Posts made by ThatGuyThere

@Arkandel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@faraday said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

This was actually a thing on HM from time to time. Did the big scenes where a Covenant's domain was attacked happen at 3 am in the morning for one of the political aspirants in it? "Where were you when we were fighting for our lives, you COWARD?".

Yeah, it's a douche move.

This reminds me of one point where I have to give all the credit to Kerfuffle regarding the Changeling plot on FC. After the big climactic final battle scene he said on channel that the folks who were not there we allowed to right in the parts they played in the victory since it is impossible for everyone to be there for the big scene. So even though I avoided it, mainly because the thought of a five hour plot ending combat scene is concentrated unfun for me. I am able to answer the what did you do during the battle question ICly. I hauled loads of ammo from the armory to the big guns as needed.

Looks neat, thanks for sharing.
I have always liked the Romance of the Three Kingdoms time frame as a setting for Wargames. (Or really any setting but the over done Big Four)

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

I just understand (and wholly endorse) going about things IC as much as possible in a game with a more immersive grid / population.

This might be another cultural difference, immersion is impossible for me on a computer. In tabletop yes immersion is a great and wonderful thing and fairly easy to achieve only breaking out of it for the die rolling.
On a computer, even if you discount other windows, web browsing and turn off every channel there is still other people in the house talking, tv being on, etc.
Now yes I could come up with a reason to avoid combat without the OOC talk before hand, but in this example I would not know that i needed to, so lets say we don't talk IC combat happens cause they chars really don't get along, then the person who in the example was not me, didn't get the scene they wanted and likely ended up not enjoying things. Regardless of which way is more IC that is a less good scene then the one where we talk and leaving things possibly undone ICly but both OOCly enjoyed.
OOC enjoyment is really the main point of the RP to me, that not not mean IC enjoyment. I have loved scenes my characters have hated being in, in fact sometimes the fun is enjoying the torment you inflict on the other character. And while weather or not I do something to improve the IC life of another PC depends on IC circumstances, I will do whatever I can to improve someones OOC enjoyment of the game even if that is best done by avoiding them.

@Apos
Now this opinion might make me an asshole, but we also need to decide how much of what is currently MUSH are we willing to sacrifice to appeal to other types of RPers.
Changing the interface sure I can deal with that, changing the basic command structure less so.
Cultural things are the same way, there are things I think we should be willing to part with but other things I think we should keep.
For example most play by post stuff is written in the past tense, that would be one of those unacceptable changes at least for me.

@Groth said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

What most people work hardest to arrange OOCly are abusive relationships and antagonistic relationships. It's been my impression that most MUSH players want IC conflict however they don't want the OOC drama and escalation that often comes hand to hand in it so they end up very shy unless things are OOCly worked out beforehand.

This completely most of the time the OOC talk is to find an IC relationship that is mutually Enjoyable on an OOC level not to avoid IC conflict. There is lettle better then a fun IC antagonism that both people get to enjoy on an OOC level.
Honestly for me when there is no OOC communication that is when it runs into either we get along IC, completely avoid each other, or we conflict by +job not rp since if we aren't talking OOC then we are reaching any sort of agreement on rules interpretations either so staff is having to deal with it as well.
Also I hate predetermining an outcome for a scene, hate it to the point that I will not do it unless the other party is a long time OOC friend.
But what I will do for everyone is sent boundaries before hand, example I won't agree to "Let's have our chars meet and become friends." But I will gladly agree to, "I am not feeling up to a lot of IC conflict, so lets have our chars meet, and if they don't get along we wrap things up quickly." the difference to me is that the first one is scripted, where the second my char is free to hate this other char and then I can come up with a reason why he just leaves instead of presses the issue. Maybe the other player feels more like building on the possible conflict later maybe we don't either way we had what i hope would be an enjoyable scene that night, and well to me that is the point of the enterprise.

For me the answer is both simple yet amorphous, a game is a success if it gains a player base and the players on it have fun. I would also tend to add that it maintains those two conditions for a time frame of at least six months but that opens the can of worms over which is more important quality or longevity.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
. But, I intend to follow the advice others have given on this thread about self-selection (ironically), so hopefully I won't have to deal with this too much.

to me the ability to self select RP group is the biggest point in favor of mushes. It allows me to avoid those that drive me crazy on an OOC level and allows those that want to avoid me the same ability.

@TNP: Sleep is for the weak.

I said this so many times before I was thirty five, now I nap every day off I have.

@Kestrel
It seems to me from this thread the biggest cultural difference between MUDs and MUSHes is on MUD IC has primacy, things tend to me looked at mainly though the lens of IC.
On MUSHes OOC tends to have primacy, some aspects of this I think are positive some are negative.
The feeling I am picking up from MUD folks is that the game is meant to simulate the life of the characters in a very sim like fashion.
On a MUSH there is more of a focus on creating good fiction, one example is I was in a scene a couple of nights ago. It went well story got moved forward and it reached a natural conclusion. I am sure many like this happen on a MUD on a regular basis. In case we just decided to fade there, not wrap up no how folks got home just fading to the character chatting, much like a fade out of a scene on TV or in a movie. The scene had served it's purpose nothing more need to be said. From what I gather on a MUD those of us in the scene would be expected to actually pose out good byes and navigate the grid to our residences before logging out. Instead of +ooc then logging out.
If this correct? Not judging just trying to make sure I have things straight in my head.

@ixokai And the other Phone code discussers.
I kinda like phone code that is simple such as +call Person, cause it lets me have a conversation over the phone with out then having to Emit the same thing again to the room I am in. I ma lazy like that.
However +phone code that makes me try to remember a number can go right to dying in fire. We don't need to remember real numbers anymore for the most part if your game tries to make me you are bad and should feel bad.

On the actual topic of Places code, I would only bother using it if it was hidden from the room. Not because of any privacy issues but because of the spam reduction factor. If there are eight people in a room and I still get 8 peoples worth of spam I am out of there place code making the part I care about stand out more or not.

@Kestrel
I think one part that has been mentioned but deserves mentioning again is if in that situation and not asked just joined. Politeness aside, if 3 or the 5 present decide it is too big, which is what it sounds like would have happened and left, right as the new people showed up. Then how is that seen as more welcoming?
The end result is close to the same if not exactly.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

a social construct that makes no sense. It's inefficient. It's a waste of time.

Social contracts are rarely about efficiency, they tend to be the result of years and years or reactions to things that happen then counter reactions.
The asking to join the scene one or the principle or respecting the scene in place is a direct outgrowth of people being pissed off as a result of others completely shitting on scenes in progress.
There was a time when the asking would have been seen as odd at least in the WoD corner of things. But those were also the wild west days of Sabbat walking into the bar and horrid forming for no reason but boredom to create combat or a Brujah just deciding hey lets create chaos or Garou of both Gaian and Wyrm allegiance doing the same thing. Of hell in some places just a mortal who got his hands on a gun. (Usually at this time the gun had to be a coded object for people to actually go with it being there. ) This was a normal hazard to playing in public, and I personally saw it happen on three separate games. Heck to some extent it still happens to this day on WoD games. On CoH about a year ago I was in a scene and two folks decided to come in a start a fight because "we decided you must be bored and decided to spice things up for you." They got upset and stormed off when I told them we would wait for staff to arrive cause my spirit mage was going to be doing spirit mage-y shit.
Now most people agree there should be consequences for IC action and those folks usually got greased but there were also folks that lost characters for simply RPing in the wrong hangout. This lead to the reaction of creating etiquette for what is and is not proper for joining public scenes.
Now those days are long in the past but a fair number of the mushers from those days are still around so still carry the baggage from those areas.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

On the topic of self-selection that @lordbelh brings up, and with @faraday's (among others') analogy that explaining MUSH culture is more like explaining kilt-wearing in Europe than kilt-wearing in Scotland, I wonder if the setting one chooses is a good way to predict player trends. With Kushiel's Debut being a Lord-and-Ladies style MUSH that focuses on social/political intrigue, for instance (as I'm given to understand — I don't play there), are people more conflict-averse there than on say, the 100 MUSH, which is a criminals vs. tribes war/survival game?

Each genre has a pretty distinct culture, there is player overlap true but there is just a different OOC feel about the games that is hard to define, sometimes this gets broken down more so. For example I have found OWoD to be more conflicty/ competitive then NWoD is. Comic games have a different set of etiquette then WoD games do, as do lords and ladies games.
I cannot speak about the 100 games since i have never been on it, but my guess based on the thread here is that it would lean towards the Lords and Ladies culture since the game runners previously ran a L+L game but that is at best a semi-educated guess on my part.
Sadly little of the cultural mores ever get written down so it is a matter of having to discover the differences by playing and hopefully not screwing up too badly.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@ThatGuyThere
You are so delicate!

I can't give my preferred response response since we are in constructive. I am not delicate I am just a firm believer in making the appropriate social gruntings at each other after all that is how pack primates function.

@acceleration said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Lotherio

There are plenty of perma-death MUDs. RPIs are all perma-death and several RP-centric MUDs are also perma-death. Non-perma-death MUDs are typically considered RP-light with combat emphasis (like the IRE series and New Worlds) and probably not where OP is coming from given they seem more interested in figuring out if people on MUSHes are conflict-averse.

I think one of the big reasons people tend to be conflict averse on mushes as opposed to muds is that Mud have code that is likely unbiased. I mean you can write code that cheats but that is a lot of work and easy to discover by others with access to the code. On a mush especially one that uses tabletop rules conflicts are adjudicate by people. This is a feature not a bug but also raises the specter of favoritism, especially in OWoD where book rules were written vague on purpose by the designers.
I know on games where I trust staff I am much more open to conflict rp then on games where I am less trusting of staff.

@lordbelh said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

This is something I'd agree with, but it also runs directly counter to the idea you have to ask before joining a scene (asking means you can be denied, which means people can totally have private scenes anywhere they like.)

To me the asking to join is not about getting permission, but about acknowledging there is a scene in process and being polite. I would consider anyone who said out right no to the question to join more then a bit of a dick. that still said i will tend to minimized interaction with those that don't ask. It is one of those polite non questions that helps social situations function. Like the How are you doing? to a stranger in RL you aren't seeking a real answer just giving them polite acknowledgement.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

• Metaposing — which means the opposite of show-don't-tell, and apparently is sometimes acceptable, sometimes not

Generally it is more how you metapose then that you metapose. For example on some of my characters especially those that are not sociable ICly I tend to make a lot of Meta pose pointing and laughing at my own chars type of comment and I have never had a anyone complain. I also tend to in some cases meta-pose the thought process behind my chars actions, I do this because to me the audience is the other player not the other character. Though this is a taste thing some like it some do not so mainly it comes down to finding people whose styles gel with yours.
The one type of metapose that everyone will hate on is the snarky metapose where you use it to hurl OOC insults without having to deal with an IC responce, such as ,Bob thinks Joe is an idiot but answer his stupid question anyway, "Yes, I am from Nantucket."

@surreality said in Faction-Based Villain Policy Idea:

Basically, 'physical risk' is simpler. It's more universal. It's easier. It's one of the main reasons it's what we see the most of.

Let's not forget the other big reason we will see more of it. It is often the most defined part of the system.
Even WoD which is not particularly combat heavy spends more pages on combat then on skill use. (At least as of the base NWoD book. I have not counted up pages on the GMC edition nor do I have a copy of Chronicles.)
Fact of the matter is it is always easier to run a combat then another encounter at least on a MUSH, a lot of this is mechanical, a lot is cultural.

As far as character death, honestly I tend to be on the minimalist side of things when it comes to MUSHing and I have a rep for being a killer GM in table top. The big reason is what is lost. I am not talking about the character but the ability of the player to play.
In a tabletop you die you miss the rest of the session at most. (As both player and GM I have seen ready ideas get turned into Characters and back in the game by the end of the session.) And get to pick up basically from where you left off with being part of the group. Neither of this is true on a MUSH, even if you have your idea ready to go you are looking at a minimum of four days more likely a week plus before you get approved. Then what a good month of Hi my name is scenes, and if you, god forbid, join the same group your last character was a part of you are all manner of cheating asshole.
If you want death to be more prevalent and accepted those issues likely need to be fixed first.

I would not really be comfortable with someone else posing out my actions, even the GM of the scene.
Not all characters fight the same, I have players characters with high brawl that had it high because they were semi-pro boxers, having the GM pose an attack from them as a kick or a knife hand strike or the like would be jarring as all heck to me even if the actual mechanical result was the same. Sometimes GMs in scenes will not have the familiarity with the chars to know details like that. It might take longer but I would prefer everyone getting to do their own pose.

@Jennkryst said in What are you playing...?:

As I understand it, CoH shut down, people decided to take the database and start their own version of CoH ('New' Prospect), and then CoH came back. Could be wrong, because I wasn't there for any of that, so dunno.

Close but not quite. CoH was created, then grew a bunch, new staff was added. Old staff stepped back, new staff ran things. Original staff returned and disagreed with things. Since they had back ups, they opened New Prospect. Throughout all this both games were on the same machine, since original CoH staff was still providing the server now for both games. Two games co-existed for a while then the folks with the server decided we aren't mushing any more and both games went down. Now both games are coming back. CoH was a lot more organized and came back to what it was a lot faster at New Prospect the rebuild is moving as a slower pace.
Since the people I liked split about 50/50 I have ended up playing both places.

You don't have to post to be verified. When you registered an got a name it asked for an e-mail. Then in that e-mail there was a link to clink on that brought you back to MUSoapbox and ta da you were verified.
Most places use it as an anti spam measure since the spam bots aren't good at doing extra steps. I can also see it's use as an anti-troll measure or at least an anti-get around ban measure since the standard dummy e-mail addy won't then let them post, they would have to make a real new e-mail, not hard but a bit of discouragement.

@Insomnia someone can create an account then let it sit unverified forever then go back and verify to post, essentially this prevents pre-stored of sock monkeys.