Posts made by Tat

@scar said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

@cobaltasaurus said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

It had me at twin peaks and Buffy. But I work all the time so not sure... @Tat How accessible do you see your game to casual players? (Like I work overtime a lot so scene maybe once or twice a week.)

Once or twice a week should be somewhat manageable. Supernatural occurrences are going to be cut with small-town happenings that we hope will regulate pace somewhat. The setting is a real place, it's google-able, and it's hilarious. While there are a few plans down the line that may shake things up, there's no real aim to make this the kind of place where you look away for a second and suddenly all of the things have changed.

Our Alpha was a bit rapid-fire due to time constraints so I think it's safe to say that's something we're being mindful of.

Yeah, what @scar said. I think that once or twice a week might make it a bit difficult to engage with larger plots (although I envision a fair number of one-or-two-scene exploratory plots), but we try to be very on top of keeping plot pages up to date with a skimmable summary so that players who are in and out can track what's going on without having to read logs.

And hopefully there will be plenty of day to day RP, both magical and otherwise.

Also, as scar mentioned, for anyone considering apping, I cannot suggest walking through Grand Lake on google street view enough.

@cobaltasaurus

Because Ares will notify you of things like updates in your chat window and poses in your scene, if you enable them.

If you'd rather not, you can always choose 'block' and then re-add it to your white list if you want them back later.

@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 .

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

@sab Don't dive into the pinterest boards. You'll never come out.

About Spirit Lake   ·   World Intro  ·   Policies  ·   Join Us  ·   Why Beta?

Set in the tiny Colorado town of Grand Lake, Spirit Lake is a game that explores what happens when magic re-enters the world. Grand Lake has long been known as the gateway to the Rockies. It turns out that it's also a gateway to other worlds. Portals have begun to open nearby, letting humans cross into other worlds - and letting things from those worlds cross into ours. At the same time, some have found themselves gifted with inexplicable powers that they don't understand and don't know how to control. Abruptly, the world is magical again.

Inspired by a host of modern fantasy and bump-in-the-dark sources such as The Magicians, Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things, Spirit Lake has its roots in stories about small towns beset by mystery, magic, and myths come to life

Characters can learn spells, find books, explore worlds, meet creatures, and uncover mysteries.

OOCly, Spirit Lake is about collaborative discovery and creating a world through play. Players are actively encouraged to run plots, write spells, create magical worlds, and invent creatures. We will build the world as we play in it, and we look forward to the surprises that lay in wait.

Spirit Lake is built in Ares and uses a modified version of @faraday's FS3 system for combat and spellcasting. After a fall spent Alpha testing (and many, many months spent developing), we are finally ready for open Beta.

Log-in and character creation will be turned on Wednesday, January 9. We hope to see you there!

A game full of players who take on the challenge of an extremely buggy Alpha plot and make it interesting, complex, and kind of sad to hit the end of. And their endless patience with 'shit, I broke combat again, one minute' in the midst of an otherwise badass scene.

Bonus: Their complete willingness to dive headlong into engaging with and running plot in ways that I can't wait to play with later.

Seriously, I know there are a lot of M*ers who suck, but there are a lot who are SUPER FREAKING AWESOME, too.

@thenomain Okay, I'm stumped. HOW do you upload your own maps?

@thenomain Oh, you can? Interesting! I'll have to play with that, thanks.

@thenomain Yeah, and I love it for real locations. Not so handy for misc warehouse full of monsters #5, though.

@skew We actually use google drawings now - I just throw a transparent grid over the map, and it suffices well enough. If you don't mind fiddly counting.

I'm just holding onto the hope that there's a super great service out there I've somehow never heard of.

Thanks!

Does anyone know of tools that could be used to make maps for a game where range matters, and that make it easy to measure distance? Ideally, tools that don't require players to make an account and log in.

I know that roll20 does this nicely, but I'm super loathe to ask players on a M* to make an account elsewhere just for the occasional combat map. On the other hand, it's really frustrating to count tiny squares on a computer screen.

Any resources out there I don't know about?

@roz said in MUSHgicians elements:

@il-volpe If you use Ares, @Tat might also be willing to talk about her process of building a magic system on top of FS3.

I think it really depends on how you want to work it. If you want a system that lets you type 'cast <spell>' instead of 'combat/weapon fireball' and then 'combat/attack person', you'll need to dig into code. If you don't care about being kind of kludgy and want to mostly rely on rolls and GM interpretation, you're probably fine. It's always easier to use a system that is basically interpreting dice according to a set of rules. (Note: I think this is a perfectly fine and even awesome way to run an FS3 game, I've done it with mutations).

The FS3 danger is that if you plan to have combat of any sort - say, adventurers slashing at things in Fillory - it gets complicated to have some people using a sword in FS3 combat to do damage, and not having a nice fireball equiv ready to go. IC improv is all well and good, but a coded system means you had to have time to configure stuff.

And magical attacks are pretty easy, but if you want to really explore the full range of magic - stunning, AOEs, healing, buffs and debuffs, etc - well. That's a lot harder to do well without code. Which is why I did the insane thing Roz describes above.

All of this is to say that when deciding what systems you're using, definitely think about how they will intermingle with FS3, if that's what you're using, especially when it comes to fighty and healing things.

There are a lot of things I've just designed a certain way explicitly because that's how FS3 does or does not work, and I think that's a lot better than designing a system you love and then trying to smoosh it in.

@kumakun Potato also doesn't allow you to access your spawns via a keyboard shortcut, which is kind of miserable. That plus the lack of clear activity notifications just sucks.

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

I'd say that it's less that we absolutely will not, more that we absolutely don't see the need. Speaking for myself, at the very least.

As the person reporting issues with SimpleMU, it's actually because I don't have a good option. There's no modern client on PCs that handles spawns nicely, to my knowledge (and good lord if there is one, please point me to it).

Please, get me away from this thing. I'd love to upgrade. I'd love to go telnet-free.

I admit that I do still want a client, though. I really like having a separate program for my RP so it doesn't get lost in the clutter. But for a good enough system, I'd deal.

@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.

@goldfish said in Unlikeable, incompetent, and inactive: Can these characters work in an MU?:

Can I make an unlikeable character?

Yes, but you have to be very, very careful. These characters are best done, in my opinion, when the players KNOWS they are unlikable and manages that carefully. An unlikeable character probably shouldn't be unlikable to EVERYONE. They should have some likeable qualities. They should have some characters they can mesh with. Otherwise you're just going to have a headache all the time trying to play with people.

They are also best done within some context wherein other characters have an excuse to interact with them. That is to say, they work in a job, they are in a faction, etc. So that if my character suddenly realizes that yours is, surprise! unlikeable, I can still manage to RP with you, a player who presumably I like playing with.

PS: If you play an unlikeable character, it's super important that you be pleasant, realistic, and willing to do a bit of extra labor to make scenes 'go'.

Can I make a low activity one?

I mean, I think also yeah, but you probably are going to get left behind on plottage a lot. If I were doing it, I'd make up a reason for a character to be in and out a lot. A busy job that has them traveling, a demanding family, or something along those lines.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

This is a great idea. One of the things I didn't realize early on in coding Ares was that I could search git for code snippets to see them at work. Little tips like this, or links to relevant code, are super useful.

So I'm someone who had a rudimentary coding knowledge in PennMUSH and MOO who decided to build a game in Ares. I started in late July, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that I MOSTLY know what I'm doing in coding for Ares now. I recognize more errors than I don't (this is a serious accomplishment). I am not a coder by profession or by hobby, and I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge when it comes to things like 'usual programming workflow'.

I haven't looked at Evennia or Python, but here are the things that were helpful and hard when picking up a new codebase with external documentation available, that might also apply to thinking about Evennia docs.

1. Remember that people probably aren't going to read your documentation in order, from start to end. They're going to skip around to what seems relevant to them. This is why reminding people to start virtual environments or whatever is important every time.

2. I knew how to log into a server shell and do basic commands there, but I lacked the language to even google how to do something more than basic. Give your readers that language whenever possible. It's hard to solve your own problems when you have a vocabulary gap.

3. Github was a ridiculous hurdle for me. I didn't (and still only barely) understand the workflow of how to code, see it on a game, push it to git, pull it into another game, not get conflict errors, resolve conflicts, edit text in the shell... I MOSTLY have this worked out, but just yesterday I fought a battle where git thought there was a conflict and I couldn't find it. Git tutorials often assume a different sort of set-up or a work flow that I didn't have, and were less than useful in figuring this stuff out.

4. I did some basic Ruby tutorials, and they were helpful for vocabulary and the basic way things work. What was more useful were the Ares-specific tutorials that taught me where things lived, how Ares calls certain things, how Ares stores things in its database, etc. I'm not actually sure I can code anything in Ruby, because I'm not sure where Ares ends and Ruby begins. And I DON'T CARE.

5. And this is why general language tutorials aren't always that helpful. They are GREAT when I'm trying to figure out how to manipulate an array or something, but not so great in a 'learn Ruby by reading tutorials' sort of way. Much of it doesn't apply directly, or it's really hard to make the connection between what I'm trying to do in my game-specific environment and what they're trying to do out in some other environment.

6. Tutorials teaching you how to do basic, specific things that you want to do in a game are really, really, really helpful. For every language I've learned, I've started with 'store and retrieve data on an object/character/place/whatever'. Helpfully, @faraday's first tutorial teaches me how to do that. It explains what it's doing and shows me how to do it. The next tutorial steps it up by teaching me how to manipulate that data, etc. These first two tutorials were hands down the most useful thing for me when I started trying to code for Ares. This is also what helped me build my vocabulary enough to google smaller problems.

7. Remember that the people who are learning a language to code a game are interested mostly in building a game. This is the other reason that general ruby tutorials were only helpful for me in the super basics. I never did find a tutorial that taught me how to store and manipulate data on an object. Maybe I would have gotten there eventually, but I'm not here to learn to code Ruby. I don't want hours and hours of general Ruby education. I'm here to code a game, and I want education that will help me do that.

8. Document basic stuff in easy to find lists. Maybe you already do this, IDK. But I want quick references for things I'm going to want to do. For example, what are all the ways I emit a message? To a person, to multiple people, to a room, to the game. How can I format text? Those sorts of things.

9. Teach them debugging skills, and link to them OFTEN. I didn't discover the debug/dev mode in Ares until way too late in the game, and it could have saved me a lot of strife. I didn't know how to write info to the debug mode, so I was constantly trying to emit to my character, sometimes in complicated ways. Link to how to debug on every damn code tutorial page I swear.

Some of these may not be as applicable to Evennia/Python, and I know that you folks don't have the 'game in box' goal that Faraday does, but I'm happy to elaborate about anything that might be helpful.

@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.