Posts made by surreality

Thank you, ES.

@Cobaltasaurus I really like this.

I did something similar many many moons ago with MOO code, but the layout was very different and it was more text-flow than list format. (It's the way the room parent was set up for that core, about, uh... 15+ years ago, before the more SGP style of formatting became more the standard.)

It essentially had a paragraph at the end of the desc composed of the exit list. With the examples above, it would have looked more or less like this:

A wooden door with a port-hole style window, sits in the middle of a squat, brown building. A neon sign flashes 'Harbor Bar, open' <HB>. Northward down the boardwalk, or down different flights of stairs, leads to the heavily polluted Nestor's Bay <NB>.

(etc., and the actual exit names and aliases were ANSI'd if I recall.)

The list format is more clear. That old MOO style is more compact (which can sometimes be relevant if a room has a mountain of exits in it) and I always liked the way it flowed with the actual desc.

If it's MUX, I think the pre-coded parents usually use the 'nameformat' attribute for this -- so that's what you'd want to search for, at least.

@rebekahse I'm the wiki staffer, so I can't pretend I'm unbiased here -- but I would say yes, it is.

The reason why, though, is pretty objective: it's easier to learn just the mortal stuff than it is to learn the mortals stuff and the various splat stuff of all the other creatures you might encounter on a multi-sphere game. It makes it much easier to start out, and there is a lot less you need to know. (Smaller cost, too, since it's only one book to acquire.)

@Pyrephox Yup, that exactly! And a lot of people who talk about the 'this is crossing into OOC massive discomfort zones/driving players away/etc.' are talking about those things as the source of problems. Dealing with it on a subject matter level, well... every damn one of those things have been huge drama magnets. Having to get on record what people agreed to and when in regard to them, not even taking mechanics or systems into account, can be of enormous benefit to staff if they later have to mediate something in regard to one of those issues, which is an added bonus. (And all too often, they do.)

Those are the kind of subjects most folks are talking about when they say, "Don't care what the system says, that is going to lead places uncomfortable enough for me as a player if they are forced down my throat that I'm not going to want to play that character any more." If a character is killed IC, at least there's a story and closure there. When you have to retire them because someone's OOC whims and dice pool made them too unpalatable to ever play again -- especially when you will be expected to continue playing them with those things in place? Yeah, that really is worse than (IC) death, and all the FtB in the world isn't gonna help.

@Pyrephox I'm more a fan of restricting certain subject matter to consent-based, typically: rape, pregnancy, sexual preference changes, romantic relationships. These are the places where the most abuses seem to occur -- and by restricting the specific subject matter rather than the stats, you diminish the possible loopholes. For example, some of the above could be done socially or physically through force/etc. and if it's the subject matter that proves problematic, no amount of mechanics change is going to prevent the people dedicated to asshattery from seeking out alternate means of being that asshat.

@Pyrephox I was pretty specific about what I said, namely that 'true to the system' is not viable in this case for M*, and that it isn't a solution that suits this medium, and in many ways, 'true to the system' is a less ideal aim than is remotely practical when translating from one medium to the other.

I didn't say 'social dice shouldn't work on PCs' for any reason ever. As a result, we're not even having the same conversation here -- you're arguing things that are not, not even remotely, what has been said.

Instead, we're getting the same tired-ass argument about combat twinks as a reason to allow free rein on all things social, which everyone knows and everyone agrees are also a problem that also needs to be addressed by staff reinforcement and potential bitch-slap HRs for those who abuse the system in that direction. Everybody knows these asshats are a problem, just like everybody knows the people who want to force someone to go against sexual preference for their OOC jollies factor are a problem. The rules similarly don't forbid the classic, "He sat on my favorite bar stool, so I killed him dead," but somehow we all manage to understand that a player who pulls this one is an asshole, and HRs or policy to control that breed of asshattery are also not unheard of.

@faraday What you're describing is fairly reasonable. In the systems currently out there, though? The modifiers for things like you describe are either not present, or are left to GM discretion. If they exist at all, the players making the rolls love to fall back to, 'you're just trying to weasel out of losing!' when, absolutely, a priest is probably going to be harder to get into bed than a horny college kid, even if their stats on sheet are the same. This is 100% common sense to me, too, but it goes straight out the window the moment someone wants to make one of these rolls, and it is head-desk-worthy. No one argues you'd have a mod for sword-fighting in a hailstorm, but a mod for 'not my gender of preference' apparently means 'that guy is cheating!'

@Pyrephox I think the suggested 'no go' zones are a good start (and they would need to be fairly broad, not loop-hole ridden specificity), but it does, absolutely, need pairing with staff with enough balls to curb stomp abusive players right out the door. Neither of these things are 'true to the system' as what was being described as a laudable ideal, though; in our environment, mods of some kind are necessary to make that system remotely viable. 'Being true to the system' should never be a higher goal than 'players not being abused'.

@acceleration said in What do RPGs *never* handle in mu*'s? What *should* they handle?:

I think using FTBs and avoidance to prevent rewarding 'pornomancers' is more true to the game system than saying 'no, you can't affect me because I'm a PC'.

It may be more true to the system, but it is largely ineffective for reasons too numerous to repeat yet again, prime among them the fact that most players already intent on using the system to strong-arm this type of roleplay are also keen on using other exploitative means OOC to force their way, often insisting on escalations of consequences or events in the FtB that further punish the player requesting the FtB once they do so, many times, in ways that make the target unplayable thereafter.

No one would dream of pulling this crap in tabletop (trying to strongarm another PC into sexual RP while they likely have their pants off under said table) and expect players to return to that table until it was addressed, and no one would try this kind of tactic at a table and expect to be invited back.

The anonymity -- and frankly, the lack of having to look someone you've just disgusted with your urge to wank all over them (who wants no part of it) in the eye, -- of the internet makes this much less simple, because they both enable these behaviors considerably. The dynamic at the table is fundamentally different enough from the dynamic on a M* that a vast array of changes become necessary -- sometimes due to number of players, and sometimes due to the vastly different social dynamics at work. At the table, everything works against the person who shows up with an aim to forcibly creep. On a M*, it's completely the opposite. Choosing to ignore this reality is a pretty bad idea, because it gives some genuinely awful players free rein to abuse others, and it's not going to be a question of whether your game loses players over it, it's going to be a question of how many and how fast.

At the end of the day, players are more important than pure mechanics and always will be. Games that forget this ultimately do so at their own peril.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in I will design you a MUX:

@Coin said in I will design you a MUX:

I would actually play the fuck out of this. I have been kind of jonesing for a Lords and Ladies-type game that is also set in modern times (kind of like the ill-fated one-season series Kings). Modern conveniences and technology, but with antiquated governmental structure? Now that sounds interesting.

Oh Kings. So weird, so good, so doomed. I still pull out the DVD every now and again.

It is a good model for alt-history, in the way it said, "OK, it's basically modern times except in a made-up country that still has a king, just fucking go with it."

I would also play the ever living fuck out of this. It was an amazing setting, and a really weird and unique twist on all the things.

DO NOT try to use SSL to connect to the MUX at this time, plz. This seems to have something to do with what's crashing it at the moment.

A fix is apparently in the works, but until then: if whoever keeps trying to connect this way is here, plz stahp. Use a non-SSL connection and hang out and be groovy, but knock off the SSL plz.

@bored said:

PRP-only games also require next to zero staff work, so there's that.

Not so true as I'm sure a lot of people wish it was. This isn't actually the case at all.

@Scissors Eee, I didn't see this before -- but thank you! I've been trying.

There's a lot of wiki-side stuff I've been poking at for around a year now, so that's the tip of the iceberg thus far. (More or less what I know will mostly work without a pile of docs and/or additional work and tweaks.)

It seems like some of the wiki-side auto-tracking and wanted concepts stuff is proving helpful; that's a huge start and I'm hoping it's helping folks keep things organized more easily (outside of the usual adjustment period for any new code) and find the RP they're looking for.

@Ganymede This is what I remember of it, too. If I sent a query out to players, I would have to specifically publish the job to be totally open, or publish individual adds to the job.

@Taika That cap on the activity beats would be a deal-breaker for me. Not just in terms of being 'too low', but in that all of those things can and do pose a real risk to the character in terms of damage being done. (Not so much aspirations, but breaking points and conditions, definitely.) Gaining XP for these hardships is built into the system as character growth -- as in, it's 'hard earned experience from bad situations'.

With a cap that low, you're asking players to face a lot of risks, suffer more than a few losses, and not get the rewards the system is created to provide for them in return. Not as rosy when you look at it from that perspective.

@Taika Aspirations have been well-received in my experience.

Caveats:

• Some people are confused by them.
• The book allows for some that are fairly simple on a MUX but hard in tabletop, and vice-versa. You'll want to look at that and address it.
• The book allows for some that are simple; some staffers I've seen take major exception to this. If you want to restrict it more than the book examples (which include things like 'go out partying' and 'get laid' -- no, really) you're going to want to say so up front somewhere.

@Ganymede said:

On Reno, we are capping weekly XP gain via code. XP gained via Aspirations or PRPs is not capped. So, basically, once you're over a threshold, the weekly XP gain shuts off, unless we decide to raise the caps.

Are aspirations going back into play? They're currently not in play there. (Sorry for the derail, but that's something you may need/want to address.)

I can show the XP log for it if you want -- there are no shennanigans here. The character was created a little over a year ago, but has spent some periods of time frozen, so it comes out to about a year unfrozen. There is some XP from plots and STing, but not much -- and she started with the 25xp starting XP, not the 40 people get now. (And her adjustment bonus was something like .2xp when that hit.)

Edit: Also, she was over-cap for STing rather often for a while, so there was earned XP that was never awarded. This was before the cap for earned XP from STing was removed. (And one of the reasons that it was.)

The reason @Coin mentions me is because when someone decided to try to pull some epic brain-dead stupid -- well, yes, what he just said below. I ran the numbers on active and inactive characters and the differential was depressing as hell.

I am not hauling out notes, because it was in old files I scragged when I quit the joint. There are summaries of it all over the place here, though, if one wants to dig around for them.