Posts made by surreality

@Lithium That's actually fixable. Not easily fixable, but it's fixable. The folks at Truelands more or less did so, changing the commands to be a lot closer (if not the same as) MUSH commands.

@GangOfDolls It wasn't actually a MUD/MOO hybrid. It was pure MOO.

The code for stuff like combat and wandering monsters was, from what I gather, all Quinncode. It's what GhostwheelMOO used, with minor tweaks and a setting shift. (This included a combat engine, wandering monster puppet parent, stat system, etc.) The two places ended up then diverging sharply from there.

You can, last I checked, still get the Quinncore MOO db (which has the Ghostwheel stuff, stripped of player stuff and whatnot) somewhere on the interwebs. If there wasn't so much I'd want to tweak in it system-wise, and I had a damn clue how to get a MOO running on this comp that allows inbound connections (apparently more of a pain in the ass than I'd hoped), I'd seriously tinker with that shit for shits and giggles.

There's that old saying about how it's not the size or how long you go, it's about 'the motion in the ocean'. And y'all likely know what old saying I mean.

I find the same applies to a scene.

Short or long poses, long scene or short, none of it matters so much as how well it flows and what gets accomplished.

I was there around... '97 I think?

I was a hopeless clueless newbie and highly dumb. I was Mayor Mike, the six-armed stripper chick that ended up elected when the guy who was always mayor didn't feel like doing it for a term and it was open. I promptly ended up having to leave the game due to RL (my grandmother, who raised me, was dying ) but not before the character got married to someone whose street name she knew -- but not his real name.

She did not realize his name was Edgar Caine, and that she was now...

...Michael Caine.

Sometimes I love this hobby for the accidental hilarious weirdness.

@faraday What you're describing -- the provisional RP -- is actually fairly common lately. I know TR, Reno, and BITN have all allowed it (in temp rooms, not on the actual grid), for instance. It's permitted pre-approval often enough I'm not sure what change was being suggested to that, pretty much.

I'm with @Ganymede on this. Post-approval checking doesn't get around the fact that by approving the character, as staff, you have essentially told them: "What you have created is OK and safe to go on the grid."

Even in the most innocent of circumstances, with the best of intentions on all sides, when you tell a player something has to change after approval, you're essentially saying this: "I know we said that was OK, but it's actually not." This doesn't really engender trust in the best of circumstances, and can leave a player feeling like things can get yanked out from under their feet at any time, both of which are Not Great Things.

@Ninjakitten Nailed it! Though @Ganymede has it nailed, too, really.

(If I had a dime for every time I've seen that play out on a M*... well, I could at least pay for MUX hosting for life.)

@Pandora There are assumptions there that swing one way or the other. There's an unfairness to 'assume the character is always there whether the player is there or not', but there's also an unfairness to 'assume the character isn't there simply because the player cannot be'.

Solution: wait until the player is connected, but isn't around the target IC. That's fair to all parties involved in every possible way, and assumes nothing in one direction or the other.

One of the reasons I like this idea as opposed to backgrounds is that it leaves space for people to fill in connections later. The more defined and specific a background is, the harder that can sometimes be to do. Leaving some wiggle room there strikes me as a good thing for people to use to make connections with other characters coming into the game later -- whether they seize on an existing defining moment to, say, ask, "Hey, could I be that dude that stuck up for your character that time long ago?" or "Maybe my character is someone who was one of the people who bullied your character when they were a kid?"/etc. in ways that give new characters a foot in the door in some respects.

@Pandora The 'you abandoned me' thing came up in someone else's post earlier (though I can't go dig for it now), so I don't think anyone was trying to imply you came up with that one. It was one of the examples someone gave as the reason they would use for someone else not being there -- as in, the player is not connected, and instead of going with a neutral 'he just wasn't there', the person looking for them went to the 'he wasn't there because he abandoned me and left us in the lurch that bastard!' kind of place.

I see a difference between the two there; one is 'he's just not there', the other power-poses the reasons he's not there on the other player, so instead of 'come up with a reason I wasn't there', the other player is stuck with 'come up with a reason my character abandoned people and left them in the lurch', which are pretty different things to have to explain or justify IC.

I like this. I like this a lot, actually. Maybe call it 'defining moments'?

@Kanye-Qwest I see it less as pre-determining an outcome as I do noting one's personal limits.

For instance, if I'm cranky or aggro that day because life's been crappy, for instance, I will mention something along the lines of what @ThatGuyThere describes: "Sure, we can do a thing, but I'd like to avoid anything openly hostile." This is three-fold:

• if the other player is looking for a fight that day, I'm giving them the chance to find someone else who is going to find that just as much fun as they will;
• I've probably had enough grief for the day and that's not what I'm looking for in my happy fun times;
• I would rather not risk my RL angst bleeding over into RP in ways that would harsh someone else's fun. (While I think I'm usually good at avoiding this, I know I like everyone else am not the best judge of how good at this I actually am.)

Letting someone know what kind of thing I'm looking for -- which isn't usually avoiding conflict, for instance I may be actually seeking one in the form of a rival or adversary or enemy or threat -- gives the other player a chance to nope that right in the bud, too.

It's more a factor of, "I'm looking for this kind of fun today, that sound good to you?" -- and if it does, everybody's more likely to be happy with it. Fun is generally the goal, so this step can be important in that respect.

99% of the time, I don't really have a preference. A scene is a scene and a scene is something that's going to be fun no matter what it contains.

It's that 1% that can sometimes trip shit up.

@Apos said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

I wasn't really thinking how the larger guild of Arx would appeal to explorers bartle-types, even when I wrote in a bunch of easter eggs- I just found it fun to do from a design standpoint. I kind of figured explorer types would need something meatier, so we focused on a dynamic generated/explorable outside world as an extra little mini-game.

I think most mushes could do this with softcode but it would probably be more difficult, someone would probably have to make a dozen different random types of rooms with then a few dozen random types of events happening as you find the rooms, generated automatically when a character discovers them and is then able to leave their mark in some way based off the encounters.

This is kinda how it can be done -- or, it could be done that way, I'm sure. Some of the kinds of things I was looking at for the old project concept involved doors that only opened at certain times (sometimes portals), lots of other emits on timers that would go off on specific days and times -- whether players were there or not, really. (Especially effective to emulate things like residual hauntings, which the game's concept focused on a lot; the place was unstuck in time and hints about how to get out would be revealed in these glimpses of its 'history' that people could then later explore/etc. or track down, sometimes on their own and sometimes with staff help/+jobs/etc. It was a super esoteric and abstract theme, which was why it got dropped eventually; the overhead/dev work for it all would have taken forever and that's with the knowledge that a fair 80% of it might not ever get discovered.)

@Kestrel said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

In the other, more game-related direction, I'm very fond of the Richard Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, the author of which is the co-creator of the first MUD and I believe some kind of associate of Matt Mihaly, the founder of IRE.

How I know I'm old: I remember seeing this referenced back when it was a paper on a personal website. Wow. I am really glad to see it referenced and linked in its current form, though; I've also found it very helpful in game design. It's easier, IMHO, to hit all the bases for something like this with a MOO or MUD than a MUX, but that's based on my limited code ability and what was available back when I was still attempting it.

The code of MUX focuses strongly on the Socializer player type.

Grids have become much smaller over time, which limits the Explorer; I've looked at some ways around this for a super bizarre project I wanted to try and found some ways around it but there's no way around a somewhat larger-than-people-find-ideal-these-days grid. (That, or I am just used to people shrieking like harpies at any over all grid of more than 20-25 rooms; I'm accustomed to that being a minor side area grid from a main area that may have two or three of those springing from it from the days of MOO, by contrast.)

Ironically, I think this is where MUX could draw more people in, or provide more options than it currently does, it's just utterly counter to the current game design mindset in a number of ways and it's time intensive on the build side before the doors open -- many staffcorps are racing to open and there's simply no time for this level of detail. To me, personally, I consider this a drastic loss. We used to see more of it. It is/was a fantastic means of imbedding plot elements or story seeds in the setting that players can uncover and then explore or pursue, solo or with STs/GMs or other staff assistance.

@Thenomain You could have that, and perhaps [privately by the fountain] depending on whether the pose is announced to the whole room or not.

Having some kind of distinction between what is seen privately and what is seen by the whole room is very useful -- but I really like that tagged-no-matter-what permutation as it keeps the space of the location in mind and makes it immediately (and repeatedly if necessary) apparent.

I like the color coded thing someone mentioned above. Not as much in the 'it's showing to the whole room' context, but the idea that you could rapidly and easily separate 'at your place' from 'in the main room' is still quite helpful, I'd think.

@Arkandel I'm with you on it being a peeve, but I can empathize a little.

A scene in progress has momentum already; starting one can take a shred more oomph or sometimes the inevitable and dreaded:

"What do you want to do?"
"I dunno, what do you want to do?"
"Anything's fine."
"Anybody got any ideas?"
<silence>

@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I think some of us are saying we all need to be adult and consider everyone’s awkward feelings in the shared environment.

Quoted for truth.

On some level, this is a 'playground rules' issue to me.

Two kids are playing with a ball at recess. A third would like to play, too.

It's great when the first two see the third approaching and say, "Hey, wanna play with us?"

It's great when the third asks, "Hey, can I play, too?"

It's not great when the first two ignore the third.

It's not great when the third runs up and grabs the ball from the first two and forcibly starts a different kind of ball game.

This is not complicated unless the first two are playing a one-on-one that's necessarily one-on-one, in which case you have the following options that don't involve being not great:

• Table the one on one for later and start a new game that involves more than two people.

• Be politely proactive and let the third party know you're playing a one-on-one game right now that's important to you, and would like the chance to finish up before adding new players.

Ultimately, these are the two options.

Yes, the first pair can leave the public space to continue their scene privately, but this isn't as relevant as it may initially appear, because it still leaves the third party alone in the public space. Unless there's more than one wishing to join or there are others heading in, the third person is no better off if this happens than if they step out on their own.

We learned this in kindergarten, didn't we?

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I've always had a lot more fun on freeform RP sites. Without any kind of coded punishment or measurable e-peen points to accrue, people feel they have less to lose and can just let go in favour of focusing on the story. And since you can only 'win' by emoting a scene so awesome that people happily go along with it, it's in everyone's best interests to strive to win one another over socially, in that way — even if that social aspect is just as anonymous writers with high regard for one another.

^ This. This is actually one of the reasons Shangrila works, and it's the reason the first game I put together over a decade ago didn't have much in the way of stats. (We just requested people write up notes about their powers.) Under these conditions, the whole thing becomes collaborative.

It has its own failings -- people refusing to agree to reasonable things or refusing to ever lose (face, a fight, the girl, etc.) -- but it definitely has its perks.

Trying to find the sweet spot between that and 'code everything to deal with consent twinks without throwing everything to the stat twinks' is more or less the core thing every argument eventually comes down to in a lot of ways. I don't know if anyone's managed to do it yet, and I'm not entirely convinced it can be done in any sort of fool-proof fashion.

It can be done amongst groups of players with some measure of consensus about what they're looking for in terms of 'what do I want to get out of my RP time', which is what you touch on a little later. I don't necessarily see it in terms of a scale of conflict-welcome to conflict-averse, though; I see it more as having interest in different types of conflicts. With the examples there, I'd say you'd see a lot more social challenges and conflicts in the former, with more physical challenges conflicts in the latter, with political conflicts and challenges present about equally in both settings.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel

I would be okay with that second meta pose but a lot of people would bristle at it. It's entertaining and probably accurate. If you had posed how you thought he was a jerk but would never say so out loud, you are denying the other player retort to an insult. That is not okay.

Is it different if I use my character's silently-held disdain to explain the atmosphere of the scene? e.g.:

When @Thenomain walks up to Kestrel, she just glares. She thinks he's a jerk, but of course she'd never say that out loud. And so biting back her insult, she grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir."

This one, if directed at me, wouldn't bother me at all, actually, but YMMV.

Why: the inclusion of 'she thinks he's a jerk' is very different from, say, just 'he's a jerk'; one reflects character opinion, the other is name-calling in editorial commentary. There's definitely a difference between the two. While I may not be able to respond to it IC directly, there's no actual insult being slung in my direction, there's just a character's opinion being presented.