Best posts made by Sparks

@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:

The Mummy remake, meanwhile, shifted to 'safe' by (according to what I've read) emphasizing the role of its bankable white dude lead

When you say "the Mummy remake", I am guessing from "in a use of an IP that had paid off big not too long back" that you mean the 2017 disaster that happened to share a title, not the 1999 remake (which was legitimately called a 'remake' of the original 1932 movie, though it's a loose one at best).

I'm only double-checking because you're drawing parallels with a 1998 movie that came out around the same time as the 1999 remake. And if you're talking smack about Rick and Evelyn, I will object with every fiber of my soul. Because what's wrong with that movie? What would I change about it?

@sparks said in MU Things I Love:

Bringing a long-term code project for a game to completion, and being ready to unleash it on a bunch of guinea pigs to test. In particular, I love reaching the point in a system where it's functional and you can start to really tweak it or add new features, rather than still constructing the basic functionality.

To add to this, when players are enthusiastic about testing the system, and give you lots of useful constructive feedback. Especially when they seem to have fun doing it; there's nothing better than seeing people enjoying something you've made!

Pissed off that a friend just passed away from heart failure this afternoon.

Not really sure what I'm angry at. But I'm angry.

Here's my flat take on it: if someone (staff or player) has feelings about someone else (staff or player) OOCly to such a degree that it is disruptive, that's a problem. It has nothing to do with NPCs; it doesn't matter whether those involved are NPCs or PCs. If it is disruptive on an OOC level, it's a problem.

If it's the "my faction-leader PC will only play with this one person because they are my bestest friend on the game", it's a problem.

If it's "these two players have TS'd and now the first one is trying to control the second one by becoming OOCly furious and accusing the other player of 'cheating' if they're alone with another character on +where", it's a problem.

If it's "because this person is my bestest OOC buddy, I will give them access to IC resources I control that other players don't have", it's a problem.

If it's "I OOCly hate this person with the passion of a thousand burning suns and, by the old gods and the new, I will see every plot they try to launch go down in flames", that's a problem.

If it's "I OOCly think this person is awful because they betrayed me on another game, so I'm going to spread gossip throughout the entire playerbase that they can't be trusted, and turn all the other players against them", that's a problem.

If someone TSes and that doesn't happen, it's not a problem. The fact that some people do get that way when they TS shouldn't mean that you ban TS, any more than the fact that some people do get that way when they encounter an RP style they really like means you should ban all good RPers.

TS is one possible avenue to the problem, sure, and I guess the reason people tend to leap to it is that it's the most scandalous to gossip about. "I hear Joe and NPC Bob dress up in fursuits and engage in BDSM every Wednesday when their RP times line up!" is, presumably, a lot more fun to whisper around and gasp about than "So, I hear NPC Bob really likes Joe's RP style; I guess he's obsessed with the really atmospheric way Joe poses."

So, no, TS isn't the problem. The actual problem is when you have someone with an OOC opinion about someone else that is so strong it is literally disruptive to gameplay in some manner, whether that manner is beneficial to the target of this feeling or not.

Automated GM-Free Adventures (a.k.a. "Shardhavens")

Basic Intro

So, as some of you know, I've been working on the first phase of an automated 'exploration' system on Arx, which will allow people to go out and have adventures on their own that can result in treasure/lore without requiring a GM present, but which still have risk.

The first phase involves generating 'shardhavens', which are a specific bit of Arxian lore: abyssally-tainted ruins and other places, where monsters live and treasures or lost bits of knowledge can be found.

These shardhavens are procedurally-generated mazes which are full of monsters to fight, treasures and trinkets and lore to find, puzzles to solve, traps to disarm, and other obstacles to pass.

In effect, they're each a tiny multiplayer roguelike that happens to give you interesting things you can use in the main game (and which come with an attendant risk of injury and/or death at the hands of horrifying monsters).

This thread is as much to share my own system design thoughts as anything else, but I know some people have been curious about it.

Basic Concepts

To start out, I defined the concept of a 'shardhaven type'. For instance, an old crumbling ruin will need different descriptions than a dank cavern system, and both will need different descriptions than a twisted, abyssal forest.

Shardhaven types are dynamic; we can add new ones as-needed. All other 'pieces' that get put together for a shardhaven when one is generated are marked as belonging to one or more shardhaven types, and so the system can easily find what it's looking for.

The concepts the system uses right now are fairly simple:

• Shardhaven definition
• Tilesets and Mood Fragments
• Obstacles
• Treasures/trinkets
• Monsters

Procedural Generation

The first and most important stage of a shardhaven's creation is to generate an actual layout. This is done through a procedural generation maze-maker I wrote, using a fairly standard recursive backtracking algorithm. (Since in my variant each 'wall' is one cell square in size, the algorithm has the limitation that it requires odd dimensions; a 21x13 grid is acceptable, but a 20x14 one would not be.)

Each square of the maze is assigned a template from the tileset; a tileset is a series of names and 'mad libs' type descriptions, such as:

The ceiling of this once-grand room arches high overhead. {} Columns line both sides of the room, making for shadowed alcoves where anything could be hiding. {} {}

When the rooms are instanciated later, each of those bits marked with {} will be replaced by a Mood Fragment, which is a 1-2 sentence blurb like, "There are long, deep lines scored into the stone near the entrance, as though something once desperately clawed at the wall."

Once the maze is generated and tilesets are assigned to all the squares, exit markers are generated between each square of the maze; some of these exits have an Obstacle assigned to them, to make something the group will have to pass.

At this point, though, the shardhaven is still just a 'layout'; there's no actual rooms that players could go through. The layout actually stores all the 'state' of a shardhaven: who's explored where, who has disarmed what traps, and so on.

When a shardhaven is 'instanciated', it goes through that layout and dynamically builds all the rooms/exits necessary for a player to actually move through the shardhaven. It's at the instanciation phase that the 'mad libs' bit of tileset descriptions are filled in with Mood Fragments.

A shardhaven can also be deinstanciated; all the rooms and exits will be destroyed, but the layout remains intact. When reinstanciated, doors that have been broken down or traps/puzzles that have otherwise been disarmed/solved will still have their state (unless someone has 'reset' the shardhaven, which clears all that data).

Obstacles

Obstacles prevent a party from passing through an exit until they're addressed. There are three types of obstacles:

• Obstacles that each player must pass every time. (Think a chasm to jump over, which you have to jump back over if you backtrack.)
• Obstacles that each player must pass once. (Think a trial of spirit, where you don't have to pass it a second time when you backtrack.)
• Obstacles that only one player needs to pass and then the whole party can go through. (Think locks to pick, puzzles to solve on a door, and so on.)

Each obstacle has a collection of solutions. A solution can be a list of bits of IC knowledge (@clues), where if you possess that knowledge you don't even have to roll because you have the necessary knowledge to pass it. But more commonly, a solution is a dice roll; to jump a chasm, for instance, might be a dexterity+athletics roll.

Some solutions will pass the obstacle for everyone. The chasm might have a dexterity+carpentry roll to construct a crude rope bridge, in case you have a carpenter along; if the bridge is constructed, now everyone can pass instead of having to each jump across the chasm.

When you attempt to take an exit that's blocked by an obstacle, it tells you what your options are and lets you pick one. On failure, some obstacles will hurt you (don't fall into the chasm!); all obstacles will prevent you from attempting again for three minutes (to avoid people just spamming attempts, and to encourage RP in the room while you wait).

Monsters

When you enter a room, there's a chance of a monster appearing to attack you. (You can 'sneak' from room to room -- a dexterity+stealth roll -- to reduce this chance.)

Monsters are basically a random encounter table; there are 'mook' monsters (where multiple weaker monsters will attack you) or 'boss' monsters (bigger single monsters). When a monster attacks, everyone in the room is pulled into coded combat, where you have the opportunity to guard other players, attack, attempt to flee, and so on.

When a monster dies, there's a chance of it dropping alchemical materials (basically monster-parts) or a treasure.

Treasures (Trinkets and Weapons)

These are also randomly generated from what are called 'loot fragments'; a list of adjectives ('shining', 'gleaming', 'sinister', etc.), a list of weapon decorations, a list of item types, and so on.

A trinket might be an {adjective} {material} {item}, like a 'gleaming copper lantern' or a 'sinister orichalcum lyre'. (These items will actually figure into the magic system eventually, as they'll be able to be broken down for magic power to use in rituals.)

Weapons, meanwhile, are actual weapons for use in the combat system; those that are of lower-quality materials are just 'an ancient {material} {weapontype}', like 'an ancient rubicund halberd'. Those of high-quality materials actually get names generated from first/last fragments, such as 'Songstealer, a diamondplate longsword' or 'Neverweeper, an alaricite longbow'.

The material, quality, and type (small, medium, huge, or bow) of a weapon are picked from a probability table, and then the name and a description are generated.

Shardhaven Configuration

Everything about a shardhaven -- spawn rates and chances, how often monsters are 'mooks' versus 'boss' monsters, how difficult the monsters should be overall, and so on -- is tuned in the original Shardhaven record. This makes it easy to tweak a shardhaven, or to make one a lot more difficult than another.

Down the road, I plan to add a graphical shardhaven editor so that staff can actually manually tweak a shardhaven's layout after generation -- placing guaranteed monster encounters, marking a room that will absolutely contain a treasure, and so on.

Future Features

Shardhavens are just the first part of the greater exploration system, and this is only the first phase of shardhavens. There are still things I plan to add even from a player side, like:

• Potentially-trapped chests containing trinkets, treasure, or rare materials for the crafting system.
• The ability to rediscover lost lore in a shardhaven, thus earning @clues.
• Integration with the magic system down the road, where there will be magic-using ways to pass some of the obstacles.
• Wrapping a shardhaven journey into an 'expedition' which you need to actually ICly fund before you can embark on your adventure, and which will track what sort of things you found.

Wrap-Up

I've been trying hard to make the obstacles have an interesting variety of skills involved, so that there's reasons to bring smart people who aren't swordy-fighters (who then you want your tanks to protect in combat!), and so on.

I've even added a command to allow people with leadership to make a party leadership roll (once every 30 minutes) to reduce the difficulty of an obstacle temporarily, in order to represent drawing the party together to help someone pass along who might not otherwise be able to do a 'jump the chasm' obstacle.

But I am curious about balance -- about what sort of skills people want to be able to bring to these areas -- and what people think of such a system in general. The players I've run through the Castle of Testing (my test shardhaven) seem to have enjoyed themselves, but I'm always curious what sort of things people most /want/ to see out of exploration.

@Testament said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

@Sparks You do realize this is more or less the MU equivalent to an argument against the fair wage act, right?

Maybe that's not the intent, but hoo boy that's how it reads.

Let's, for a moment, assume that employment and an in-person GM'd scene with an NPC are a reasonable metaphor for each other in this case.

You're correct; the Fair Play Act prevents me from denying someone employment on the basis of several protected classes, such as gender identity, sexuality, race, etc. Howeer, the Fair Pay Act also still lets me deny someone employment on the basis that they're not actually good at the job I'm hiring for.

Let's say someone gets to the interview and tech screen stage at my company. I cannot disqualify this person based on their race, sexuality, gender identity, or any other protected class. Nor should I want to. But I can still disqualify them because "this person was actively hostile even during the interview, shouted insults at the interviewers, and I think that attitude is detrimental to getting the job done". I can absolutely disqualify them on the grounds that "I am hiring for a firmware engineering position and frankly I'm not convinced this person actually knows C, much less C++." Those are not protected classes, and they are relevant to their suitability for employment.

In this analogy, where deciding whether or not you want to GM an in person, on screen scene for someone is equivalent to giving them a job interview? Traits like "your roleplay is dull as dishwater", or "you are actively hostile whenever roleplay does not go your way", or "when you don't get exactly what you want you revert to one-line poses and sometimes just idle for an hour"? Those are not protected classes. And further, when the 'job' you're referring to is about having fun telling collaborative story via live roleplay, I would argue that your ability to actually make roleplay enjoyable for others (including the GM) is not only not a protected class, but actually a fairly relevant consideration in my deciding if you have the ability to perform the job I am 'hiring' for.

So, even if we apply the Fair Pay Act as an analogy here—which I will note, I still think is a ridiculous comparison—this is still actually acceptable.

I will further note I think it is ridiculous to use the Fair Pay Act here as an analogy here. I feel like a much better analogy would be to make the plot advancement a piece of information you need to get to the player, and GM'ing an in-person scene with an NPC is equivalent to calling someone on the phone; doing some rolls and sending the result is the equivalent of sending an email. If I know the person can never get to the point on the phone, if I know they ramble and I'll never be able to politely hang up, if I know the phone call will make me miserable, if I have made 17 phone calls in the past three days and I'm so tired of talking on the phone, if I just don't feel social enough to want to talk on the phone to anyone this week? I can send them an email instead. The person might wish they had gotten a phone call, but I still got them the information either way.

@faraday — There's several answers to that.

First off, even with really random test groups running, there's only been two obstacles that stopped a group dead in their tracks; I've tried to tune those two a bit more. Most obstacles have multiple ways to pass them with widely varied skillsets needed, so there's usually something someone can do. It hasn't always been easy, but generally groups have gotten through. But yes, this is dependent on good obstacle design.

Second, it's not intended that you run an entire good-sized Shardhaven at once; you may encounter an obstacle and have to backtrack to find another path, or even return to the city and research information on how to pass it, or find someone who can help, and come back to continue on another expedition. You might even have to flee when someone is too badly injured to continue!

Third, not all Shardhavens will be GM free. I'm intending to build a kit that will let players GM a Shardhaven for other players, like a D&D adventure module. They'll have the ability to spawn in monsters, any special loot that was approved when their PRP was approved, and so on. And they'll have a way to bypass obstacles for the group they're GMing for if the players come up with some really creative solution the obstacle didn't account for.

@Jeshin said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

I think @Tinuviel is saying whether he excluded red heads, irish people, black people, gay people, etc etc. That the specific group excluded doesn't matter to the question of whether excluding a group makes the game owner and/or staff bigoted.

I think the issue here is that from a game owner's standpoint, it's "I feel <concept X> is played poorly/fetishized/overused, therefore I shall forbid it on game-balance grounds and grounds of taste." And while there are players who do play trans characters very well, and use that aspect of the character to give them genuine depth, I can't deny that there are also players out there who also do borderline-insulting fetishy things with trans characters. (And lesbian characters. And intersexed characters. And nonbinary characters. And redheads. And...)

But to someone whose RL identity falls into <concept X>, seeing something like "no lesbian characters will be allowed on the game" or "no trans characters will be allowed on the game" is probably going to feel like a rejection of the player themselves, regardless of whether that exclusion is made with what the game owner believes is the best intentions. It will still often put a player on the defensive; "I'm trans iRL. You feel people like me don't have a place in this narrative?" or something similar.

People probably aren't going to find common ground here, because they're looking at a thing from two completely different angles. It's like a statue in a museum; two people can be looking at the statue at the same time, but if one person's standing in front of the statue and looking at the face/chest, they're going to have a different perception of the statue than the person standing behind it (and who can't see the face) does.

Now that I have caffeine (if not actually any sleep) in my system and my brain is somewhat more orderly and somewhat less "blearily stream of consciousness", I shall try to be more clear (though knowing me, just as overly verbose) as I type up things between working on actual-work-stuff...

@Tinuviel said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:

@Sparks said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:

That said... even if it helps with some understanding and forces you to break out of unconscious biases? It's even more important to take those experiences and really internalize that they've got nothing on what POC folks have to go through RL.

While I agree that yes, breaking biases and doing one's best to reach a better understanding of those different to one's self... I honestly don't understand how playing a POC on a MU is going to do it. A character on a MU is not at all the same as an avatar in a game world, especially if the game world is fictional. The choices you can make in a video game are exceptionally limited when compared -to that of a MU*, so playing "someone with dark skin" isn't the same as playing an actual black person from Harlem.

I mean, sure, if you're not RP'ing then you don't have to force yourself to think about things that way because you're constrained by the choices the game allows you. Now, that said, RP is definitely a thing that happens in MMOs—or outside MMOs, but with those characters and settings—so sometimes you get the weird duality of having that avatar viewed as "you" and trying to also tell a story with them a'la a MU*, but I grant that the majority of MMO players don't RP the characters they make.

Even without the RP, you may still be forced to confront unconscious biases and assumptions in other ways, but maybe not those. That doesn't change the fact that putting yourself into the head of a character with wildly differing experiences than your own can help to widen your viewpoints. Maybe not in ways that aren't as much of a shock to the system as having someone let loose on you with a string of really vile racial epithets in the middle of online gaming, I grant.

The point I was very clumsily and blearily trying to get at is that you can find ways to break your biases and shift your viewpoint in unexpected places; witness that deciding to play a dark-skinned avatar in online games leads to many people assuming that you must be a POC iRL and feeling free to let loose with racist invective at you, which can be a viewpoint-shifting experience you would not otherwise have. And that only magnifies my feeling that an attitude that you should play or write only what you've personally experienced is horribly restrictive in a number of ways.

I've never been an insane nocturnal elf obsessed with death and spiders. Or a mage trying very hard to hold the world together after the passing of their teacher, who had basically become a lynchpin of the world they lived in. Or an explorer trying to map the forgotten parts of the world. Or a parkour enthusiast in a semi-dystopic cyberpunk future. Or a deeply emotionally damaged biotic with serious commitment and trust issues. Or a newborn AI. Or the young and somewhat reluctant ruler of a nation. Or the inconvenient bastard child of the ruler of an entirely different nation. Or a rancher in the 1880's Australian Outback. Or any number of other things I've played on MU*s.

And if we want to stick to modern-day real-world things, then I've never been a medical professional even though I've played a doctor. I've never been a pilot, though I've played people who flew planes. I've never been from New York, though I've played folks from there. I've never been from Texas, though I've played folks from there. I've never been someone from a wealthy background, though I've played those. I've never been a foster kid, though I've played those. I've never been blind—save during my worst migraines, where the loss of vision is blessedly temporary and usually only one eye—but I've played a blind character before.

Hell, I've never really been a straight person, and I've played those. (To be fair, I've never really been gay/lesbian either—woo, asexuality?—and I've played characters who were.)

Which is all a way of trying to say...

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

If you have the knowledge to accurately play a POC, with all their culture and history intact, then chances are high you already are aware of your biases enough to deal with them. If you don't, then you're likely just playing a white dude with chocolate frosting.

...that I disagree (and fairly vehemently) with the implication here. Maybe I'm misreading what you're trying to say, since general lack of sleep? If so, apologies for springboarding off of the comment erroneously.

But if I did read a correct implication there, then I think trying to limit yourself to only roles you have direct personal knowledge of is limiting, both narratively as a player—frankly there are honestly only so many times I'm willing to play a tomboyish ginger software/hardware engineer with ADHD, since I can just log off and be that in the real world—and in terms of letting you sit comfortably in your own OOC viewpoint.

We may not always get it right. Some things will just make people grit their teeth; we might try to do some research but still get it wrong. I'm certain there are a lot of little details I got wrong while playing a doctor that would drive real medical professionals nuts. I certainly know there are things where people are like "And then with my Mad Electronics Skillz, I'm going to do this" and I'm thinking "AUGH no how are you handling this aspect of that? You need this or else your device is going to catch fire. Which generally is bad and makes you fail the design review!" But it's fiction, and we can wave our hands around somewhat.

And yeah, when you get into questions of race, gender identity, sexual preference, etc., having things you do be perceived as 'wrong' can lead to more hard feelings. But I've seen someone get accusatory that "you're playing X wrong, because I'm X and that's not my experience of things" only to discover the other player was in fact also X, and that their personal experiences just happened to differ. Because experiences aren't universal.

There's no one way to play a character who happens to be POC, because there's no one universal "POC culture". There's no one way to play a character who happens to be ADHD, because ADHD presents differently in different people (and is co-morbid with a whole mess of other neurodivergent things). There's no one way to play a gay man, because there's no single universal template for "this is all gay men in the world". People are messy and made up of complex intersections of many different things; even people who are intersections of a lot of the same things ("Feminine, lesbian, POC from the Ivory Coast, scared of heights, allergic to penicillin, etc.") can be extremely different individuals.

Sure, if you think all black men have to be "thugz from the hood" and that's literally the entire depth of your character, then yeah, that's likely to be offensive. Just like if you do the same thing with homosexuality, or neurodivergence, or Asian ancestry, or anything else. Speaking as someone of partial Roma ancestry, the cliche and borderline-fetishized—pardon the slur for illustrative purposes—'gypsy' stuff that people romanticize makes me want to gnaw on my keyboard in quiet but deeply offended frustration. But I've seen complex, well-rounded, fully-realized characters who happen to be of Roma descent, too. Anything can be boiled down to a shallow and potentially-offensive cliche.

I'd argue that the possibility of getting it "wrong" doesn't mean you shouldn't try to construct characters who differ from your own life experiences in fundamental ways, even when those characters inhabit a fictional world that is far closer to our reality than many of the more out-there worlds we tell stories in. It makes for more interesting narrative and richer stories (and in the best case, more complex and full characters) if you have more diversity in your story world... and learning to try to really think about how all those different elements of a character's identity will drive their decisions and story and reactions can also be very good even outside of RP to learn to broaden your viewpoints. So it seems like a win-win; a richer world for the storytelling, and a chance to confront our own unconscious biases. Just be willing to genuinely hear concerns if people whose real-world experience touches on that of your character express them.

I mean, obviously, varying your RP in pretendy fun-times internet story games isn't going to make massive shifts in the state of the world; even if every single person in the MU*ing world learned to see things from viewpoints far different from our own, it wouldn't measurably move the needle on a global scale. But people have asked me before why I'll go buy lunch for the homeless folks near my office (pre-pandemic, I mean) because "it's not like buying lunch for those four people today is going to really make a dent in the problem". And aside from the fact that it demonstrably makes a difference to those four people? I like to think that if everyone did tiny acts of kindness, the world would in aggregate be a far better place... and even if no one else is doing little acts of kindness at that moment, that doesn't mean I should just stop doing it myself.

Because the world desperately needs us all, collectively, to learn to broaden our viewpoints and confront our unconscious biases. And even if other people aren't doing it, that doesn't mean we should just shrug and give up on doing so ourselves.

I guess it's more... I don't know that it's about making the hobby a safe space for POC in my way of looking at it, though I feel like if it isn't a safe space for POC already (beyond the usual ways in which the world can be shit towards POC, because woo systemic oppression) then we've got an entirely different additional discussion to have. But I think it's an exercise in learning to break our own unconscious biases, to learn to think more diverse, and most importantly to carry those changes in our thinking out into the rest of our lives.

I can say from personal experience that my writing without making conscious effort to write more diverse casts is still more diverse now than it was when a much-younger me was consciously reminding myself to add diversity. (It's also had the same effect on the mental images my brain spits out when I'm reading and encounter a character who isn't described in detail visually.) It doesn't happen overnight—if I look at my own writing, this is an unconscious shift, but that's taken a little more than ten years, and lord knows there's certainly still always a lot of room for further improvement—but it still seems worth striving for.

Humanity is a tapestry of infinite complexity, and people are plotted on a multidimensional chart with an uncountable number of axes; even if two people share the exact same coordinates in one axis ("cultural background") they could be separated widely on that chart by almost everything else. Possibilities are endless, and we're roleplayers; our entire hobby is about using our imagination. And if we storytellers—either as GMs or players—are incapable of imagining what the world looks like from any viewpoint but the one we've personally lived, or if attempting to do so means we'll end up with a shallow (and potentially offensive) cliche... then I'd argue those imaginations are frighteningly limited.

@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Sunny said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

The more... verbose people in this thread seem to want a place to actually explore the reality of being a POC.

I haven't gotten that impression, but if it's true, that strikes me as exactly opposite of something that would make RL POC comfortable/feel included.

I haven't gotten that impression, either. I've seen @Sparks be verbose on this, but my takeaway from her stuff was "It was really valuable to my perspective to branch out in making my characters on MMO dark-skinned," not "I want to play stories in game about the effects of racism, not stories where race isn't an issue." (For one thing, I know that she enjoys Arx's setting. Enough to staff there!)

Yeah, to demonstrate more clearly, what happened with that challenge was basically this. Albeit paraphrasing because fourteen years ago or whatever, so hell if I remember exact quotes, and the paraphrase is funny. (And putting it in spoilers because psuedo-script-formatting gets long.)

***=So much text***

(I am also suddenly fiercely missing online gaming with this friend since he moved across the country and we gradually lost touch several years ago. I'm a little tempted to reach out and see if he's currently playing anything actively.)

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

What is being discussed here is design for the server, not the protocol.

I think the idea is a server which is no longer beholden to telnet at all, which is why "telnet" is still a relevant term here.

The old Pueblo-enabled servers—and even Ares and Evennia, presently—have a design requirement that whatever they do must also be accessible via plain old boring text-only telnet. Thus even in that world, telnet is still a consideration in everything you design; everything has to be accessible to that lowest common denominator. You can't make channels work solely like Slack or Discord, because you still need to be able to interact with them via telnet in SimpleMU. You can't even make those channels support multi-line text cleanly (something you can do in, say, Slack or Discord), because you still need to be able to spawn them on old legacy clients, and only the first line would be slurped into a spawn. Etc.

This also means that Evennia and Ares' web clients tend to look very like telnet, because that's the easiest way to support things.

A complete redesign—something that does away with the telnet requirement—is not constrained by those same limitations.

So, one more thing that occurred to me in the aftermath of last night's episode...

***=One More Thing***

Double post, because it occurred to me in another thread: the Secret World. I want that as a game.

Give me a setting where secret societies have been shaping the world from behind the scenes throughout recorded history. Where the Illuminati really are the power behind the throne in the US, where the Templars were just one incarnation of an organization dating back to the Tower of Babel, and have viewed themselves as the border between the everyday world and that of things that live in the shadows... or in the spaces outside our world. Where a hidden Council has long existed to broker treaties and deals between these rival societies.

Give me a setting where all myths and conspiracy theories have a grain of truth to them. Where the Hollow Earth not only exists, but is filled with the myriad branches of the World Tree serving as express lanes between so many places around the world. Where there really was a secret base on the moon. Where December 2012 truly was the Apocalypse, but the rival societies banded together to stop it. Where cults lie to their followers, but those lies conceal even more horrifying truths.

Give me a setting where both horror and wonder are always present. Where hidden histories of Ages past lead to wonderous forgotten technology; ancient clockwork time machines, sarcophagi from times long forgotten which produce incomprehensible holograms when you toy with them. Where there are always things scratching at the door of reality, huge and incomprehensible, who are worshipped as gods but whose motives are both incomprehensible and terrifying. Where hidden Gaia Engines buried beneath the Earth which lock the Dreamers away in the Dreaming Prison, and you should pray to any god listening that they never wake... save that few things humanity has believed to be gods are truly what we believe, and even fewer are benevolent.

Give me a setting where people newly changed and awakened to the existence of magic as Gaia chooses new agents to work through find themselves struggling to understand the world they've found themselves pulled into, with no time to really sit and process the wonder and horror. Where you find yourself newly immortal, the dust of your body whisked away and rebuilt any time you die, over and over. Where you slowly begin to realize that nearly every immortal you meet from Ages past regards their immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and are filled with worry for your future. Where a villain might sever your legs and leave you imprisoned in eternal pain, but refuse to kill you because they know that if they do you'll vanish and be reborn in the nearest well of pure anima. Where those they'd look to for answers about what they are rarely have them to give, because these hundreds of infant immortals taking their first steps into the shadows of the world represent something new, something never seen before, and something all of the societies would like to control if they could.

Give me a setting where the shadowy secrets of the world are becoming harder for even the Illuminati to conceal, and the impact is beginning to be felt. Where unethical corporations have captured some of these new immortals and begun trying to experiment on them. After all, once you figure out how to generate an anima well, you don't have to worry about the test subject dying. When they do, they just appear again in that well, whole and healthy and with a fresh batch of organs to experiment on. Where they have tried to make children into tools or weapons using what they've found. (Hello I walk into empty / hallways tell me not to worry / caution sends the signal not to / look around the bend and signal...)

Give me a setting where the bees are the voice, and perhaps the conscience, of the world itself. Where the Buzzing contains hidden truths for those willing to seek them out and listen.

Our wisdom flows so sweet, taste and see...

@arkandel I think the idea is that a lot of the "negative reviews" around here tend to boil down not to what's wrong with the game but what's wrong with the staff, which is a) probably not strictly "constructive", and b) probably going to end up coming across as a personal attack.

So I suspect the fear is that, based on all past experiences on this forum, the following sort of exchange will happen:

Admin: Come play at Game X, we have churros for everyone!

Potential Player: Ooh. I like churros. Tell me more!

Former Player: Game X? That game is terrible. You only get whipped cream with your churros if you're one of Admin's TS buddies, and everyone else has to get the dregs.

Admin: What? That's a blatant lie. Whipped cream is available for anyone who runs a plot for other people.

Former Player: [screed about how they never got whipped cream despite running two plots early on]

Admin: [rant about how the whipped-cream-for-GMs rule post-dated those two plots, and besides, Former Player got banned for Egregious Churro Hoarding anyway]

Random MSB Poster: [gif of eating popcorn]

Former Player: [profanity-laden response boiling down to "No, you", and also how the churros weren't even very good]

Moderator: Okay, this thread is off into the Hog Pit if it's turning into this much negativity and attacks.

Edit: And apparently @Faraday and I went to the same place, only I had more churros.

So, I get to do software team interviews and resume reviews, and I'll tell you the things I've noticed (and which I've realized I'm prone to as well on the other side of the divide):

• Women in tech will often downplay our own achievements and skills. This means that a woman's resume will often (but not always!) leave out anything that isn't one of the most notable bullet points, will tend to omit skills in the 'skill list' that aren't at really expert levels, etc. Conversely, a lot (but not all!) of the resumes I've dealt with for male engineers will have any skill they've ever used in the skills list. "I know C++" does not always mean what I would read it to mean; I've encountered folks where it means that they've written lots of C code, glanced at some C++ source on github, and thought "okay, classes! I know those from Java. How hard can it be?" (And then they get into the STL and start to weep tears of blood. ANYWAY.)
• Women are not (usually) as good at—or at least as prone to—bullshitting. I've met guys who can talk their way through an interview sounding like they know everything, then hit the engineering floor and start flailing. I see this most often with wireless tech; more than once, I've had a guy cheerily tell me how they're just great with Bluetooth Low Energy, and I'm like "Cool! Can you show me how you'd design a simple protocol to do <X> over BLE?" and things come to a screeching halt. I have not had that with a woman in interviews.

The practical upshot of this is that given a man and a woman of exactly equal skill level applying for the job, the man will very often look 'better' on paper and talk a better game in an interview. I just have to keep this in mind when reviewing resumes in general, and then do actual technical interviews.

Note, I do not like 'program this solution' tests for technical interviews; I know I can't always write actual code on a whiteboard under pressure, and I'm the freaking Program Lead. So I test technical skills in other ways. Like:

• You say you've got great experience in wireless communications? Given this use case, sketch out the basics of a protocol that will get the necessary data transferred over Bluetooth 4.1 without any major inefficiencies, which will be easily processed on resource-constrained silicon, and do so without using so many characteristics that it would break Nordic's Bluetooth radio firmware.
• You're an expert debugger? Awesome! I have what I call the 'train wreck' file; really horrible bugs which are not at all obvious on first glance. Let's grab one in a language you know, let's say that given this particular bug-induced behavior, if you'd narrowed the issue down to this piece of code, how would you go about fixing it?
• You're really familiar with low level silicon on ARM chips? Sweet! Let's talk register access on a Cortex-M3; what happens if you create a register variable and do this? Or let's go over the implications and uses of the volatile keyword!

Things like that. I come up with technical challenges that let me see their thought process, rather than their "woo, I can write a program to efficiently calculate an integral image on the whiteboard". I find that this works really well to show me who's bullshitting (or who would've read up on glassdoor to get our usual programming questions and memorize a solution) versus who can actually take a design or debugging problem and work through it. People who know what they're doing will have a lot more confidence when questioned in that way, rather than being put on the spot with "Write a C++ program to efficiently calculate an integral image on the whiteboard."

I would also definitely concur with the "do not make your first woman hired about 'Look! We've got a woman on the team now!'" You do not want your new hire to feel like they were hired to meet a quota, much less to feel like a zoo exhibit.

@apos said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

Characters that speak only in rhyme, meter, with a specific literary device, or only using grandiloquent phrasing. It's easy to fall in that from like having a few hour scene where every pose is only in alliteration or whatever, and then it's like, 'hey I bet I could make a character that only does...' no, don't.

Do you wanna make a cliché?
Do you wanna drive them mad?
Speak in only song, it cannot go wrong!
(This idea's quite bad!)

@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

@Sparks @faraday Just wanna pop in and say that I, in no way, was saying that or had any malice. Politics is just probably the base word to use, but I'm not that guy that groks too much on the whole Convservative vs. Liberal shit.
[ ... ]
I said the same thing everyone else did: choose the right people/good team.

I am totally willing to accept that there was no malicious intent in what you said. But, I really want you to genuinely step back from the situation for a moment and consider what I'm about to say.

Do you know how many times I've seen a conversation about "So, we have a pretty defined corporate culture, but we need to make some new hires and I'm a little worried it might be jarring or off-putting to a new guy to come into. Anyone have advice on how to make the environment welcoming to him?" get derailed by men stepping in and going "Just be sure you aren't hiring a guy because of political motivations, just to meet a quota!" and thus subtly shifting the conversation to being about whether or not a man was the best qualified for the job? Thus far, in my technical career, that would be 0. (Or nil, or NULL, or None, depending on your preferred programming language.)

Do you know how many times I have seen "So, I'm a little worried that we're a homogenous corporate culture of guys, and that could be off-putting to any women we hire. Anyone have advice on how to make a more inclusive and welcoming environment at work?" get derailed by a guy stepping in and going, "Make sure you aren't hiring a woman just for politics; if you hire a woman instead of a guy who can do the job better, it will hurt your team!" and thus redirecting the conversation from "how to be welcoming to the women we include" to justifying whether or not women should even be included in the first place? I actually cannot tell you, because I lost count years ago.

Somehow, the "be sure to choose the right people/team" topic shift only ever comes up when people are discussing how to make a work environment more comfortable for women or minorities. And after a certain point, it doesn't matter whether it's an intentional redirect or acting on an unconscious bias; the effect on the discourse is the same.

So I ask that you please step back and ask yourself, honestly, if you saw that first question in this post—"what are some good tips I should consider in making a welcoming environment for the new guy we hired?"—would your instinctive gut response to be "Make sure the new guy who you hired wasn't politically motivated; if you hire a man just to have a man, when a woman might be the better candidate, you'll only hurt your team." rather than giving tips on how to make a fun and welcoming work environment?

If not, then take a minute or so and dwell on that fact.

Like I said earlier, we—collectively, as a society—need to do better.

@Arkandel said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

There are other things we do need to adjust. For example we have two washrooms in our area, both men's... that's gonna have to change unless we expect a new hire to walk across the first floor to use the facilities.

The guys used to complain about restrooms on the engineering design floor not having enough stalls and how they'd have to wait in line. The first day, years ago, that we had a line in the women's design floor restroom? There was actually a victory email sent out among the women at the company (we made an internal mailing list ages ago) going, "Yes! There's finally enough of us that this happened!" and a fistpump GIF.

Saying you should put other people's fun before your own is a little unfair to players in general. When I think "try to think of other people's fun", I generally mean just to try not to stomp on other people's fun, so long as that fun still fits within the theme. In general, my rule of thumb for how I try to play is just "try to make the scene interesting and enjoyable for everyone involved".

(Including if I get a scene with a staff-controlled NPC; if the staffer is taking the time to RP an NPC with me, they should get to have fun with it too. Rather than just me trying to be 'push button, dispense plot plz.')

@Ganymede said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I don't see anything in what Ghost said speaking to your experience or contradicting your frustration. To the contrary, it appears to me that Ghost understands the constant battle being warred in the boardrooms and hiring halls. Yet nothing Ghost has said is, to me, incorrect.

It is possible to be completely factually accurate in your statement and also display harmful bias at the same time.

"You should always hire the right person for the job." is a factual statement and very good advice; of course this is what you want to do.

But take the context; "how do I make this process/workspace more inviting to a new woman who we might be hiring" is often met with that reminder to "always hire the right person for the job", while "how do I make this process/workspace more inviting to the new guy we're looking at hiring" somehow never seems to prompt that same reminder. In both cases, the reminder given is completely correct; the fact that people only feel it necessary to constantly give that reminder in one of those two situations is the thing I think is worth examining more deeply.

It doesn't have to be active intentional malice or misogyny to exist, nor to be harmful. This example of unconscious bias is something where if you drag it out into the light and look at it, you can see the monster for what it is and slowly begin to kill it. It's not comfortable to do so, but I believe it's absolutely worthwhile.

Because I can find no reason that almost every mention of hiring a woman needs the reminder to "hire the right person for the job", whereas mention of hiring a man merits it rarely (if ever).

The advice is perfectly reasonable; the context makes an implication which is not.

@Ganymede said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

But you did ask him to step away. And then comes the dogpile.

I did not ask him to step away, and I apologize if it came across that way to some folks; I was feeling somewhat impassioned and perhaps not at my most eloquent, so I may not have been as clear as I hoped.

I did ask him to examine his response and posed a question he could ask himself to genuinely self-reflect on if there was an unconscious bias there; it came across as his choice to step away from the conversation rather than do so. That's a valid, albeit depressingly common, choice; no one can really force you into examining your unconscious biases, especially not online.

But the reason I think it's important to do so is that if you do want to build an inclusive environment, these are exactly the sort of ingrained things we need to address. The unspoken assumption that a woman needs to actively prove she can do the job and wasn't hired just because of her gender identity, while a man is given the time and space to prove he can't do the same job? That's exactly the sort of thing that makes for a low-grade hostile work environment rather than an inclusive one.

And the sad thing is, at least in STEM fields, most of the women I know just assume they're going to get the former and brace themselves for that low-grade hostility to be their daily reality. It's just the assumed baseline.

At any rate. It was not my intention to become preachy in a non-constructive manner and it appears I have done so, for which I apologize. (Plus I think I have pretty much expended all the words I have in me to expend on this without just going back and reiterating myself.) So I'll just let what I've said already stand as my statement on the type of things I think we need to deal with—the bits of unconscious bias and assumption we need to drag into the light and kill—if we really do want to make environments inclusive and welcoming.

@faraday said in Incentives for RP:

I think at this point I'm mostly in the "get off my lawn" phase of MUSH running. If I need to bribe you to get involved in plots, or be welcoming to new players, or support the others, then why are you even here? I'm just not inclined to cater to those people any more.

I admit, I view the incentives less as useful for "I want to get this player to go out and do things", and more for "I want these players who are already doing things to maybe think about including the player who is not, and is feeling stymied because they don't know where to start." Because even players who aren't being actively malicious or exclusionary can still tend to cluster into little clumps. You only have a couple hours a night to RP, and this is the storyline you're interested in? Well, you're probably going to keep RP'ing with those two folks. And it gets easy to almost not notice that poor Bob over there is sitting in the corner, seeing you three together on +where every night, and wondering what he needs to do in order to get into a story like that.

You're not wrong that all the systems are kind of inherently flawed, though. I feel like all you can do is pick the one that's flawed in the least-destructive way for your particular game.