Best posts made by Sparks

@Auspice said in Where's your RP at?:

Economy systems are cool in theory, but finding the balance is hard. You have to be willing to throttle it hard... or else risk the people that have little to no RL demands dominating the entire game.

What I did on Lost Stars (a private invite-only PennMUSH-based science fiction game ages ago) was a system I called DICE, where you had 100 units of 'time' per week. The system was then made of blocks, that would take an input, operate on it with a function, and then output something.

You could literally set up a block that said, "I have Skill X / Career Y, I will spend 40 units of my time this week making money at that." The input was time, the function was your skill/career, the output was money.

But if you wanted to train a skill up, that also cost time. (As opposed to XP; there was no XP to buy up skills, you just had to spend the time training them. It was level * 150 time, so level 1 of a skill took 150 time units, level 2 took 300, etc.) That was another block you could place in the system. The input was time, the output was progression towards a skill. (Basically, learning a skill had a 'meter' that had to fill.)

And other things could cost time, too; want to decipher that alien language? It'll take a roll (to determine how well you do) and then X amount of time working on it (where X is based off the roll). That was a custom block added to people involved in a plotline; you could even share those blocks around (to involve other people and get through a plot faster, provided they had appropriate skills).

Of course, I had other blocks as well to act as drains. Want to keep that nice apartment? That was a block that said 'this apartment will cost you X credits per week'. Want to have a ship to fly around? There was a maintenance block to pay upkeep and docking fees.

In effect, you had a breakdown that might say "Each week, I am spending 40 units of time on my 'job' running this fuel depot (which at my level means I'll get 1000 credits), 30 units of time on improving my engineering skill (until that's done), and 30 units of time on trying to reconstruct this weird alien device someone brought me (until that completes and staff moves that plotline forward). Also, 150 credits on my apartment, and 300 credits on my ship's docking and maintenance fees." And so each week it would run all of those.

The practical upshot of the system was, being 'super active' didn't give you any significant benefit economically, and everyone still had to balance their time. You could not learn all the things and get all the money and do all the cool plot things. Even if you were on every day, you had no inherent advantages (economically, at least) over a player who only logged in once or twice a week. And it had the added benefit that your income/costs weren't dependent on other player action (as can often be the case with PC crafters in coded economies).

It didn't work out perfectly; there are a whole honking stack of things I'd do differently in a modernized version of DICE. I would have the unused time carry over one week or so, because that way you would have a little leeway and not 'waste time' when training a skill or doing a plot (i.e., a block that would complete and expire) vanished, but you were away that week and didn't notice. I would automate a hell of a lot more of the block setup. I would have done away with the 'employee' block (where I could 'employ' someone to get X amount of their time per week for Y amount of my money), because it just contributed to system imbalance in ways that gave me headaches.

But I think the concept, as a whole, still has a lot of value, and gets closer to a 'balanced' economy than a lot of things I've seen.

Well, it's very hard to know how far down you need to go.

I've begun working on a very basic "how to write an Evennia command" tutorial draft for MUSHcoders, who aren't experienced Python users, and I try to explain Pythonic concepts in it, but it's hard for me to know what people don't know—and it's hard not to make everything verbose and overwhelming if I include everything. Like, do I also need to include a definition of what a "class" is and a summary of object-oriented programming at the beginning? How far down do I go in my explanations?

It's tricky to find the right balance.

@EUBanana ...damn, and I thought I was crazy.

@tehom said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Okay, here's a question. Instead of trying to write a really verbose tutorial like the half-done one I linked before, would it be easier for folks if there was just a really basic Evennia-in-a-box that provided some nice basic systems, like a bboard system, a mail system, and so on? (If the systems were really well commented in the source code, I mean. Commented on the level of that last code listing in the tutorial.)

Because writing the tutorial is slow and kind of painful as I try to think what I need to explain, while just writing the code would be much faster.

I personally feel that'd be the way to go. I think learning coding as you go via modifying existing features is much less intimidating than trying to implement them yourself, and tutorials would probably feel less daunting if they're more along the lines of 'Add a character's signature to their mail' than 'Create a simple version of a mail command'.

Maybe I'll just finish the WHO command tutorial since it's now maybe two-thirds done anyway, and then just make a basic out-of-box game someone could use. I do have what the final WHO command source will be, with copious—perhaps excessive—comments. (I don't know that I could do an entire example game with that many comments, especially since it looks much more legible without.)

Edit: And, the tutorial's done!

@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

However, if your point is that social combat is not something that was included in the original vision of the game, I think you're mistaken. If I recall correctly, Hellfrog has spoken multiple times about getting a social combat system in. There's even been talk of finding ways to weave fashion into it as a way to give bonuses and such. I know the game was advertised as a PvE game and this seems against the spirit of such, but I thought we'd concluded a while ago that it really is PvP.

She has, and rightly so.

PvE games can benefit from physical combat systems too, after all: fighting NPCs, for instance, or practicing your skills with a friendly sparring match.

You don't have to be an RL great swordfighter to play a really good combatant; it should be at least possible to potentially do diplomatic or manipulative work with dice too. Even without debates and such, you could let players try to sway an NPC with arguments rather than fighting with them. If you let the systems share 'rounds' of action, you could even have, while one player is fighting the NPC, another arguing passionately that the NPC should stop, please, we don't want to kill you.

I think a social combat system on Arx could really benefit a lot of PRP GMs, and even staff GM'ing too, and make those manipulation dice just as potentially useful as medium wpn is.

@faraday said in Seeking Accessibility Feedback:

If you or someone you know plays MUSHes with a screen reader or other accessibility device, I would love to get feedback about how to make AresMUSH more accessible to everyone. Feel free to PM me or post here or on the Ares forums.

One of the Evennia devs uses a screenreader (hence why accessibility is baked into Evennia's codebase); if no one else turns up, I imagine one of us can reach out to him and see if he can help with feedback on accessibility.

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

@Sparks prototype is indeed looking very cool. There are Django bb apps but this of course has the advantage of being adapted to Evennia - and I guarantee no third party app offers an in-game text-only version of the same thing! Hope you may consider it as an Evennia contrib as some point.
.
Griatch

I plan to. I have some last cleanup I want to do, maybe this weekend, and then I'll throw it up on GitHub for others to poke at. It was my first major Evennia thing and so probably could stand some improvement.

@Herja said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Now, if we were talking Lenfell, I feel like that would just be me. I love that story world so much. Melanie Rawn is an incredible world-builder even if her unreliability as a writer has made it so that I don't read her work anymore.

22 years this past March. 22 years. I have literally been waiting for the next book for more than half of my actual lifetime. Please just put us out of our misery and tell us you're not writing the last Lenfell book so we can move on, instead of posting every few years that you'll be working on the book soon and thus nudging the dying embers of hope back to a semblance of life!

George R.R. Martin's fans are still playing the waiting game on easy mode.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Oh man it would be fun to make another grid. And we might! But it is unlikely to be Eurus, because of our avoidance of PCs without agency. Eurus is an unpleasant place to be, if you aren't one of those in power.

My impression based on everything Aislin has learned is that "an unpleasant place to be" describes much of the rest of the world. It's just the nature of the unpleasant that varies!

(Still ICly want to see those places, though!)

Double your pleasure, double your posts... (to the tune of the Doublemint Gum commercials)

@faraday said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

I also think that we as a MUSH Community often have a very narrow definition of success. Like the only games that have perceived value are ones with a zillion logins like Arx or that run for years and years like Elendor.

If five people showed up to a game and had fun for six months, it's okay to consider that a success. Heck, that's more than some TTRPG groups get out of a campaign. Certainly more than the longevity of your typical PbPost or Storium game.

If I spent a year and a half building custom bespoke systems and doing world-building, then having 7 people have fun for four months would feel like the game was a failure, to me. But if I literally just opened it as a sandbox with minimal code and had 7 people have fun for four months? Worth it.

So my question to myself "was the amount of enjoyment generated by the game greater than the amount of effort which went into building it". And as long as I can answer yes? The game was a success.

(I mean, a zillion logins is not universally a good thing either; it means you can probably always find RP, which is definitely a plus! But as a GM, I can provide way more tailored attention to players' individual stories on a game with 7 regular players than I can on a game with 207 regular players.)

@Atomic - The mention of "rescue entertainment" makes me almost want to see a game based on—or at least inspired by—Sleepless Domain.

It's a magical girl comic which takes place in a city sealed off from the world; once it's dark out, monsters can emerge through the barrier and roam through the city. Girls will sometimes awaken as magical girls and be sent to train, after which point they're the ones allowed out after dark to try and stop all the monsters. And if you have a 'theme' to your power, you find the other folks with the same theme and team up.

But the various teams get their exploits filmed and aired, there's merchandise of them and everything, and people rank their favorites and stuff as the powers that be make it into a spectacle for the public rather than this sort of eldritch "the world outside is full of monsters and none of us understand them or what they want when they come in here, but it never ends well" existence. But if you send teenage girls out to fight monsters every night, sure, sometimes it's all fun and games and quippery as they kick ass, but sometimes Bad Things happen, and not every magical girl is even close to free of PTSD-induced nightmares when they do to get sleep. And not every magical girl makes it out alive, either...

Really, two of my favorite 'magical girl' stories that are webcomics that toy with the trope: the aforementioned Sleepless Domain and Shattered Starlight (comic tagline: "Sucks to be you, magical girl.") which is about what happens after you're doing being a magical girl (in Toronto), but can't really get away from the world you were pulled into.

And a magical girl game that played with the tropes in ways like that could be a lot of fun.

@Ghost — There used to be what felt like 200 different anime games out there back in the 1990's, and every time you blinked another one popped up. AnimeMUCK, AnimeMUSH, RanmaMUCK, ElseMUCK, ShoujoMUCK, FictionMUCK, there was a MUCK solely based on Utena which I do not honestly remember the name of, BSSMM (Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon MUX)...

The Secret World
The Secret World
also
The Secret World

(There is a chance that after writing that long post earlier, I now find myself seriously missing playing my Templar Paladin, and rereading old gdocs RP.)

@falsgrave - I would love some Rebels era Star Wars. Those early days, when the Rebellion has no central base or huge well-known heroes; there's just a loose network of cells sharing intelligence and resources. Where your information of viable targets in your home system comes from a faceless, anonymous operative going by Fulcrum. Like the first season or so, when the Ghost crew are based pretty entirely on Lothal, with no contact with other Rebel cells, save for information funneled back and forth by Fulcrum.

People might OOCly know canon FCs are involved—that Bail Organa and Ahsoka Tano are the ones who started Fulcrum to draw disparate little uprisings together, that the first Fulcrum was Ahsoka herself—but those facts would never need to come out in game; all they'd know of Fulcrum is the periodic secured transmissions giving them new intelligence on Imperial movements and goals, to inform their own operations.

If you want a little more flexibility as to cell operations, you could bump it a little further, to where a particularly well-equipped Rebel cell might have an aged frigate like the Phoenix cell's the Phoenix Home, a flagship from which smaller ships can be launched, giving them freedom to conduct operations in an entire Sector rather than a single system.

If all of the PCs were members of a cell, you have a ready-made excuse for every PC to interact with every other PC, and for any combination of characters to go on various missions. But they could still have widely varied day jobs outside of their actions for the cell; this one pilots a shuttle between the orbital station and the ground shuttleport, that one works an industrial job in an Imperial manufacturing plant, this one is a local peacekeeper, that one runs a bar or restaurant where off-duty Stormtroopers like to hang out and are sometimes a little too loose-lipped when they've had a couple of stronger-than-expected drinks...

@mietze - Honestly, if you need to constrain playerbase size, just do what Spirit Lake did, and close applications (and character creation) after you hit a certain size. Lots of people will fall off again fairly quickly to try the newest shiny when another game opened, and once that happens and you have your core playerbase you can decide whether you've got staff power to open it back up.

Closing a game to applications isn't always popular, but if you don't, and you do intend active GM'ing... gestures silently to our playerbase size on Arx, and resultant backlog of GM requests

@Seraphim73 - I will also note that focusing on a single faction means you can GM more effectively. You aren't writing plots for this group and this group and this group; you're writing plots for the cell. Missions they can undertake.

But canon FCs should absolutely be used sparingly; less a presence and more a guest appearance, like Leia's appearance in Rebels during the operation where they staged the theft of three frigates to cover up the fact that House Organa was delivering them to the Rebellion. You could, for instance, have a pilot flying a Rebellion courier mission shot down and captured, and need to go free this poor young "Wedge Antilles" guy, whoever he is, before the local authorities hand him over to this ambitious young Imperial officer named Rae Sloane. Or where you need to handle part of a mission off-world, and the only Rebellion ship available and equipped to run a blockade to get you there is this retrofitted Corellian VCX-100 light freighter named the Ghost.

If you are doing that sort of GM'ing, it's much more like running a tabletop campaign in some ways.

ETA: Dangit, I really want this now.

The reason people are talking about it taking 1-3 days for a scene is that's how long RP through Google Docs, Storium, forum RP, and so on can take.

MU* in general are not friendly to newcomers to RP; you'll find them engaging in RP on web forums, or on Tumblr, or in shared Google Docs. To draw new folks into the hobby, whatever comes next should be more approachable.

I mean, I think folks aren't talking just about converting MU* to the web, but rather making something new and web-based for RP that's more approachable to newcomers. But one of the things about it being more approachable is being more friendly to putting it down and coming back later.

@kanye-qwest said in General Video Game Thread:

@tempest said in General Video Game Thread:

I really enjoyed Inquisition, aside from all of the characters being god awful trash heaps (except Cassandra and the Iron Bull guy).

DEEP BREATH um wow you take that back Varric Tethras is the best Dragon Age companion ever, even if he did get sad between 2 and Inquisition, he is still my fake platonic true love. (also cassandra and iron bull are gr8)

sits here in the "I kind of like Solas, even though he's a lying jackass" corner

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

Their newbie help channel actually helped newbies; you would usually walk away knowing how to find an answer next time.

This is also key, but I think it's another thing that comes up naturally with successful original themes. There's no "just check the sourcebook" or "oh, you can check the wikia for the show/books" type shortcut answers to give for original themes, after all.

You already called out Aether. And whether you like or hate the rest of the game, I think Firan's "Help" channel was pretty active and generally helpful to folks feeling lost or needing info. I think Arx's Info channel is similarly pretty active and helpful (even if like 70% of it consists of @Roz beating everyone else to the answer).

Conversely, on many another game I've been on, there may not even be a 'Help' or 'Info' channel.

I think my takeaway, anyway, is that anything that's run based on something else should be set up with the assumption that a new player won't know the system/setting, and at least give them clear avenues to get answers.

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

I don't think taking a part someone's code will help me-- at least not at this stage in my learning. However, I have paid for through the humblebundle a bunch of python video tutorials, and once I get a droth of freelance work that's due tomorrow at 6pm CT (eep) done, I'll go back to those, and then maybe poke @griath or @Tehom to perhaps walk me through building a +Who for Sacred Seed.

I will happily sit down with you to help with writing a WHO command (once I'm back from my writing conference).