Best posts made by Tat

@Admiral Are you sure? I know of someone who's running an Ares game entirely on the web portal for folks she used to RP on Discord with. Never touched a M*. They've said pretty explicitly that their players are young.

I know someone else who set up a sandbox game for her MMO friends, who she used to RP in GDocs with. It's more free form and less formal, but it's an introduction to our way of RPing.

Change takes time. Games running on Ares have only been around for 9 months - and the web portal has changed substantially in that time.

I don't think it's the only solution, or that tech is the only problem, but it is A problem - and it is HELPING.

@bored said in Serious Question About Making A MU:

But really none of that's the problem. Mostly I get hung up on the format itself. Everyone targets and exchanges volleys. Repeat. That's basically it.

I think a lot of combat RP ends up like this, but also it doesn't HAVE to. A great deal comes down to GMing. You can use a map and insist that people think tactically and refuse to allow people to attack without taking a turn to close distance, etc. You can set up enemies where teamwork tactics like distraction or suppression have a significant effect. It's extra work to do it, though, and I think some people don't find it worth the effort.

That is to say, I don't think the 'sameness' of FS3 combat is a result of the code, but of the GMing,

One thing I've started to do that I find more interesting is to only pose every 2-3 combat rounds, so you can wrap things up cinematically a little better rather than posing every strike. I think a lot of people have always done this, but I never had, and it's definitely made things more interesting because I can complicate the combat without slowing the scene down as much.

@silverfox said in MU Things I Love:

@Tat

It is less my time zone and more the fact that I am clearly an old lady who can't function without a solid night's sleep.

I feel bad asking for accommodation when I am making the CHOICE to leave early.

I mean, same thing really, practically. I'd feel the same way about a player working shifts that adjust their sleep schedule. Or players that have kids they schedule around. I can't hit everyone every time, but I also want to do my best to involve people who want to be involved when I can.

Spirit Lake has had a fair amount of MUDConnector traffic (like, way more than I would have guessed), and I don't think we're very MUD-like.

Other games I've run have had less. I couldn't tell you why one and not the other, but there are definitely people using it and looking at MUSHes there. I've done it myself, when looking for a game.

There are also lots of games out there between 'Arx-sized' and '10 players'. A fair number of the Ares games look like they're living between 20-30 players each, which is my personal preferred game-size.

@betternow said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

I was just kind of confused. I mean if they said Ethel or Eustice or Jehosephat, it would have landed the way they intended. I was just surprised they would think Bianca is an "old-fashioned" name.

THESE kinds of names actually very common now - among the preschool set. There seems to be a cycle of folks naming kids after their grandparents/looking backward for classic names. My kids' classes (preK and 1st) are full of kids with either the 'new spelling or variation' type name (think Jaxton, etc) or old-fashioned names that make me think of grandparents (their great-grandparents). Think: Eleanor, Maude, etc. Incidentally, I've noticed that boys names tend to stay more classic - Joseph, Benjamin - than girls names.

@faraday

Dice mechanics are HARD. You have to have something that is:

Intuitive enough for people to understand (FS3v1's custom dice curves did NOT go over well)
Have enough variation that the dice feel meaningful, but... not TOO much, because it's frustrating when your character's performance is wildly unpredictable (I'm looking at you D20).
Have enough ability for modifiers that you can account for difficulty/wounds/etc., but not SO much that a +2 mod changes you from a complete noob to a professional (I'm looking at you FUDGE).

Sometimes it feels like an impossible balancing act and at some point you just have to say "screw it, roll some dice and have some fun"

Oh my GOD I cannot even put into words how hard balancing a system is. I had an inkling before we started building ~400 custom-made spells to slide into FS3, but I had no true idea.

All the things Faraday says here, but also add things like

• Is a +3 initiative as useful as a +3 defense?
• How does being able to turn into a mouse balance against being able to turn into a bear?
• Is a stun that lasts 3 rounds for one person equal to a stun that lasts 1 round for 3 people (given that both have the possibility for being resisted)?
• Are 3 level 1 spells equal to 1 level 3 spell?

And on and on.

I think it IS an impossible balancing act. At the end of the day you just kind of do the best you can and go and hope your players show you grace and manage to have fun despite the fact that you sometimes got it wrong.

@thesuntsar said in Meshing Groups:

This is probably something I fail at. I get very caught up in going "Okay I started at 8 but I really need to be wrapping up what I'm doing by 11 or else I'll be too wound up to sleep!!!" and then I tend to push stuff along at my speed rather than a more natural pacing. It might help to just say "We're going for three hours and then pausing" than trying to hit a plot point in those three hours.

Or just be okay with less interaction IN the scene, and build in time for those characters to connect around what happened later. Honestly, in action scenes, I often feel like I'm doing good to track what's going on at all. But if the GM gives a few places where character actions affect each other - someone saves someone, or nearly hits them, or heals them or rallies them, or even they all see the same crazy thing - and there's a beat AFTER the action, then I can do all kinds of bonding.

Plots that build in social scenes for the aftermath are nice because then I don't have to personally go begging for it, or other people's timelines won't pass mine. If we all know 'we're RPing the aftermath tomorrow at X time', we can hold mental space and RL time for that and get that meaty goodness in.

@krmbm

This whole list is spot on, in my opinion (as someone who played Pern back in Ye Olde Days and briefly revisited it a few years ago). The one that really stands out to me is:

Provide non-Thread conflict. HT originally had this by way of the Oldtimers vs. Nowtimers plot, but that's unraveled, and you can start to see the game devolving into typical "Pern" stuff: Impress, get a boyfriend, have some babies, rinse, repeat. Instead of trying to write Pern's conflict out (color hierarchy, gender issues, non-riders mistrusting riders, etc.), use these as fodder to help drive a story.

This is where most Pern games honestly lose my interest. Pern is weird in that a lot of the obvious conflicts have been written out of the theme. War isn't really a thing (Fax apparently having been a bizarre exception due to the lack of dragons at the time). Technological advances are (usually) considered unthematic. Most Pern games don't do a lot of with crime.

You REALLY need something to keep things moving when Threadfall becomes the same old hat. Politicking can be great if you have players who do it well, but to me, a good Pern game is one that says yes, you can advance technology, yes, there are mauraders who aren't easily stopped by dragons, or a Weyrleader who simply refuses to get involved, or... something. Some story. Some external conflict. Something to RP about.

@Ninjakitten

Oh yeah, so my in-game texts look like this now in Beip:

Everyone not me gets a default style, and then characters I text a lot get their own special background colors.

Given the discussion above, I think the general consensus is that an effective resolution system is worth compromising powers within a combat setting. Hence, why some of us believe your system is super-wicked-effective for a superhero game.

Yeah. I've played (and run) X-Men games both ways, and it really is pretty awesome to be able to use the system.

But also we wanted street-level anyway, because that's where we wanted to tell our stories, and because it's way easier to keep things balanced and create interesting challenges at street level. We still did some BADASS shit, but like. Not world breaking. Generally.

So it wasn't even really a compromise for us. And PERSONALLY I'd suggest that people who do superhero games think real hard about going street-level, because providing constant challenges for Superman is hard enough. Doing it for 20 Supermans is insane.

@three-eyed-crow said in Mass Effect MU*?:

@shelbeast said in Mass Effect MU*?:

So, i've never seen/played with FS3. I hear about it a lot. It seems like it's really ONLY good for firearm combat. I've heard that it doesn't do melee well. It doesn't do magic. It doesn't do this or that.

I think it does melee (and small vehicle combat) decently enough for modern or futuristic settings. What it's not made to handle is feudal/fantasy combat (swords and horses and stuff). There are hacks out there that try, with varying degrees of success.

I think it also depends on how much you want your combat system to be your absolute and total authority, and how much you want your GMs to be able to be like 'you know what? I screwed up with that NPC and these results are stupid and I'm changing them'.

The further you go from the intended design, the more willing you have to be to just fall back on GMing when something doesn't work as you meant it to.

Like, the one time I made a different NPC type to represent giant alien bugs, it turns out I made their armor a bit too thick and I did some modifications on the fly. Or the time my NPCs were statted higher than they should have been and kept crushing my PCs, so I modded them down. Occasionally I've flat out ignored the results of rolls (always in favor of players vs NPCs) to keep the scene moving.

If you're willing to do that sort of thing, your options are much wider.

@ganymede said in Alternative Formats to MU:

All of this may be true, but good games differ from one another. Your package may have all of the great features we've come to know and love, but I don't think, for example, that the developers are interested in coding up special, unique features for each game.

I could be wrong, mind.

I can think of half a dozen different games I could run on an Ares FS3 install without changing a lick of code beyond the configuration settings (types of weapons, factions, ranks, etc). AT LEAST.

I'm also working on a game that's involving a lot of actual code changing. There's no reason it can't be done in Ares (or Evennia) if one wants to, the same way it can be in MUSH.

But there is a LOT of room for creativity within the basic framework, even without different stuff. That opens doors for a lot of people who'd otherwise have them shut because lack of coder.

@faraday said in AresMUSH Updates:

Just an update... Ares is one step closer to a stable release. The web portal overhaul is complete and you can see it in action on BSGU. I'm churning through some bugfixes and installation script updates related to the separation of the portal and the game engine, and working on some more tutorials.

Here's a breakdown of the web portal features.

I cannot TELL YOU how excited I am about this. The scene searching by character addition makes me super super happy.

The chat stuff also looks very cool.

Can't wait to get my hands on it!

Copyright law draws a line about where you're suggesting - copyright covers anything put into a tangible form. IE, write it down, record it, draw it.

Code is covered here (or at least, 'computer programs' are). Technically, using code that's not Creative Commons licensed or given with explicit permission is probably a violation of copyright law - though there may be a fair use argument regarding the AMOUNT of code used.

Not that I think M*ers are likely to take each other to court over using and being inspired by code, and most code repositories are labeled as freely shareable. And 'ethics' and 'copyright law' don't always align.

But I think the 'tangible form' line is still a useful one in terms of giving credit. Unless it is a spectacularly unique and complicated system, just having the idea doesn't really seem like enough for me.

@sparks said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I absolutely love Ares' web integration, it's inspirational. Evennia's integrated too, but I feel Ares focuses more on the community aspect.

There's no reason you can't do the same integration on Evennia, fwiw; Ares is just a complete game out of box, while Evennia is a flexible system to build a custom game from scratch.

Ares CAN be a complete game out of a box, but there's not really any 'just' about it. It can also be highly customized, if you want to code it. Almost everything in Ares exists as a plug-in you can disable and replace with your own system.

Almost always one of two reasons:

1. I have observed staff behaving in a manner that I find unethical. This is pretty much never 'unethical toward me', but if I've seen them be shitty or shifty to other players, it's not hard to see the writing on the wall. This includes, but is not limited to, not following their own rules, mocking players, taking advantage of the system for their own benefit, applying rules unevenly, spying on players without good reason, or just generally being mean to people.

2. There's no driving story and I can't get or stay interested in things.This is usually coupled with little interest in or freedom for player run things, or a general game-wide apathy for Things Happening in favor of more quiet, social RP. I can make my own fun for a good while, but if I'm playing on a game where most people want to have babies and drink beer, it's just not going to be a long-term fit for me.

I've also occasionally dabbled in PvP games despite the fact that I really don't like it much, and sometimes I run away because the competitive atmosphere creates more anxiety than fun for me, but that's rarer.

@scar

I totally planned Mikhail for a short life, but I COULD NOT have planned a death as amazingly glorious as the one you gave me. Having a trusted mentor slip toward the dark side and actually KILL the kid he was trying to save was amazing.

@ortallus said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Tenebrae/Symbol of Ea also has a really cute "random plot generator" for PrPs. You pull a lever and it spits something out like, "<Class/Villain type> is doing <thing> and it's pissing off <group> so they've hired a group of adventurers to stop them!"

I coded something like this for Alpha & Omega. You hit +gmscene, and it spit out either an NPC(s) + an action, or a scenario.

It got used... some. I think the scenarios were more successful than the NPC + action (probably because they tended to involve less needing to NPC). It was a cool idea, and I'd probably do it again, but it really was only a tool players who were already proactive were using for inspiration, not something that inspired people to become proactive, I think.

If you're curious, you can see the NPC/action/scenario list here.

A few thoughts:

• One question seems to assume that 'in public places on the grid' means available for RP, but keep in mind when crunching numbers that there are games for which this is not the culture, and where people are pretty much never out in public unless RPing.
• Your 'low XP or high XP' question ignores games with no XP or no system at all.
• Your 'PvE or PvP' question ignores games with neither (I might add 'social' as an option).
• How is a non-WoD game meant to answer the single sphere vs multi-sphere question? Are you really asking about factions?
• What is the different between a political game and a plot driven game? What if the plots are political?
• Really every question should have a 'NA' or 'other' option. I've run several games with no '+request' system, and one with a system that no one ever used really. Your questions about how information is disseminated are also likely to turn up some other weird options.
• Consider adding additional terminology for 'temp rooms', especially with the advent of Faraday's scene system.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Well, with FS3 the dice literally are largely in your favor. The stats are slated heavily towards PCs and it's a very consent-ish system, where death occurs by choice and there's no built-in mechanic for maiming or lasting injury.

Yeah, that's what I mean - there are systems out there where that is NOT the assumption with dice, but with FS3, you get that balance of randomized while still leaning toward PC success.

In my use, at least, this balance tended to encourage people toward things like terrible injuries because they knew that they weren't ALSO going to bleed out and die and PROBABLY the team as a whole was going to win.

Done right, it might even mean that there's a lot of RP around other players trying to save your butt on the battlefield and freaking out about you being down or too injured to fight well, which again - attention, man. It's intoxicating.

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

It obviously really depends on the game. People have given single parameters in some case (size, genre, level of conflict, etc) but it's really going to be a mix of all of these, sometimes.

The traditional Pern games had massive player counts in their heyday and ran 99% on player faction leaders. Some of these were naturally wizard alts but on those games, the wizbits were really there for code reasons and nothing else. This included the dragon-getting process which was ridiculously drama-filled. Still, all handled at a PC level. Everyone kept to (an albeit thin) theme, but they were also low-conflict close to nearly full-social games.

I mean, you're right, but as someone who did faction heading and staffing on one of those games in its hey day, I'll tell you that 'PC level' is misleading. Faction staff WAS staff. I did as much (probably more) staff work in those positions as I have on games I've run as actual staff. Plots, player-conflict, even misc 'paperwork' like helpfiles and hitting code to add people to factions.

Those games were often pretty much wiz-free, but they absolutely had staff doing staff things.