Posts made by ThatGuyThere

@Tempest
Not sure where you have been playing but I can count on one had the number of times Allies have been a useful stat on any mush.
A stat that requires going through staff to have a result in most cases is useless, unless they have predetermined systems set up.
Here how it goes, you put in a request to have you mobster allies do something. Said request sits there untouched usually til the situation you wanted to have an ally intervene about is resolved through other methods and then you ask the job to be closed.
Doing things ICly should not just mean doing things on-screen.

I think every knows the faults of RfK heck I argued against a pair of policies quite vocally her, but lets face it 90 percent of MUSHes are sand boxing, ts and the occasional plot. I might have only played RfK for a few months but it was obvious it was working to be different; and like TGG before it it did offer something different.
No game will ever be prefect but I think this hobby need more games trying to be different. There will always be a few multi-sphere by night games and they can be fun; I enjoy them but I know I enjoy mushing as a whole a lot me when I also game log onto a different game and get a different play style.
And yes having systems to back up things besides punching power is a bonus in my mind.

@FiranSurvivor
Wouldn't automation to that point basically make it a mud? Not that there would be anything wrong with a Shadowrun mud but I know it would not be anything i would be interested in.
What draws me to text based games is the interaction with other people and because there is a human mind running the plots the ability to come up with an idea out of left field and run with it.
For automated have to stick with basic path sort of things, well for that i have lots of video games and they have pretty pictures.
And I also disagree that is doesn't kill the live runs, people are creatures of least resistance, if there is an automated way even if it is inferior that is what will be used and live runs will become ultra rare.

I think Kingsmouth should be praised. In my opinion it was the type of game we need more of. Like The Lost/Greatest Generation before it, both had a tight focus that made them unique, coded the systems to help this focus and then when they had run their course for whatever reason the staff allowed the game to pass on rather then have a linger period of animate morbidity that most other games go through.
Now I will say that a lot of the things Kingsmouth did would be hell on a multi-spehere game it was focused on being a good vampire game, and there is a big difference between being on a vampire game and being part of a vampire sphere on a hey we gots it all type of game.
As far as recreating an RfK type of game even with the code that could be very hard to do for two reasons. First the seeming boundless energy and effort Shava put into things, even things like the beat sheets, it was rare that a week happened when she didn't find extra beats when she went over my sheet that I missed, that is not something most staff would do, even great staff, with out that effort of actively looking for how to help folk I don't think you would get the same place, which leads to the second, the trust factor between staff and the player base. I honestly have never seen a game that rivaled RfK in this point, even full consent games without mechanics tend to still have a divide between players and staff, and I did not notice that divide on RfK. trust is a very hard thing to build especially over electronic communications like a MUSH to be that would be the biggest issue to address when trying to make a spiritual successor to RfK, how to you reforge/maintain that trust level.

He was also one of the stars of Route 66.
I have been watching a lot of Adam -12 lately, it is on during my lunch hour.

We look at it from different perspective then. I mainly come up with ohh this is a char I want to play. Usually it is a personality and a history. Then I think ok how can I work things into something game useful.
At least that is my process for a MUSH.
For table top I think ok what does the party need, alright how can I put a few twists on that to make it fun.

If your point is most backgrounds are bland and poorly written I will agree.
And how fiction characters experience their lives vary greatly with the medium we experience them in.
It comes down to personal taste, you might be fine with a bunch of folks making things up from their past as they go along. I am too if they keep a consistent narrative, but i have lost count of the times that I have rped with people had gotten two contradictory versions of the past of the same character and when I ask oocly Hey is your char fibbing or did the backstory just change, the answer has never been that the person was ICly trying to deceive.
this usually results for anything but trivial changes in my starting to diminish the amount i rp with this person.

@Arkandel
Yeah to be a background is a page at most. Two pages would be excessive.
@Groth
History is what creates a characters mindset and philosophy. Any character or person for that matter is essentially the sum of their past experiences and genetics. And sense fictional characters hove no genetics all they have is the experiences.

I make stuff up with my backstory all the time. Hell I never know what type of music a character likes for example until asked IC and sometimes the character's answer distresses the player.
Maybe we are talking about different things but to be a background doesn't go often into a lot of detail just the broad strokes, born this time in x place. A rough description of family life even if just the sentence basically normal. And basic activities since adulthood. To be if you can do that then you really don't have a character just a collection of numbers.

@Arkandel
I can defiantly see not wanting to do a bg but to me it is an important part of the character as the numbers.
But then I am also that odd GM who requires a background for table top as well., not always written out but always fairly in depth.
And yes i have lost a player or two because of that in the past.

I am one of those with no problem writing backgrounds i think giving the character a cohesive backstory helps me get into character for the first couple of scenes.
I know on places where I am not required to have a bg that anything not on a sheet is pretty fluid for the first month or so which can lead to issues. That game I applied do had the options of questions or a story I did both.
But then again I have always seen the backgrounds as a tool for me rather then for staff since i expect they are at best scanned by them.

As a hobby we are very closed off and borderline hostile to new folks.
I try not to be this way and give newbies more slack then others, and for the most part I like to think I succeed.
The technical issues would be the easiest to fix since I have seen mush plaything tutorials on some games if someone could compile one for a website, a lot of work true but would help.
I think the bigger issue which the letter writer did not get to is that once you figure out the technical side we are still a hobby with a lot of basically anti social people, not even in a malicious way most of the time but in a I have my play group way. How to correct that is the harder question. I have no real answers to that but one.

While I have vociferously disagreed with a couple of policies onthese boards, and I no longer play there. I am genuinely sorry to hear of this closing. Kingsmouth was one of the better games I have been on and despite my general distaste for vampire I enjoyed my time there a lot.
And Shavalyoth always struck me as a person who honestly cared about others which is a quality is short supply in the world in general, especially in our hobbies corner of it. I wish her hte best in what she does from here on out nad iwould likely play any game she had a hand in runnign that was not vampire based despite my disagreement on some policy things.
A game closing is never a good thing, but I am glad the option remains for people to get closure to their stories.

All I can say is damn this game might actualyl force me to bother with GMC rules .... Love the setting as presented.

Skimmed most of the last fw pages but I has a question, How is turning of a comments section a bad thing?
Internet comment sections are turly the lowest rung of the communication ladder, right below attempting to fart out words.
Serious go you youtube you will see I am right.
That aside this thread is like watch differing evangelist snipe at each other.

@Alzie
Not tried runnign it online but have run it table top and I did not find it harder to deal with then WoD of any flavor, and easier then Traveller or Hero System, and likely about the same as any of the various D20 games. (Except 5th Ed D+D which rocks as far as ease of use goes.)
It is a rules medium game so there are a lot of rules light games that would run quicker but none of them are really used for mushes.

Lithium says, as if STing for shadowrun is somehow easy.

Maybe it is just me but I don't see how runnign for ShadowRun is any more difficult then running for anything else?
Now running things in general online is a pain in the ass, but more so for scheeduling then the actual scenes.

That would depend. Are we talking about vampire by itself in a game or vampire as part of a multisphere game?
In a mutlisphere games I would lean towards the honor system, that way you can avoid having to come up wiht systems to deal with each critters need for fuel.
If it was vampire only i would likely steal Kingsmouth's feeding system where spaces had a blood pool and if oyu wnet over it it could trigger trouble and beleive you could investigate who feed in what terretory. Keeps theme strong, and cna provide plotlines as well. Yes it does add a bit of bookkeeping but well RPG have a fair ammount on inheirent bookkeeping already.

@Arkandel said:

Hey, if there's a demographic for anything, there's one for that.

Drinking and fucking all day? That sounds horrible!

Damn I miss college and that was mostly only the drinking part of the equation.

The main reason I would be against a 30 day limit is that I need at least 3 to 5 scenes before I have a feel for the character, even if it is a published one I have followed for 30 plus years. These days 2 to 3 scenes a week is about my average so by the time I was comfortable with a character I was playing I could easily be halfway through the term I had as a player.
I can see a lot of upsides to the system but that right there would make me avoid it, since the same cost factors also go into getting th feel for a character on another game that I could hthen have also long as I wanted.