a dozen rooms, and then descriptions of another 30ish rooms available for use in Ares's delightful scene code. Plus anyone can always add their own rooms on the spot using the scene code. But the grid is only about a dozen rooms.

@Ganymede is right that FS3 is pretty much awesome for Mass Effect -- and @Tat is right that there are some weaknesses. I don't know of any way to do combos without a) the GM hand-tweaking things when they come up, or b) adding a system where certain attacks added statuses to their targets. But tech attacks and many biotic powers can easily work under the attack/suppress/distract/subdue system as is. With Ares, shields/barriers can easily be handled with the new Armor Specials. The best way that comes to mind for handling the fact that some weapons/powers/abilities work best against armor/shields/barriers is to have a weapon special for all weapons called Match that provides some extra penetration. It's a little cludgy and requires players and GMs to be on their toes, but it would certainly work to represent Warp vs Armor, Shield-Piercing Ammo vs Shields, etc.

@auspice I just stole (borrowed, used with permission, whatever) one from someone who could code.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And what are the up-sides? @Seraphim73 could make a custom multi-descer instead of the built-in one for all the descs that nobody's going to read Someone else could make a custom notepad instead of the built-in one.

Now why would I do that? No one's going to read them anyway. Heh.

Also, I totally can't code. I should get on that though, just to build my own custom multi-descer in every system known to MU*kind.

I use help/detail more than I do the links to online help. I like having as much as possible in one window.

There are definitely some things on The Eighth Sea wiki that could benefit from being on the MUSH itself (role lists, for instance), and I would love to hear what your suggestions might be, but we should probably handle that discussion elsewhere (I'm good with a Suggestions thread for the game, or private-messages).

@lithium I actually had to do this a while back too, when I was on Comcast. Pain in the butt.

@arkandel For a group app, I definitely want to make sure we have all of the basic roles for whatever group we're planning to make handled. Like, say if we're making a T8S crew for a small ship (although we're not doing that quite yet), I might make sure we had a captain, a gunner, a healer, a fighter, and that at least 1-2 of those people had strong Sailing too. Definitely those roles could overlap, but I would want to make sure that the basic things were covered. Likewise, for a Star Wars mercenary group app, I would want to make sure that there was a commander, a pilot (if we had a ship), 1-2 people who could handle ship guns if we had those, a healer, a techie, and a fighter or two. Again, those roles can overlap (commander/gunner, techie/fighter, healer/fighter, etc). I don't care if there are four /fighters, or two /techies, as long as we don't have more than one primary commander and one primary pilot.

For group app BGs, I usually want to at least know how each character met one another, and something about how that initial interaction went. Usually the relationships change and grow once we get on-screen, but I want at least the initial point to be settled to some degree.

Yeah, we're definitely serving as a sort of beta-test, especially since Faraday hasn't had to work with an Admin team previously, so some things that are coming up for us never came up for her (admin-only comments to requests telling the player who submitted the request that there is new activity when they can't see anything). And yes, we've had some broken-ness that we've had to deal with in being that beta-test, which Fara and Kraken have both been really good about cleaning up as quickly as possible. Definitely worth the trouble, but it has been trouble working with pre-release code (thank you very much to Fara for allowing it).

Too random.

I like my bell curves when it comes to dice. Whether they're from multiple dice being rolled at once, or from a bell curve distribution of results... I don't want a 5% chance of a critical failure and a 5% chance of a critical success on every roll (most d100 systems have similar problems for me).

Yes, I'm saying this having played on several Saga Edition games. Yes, d20 drives me batty for most settings. Yes, I can handle it better in Tabletop. But when it comes to a character that I have poured months or years of time into, I want a little more assurance that they won't drop their sword 5% of the time.

@three-eyed-crow Agreed. I think that if your (generic you) character fits perfectly into theme without a ripple... they're liable to disappear without a ripple, no matter how snowflake-y they might be. If, however, you set them up so that they either represent someone who stands out from the theme, or someone who can provide friction to those who stand out from the theme, you're liable to get a lot more good RP (provided you and those around you are willing to RP the consequences of standing out from the theme).

@the_generic_one Yeah.... no. This is an extremely privileged position to take.

While I'm all in favor of including -isms that make sense for the setting (usually a historical one... if it's a fantasy or sci-fi setting, why not arrange -isms that aren't likely to trouble people?), and playing them somewhat delicately to avoid making people upset... just expecting people to suck it up and RP things that may disturb them in real life every day is not a good way to keep people having fun on your game--or to keep them on your game at all.

I think there are ways to make the experience immersive without shoving people's noses in the crap they have to deal with RL too. Or, I don't know, do you think a lot of people RP urinary tract infections, or tooth abscesses, or paying taxes (sure, everyone RPs raising them, but how many RP paying them)? There are some things that are too painful (physically, socially, spiritually, whatever) to be required to be RPed.

@sunny I don't think that racism was the point of the movie, but considering that it involved would be Confederate holdouts, an attempted lynching, "jokes"/taunting about slavery, and several people remarking with surprise on the idea of a black law enforcement officer, I would say that it was certainly one of the lesser themes of what was otherwise a whacky steampunk-y (delightfully) bad action movie.

That said, I think it's perfectly reasonable if some games want to scrub such things from their setting, and some games want to leave it in. People will vote with their logins. I do think that any game that makes racism or sexism or homophobia a major theme should be asking to get no players outside of a small group of assholes (and if the game is all bigots with nobody to be prejudiced against, they're likely to be disappointed too).

@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Oh, and the 8th Sea, as has been mentioned, is pretty equal in regards to how shipcrews are rostered. I don't think you'll find much in the way of gender discrimination there, at least functionally speaking.

Just for the record:

Among pirates and merchants, that's true, but the national navies are still male-only (although there are a couple of female characters who served as "boys" for a while), and it is difficult as a female character to have gone to a formal school for medicine or navigation. There is no homophobia in Tortuga or on the ships. There are also ex-slave PCs, and two slave-holding plantations on the island. Both sexism and racism exist in the world of The 8th Sea, but have been toned down to "good" Hollywood levels (because we all know that there are bad Hollywood levels of both too). It might touch PCs, but usually only by their players' choice or in off-hand sort of ways ("You're a doctor? Never would have expected it from a woman. Sure, you can take a look at the dead body.").

If someone is uncomfortable with that much, they are welcome to talk to Staff about it on the game, and we'll see if we can arrange a concept that is unlikely to touch on any of it.

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Now, if it was a Wild Wild West movie game (see: Will Smith), I would not expect there to be a problem with wanting to opt-out of the racism stuff. Cos that's not the point of it (we have giant spider robots, ffs, we are not going for historical accuracy).

Interestingly enough, there was a good deal of racism in the Wild Wild West movie. Heck, they nearly lynched the black main character.

@flahgenstow It's definitely Hollywood piracy. Your pirate can be as filthy or not-filthy as they want to be (within -some- reason, no towering Louis XIV beehive hairdos every day). Swashbuckling is encouraged.