Best posts made by Tat

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Any game can state its ethos from the outset, and you can proudly trumpet ICC = ICA until you're blue in the face, but ultimately it's the game designer's responsibility to cultivate the player culture they want. If the way the design doesn't support the ethos it's trying to achieve, no amount of asking people nicely is going to change that. @arkandel is quite right in that if you're telling people that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, but you're only rewarding winning, you aren't going to get the results you want.

I think this is 100% spot on and a great point. I've played a number of games where I was baffled at some design choices that seemed to contradict what they said they wanted. I think especially there is a fear among M*s of turning away people who want the faction or character option or power you aren't offering. There is a fear of being small.

And to some extent I get it. There is a critical number of people needed to keep a M* going. But I also think that certain sacrifices to game design in the name of attracting more players cause more trouble than they solve, and that being smallish is sometimes a bonus, not a flaw.

Guys. The new Beip client LOADS IMAGES. You can turn this on and off, and control where the image window goes.

Here's my current set-up, with the image on the right where I have blank space anyway due to line wrapping, with my second input box underneath it.

You might find something of interest on the Ares directory of games. Several are still in development, but a fair few are publicly open now.

I literally made a list like this for the theme file of the game I'm currently building. It is:

• The Magicians
• Twin Peaks
• Stranger Things
• Buffy

I'd also add mythology of any sort, from ancient Egypt to American folk tales.

@arkandel Ha. It is. It's a game involving magic, small towns, mysteries, and exploration. I'll save further details for when we're ready to beta test.

@sab Let's just say I've lost more than one afternoon in those boards.

@rucket Annnd we're back. Sorry, that was an extremely poorly timed example of me breaking the game trying to fix something.

Thank goodness for @faraday .

@meg This just in: HASHTAGS BANNED ON SPIRIT LAKE.

@scar BEAT YOU.

@ninjakitten This is pretty much me, exactly. I threw things into my buffer with ctrl-b and got them back with ctrl-up (or ctrl-p depending on your settings).

I'm liking BeipMU pretty well, though. I've clicked links from it SEVERAL TIMES. I might finally switch.

@Derp said in Faraday Appreciation Thread:

@saosmash said in Faraday Appreciation Thread:

Faraday is a class act and a half, and she won't even take money for the work she does for this hobby even when people are trying to throw it at her.

I would, no lie, contribute to some kind of tip jar for her work.

In a hot second. For real.

@silverfox I don't know your timezone, but I just wanted to put out there for other folks who are in less common timezones: personally I never mind - and in fact appreciate - getting the occasional nudged reminder that X plot hasn't had any action when my GMT folks can make it.

I try to remember, honest, it's just that there are a lot of moving pieces, and it's real easy for me to lose track of what's been run when. I usually think of it for the big all-hands stuff, but lose track of it in the smaller day to day things.

A polite request that some mayhem be scheduled earlier if at all possible is a totally thing welcome, for me.

I can't ALWAYS accommodate, but more often than not, it's an oversight that someone on the ST team can fix.

@surreality If you ever end up working on this project and want some help, let me know. I staff with @Roz and have spent a lot of time neck-deep in SMW and basic infobox templates. I've also recently moved most the back-end set-up stuff from our previous wiki to our current one as we swapped games.

The big issue with this is probably version issues. Inevitably every time things upgrade, things break. There were only 2 and a halfish years between building one wiki and building another, and I still had to fix extension compatibility issues. I'm not entirely certain I've hashed them all out yet, even.

But the basics of an infobox template and how to get that into a form ought to be pretty easy to do. So too should a list of really great extensions for M*s.

I might be a little bit of a mediawiki nut. Little bit.

@surreality said:

...now if there was a way to create a 'play from the wiki' or wiki-based game engine that links around to all the things when/as needed? AWWWWWWYEAH. So many of the things we talk about wanting from a MU* -- links, instant access to data, graphics, color, etc. -- would be entirely possible.

But that's ten thousand miles beyond me. The things that could be accomplished with that could potentially be amazing. It strikes me as something that is likely possible, though.

Yeah, I feel like that's the dream and I wonder if it could re-invigorate the hobby. The reality is that there is TONS of roleplay out there, it's just scattered, and the entry-barrier to M* is super high.

It'd be an entirely viable option for play-by-post/play-by-email style games, and I'm surprised that isn't something I see everywhere already.

I've seen it before, but it doesn't seem to be super common. I suspect this is because 1) wikis aren't actually very good for discussion or give/take in the way that RP needs. Even forums are better. And 2) though wikis can become super user friendly, they don't start that way - getting a wiki into shape takes a lot more technical know-how than getting a forum into shape.

Even a package like what we refer to would involve someone adjusting LocalSettings.php and moving things around on a server on a constant basis.

If I were building a play-by-post wiki, I'd be looking for, at MINIMUM, a chat-box extension, something like liquid threads, something to prevent edit conflicts, which have always been buggy for me, preferably semantic wiki and semantic forms to keep things easy on the player end, and then the 'usual' stuff like parser functions, arrays, input boxes, etc. I'd also want a better rich text editor - and I don't know of any that work with semantic forms, unfortunately (I haven't looked much though).

In other words, there'd be a lot of stuff. I think it can be done, but it almost has to be done by someone who already sort of understands the strengths and weaknesses of wikis and how to make it work for RP - and I think most people who run Play by Post probably don't. Heck, it took me until like my 3rd wiki to even start to feel like I was doing things in way that made reasonable, consistent sense.

One of the main stumbling blocks is that everything is visible, and privacy would be an issue. If something involving bot edits could be tweaked, there's hope at least, but still. Otherwise it'd more be a cultural issue of people getting used to things all being 'public' in some fashion, like open sheet/etc.

It's interesting that you mention this, because most the games I've played for the past 10 or so years have been pretty much completely transparent. I actually don't think it's as big a hurdle as it might seem. That said, these games have ALSO not been PvP. I think transparency is ttly different when PvP comes into play.

If I am ever poking at the original system thing again, I might try this in the more 'play by post' (play by edit?) format. I was able to get the basics (and the basics aren't very basic) of a +sheet together, and with original systems, every element on the sheet is clickable so you can see exactly what the power/stat/whatever does. (Not possible with copyrighted game systems, alas, unless it's something HR'd or just a reference to the book and page -- but even that can be a major help.)

Yeah, THIS sort of thing is what makes wikis super powerful and super awesome. Semantic wiki is pretty damn great because you can then also manipulate those by clicking on a header and seeing, for example, everyone who's taken that skill in order by points or something like that. It automates a ridiculous number of things if you're smart about how you do templates.

@Roz said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

I think the best way someone can remedy this if somebody feels like maybe this is happening to them is make an effort to RP ABOUT other people if you're in a scene, rather than themselves. Like, ask about somebody's IC job or how they feel about that thing that happened ICly or whatever. I feel like this also helps in the being inclusive thing. I don't mind people who pose less-than-perfectly, as long as they're engaging with me and not expecting it to be All About Them 100% of the time.

100% this. I always tell people that the best way to get attention is to give attention. It won't always work, because some players are pretty self-centered and don't really play off other characters well. But a good amount of players will note when others are playing about them or expressing interest in their character and will feel goodwill that tends to get returned. And the playerbase at large notices it in logs.

@Thenomain said:

The second is that all new players are introduced to the game. I want to mention the AetherMUX quiz and casual newbie channel again. They also had reccs read by other players, so everyone had a chance to see everyone saying good things about everyone else. The game did not just expect a positive atmosphere, it created one.

I am interested in learning more about this!

I am also super interested in learning more about this. I really, really like to think about ways to create positive atmosphere. I remember when I was a new player on Second Pass, for example, I found the comps people gave to award XP really helped me feel a part of the game and showed me what was working with my character. So it's an idea I stole for the game we run now. And I love reading what other people enjoy about a scene or a character that I'm not involved in. It gives me a sense of the pulse of the game.

I really like breaking 'background' skills into expertise and interests - in setting up FS3 (but never having played it previously), I found the concept of background skills to be kind of hard to wrap my mind around, and I've seen players fight similar confusion. These terms better reflect what they're meant to be, I think.

I'm of two minds about dropping from 12 to 5. We do use all 12 levels and stare hard at sheets to be sure that they match the little chart I made after reading lots and lots of documentation, so part of me is attached to the level of granularity we can get - I mean, we can reflect whether, say, you're a professional cop who can fire his gun /well/ or one who just managed to pass testing.

That said, I had to read a lot of documentation to fully understand that, and I do think it's confusing to players, and my understanding of the way the dice work is that there's not actually a HUGE difference in the upper levels when it comes to chance of success (?) anyway. The biggest difference would maybe be in vs. rolls?

I'm glad quirks are gone, I hated them (we removed them). I like the idea of RP hooks and goals and I'm now trying to decide if we can retroactively incorporate them.

I second @Tez's suggestions regarding customizable defaults - we have a LOT of customized weapons and armor and stances to match mutations, and it'd make life a lot easier.

I also share her question regarding NPCs, because that's also something I struggle with. In fact, it's one of the places I might suggest could use more documentation. I'm never entirely sure how my NPCs are going to match up against my PCs and end up having to mod things more than I'd like (though I'm glad I can)!

@Lithium said:

@Tat If people don't get to use it (aka rolling the dice) then they don't know if their character is actually being /good/ at it or not in that instance. There are sides both for and against it, but without a dice roll it could be construed that no matter what, they were going to get the information anyways and thus the character taking the non-combat skill is just wasting the points to begin with.

That's why I will always allow a roll if there is a possibility of differing amounts of information. You want the story to progress, yes, but you also want the investigator to feel just as engaged and useful as the combat monster in their field of expertise.

I suspect we play on very different sorts of games. I don't generally think that investigatey characters feel less useful than combaty characters because neither one is the meat of the games I run - and people frequently play characters who are designed to fail sort of miserably at some aspect or another quite happily. It's pretty low-competition, which is a thing that I enjoy greatly about it.

On a game which relies more heavily on dice and stats measured against a common system, I take your point.