White Wolf had a game that was... forum-based, I believe? It was supposedly large, from the people I have heard describe playing on it. AOL used to have a lot of WoD RP, but it was wholly unregulated in parts -- I don't know if it stayed that way forever or not, but around '93-'94 it wasn't uncommon to see someone just decided they were a 3rd generation All The Things.
@Wizz said:
@Shebakoby said:
@surreality It's not an original creation; it's a theme based on a comic book (that also has cartoon media in its history).
...Is this one of those My Little Pony games? Please, please tell me it is.
I needed that laugh so much.
A quick thing re: MOO cores: while it has been a long time, I know Lambdacore is still out there, and for a while, ghostcore was as well. ghostcore was Quinn's baby, and was a heavily modified Lambdacore with more features designed around the idea of automated game play. It was created from what he learned mostly in creating Ghostwheel, which was an RPG MOO. Many MOOs are social spaces, and the ghostcore had the additions to create wandering monsters, combat systems, etc. from what I recall of it. (Ghostwheel did, but I only half recall if Quinn's distribution of the core had the systems in full, or just the code that would allow someone to craft a system of their own. It's been over a decade.)
One needn't go looney when they're already there, 'cause like, wow, goddamn.
Is the game an original theme/creation? If that's the case, the 'hand over the reins' advice is less viable -- even just practically speaking -- than it could be otherwise.
In this specific case: regardless of the above, there's obviously a problem. Wherever the 'truth' is in this situation -- I have no idea and won't pretend to know -- I don't know if I would call it something fixable. If the situation has degenerated far enough to have factionalized the game so dramatically in an OOC fashion, there's no 'win' here, and that's for any of the parties involved.
In the case of an original theme game especially, but more broadly, it may be a beneficial gesture to grant permission to the parties who can't come to an agreement to share the same space peaceably to recreate whatever aspects of the game they like elsewhere. While it shares conceptual space with 'hand over the reins', it isn't the same thing: if people want to keep going with their stories free from whatever they consider an oppressive influence, they're free to do that -- but they have to put the work in to do so.
Also, if there is a real problem here -- I don't know if there is and I'm not going to guess -- and there was evidence that was ignored for whatever reason, that is really not something that is OK. No amount of sticking your head in the sand will fix it, and I say that as someone who is pretty impressively avoidant and isn't super comfortable raising issues I think will be difficult, especially with friends or people I rely on for some reason. Avoiding it only lets those problems grow larger and mutate until they demand a resolution of some kind, after all.
@tragedyjones said:
Reno gonna be screwed if I actually start staffing again. The place is so nice now I hear.
This is where I quietly point-laugh. (Also, OMG thank you. You have no idea how much the help was needed.)
(Srsly, I think weresphere is about 65 characters or so, now. Which is fucking amazing, and they are awesome, but omg that is one hell of a lot of paperwork for one already-busy-with-RL me.)
There's likely a venn diagram waiting to happen here. 
You have text games, you have interact-with-the-game-code games, and you have interact-with-players games. How that diagram gets labeled may vary -- some folks may just slap 'games' over the whole of it and call it a day, for instance -- but if I had to place 'the kind of games people discuss here (MUSHes, MUXes, MUCKs and MOOs in some cases), they'd be in the central overlap.
@Jeshin said:
I do wonder if you guys think Depression Quest or other Interactive Novels qualify as Text-based games or if they're just a variant of choose your own adventure.
Are they multi-player? (I am not familiar with the game in question, and haven't investigated the genre more broadly.) If not, I would lean toward 'choose your own adventure'.
As a side note, respectfully: '[we] guys' have a pretty broad range of opinions; you'll likely get a spread of them on any given question. I realize this is generally pretty self-evident, but the couching of the statement suggests an expectation of groupthink that is... well, to put it (not so) delicately, the odds of any three people around here agreeing on everything are slim enough to taunt the lottery for being a shameless hussy that never stops putting out.
These are both super helpful -- thank you.
I may be the one person left on earth without pretty much anything resembling a smartphone, so I am clueless there. I have an ipad but it's of the mondo huge variety, so I hesitate to use it for a frame of reference for the likely much more typical phone usage.
...just a few questions. Since I want to pitch in with @Sunny's efforts and some other wiki goodness, I have a basic question for y'all:
Roughly what resolution are you usually using viewing wikis? Phone? Big screen? Little screen? Low-res, high?
While I have a big enough monitor I tend toward smaller browser windows personally, apparently much smaller than some designers prefer for wiki pages generally, so I don't know if I'm just an aberration out here with my dinky windows on a big screen, or if the BIG SPLASY HUGE WIDE designs are more likely to be the outliers.
I'm not asking in regard to personal pages, but for some things I'm cobbling together for mods to Vector, resource pages and/or templates for others to use, so there's a little more to it than one character page layout design that someone can just click away from without missing much.
@HelloRaptor said:
This is sort of a thing I love, because I love it, but RL Anger is really the only suitable place to post about 50 Shades of Goddamnit.
They really should make the cam rip of that a special feature on the DVD. The audience heckling and cracking the fuck up at the very least. 
@Shebakoby said:
No, it doesn't address corporate profit behavior. Why can't the government be accused of gouging as well?
Because this is what you asked, and the answer had nothing to do with government tax rates and everything to do with what the company was charging people.
@surreality said:
@Shebakoby said:
Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?
All signs point to yes. If you look at gas prices for an example it becomes fairly clear: if they could get away with it yesterday, they will try to get away with it today and tomorrow.
@Shebakoby said:
The point i was making about the taxes is it's probably every bit as "gouging" as the companies' prices.
That you think this somehow addresses corporate profit behaviors in any capacity just boggles the mind. It does not. Not even in the slightest way. There is no parity here, it is not a parallel, it isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and dump trucks.
I have to ask, because I'm not reading through this thread to dig for it: @Shebakoby , are you talking about an issue that personally affected you or people you personally know offline, or fringe outlier cases you've heard about having happened?
Because I would run out of fingers and toes counting the people I know personally, offline, who have been screwed up in some permanent and sometimes life-threatening fashion by the old version of US healthcare or their lack of access to it, myself included.
So if you're talking outlier strangers, please have at least a frail iota of respect for those people who are living with the consequences of the nightmare you're idealizing.
@Shebakoby said:
Don't American gas prices have a huge chunk of it in tax, too? Maybe not as much as Canada, but still?
Everything here has a pile of taxes in it; that doesn't impact the behavior of companies that, once they have established that they can acquire a certain level of profit, will continue to do precisely that. Do not think for a second the companies screaming, "Oh, gov't! Bail us out! We are in trouble even though we already raised our prices!" didn't make record profits: they absolutely did. And they kept making them even when their cost dropped substantially, because it had been proven that the market would bear the new price point, which was not 'oh the gov't just added a pile of taxes', ffs. Rare is the corporation that is going to lower their price point from a level that's proven to be sustainable even if their cost drops; they will just repeat the whole process later and cry about how their 'new normal' is being threatened and we get to go through the whole rigamarole again.
@Shebakoby said:
@surreality said:
@Shebakoby said:
Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?
All signs point to yes. If you look at gas prices for an example it becomes fairly clear: if they could get away with it yesterday, they will try to get away with it today and tomorrow.
Gas prices in Canada are mostly gas tax from various levels of government.
...I'm not talking about gas prices in Canada.
@Shebakoby said:
Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?
All signs point to yes. If you look at gas prices for an example it becomes fairly clear: if they could get away with it yesterday, they will try to get away with it today and tomorrow.
@HelloRaptor said:
@VulgarKitten said:
Today's Hate: Why is there no cam copy of Magic Mike XXL for us agoraphobes??
Suffer! People who perpetuate the cam release scene should all suffer.
Not that I've got anything against piracy, but cams? Ugh. Wait for the BR rip. Watching cams is like eating cockroaches. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I have watched precisely 20 minutes of one cam thing ever, and I went for that option deliberately.
...it made those twenty minutes of 50 Shades of Gray almost tolerable since I secretly wanted to hear how much the audience was laughing.
It was rather a lot.
It still couldn't get me any further into that trainwreck, but the amount of heckling and snickering (it was really, really rather a lot) was intensely gratifying.
My nightmares either go full below-the-belt awful, or turn into unintentional comedy on me.
The most memorable involved rushing around the house inexplicably with a pile of paperwork I was oh-so-very-insistent on completing despite the Jason-style slasher brutally murdering people in nearly every room. I'd run, and resume the paperwork the moment I was out of immediate danger, on repeat for what seemed like hours. Finally, after running like a madwoman to the front door, said slasher materializes on the other side of the front door (like they do), at which point I shake the paperwork and yell, "Do you mind? I'm trying to do my taxes!" At which point he lowered his machete, his shoulders slumped, and he trudged sadly down the path and walked away in a full sulk.
Thankfully, it's the ones that go funny on me that I remember more often than the rest, which just leave that quaky state of shivery awful lingering for the remainder of the day with some associated phobia usually sticking around for the rest of the week. 
@thebird said:
@surreality said:
I hate that dream so fucking much, even if it always seems to wake me up snickering at its inherent absurdity.
Snickering until you realize you actually do have to pee so bad that the apocalypse will have to wait, and nearly wet yourself in your feeble attempts to stumble, in blind half-asleep-ness, to the bathroom.
...yup. The perils of coffee before bed, indeed. That dream is inevitable. 
Nothing beats the 'I have to pee' dream, though. Come on, people.
It does not matter what is happening in that dream, you will have to stop to use the facilities every few minutes until it wakes you up. Outrunning a deadly apocalyptic storm? "I swear it will JUST take a second just bundle up and you probably won't freeze to death in the blizzard winds!" Space ship crashing? "But the life pod doesn't have a bathroom it's right around the corner I swear I will be right back!" Terminator chasing you? "I know, I'll hide in this convenient restroom!"
I hate that dream so fucking much, even if it always seems to wake me up snickering at its inherent absurdity.
