Posts made by Sunny

@Arkandel said:

1. Without needing to commit to specific numbers but just to clarify, where do you see the experience curve of a casual compared to the annual cap? Say, assuming a pretty active player is meant to hit the annual cap, would you say a casual one would make closer to 25%, 50% or 75% of it at the end of the year?

Whatever we decide that the cap will be, the hope will be for the real heavy XP characters to have earned (at the absolute most) 2x the cap. The goal is to create enough ways to earn XP that casual players would realistically be closer to 90% of the cap. Our control is not on earning, but (ultimately) on the spending side, so we want to make sure that earning is easy.

2. Are you considering an approval system for spends? I'm referring to stats like Gnosis, Renown, etc.

Yes and no. There are some stats that will go into the approval queue (so to speak) instead of being set and added for review. This is not, however, going to be on what most people consider to be problem stats, but will primarily relate to faction status stats.

3. Are you using automatic experience gains? Catch-up experience for newer players? Transfers to new alts in case of IC death/permanent retirement?

All characters will earn XP every week from the point of 'game on' -- even those not made. When everyone is awarded the weekly XP, it will add to the total characters are awarded in chargen. That's their 'catch up' experience. Permanent death/retirement will only in some cases allow all unspent experience to be transferred at 1:1. Already spent experience will not be transferred. However, there is also a roundabout mechanic to transfer XP from one active PC to another, as well. That's at a loss. As far as what cases folks get 1:1 transfers, it requires either an on-screen death or a death that other characters can investigate and verify in some fashion -- either it needs to have happened on screen, or it needs to provide other PCs with closure, essentially. (EDITED TO ADD: OMG I forgot to note, suicide does not count.)

4. How are Fate points earned? How do they translate into the IC world if they include things often impossible in the IC world like coming back from the dead?

Purchased with either XP or Player Points, refresh to a certain level weekly, and in some cases they can be taken instead of beats (such as choosing to move from a failure to a dramatic failure).

5. If I remember correctly you plan to open spheres for which the books aren't out yet. How are you planning to handle things when they are published?

We're not opening spheres for non-published books except in the case of those which we do not believe are going to get a 2.0 update (Geist, Changing Breeds). In those cases, if the book does end up coming out after the fact, we will be remaining with our house rules / story. The new books will be reviewed, and we will implement as much as we can without breaking IC reality. No changes will be made until the full review is finished, though.

As far as those we know are happening, we're creating vague stories/history for those races alongside the rest of the game as things progress. We'll be updating and changing this as more information becomes available. Once the books are published, we'll be going through the histories and adjusting them as necessary for what the book actually says, get it formally written up, plug their stats into chargen (that's just going to be data entry), and then open 'em. Alt limits will not change. But all the critters are around and will be doing their thing even before they're represented by PCs. This is going to be most obvious with the Lost, because we'll have Keepers written into the local history (as an example). There's an NPC freehold, and it does things in reaction to things that happen.

The reasoning behind this is that we don't want any of the spheres to feel tacked on after the fact. They might not be open, but they're still being designed as best we can manage.

(I had a good one pointed out to me!)

18: On the 'second chance' or 'go the fuck away' scale of disciplinary philosophies, DtD is on the 'go the fuck away' side. If you screw up badly enough to be in actual trouble, you're gone. In addition, not everyone is welcome here in the first place. Those who have a history of abuse in the mu* community (as determined, full stop, by Blue Rose) are not welcome. They will be asked to leave when they are identified, regardless of whether or not they have misbehaved on this game.

Yeah, I really wanted to try and make sure to get as many of the make-or-break points into a bullet list like this so that people can just look at the tin to see if it's a game for them or not. We're doing a few things that I know will turn some people off, so stating it all up front is in my opinion a necessity.

(My news file rewriter has not yet gotten ahold of this; she will fix and simplify it for me, but! It's a 'basics' news file; if anyone has any major game-setup questions left after this notation, please say so so I can add things/)

People have differing expectations of a variety of things on any given game. We'd like people on the same page. So these are the Things to Know about Dust to Dust.

1: There is a metaplot, and it involves the God Machine.

2: Experience management is handled by caps; there is a monthly earning cap and a total spending cap.

3: The game will operate in year-long arcs, with both the metaplot and the experience cap. Every year, staff will evaluate the experience cap and the status of the metaplot and adjust as needed.

4: The story and game are focused on a local scope. The vast majority of the interesting things happening in the world will be happening in Bay City; the world revolves around this place. Actions and consequences from the PCs here will ripple out; there will be very little of the reverse.

5: We will never use a system to keep track of character knowledge, lore or otherwise.

6: We work on a review process, rather than an approval process. The goal is to reduce barriers to roleplay and character growth as much as possible.

7: We are using Fate Points; the biggest notation this needs is that characters can possibly come back from the dead as well as spend fate points in stories to twist things in their favor.

8: This is a cooperative game, IC and OOC. The PCs are assumed to be on the same team/side in general.

9: We encourage the use of OOC knowledge in some circumstances (detailed in another news file).

10: The game's mood is 'hopeful' with a minor focus on 'victorious'. The theme is 'every effort matters'.

11: Staff run plot will focus on neighborhoods and several factions at once; single-faction and individual plotlines will be handled primarily with PRPs.

12: Staff will not benefit in any virtual-material way from staffing.

13: We do not use the sphere structure for staffing. No sphere is an island; the game is operated as a single sphere would be in this model; all staff are facilitators of the whole game.

14: In addition to experience points and fate points used for the game, we will be using player points as the reward for contributions to the game. These can be used to purchase a variety of rewards, and are attached to the player rather than the characters.

15: As we are using experience caps, we will be offering alternatives for experience spending (aka XP dumps) that are not permanent improvements to a character's stats.

16: Various supernatural races are treated as factions, as are families and influence groups.

17: Because we will be working on review rather than approval, retcons may happen. Staff will do their best to avoid these and mitigate the extent via story explanations as necessary, but sometimes some things may simply have to be rewound. It is an option that will remain on the table.

I'm excited.

I've been fussing around looking at a few different things, from using very basic basic (single shared merit) type things through implementing something like Angel uses. Dragon Age (the tabletop version) actually has some very good rules that would probably adapt well to futuristic stuff just as well as it does fantasy. Both systems would requite adaptation regardless of what you're using, though.

That said, the provided example sounds like a very good plan. It's the development of a new system (as @Coin said, it's just a different experience reward track that you're calling something else (tokens), but it's been proven that's a good way to motivate specific behaviors. If there's a specific shiny people can earn, a lot of folks will chase it just to have it.

Well, welcome! If you have any particular questions or anything, let us know. There are a number of folks around that like to answer questions.

@Thenomain said:

Do people still use Rhost?

Dust is!

Yeah, it's really nice. My guild is spread across a number of servers, because that's where people were before. It makes things super easy. If you end up in a different instance than people you want to group with, it's a simple 'join in X area' click.

So for those unaware, GW2 is now play for free (the base game costs nothing, having an account and playing it costs nothing, it's just if you want the xpac that it costs anything).

If anyone is playing around with it and hasn't found a home guild, PM me with your account name and I'll add you. I'm midst turning the 'just for me' guild into an actual one, with both some online friends and some folks from offline. Nothing impressive now, but it'd be good to have some folks.

@Derp

I think a lot of work could be done not on the player UI side, but on the game creation and development side. As far as the player side goes, I'm sure there could be improvements, even if I can't really think what it would look like except perhaps taking Simplemu*'s lead and integrating the platform with the client a little more (simplemu* has things like a separate window for WHO if you want it).

There have actually been significant advances in the platform software I most frequently use since I started mushing, at least. New from when I started that make a difference to me as not-a-coder (the advancement on the code side is, I know, also significant):

Communication with external resources
256 color
Realms
Basic softcode packages included with install
idle (not all of them have adopted this yet)

And so on. These things were certainly improvements both on the player side and on the game creation side of things. So this is the sort of "new advanced things" -- you don't really realize you needed something until it's there, and then you wonder how the hell you lived without it.

@Jaunt said:

I think that the prompt idea is interesting. If you could make a prompt system that was optional (for instance, only used if you typed "@dig" by itself), and was designed to actually help teach you how to use the @dig command (by showing you the new sum output for each step, highlighting the additions or some such), then I think you'd be onto something.

One of the games I play on (KD) has a prompt thing set up for creating an event as well as for RP-reports (they're optional), and I have to say it's one of the easiest way to do those things that I've encountered. User friendly, the help is embedded (the script basically explains itself to you), and so on. I think the @dig prompt discussion...it's just a case of designing the prompts right to make it both intuitive AND user friendly. So I'd do something like this:

@Derp said:

@dig Kitchen=Kitchen;K,Out;O

dig

$ Name of the room you're digging?
Kitchen

$ Return Exits?
Yes

$ Name of the return exit? Format is name;alias;alias;alias (Such as Out;o;exit). Please include 'o' and 'out' for exits that lead back in the direction of the city grid.
Living Room;lr;o;out

$ Name of exit that leads to the room from your current location? Format is name;alias;alias;alias
Kitchen;k;kitchen

If you expand on the prompts like that, something like this could be both simple and intuitive. I do also think that the non-prompt version should be available for things.

--

I'll also note that some of the things being discussed are already possible with our current platforms. My game-in-the-works is setup so that all I'm going to have to do is create the news files / other documentation on our wiki in a particular way, and the game is setup so it automagically picks it up from the wiki and sticks it into the news files / help sections without me having to touch the server side of things. The last site I was working on/my social place, my wonderful coder set it up so I could do all the editing on my computer, then push a button on a program we set up and it would load the file right into the game from there.

ETA: That thing I'm talking about above is something I don't think I could live without, these days, so having it being an option in developing platforms is I think kinda a big deal.

@HelloProject said:

@Thenomain said:

All the time people complain that there is not enough ice cream that's not been done before, and you take them to a place that does burnt sugar and salted caramel and gelato made with real lilac, and they order vanilla.

Repeating an old idea does not mean it's not still very good. WoD By Night remains popular because of its popularity, as well as people's laziness. I don't think this is the hobby to count laziness as a cardinal sin, but we can still accept it for what it is.

But discouraging new ideas by saying "The old ways work just fine" is pretty much just encouraging stagnation rather than growth.

And encouraging new ideas just because they're new is also no good. Not that I don't agree with you; I think Ashes was fairly significant proof that 'you can't do it that way' just helps motivate me, but still. You have to be able to keep from throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Wondering why I feel so energetic and normal today. Realize I forgot to take my medication this morning. Take it. Energetic feeling gone.

Sigh.

@Thenomain said:

@Sunny

(Not a robot.)

I named no names! But you knew, anyway. You knew. I think that's proof enough.

@Jaunt

Yes, that does answer my interactive fiction question. Thank you. I didn't really need to be sold on it, just made aware of what it was. I always just used 'text based games' for things like Zork or LotRD or Tradewars.

I'm gonna echo what others have told you, as well. Go participate in the other discussions, and this thread will go SO much better.

@surreality said (but it's still @Jaunt):

First, it's generally not an "I" creating a game. This may be assumed but it's worth noting it shouldn't necessarily be. I'm doing a fairly absurd amount of work putting one together now, but I am absolutely not doing it alone. (It's also worth noting that the people who are also contributing their time and energy to the project are folks I've met here for the most part, all of whom have contributed in equally important ways, from my perspective, just for the asking and some volunteered. Others provided advice and tutorials that helped get everything started.)

A thousand times this. The game I'm building right now, the ones I've done over the years that never opened, and then Ashes...none of these were ever something that I could say 'I built that' even though I was always at the helm. It's definitely 'we'. I have to bounce ideas off of people and there's so much content to generate and policies to kick around and...so on. I cannot imagine that a game I put together all by myself would a- ever open, or b- be any good. Building a game, in my world, is as collaborative as playing in it. Actually, if you look at: http://musoapbox.net/topic/367/dust-to-dust-formerly-the-nwod-grenade-thread, you get just a taste of it. There are very few people on MSB that I can say haven't helped me in some way or another (even if it's just been opinions and such over the years).

(this is where the tangent starts I think, god)

Granted, some of that help was 'oh god if I do this for you will you SHUT UP and stop asking questions?' or 'are you fucking stupid what the hell this is a horrible idea', but it was still help. People have been taking code away from me for like 15 years now. It's probably a hint that I need to just stop. Someday I will do a thing and NOT make any of my coder friends want to cry. Someday.

That's really the thing though. What's key there is 'it was still help'. My skin is the thinnest. I think @Ganymede or @HelloRaptor both are some of the best to attest to that. I'm easily hurt, easily trolled, and oh boy my temper. Posting / participating here (and the other places in the past) for me was always a massive challenge (and painful) until I realized that the way I came across generally was a lot of the problem.

I came to the community as a representative not of me, but of my professional presence in the community. I was here as a game lead, or a sphere wizard, or as someone who knew that I'd be running a game again, a dino, someone who had to be Above Shit. Whatever. That's not what this place is for. When I stepped back and realized that I'd be better served in my professional presence by not presenting it here, I started working at taking the filters off. So now I'm just myself, I get picked on a LOT less (I cannot tell you how many times I have been in the hot-seat man, and I had people ACTIVELY MAD at me for years, rather than just annoyed by me on the boards), and generally the opinion of me has gone way up.

You just have to cut the shit and approach us as a person and not a representative of something. That, right there, is what I think is the foundation of the communication gap rather than the marketing persona. The marketing stuff is a symptom, I think the cause is personal vs professional.

ETA: tl;dr Be a person, not a robot. We have our robot already and like him. We do not need two!

@Jaunt said:

@Sunny

What do you think of the discussion posted/quoted above? Or the October OR content share with MSB?

As I said before regarding the content share, it was a nice try. I suspect that after you've done it for a while it'll get better. I do think you could stand to know your audience better in terms of what's interesting or whatnot to mention as a teaser, but it is at least showing an effort to engage. My frustration rekindled at the reaction to feedback to it, not to the post itself.

I know I do remember there being license 'things' way back once upon a time, but I honestly don't know if I've heard of anything like that (save that Rhost is no longer requiring an NDA!) in a billion years, so I don't know if that specific portion is relevant in a more than a 'huh, other platforms have that problem, interesting' fashion. I mostly play a genres in which I couldn't run a for profit game no matter which way I did it (even my own homebrew world stuff uses somebody else's system), so any discussion on that front isn't helpful for me. BUT, just because it isn't relevant to me doesn't mean it's not interesting. I do like hearing about how Evennia is progressing, it's super exciting to get a mu* platform of any sort that's all out there being new and such.

I don't really have much to say about the other things noted, except 'what do you mean an interactive fiction game'? I'm actually not familiar with the reference.

There is nothing in this post that is meant to be anything except helpful. This is not sarcasm.

@Jaunt

No trolling you here. When I say that you're being a dick, it's actually because I genuinely think you're behaving like a dick. You're claiming blah blah blah, but your behavior is different than you're claiming it is. I haven't bothered putting effort into explaining the specifics to you like others here have, as I'm of the opinion that if you stop squawking for ten minutes and think about your behavior, you'll see the problem with it.

It could very well be that @Miss-Demeanor is entirely correct, and the similarities to Spider that I'm seeing are what's really getting under my skin. Even if that's the case, though, these aren't good behaviors being observed.

This post is not trolling you. I am posting because of your claimed persistent aggression towards you and because I think you should read what she wrote twice more, or what TNP wrote, and actually amend your behavior based on it. You will have a better time of it. Also, 'you're being a dick' 'am not, you're being mean for pointing it out'....sigh.

@Jaunt

It's not just relevancy (though the ATTEMPT at relevancy is a good start) that is a problem here. It's that as you've made perfectly clear, you're really not willing to discuss things. 'Well that's my opinion' is a shut-down, not a discussion. This is a discussion board. @Thenomain is trying to freaking help you and you're being a gigantic dick in response.

I'm recruiting again!