Posts made by surreality

@hedgehog I am entirely out of even to can't with.

@Arkandel said in How To Advertise?:

@Brave-Saga-MUSH said in How To Advertise?:

I know that this location would be one place to advertise and I know sharing ads between MU*s is another one, but is there any advice anyone could give? Other locations that could be used? I would love some suggestions and I am even sure that there are probably some new folks out there that could be wondering as well.

My advice is this: Advertise when you are ready and know what you're going to offer, and when you're going to offer it, but not before.

Most projects fall apart well before they come out of the "hey, I got this idea..." stage. And we, fickle lot that we are to begin with, have seen way too many projects disappear well before fruition.

Seconding this. I won't even post anything until I'm at what I consider 'half done'. And the thing I did went on hiatus for something else -- which I'm not gonna post until it's ready for beta at this point 'cause I know me too well, shiny things distract me.

I'm actually thinking about setting up a link exchange when I get more of my site together, with a template setup folks can use for the same. Since a lot of folks don't come to forums even to lurk, it seems to be a good way for the community to spread the word about the kind of games that are out there on the sites people are most likely to find if they're looking for actual games.

@mietze I'm a smoker and it still happens to me! So help me.

It also doesn't help that a lot of the fashion models in magazines we're accustomed to seeing actually are teens, they're just very convincingly and adeptly made to look considerably older, too, with hair/makeup/etc. Throw this into the mix with casting mid-20s folk as high schoolers on television, and it really does skew everything considerably.

@hedgehog Upvoted because I would so kill for this these days.

@Coin said in The Apology Thread:

@Cupcake said in The Apology Thread:

I can verify what Coin said.

Devilshire had its own brand of cancer.

Hackmaster, Master of Hacks.

Granted, it was his game, but he was just so creepy.

This sounds like a story that needs telling for those of us who weren't around thenabouts, because we were in hiding on Shang. (OK, that's probably just me, but I'm sure other people weren't around to know the tale of woe, too.)

listal.com tends to have some interesting lists by 'type' sometimes. I've stumbled across a few gems there. Also willing to contribute suggestions; I seem to have weird luck with this (unless it's for myself then I am at a loss, I tend to find a face and then get inspired for the character in a flash of 'I KNOW WHO THIS IS!' -- which never works if I know who it actually is).

@Ashen-Shugar OMG, I remember my cousin getting one of these for Xmas! His was one of the giant ones I think, though. I got a 'Big Barbie' (not the creepy human child size ones they make now, just 20 inches or something) that year and we both knew we were getting those things, and kept trying to guess whose giant box was which. That still stands out somehow as Best Xmas Ever, even all these zillion old fart years later.

@TwoGunBob ...nnngh, that hurt to read. I collected anime figure kits for a while as a teenager and specifically tried to learn airbrushing just to make them as awesome as I could. (I remained bad at it, unfortunately, but damn, I still treasured those things.)

@Ashen-Shugar I feel you on this.

I also could have throttled my mother for selling off all of my My Little Ponies at a garage sale for fifty cents a piece when I could have made bank on the little buggers on ebay at the time. But I digress. <cough> She claimed to not believe this was possible until I reminded her that selling a handful of Jem doll shoes on ebay the year before had brought in over $250.

My geekery in terms of any kind of gaming has never been encouraged by my family, unfortunately, and most of my friends are all in the same 'we give each other hugs and best wishes or make little things for each other for Xmas because we're all broke as hell' category.

The geekery that tends to get fed around the holidays here is my fixation on costume and art history books, though, which is very much

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@surreality

I think -- and I could be entirely wrong -- what @Thenomain is trying to say is that once you install the MUX server, you essentially type one startup command and you have what you need to begin creating a play space on the creative front.

You have the four types of objects in place -- Player, Room, Exit, and Thing -- as well as basic communication commands.

Technically speaking, if your goal was to create a very basic, statless game, you already have more or less everything you need in place to start creating your grid/playspace by just adding and describing rooms, which is as simple as: [...]

This particular example is not making MUSH/MUX any different from any other codebase out there. Even the command examples you give work the same out of the box in Evennia.

Is this in the game, or from outside of it, though?

Are all of the interplayer communication commands already established? (Say, pose, page, whisper, emit, etc.? -- I'm asking because I don't know.) This stuff is pretty big, really.

Finally getting a map together I'm happy with.

We are getting more Zach McGowan, therefore I do not fucking care if all the cast does is take turns reading the phone book after the world goes nuclear, and I am The 100% serious on this point.

I think -- and I could be entirely wrong -- what @Thenomain is trying to say is that once you install the MUX server, you essentially type one startup command and you have what you need to begin creating a play space on the creative front.

You have the four types of objects in place -- Player, Room, Exit, and Thing -- as well as basic communication commands.

Technically speaking, if your goal was to create a very basic, statless game, you already have more or less everything you need in place to start creating your grid/playspace by just adding and describing rooms, which is as simple as:

@dig RoomName=ExitToRoom;Alias;Alias,ExitFromNewRoomBackToThisRoom;Alias;Alias
@desc here=Here is a description of my new room!
(repeat as needed)

Most people are not going to want something that simple, but it actually is that simple if that's all you need.

Edit: And I am like... a page and a half late. Oops.

@WTFE All the for that link. I had lost track of it when it vanished from youtube for a while.

@Miss-Demeanor said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality Yes, they recognized that different setting would require different rules... hence them making a whoooooooooole other line of books specifically for a LARP setting!

Which is precisely what I have said repeatedly.

However, MUSHing is comparable to tabletop in its mechanics and theme and rules. The game lines really don't require a ton of editing or House Ruling to make them workable on a MU* (unlike a LARP).

I disagree pretty strongly. MUX is closer to tabletop in some respects, and closer to LARP in others.

In terms of scale, it's much closer to a LARP, for instance. A tabletop game is not going to have multiple STs running at any given time the way a LARP does, and a tabletop game is not going to have players handling things on their own off to the side when no ST is present at all the way a LARP does and MUXes certainly do.

It's closer to tabletop in some respects simply because we can automate some systems that would be much more difficult to maintain or sustain than it would be in a LARP.

It's different and distinct from both in that other than online tabletop, the players are actually physically present. It's also a persistent world. While some LARPs attempt/have attempted to do this -- players can meet and do things between formal sessions -- tabletop games and LARPs are not persistent worlds operating 24/7/365.

Yes, all of those things change stuff.

And here's the big thing... clarification =/= House Rule.

Most house rules are precisely that.

The vast majority of them I've written for anything that's ever gone/been live have been things like, "We realize everyone can't stop arguing about whether you permanently lose a willpower dot or just lose a willpower point that can be regained through normal means from the Exciting Tell because it's not clear in the book text, here is how we're going to handle it on this game, you can all stop arguing now. Please stop arguing now. No, really, you can shut up any time... " or "The Tell is called 'Spirit Double' and it is a spirit wandering around causing trouble. While it doesn't explicitly say so in the text, yes, it being a spirit means that people who recognize a spirit when they see it will recognize that the Spirit Double is, in fact, a spirit, because there's nothing to suggest they wouldn't," and so on.

Why? Because these questions do actually come up, so yes, that shit does absolutely need to get put somewhere.

You can clarify something without making it a rule. I don't know why you insist on talking about the two as if they're interchangeable, they really aren't.

I just disagree about this, which may be semantics, but we are talking about a staff-side ruling about how something is to be handled on the game when a question has arisen about the content. Sometimes there are stupid moron interpretations of things, like Moonbeam's eyeroll-inspiring insipidity, but sometimes well-intentioned, honest, clever people still have questions about the content that need a formal verdict for how to handle it on the game. It's a ruling -- which is not creating something out of whole cloth.

And... TR failed on the House Rules front. What you mentioned about biokinesis? That's a clarification, that's not a House Rule. A House Rule is taking a mechanic that doesn't work for whatever reason, and changes it to make it work within the setting. A clarification is taking something that is functional but perhaps ambiguously worded (or someone is just an idiot and chooses to interpret it wrong) and offers the explanation/interpretation of that mechanic. And the House Rules on TR were pretty much all geared to either impede or overpower a splat, depending on which sphere you're looking at (and rarely in the direction common sense would dictate). It got utterly ridiculous.

I don't disagree with TR doing things badly, on the whole. I don't think, however, that a piss poor example means all things will go that way.

Now if you look at Reno's House Rules for Wolfbloods? It addresses things that are necessary for a game that runs 24/7 and already has over 42 unique logins but are not addressed in the book. Like +noting a specific Kuruth trigger for the Anger Issues Tell. Or spelling out a resistance roll for the Enticing Tell that isn't offered in the book.

...you realize the resist roll was originally in there from when I had to HR Exciting, right? Same with requiring the notes for things that need notes? I mean you do realize that what's up there now is slightly revamped from the stuff I actually put in there from Reno1, dropping the supernatural merit conversions the game doesn't need any more after the reboot (but pretty much did at the time without half a sphere having to scrap their characters and start over)?

I feel like once you can separate the two, you'll see that House Rules aren't abundantly necessary to a MU*.

I don't separate the two, for an important reason: that clarification is, actually, a ruling that needs to be followed going forward. It's like a legal precedent, in some respects. The precedent is not necessarily the same thing as a law, but it is part of the game's standards and practices going forward that needs to remain consistent.

@Miss-Demeanor said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:

@surreality The biggest issue I have with what you're saying is that you're taking a few sentences in the start of the WoD/CoD books and waving them about like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

I have to ask -- where exactly am I saying this? I'm saying: the canon material suggests doing this. The canon material has suggested this repeatedly and often since 1991, and has not changed its stance on this. By saying, 'stick to the canon' in the case of WoD/etc., you're choosing to ignore that this, actually, is a part of the canon.

Yes, the book states you can change whatever doesn't work for you... in the context of a small group setting in which everyone can relatively easily agree upon what will be changed and how. Blanket applying that statement to the entire gameline as its being translated to MUSHes is about as ridiculous as expecting there to be no House Rules ever, at all. Its the opposing ends of the spectrum.

I really don't see this in what I'm saying at all. Again, see the above -- that is in the canon.

Systems require more or less translation for different circumstances. We would not have different rulesets for LARP and tabletop if this was not a basic reality on the ground. That the authors recognize this is a plus, because the actual canon is often vague, inconsistent, or otherwise unclear.

As I stated earlier: the most common form of house rule is a determination of which interpretation of an ambiguous writeup or mechanic is going to be on that game for purposes of consistency. This doesn't actually change anything; it simply clarifies which of several potential interpretations is going to be in use on the game to ensure fairness and to provide reference for multiple STs to all be on the same page. That's pretty important.

No House Rules Ever means the game will have areas where it fails hard and no way to fix it. It will lead to frustration and disgruntlement, and the best you can do is shrug and tell people to deal with it.

Agreed in full -- but it's what some are suggesting, and that in place of house rules of any kind, all you have to do is say "nope!" to have no problems ever -- and that's patently silly.

Do Whatever I Want Because the Book Says I Can leads to the game becoming so bloated with House Rules that its barely recognizable as a game and expects far more effort from its players to keep up with an ever-expanding body of House Rules.

I see house rules from almost the opposite end of the spectrum, actually.

It is typically to prevent a whole lot of 'do whatever I want' -- which happens fairly often. Again, it's often stuff people wouldn't try to get away with at a table or a LARP. Sometimes it's as simple as saying, "We're using the book rules exclusively for this, do not randomly add extra effects" -- this happened on TR, for instance, when players needed to be reminded that, yes, biokinesis has specific rules and effects, and it won't give you a magic wonderdong with extra impregnation powers or function as magical birth control just because a specific player decides to interpret the fluff that way. (Yes, that exactly happened.)

This is where TR and FC failed (partly, anyways). They both quickly became a 'if I don't like the way this works, I'll just whine til they change it' free-for-all, no matter how much it fucked over the people that were actually playing by the RAW. More than half of the House Rules on both games are utterly unnecessary, add little to nothing to the game, and could easily have been solved simply by telling someone 'this is how it works per the book, follow it'.

And ideally that's how it works, as I mentioned above.

Personally, I don't mind custom content tailored to a specific setting, provided it doesn't completely suck, and it is made available in a fair way to everyone (rather than 'I want a shiny so I'm going to make myself a special shiny!' because that's just bullshit).

tldr; House Rules for the sake of House Rules are confusing at best and actively thumb their noses at players at the worst. The books were written entirely within the context of a small group of dedicated players (including the part that says to change whatever you want).

There's a paradox here: yes, written for that context, including that.

Changes are inherently necessary for a different context. I keep repeating this, and we seem to agree on that point; people saying the tabletop as written is precisely how a MUX should operate are simply ignoring this like some inconvenient trivia, when it's absolutely not the case.

No, you're not going to get 100+ people to all agree about whatever the decision is about clarification #172 the way you might at a table with five buddies, but at the table you also don't have a dozen different STs at any given moment who are being confronted with how to handle situation #172 consistently for the game without that clarification that all need to be on the same page.

@Sunny Pretty much. When apparently the only reason to not use material precisely as written -- in a series of games notorious for vagaries and inconsistencies that explicitly says that you should rework whatever you want on the fly, designed for once a week or biweekly games involving face to face interaction consisting of less than a dozen people rather than persistent worlds comprising dozens if not a hundred or more PCs played by anonymous players -- is 'you're too much of a pussy to tell people no'?

Yeah, I'm really not so worried about me being the one 'unqualified to staff'.

@Warma-Sheen ...are you actually insane?