@surreality said:
As mentioned before, if I started referring to a black and white cat as a Holstein, and people suddenly asked me what the hell a cow was doing lounging about in the sun on my windowsill, I would, perhaps, consider the possibility that my repurposed use of terminology was inherently problematic.
I'm not supposed to keep cows on my windowsill? Dammit, why didn't anyone tell me this before? 
@faraday — the old 32-bit version works fine on Mojave, and everything I used it for still worked for me too. But with the next OS release it would've stopped doing so, thus I really needed to get it ported to more up to date APIs anyway. Better to work the kinks out now rather than rushing when the next OS version hits.
(I am considering when I get everything cleaned up just bundling all the dependencies into the main source tree and then turning my github repository public, make it open source.)
@lordbelh said:
At this point in the game the people who can shine are the ones who can dig into the lore of the world, and the ones who can be social. That leaves the explorers and the soldier types somewhat threading water for the time being. I'm sure other concepts, too.
But I do know that the whole dynamic exploration ideas is going to offer something to both sorts.
I'm going to chime in here for a moment. As someone playing one of the more exploration-focused characters I found on the roster (basically, I ended up playing Lara Croft), I've actually had good luck asking the staff for tidbits.
Like, I can't run out and explore things yet. But if a chunk of lore comes up, I can go, "Hey, staff. People are talking about <thing X>. Have I seen anything in my explorations that would relate to this thing?" And certainly sometimes the answer has been "no", but sometimes the answer is "yes, and <insert infodump here>." I've actually been handed a fair amount of information this way, which I then try to run around and spread out, to seed other people looking into things.
(Admittedly, I don't know how successful I've been at that last part, but I've at least tried to make a point to find excuses to spread info and stuff around with people other than my core RP group.)
So if you can think of something you could do ICly that's hard to do right now OOCly due to a lack of an appropriate system, I highly recommend putting in a +request with details just to see if there's some information you could be handed. I.e.., if you don't have investigation, using the investigation system is going to be a little bit painful, but maybe you're a merchant and think you could try to get information about <topic X> from traveling merchant NPCs you do a lot of business with. It might take them a couple of days to get to, but in my experience they may well give you a clue or tidbit of information about current things.
Another +1 for Digital Ocean. When I want a test environment for MU* and I don't want to have to actually load it onto one of my real servers (which sort of creak under the load of hosting things a bit), spinning up a DO droplet is the simple solution I usually turn to.
As for codebase, yes, it entirely depends on what you want to do. If you just want the classic old MUSH/MUX experience, and will load on an existing WoD codebase? Go with TinyMUX or RhostMUSH. If you want Rhost's particular codebase features, Theno's right that Rhost is not a bad choice; it's also more actively maintained than TinyMUX is these days. However, if you want Unicode support, last I checked Rhost did not have proper Unicode support (mind you, last I checked was years ago, so this may have changed). PennMUSH is adding Unicode, but TinyMUX is—so far as I know—the only classic flavor codebase with comprehensive Unicode support.
If you want something newer—with integrated website, etc.—then I'd recommend either Ares or Evennia.
Ares is a full-featured (and really quite awesome) codebase out-of-box that gives you a basic MUSH-like experience, with mail and forums already built in, wiki-style character pages automatically provided by the game, and a really spectacular scene-management system. However, the tradeoff is that Ares is a fully-coded game, and while it's not terribly difficult to add to it, it is—with a few exceptions—far, far harder to rip out and replace chunks of it. And the bits you can rip out and replace do come with trade-offs; last I checked, if you pulled out FS3.3 to replace it with a custom dice system, you lose a lot of the web integration (web-based character creation, web-based combat management, etc.). It seemed to be for solid technical reasons, mind you, but it's still a tradeoff. (@faraday can answer better than I can whether that's still the case; the only Ares games I've ever been on as a player use FS3, and I have let my own Ares coding fall sadly by the wayside of late. I'm like... ugh. Six or seven point releases behind current.)
Evennia, conversely, is flexible as hell; if it's possible in Python, you can do it in Evennia. You can link TensorFlow into Evennia and use machine learning to control NPCs if you want! It would be insane, but you can do it! And Evennia is built atop Django (an ORM and web applications framework), which means you can design all kinds of really interesting things in it and can (with some limitations) use most Django plugins and extensions too. However, the tradeoff—and it's a big one—is that Evennia has basically zero functionality out of box. It is not a MU* itself, but rather a MU* construction kit; it's much more in the line of classic LPMUD type servers, where you have a very basic server and then it loads a game-specific custom codebase.
For next generation servers, if you want to do something really out there, really mechanically creative and unlike any other game, and you have a good Python coder (or three) to work with you? You want Evennia. If you don't really code but you still want next-generation functionality and you're okay with sticking with FS3.3 for a dice mechanic? Set up Ares and start building; it will do right by you.
@Lithium said in Advice For Anxious ST Novices:
The best games I've ever had, I came up with the introduction and then let the players go from there, what they decided to do, determined where the story went. Admittedly this means it is difficult for new ST's who are not used to running off the cuff but it is without a doubt, the story that the players feel the most invested in because it is their own story.
One of my earliest long-term storytelling experiences—basically an online tabletop game—I had everything all planned out. I had an NPC who the party was going to rescue from possession, who'd then be grateful and would provide them with information they'd need to get started, and an avenue of approach to the people they needed to talk to.
And in the very first session, the players misinterpreted the possession, decided the NPC was evil... and killed him. Needless to say, I watched my sheaf of notes basically go up in metaphorical smoke, and had to completely wing it from there.
It ended up being a lot of fun for everyone involved, but it taught me that I should never go "okay, this is how you'll progress" and set it ahead of time; if you try to railroad the players to one specific choice, someone is likely to end up disappointed. Either the players (feeling railroaded) or you as the ST (when the players refuse to stay on the rails).
Since then, I'll usually prepare story 'beats'. Like, "if the players do X, I can have Y happen, and I think that's a likely path so I'll have some preparations made for that". ("If you find the giant demon-beast that you might stumble across, I'll have a truly Lovecraftian description of it already prepared so you don't have to wait 20 minutes on me to type one up.") If you do go to this casino, here's a few NPCs I can use in this scenario; if you don't, hey, I'll find ways for you to stumble across this one of those NPCs. Etc.
I'm right about what the players will do maybe half of the time; the other half of the time, I find myself going, "Well. I did not expect that. Let's see what happens next." And honestly, those can be some of the best ones. 
@Griatch said in Hosting and codebase recs:
I just want to point out that while Evennia is indeed a Mu* creation toolkit of sorts, and the core is deliberately 'bare', there are a lot of contribs to play with and build on these days.
I mean, yes, but most of the contribs are also for a very specific type of game; most seem built very much for MUD-like fantasy setups, which is also true of Ainneve somewhat. And while Arx's codebase is less MUD, more MUSH-plus-8-zillion-things, it's also very, very Arx; if you don't want to build an Arx-like game with discoverable lore and coded organizations and a very specific dice system, the Arx codebase is prooobably not a good starting point.
If you want something more like a modern urban fantasy game with simple sheets and a basic dice mechanic for resolving disputes, none of the contribs will be particularly useful to you.
@Lotherio said in Hosting and codebase recs:
Penn supports web socket, can do web client at least (not fully integrated portal as with Ares).
I will note that since Penn supports SQL integration, it is actually possible to do an 'integrated' web portal if you are creative. I've done it with TinyMUX's integration before, where there were locked pages on a mediawiki installation controlled solely by the game. When things were changed on the game, it would literally just manually add a new revision of a given locked page directly in SQL (which, hey, the lock is only valid from the web side of Mediawiki, since it's in the Mediawiki codebase; nothing stops you from rewriting the page when you control the database...) and thus update the wiki. It was horrible because of the indisputable formula MUSHcode + SQL + mediawiki templating = hell, but it worked, and had character pages on a mediawiki that live-updated from the game. Did the same thing with other integrations; a calendar system that was backed by SQL, the Invision Powerboard forum software, etc.
It is not how I would recommend building a live-updating MU* website, but it's doable in Penn or TinyMUX. It is sheer hell to code, but it is doable.
@Roz said in Web-based MU poll:
And another benefit was just, uh. Searching capability in general. Which the Evennia website build doesn't have, and Arx hasn't tried to add itself yet. (My understanding is that it's a lot more intensive than anyone would like to think.)
Every URL endpoint is provided by different chunks of system. So, for instance, my Paxcomm package for Evennia can add /boards and /mail to the website of an Evennia game.
The problem is, there's no standardized 'search this module' API, so writing 'search' would require modifying the actual Evennia APIs to allow a way for each of these modules to register a search handler per module, which could take a search term and return a title, link, and summary for each result. Even then, that would require each module to then implement this or else the search still wouldn't return results. If this functionality was added and I didn't have it implemented in Paxcomm, then searching bboards wouldn't work.
The fact that any 'app' (i.e., extension to Evennia) can add stuff to the website is very powerful, but makes a centralized search very difficult.
Yeah, I need to push the 64 bit version publicly live soon, before Catalina drops in September. Otherwise the 32 bit older version dies. 
Well... to be honest, @Arkandel, I didn't have to deal with that problem much, since Lost Stars was an invite only game; anyone who got invited was able to have things hand-tweaked. (I had two staffers, myself and a friend; I was not looking to have a game with a huge population, because then I would cry and hide under my desk at the workload.)
I think, if I had a larger game that was using a second-generation DICE now, I'd probably have made it part of the chargen system; once you'd set up your career, you'd get asked for a percentage split between skill, profit, and story. Based on that split and your character's age, you'd get a certain amount of additional skill mojo to put on your sheet. Then when your character was approved, you'd get a certain amount of money in the bank (calculated off age and the skills). And the remainder of your time would be sent to staff to use as a hook into things. "Oh, hey, this person's app has them spending 60% of their time up to now doing story-related things, and they're a stellar cartographer. Let's say they were exploring uncharted space, and hook them into this plotline, as well as throwing them a couple cool metaplot hints and an NPC contact."
@Auspice said in Mac Client Recommendations?:
@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Mac Client Recommendations?:
@faraday said in Mac Client Recommendations?:
Most people I know use it to compose a pose while simultaneously carrying on a page or channel convo. I've always been so accustomed to just using the clipboard as a copy/paste buffer that even when I've used Potato on occasion I haven't found myself utilizing the dual-input window. But maybe it's something you get used to over time.
This is primarily what I use it for and I find it a lot more helpful than I did in the beginning. Channel convo I can just let scroll and whatever, but sometimes there are pages I feel like I should respond to right away. I also use it as a quick reference to bbposts or character finger info while writing. Even when I tried to save poses by copy/pasting, if you aren't vigilant about it every time, they're just gone. And recreating poses, much like copy/pasting hyperlinks from SimpleMU because it fucks up links, is a PITA I wasn't entirely aware I hated until I no longer had to deal with it.
Much of this. When I'm running a scene, it's nice to be able to draft and edit and update my poses while also keeping an eye on the scene itself, answering questions, etc.
I lose way too many poses to copying to the clipboard... and then getting distracted just long enough to copy something else.
I've done this more than once. I'll admit, it's part of why I have one of those Clipboard helpers (which keeps the last 15 things I've copied), and my old workaround was just to paste it into the input of a spawn window.
But I too have done this, especially when GM'ing, to the point I usually just have Sublime Text open to write the next GM emit. Which is, yes, why A2 has the 'you want one input area? You want six input areas? Whatever! Just enter a number!' functionality in the current prototype.
Are you talking system here, or setting, @Thenomain?
Because sometimes the two are pretty heavily tied together, and sometimes they aren't.
I feel like playing with Exalted or Scion, for instance, you're inheriting setting as well as system. Whereas "d20" or "GURPS" is a more generic structure you can build settings on.
I am rarely super-excited about the dice mechanics of a game, though I admit I love my time/advancement system I used elsewhere. There are systems I think 'oh, well, I already have that in my brain so I can use it easily', but I'm not going to go, "Oh, this game with this random setting is using GURPS, so I'm super stoked!"
@Thenomain said in Mac Client Recommendations?:
'you want one input area? You want six input areas? Whatever! Just enter a number!'
You want used electronics? You want broken electronics? Come to Manolios Ugly One's Lectro-pawn.
"Khajiit has input windows, if you have coin."
@faraday I like Asimov's approach to Nightfall, where he said since the book was in English, the terms and idioms were translated accordingly, but readers could feel free to pretend that he used the original alien cultural words instead.
I also present: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/10/01/xkcd-gets-it-right-again/
If the difference is important, use a custom term; if the mounts on your world are amphibious carnivorous snails, don't call them horses, but if it's an herbivorous quadruped with no meaningful differences from a horse... yeah, it's probably best to call it a horse and let folks move on.
This is definitely a pretty cool use of Evennia!
I've been continually plugging away at my own toolbox of Evennia stuff—bboards that also work as web-forums, in-game mail that also has a web interface, an exploration system, web-based chargen, etc.—so it's pretty awesome to see someone else hacking away on Evennia, too.
@nyctophiliac said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
That being said, I think the most frustrating things for me have been the lack of social combat system (which means everyone settles everything by duels lending to a "Euro L5R" feel - not necessarily bad, but frustrating for the social types)
Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games.
Physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.
Let's say you're holding a secret that could get someone you care about killed; a mother, an uncle, a lover, whatever. I suspect you're hiding something, so I +check a given stat and succeed highly, and go "Are you hiding something?" Let's say you say yes, so I immediately roll a 'manipulation' check and then say "Great, I convinced you: tell me the secret." At which point you go, "I don't want my character to die just because you rolled high manipulation", and call staff in.
What I keep meaning to do somewhere someday is actual combat, but with various 'methods' as weapons. So just like you have big weapons that use 'huge wpn' as the skill, daggers that use 'small wpn', etc., you would have satire, logic, manipulation, etc.
When you started a 'social combat', you'd set some sort of goal from a list of 3 or 4 'types' of combat, and the 'hitpoints' would be based off things accordingly. Are you trying to convince your opponent? Base it off willpower+perception. Are you trying to humilate them, in which case you base it off of reputation.
Then you'd get to wield 'manipulation' (works off of charm + manipulation, countered by the higher of willpower for resistance or perception for "I see through you"), 'logic' (works off of intellect and whatever, countered by intellect), 'satire' (works off of charm and entertainment/riddles/whatever, countered by... I don't know, but something), etc.
And you'd do 'damage' to the hitpoints—the resistance—of the other person. When someone is 'knocked out', your argument has convinced them.
It has the benefit of reusing a lot of a given game's combat code, so social and physical combat can share a lot of functionality. Not to mention you have the fun of trying to figure out someone's weak points. High intellect, but low willpower? You want manipulation rather than logic to try to win them to your opposing viewpoint, clearly.
And while you might STILL run into the problem of "I don't want to give up the secret that will get my loved one killed", it's less likely to be a bitter point than it is off of a single set of rolls.
Plus, I think those sort of social combats would just be FUN to watch and to play.
And I shouldn't be theorizing system design in an advertisement thread but ANYWAY.
@nyctophiliac said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
...and lack of information/wiki type stuff (They are really good about answering your setting questions, but honestly I would love to dig my teeth into some reading about the place). I know these things are on the way though and the place is still in Beta.
To be fair, some of this is purely IC and can be sought out ICly. There are Reasons
that a lot of the theme—at least the historical components of it—are sort of obscured and hazy even to the characters themselves.
However, I do completely get what you mean; it took me a while to get my feet under me at first, too. People would mention "the Tragedy" and it took me a while to realize both that they could mean the Tragedy of Sanctum (when most of the main royal branch inherit-the-throne Valardin were killed) or the Tragedy (an orphanage in the Lower Boroughs), and a bit longer still to figure out if the Tragedy was something that had happened a few years ago (yes), a decade or more ago (no), or in the distant mists of time (also no).
So I do wish there was a more immediately clear "Quickstart Guide to Theme". Maybe it's worth making a little Player's Handbook to Arx to put up somewhere.
I should throw the bboards I made at the contrib directory, once I check if they still work properly on 0.7. I suspect they'll need changes.
Posting this here because I was an unintentional jerk and accidentally kind of participated in derailing an advertisement thread with this... and besides, it's relevant to far more than just one game.
Social combat is one of those things that has always been a huge headache for games, and I've been looking more and more seriously at trying to design a solution for that.
In particular, physical combat is easy. There's no "I found your sword-strike unconvincing"; you got hit, you got hit. Social combat, though? That's harder to define.
Let's say you're holding a secret that could get someone you care about killed; a mother, an uncle, a lover, whatever. I suspect you're hiding something, so I +check a given stat and succeed highly, and go "Are you hiding something?" Let's say you say yes, so I immediately roll a 'manipulation' check and then say "Great, I convinced you: tell me the secret." At which point you go, "I don't want my character to die just because you rolled high manipulation", and call staff in.
This is a giant headache for staff, and often leads to bitterness. Either the person who suddenly had to give up their secret is bitter, or the person who has amazing manipulation dice and yet didn't get to use them to learn a useful secret is bitter.
Moreover, while physical combat usually only needs to encapsulate ranged and melee combat, social combat needs to cover a variety of things. The ones I see are:
Given that, what I keep meaning to do somewhere someday is actual combat, but with various 'methods' as weapons. So just like you have big weapons that use 'huge wpn' as the skill, daggers that use 'small wpn', etc., you would have satire, logic, manipulation, etc.
When you started a 'social combat', you'd set some sort of goal from a list of 3 or 4 'types' of combat, and the 'hitpoints' would be based off things accordingly. Are you trying to convince your opponent? Base it off willpower+perception. Or maybe you are trying to humilate them, in which case you base it off of reputation.
Then you'd get to wield 'manipulation' (works off of charm + manipulation, countered by the higher of willpower for resistance or perception for "I see through you"), 'logic' (works off of intellect and whatever, countered by intellect), 'satire' (works off of charm and entertainment/riddles/whatever, countered by... I don't know, but something), etc.
And you'd do 'damage' to the hitpoints—the resistance—of the other person. When someone is 'knocked out', your argument has convinced them.
It has the benefit of reusing a lot of a given game's combat code, so social and physical combat can share a lot of functionality. Not to mention you have the fun of trying to figure out someone's weak points. High intellect, but low willpower? You want manipulation rather than logic to try to win them to your opposing viewpoint, clearly.
And while you might STILL run into the problem of "I don't want to give up the secret that will get my loved one killed", it's less likely to be a bitter point than it is off of a single set of rolls.
Plus, I think those sort of social combats would just be FUN to watch and to play.
I don't know what others think, though. Since I am kind of trying to build a toolkit for stuff like this, I'm curious whether others think this would be fun...
@Griatch said in Evennia 0.9 released:
The player-options have been partially converted to use a generic format with
validation. This is specifically used for styling information, and allow e.g.
a player to specify how EvTables are displayed to them (like changing the
colors and symbols used). (PR by Volund).
Oh thank the lord; this means in my little custom core I've been writing for future projects, I can kill off my @display command; that was meant to let you set all your UI preferences (header/footer colors for all output, EvTable styling, etc.) One less thing in the core, one more thing in the base and globally used... that's a win. Remind me to thank Volund later.
(Though the idea of converting all of Arx's codebase from Evennia 0.7/Python 2.7 to Evennia 0.9/Python 3.7 gives me a mild feeling of existential terror.)
Since several folks asked for this a while ago, and I keep getting periodic prods on this, here's the very beginnings of codifying DICE 2.0 in a simplified system. I thought I'd share a little of it for feedback. (Mostly, so far, 2.0 is functionally identical to 1.0 save with me slowly building it for Evennia in Python as part of a toolset, rather than PennMUSH in MUSHcode.)
Dynamic Interactive Character Events
DICE is a framework on which other systems can be built. At heart, it is simply a glorified flowchart made up of blocks; each block has inputs (time, money, and/or resources), a formula, and outputs (money, resources, or progression that fills a 'meter' towards a trigger).
Players can thus assemble 'blocks' to be executed on a weekly basis, and things will flow through the system.
The basic purpose of the original DICE system was to allow some balance in an online gaming environment. It was meant to solve three specific problems:
On Lost Stars, the game DICE was originally designed for, there were only two staffers; on a game with a rather larger staff, point 3 may be slightly less important. Still, having the option would be nice. (Examples in this document are still taken from Lost Stars, however, rather than made more general. In case you wonder why things list Xenolinguistics as a sample skill.)
DICE 2.0 is meant to be an extension of the DICE ideals to a more generic system, while also doing away with the 'employment' mechanic which ended up unbalancing DICE 1.0 in various ways.
At the heart of DICE is the concept of Time. Every player has an allocation of 100 units of time, representing 100% of their available time for that week. Time is the currency you spend in DICE in order to do things.
The next major portion of DICE is the concept of 'resources', which can be generated by various methods, and spent for others. A player can have a given quantity of a resource; by default, there's always at least 'money', but there could be other types of resource as the game requires. Influence, for instance, might represent favors owed to a player.
The central concept of DICE is 'blocks'. Players will have a 'library' of blocks available to them. Some are standardized ('practice a skill'), some are specific to their skills ('work as a technician'), some will be ones custom to them added by staff ('work on translating that alien tablet').
A given block has three components.
A block has one or more inputs; a handful of system blocks will have zero inputs (potentially such as income generation). Each Input has a defined type, and players can define how much of that type they will put in per action round. Almost all blocks take Time as an input, but some may also take Resources (Money, Influence, etc.). When DICE executes an action round, the quantities a player has put in will be taken from the player and passed into the formula.
A block generally has one or more outputs; a handful of system blocks will have zero outputs (potentially such as resource drains). An output can be a resource such as money or influence, or it can fill a 'progress bar' which leads towards some other coded effect. Examples of progress bars might be the amount of work needed to complete a research project, or the amount of time/effort put towards learning a new skill.
The progress bar output is a special case, given how it is potentially backed by things other than a player. For instance, it would be possible to create a 'plot' system, and have several progressions on a given plot; how far have you gotten in translating this tablet (Xenolinguistics), and meanwhile how far have you gotten in negotiating right of travel through alien territory (Diplomacy) to get to the place you need to take the ancient alien tablet? Every player on the plot could use a block to progress one or the other of those metrics, but the resulting progress bar would be shared by all.
A block has a single 'formula': something which, given the input values and a player, will generate the actual output values.
A formula might be as straightforward as "given an input of X time, output X towards the progress bar" to practice a skill, where the amount needed to fill the bar is determined by the targeted level of the skill. (A progress bar value of 150 for level 1 of a skill, 300 for level 2, and so on.)
A formula could be more complicated and draw on player stats, such as "given an input of X time, output an amount of money equal to X * the player's career skill" in order to have a 'do your job' block which generates baseline income.
A formula could involve dice rolls, such as "given an input of X time, output an amount towards the progress bar equal to the result of a Mental + Xenolinguistics roll, multiplied by (X / 2)", in order to slowly progress towards completion of translating an alien language.
Instances of some blocks can be shared between players. This allows for a plot to involve multiple people; if Bruce asks to translate some ancient alien writings, the staff can quickly create a block which tracks how close he is to completing it, with a formula that rolls his xenolinguistics each time.
As Bruce puts time into the block, of course, the progress bar slowly fills. But maybe it's going too slow, or Bruce needs to do other things; he can run a command to share the block with other players, allowing them to join in as well. If they don't have xenolinguistics, that might be a problem, but those who do can put their time and dice towards filling the progress bar as well.
Involving others in your plot is good!
Another useful concept is linked blocks, which share an output. For instance, for a larger plot, one might have a progress bar of "how prepared are we for this planetary siege?" You could define a couple buckets (progress bars) which represent defensive measures, offensive measures, and so on. You could then define multiple different blocks that pointed to these same buckets; one block might be rolling command+leadership to add to the buckets, and represent people trying to leadership things, while another might be intellect+war to add to the offensive bucket, and so on. These buckets would all add to the same shared buckets for a given plot, allowing you to share a single metric across many buckets.
Similarly, if you had an opposed action, you could have a bucket with one block that added to the value and another subtracted from it, and in the end you could see who ends up with more influence over the result.
If I didn't already have a Grayson fealty alt, I'd certainly consider a Deepwood. Sam and her crew are good people!
